Griffith and the Nazis

Rating: Null/10 (1 February 1999)

Eeriest of all, this film foreshadows numerous elements of Nazism. Hitler was an unknown corporal at the time, but look at all the parallels. The klan go on their climactic ride to save the South to the tune of the "Ride of the Valkyries" by Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer. Also proto-Nazi is an intertitle's comment when the northern and southern whites join up against their common enemy. Since this moment seems to be the "birth of a nation" that the film's name refers to, one would expect a comment to that effect. Instead, the intertitle emphasizes the two groups' common "Aryan heritage." Even decorative elements anticipate Nazi tastes. The cross-in-circle emblems on the klansmen's breasts look like the ones that would be later be painted on Luftwaffe aircraft. The tall spikes on the klansmen's hoods are penis-envy versions of what the little corporal would have worn on his WWI helmet. Even the symbolic use of fire sends the mind backward to Wagner's operas and forward to Riefenstall's "Triumph of the Will." Most tellingly, when the mulatto politician's corpse is dumped at his sponsor's door the camera lingers for a moment in exultation over this casual brutality. The quick slump of the newly inanimate body onto the porch expresses precisely the kind of deliberately inhuman (but supposedly super-human) attitude that Nietzsche urged in the 19th century and the SS willed themselves into in the 20th. This film is more than a lesson in cinema history; in hindsight it shows us one of the paths that opened itself before an America at the crossroads in 1915. Next time you watch "Triumph of the Will," think, "there but for the grace of God go we."