Birth of a Nation

Picket painters, make your brushes ready; Birth of a Nation is returning to Cambridge. Birth of a Nation remains the only major work of art to vindicate the Ku Klux Klan, to condemn all Negroes as rapists, and to call upon extremists, both North and South, to join together in protecting their Aryan birthright. Such ultimate insights into American life were the work of the great D.W. Griffith, who apparently managed to expend all his venom on this film.

Yet to criticize Birth of a Nation on these grounds would be somewhat like banning The Merchant of Venice for anti-Semitism. Birth of a Nation performs a service by putting you in touch with its era. Instead of escaping to the idyllic gallantry of the Civil War, as Griffith intended, the film primarily exposes the bigotry which beset America during the age that was to enact immigration restriction.

Furthermore, the weird homage to peace which the film pays reflects the atmosphere of 1915, with the world on the verge of war.

Griffith thought war could be justified by a "just cause," a term that is much bandied about today. A young colonel whose sister has been murdered by a Negro has the right to call the Klan for vengance, and when that simple "justice" escalates into a racial war, Griffith's penchant for action exults in arm-swinging joy, for the seed cause was just.

If Griffith as the barometer of his age hides behind rationalization, he also holds strong values, one of which is the family. The Northern family in Birth of a Nation is typified by that of Senator Stoneman, the "Great Radical," who pays more attention to his mulatto mistress than to his children. The Camerons, the Stoneman's Southern cousins, remain united to the end. Throughout the film Northerners and Negroes are portrayed as loners while Southern gentlemen are never seen except in the context of their family or Klan.

Griffith was also committed to the epic, which might explain his passion for Southern romanticism. His Klansmen charge forth on their white steeds like King Arthur's knights, and Griffith never tires of it. The first half of the film, dealing only with the Civil War, provides a natural situation for pageantry. The stationary camera records the action from afar while the troops parade, dance, and do battle. Griffith was fully aware by 1915 that the camera could be moved, but keeping it still while filming a panorama of distant action lent just the epic tone he was searching for.

The second half, Reconstruction, loses some of its sweep in examining particulars of bigotry, but regains some epic stature during the battle between the Negro militia and the Klan. The plot, which had vaguely "followed" history during the first half, suddenly becomes important. Yet the break is not as sharp as some have reported. Griffith's films always oscillate between two poles, the intimate and the spectacular, the family and the battleground. The second half of Birth of a Nation merely swings over too far towards the intimate; it does not achieve the balanced dramatic plot of the non-epic.

Thinking in such colossal terms of our scrawny history. Birth of a Nation supplies another insight into pre-War America. The discrepancy becomes apparant as you watch the Yanks and Johnny Rebs in their shredded rags fight it out like children before Griffith's pretentious camera, nothing like those huge David paintings of Napoleon's cadres. Contronted by the prospect of European war, America, through Griffith, was boasting. Similarly, it was straining to achieve a racial solidarity for the rough times ahead.

Seen in this context, Birth of a Nation seems less despicable than pitiable. If Griffith has proved anything in this film, he has proved that hatred is little more than a reaction to fear. Happily this present version is uncut, so that the full impact of the racism comes through. For such a large dose of actual prejudice serves as a vaccination against bigotry, allowing the viewer to pity, but not accept, intolerance.