Stone Age Acting

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2005)

Certainly this film is both innovative for it's time and breathtakingly racist for ANY time. However, an aspect of this film that doesn't get much analysis is the acting. While Mr. Griffith may have expanded the boundaries of the potential of film in both the epic and the multiple-plot sense, his use of actors was in no way innovative.
At the time the common style of acting was both stagy and formal, with standardized gestures used to convey the basic emotions and no real exploration of the deeper aspects of human behavior. Mr. Griffith seems not to have understood or even cared that this theatrical style of acting was even more ineffective in film, particularly in close-ups, and therefore made no effort to explore more effective ways to help his actors connect with the audience. To be fair, he may have been correct in assuming his basic audience in 1915 wouldn't know any better, but still, it wasn't long before Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton and others (with no more knowledge than Griffith) innovated the art form in ways Griffith seemed incapable of grasping, and the film audience even in the early days always embraced the more honest and subtle styles of film acting that they instinctively connected with.
Ms. Gish & Company share little of the blame for their work in BOAN; after all, as has been stated, they never even had a script to work off of, and obviously there was no one on set to adjust their performances from the theatrical background they were used to. Occasionally a honest moment still seems to creep into a few of the performances, but they seem to be accidents since all the emotional moments Griffith emphasizes with editing and close-ups are terribly stilted. It isn't only the black characters that seem ridiculous, and part of the reason modern audiences have to stifle laughs at some of the performances is because that style of acting has been parodied since before most of them were born.
This film does make you appreciate all the more the groundbreaking work of actors from Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn to Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando and James Dean in creating the modern form of film acting.
And by the way, I have to add that even though I was warned about the racism of the film, there is nothing to prepare you for the stunning degree of ADVOCACY of the racism from Mr. Griffith. This aspect of the film, even given the overall historical impact of BIRTH OF A NATION, cannot be avoided or dismissed.