An Infallible Masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 2000)

There are probably three perfect films in existence. 2001: A Space Odyssey, for reinventing film language and raising the American film to an art form. Seven Samurai, for mastering preexisting film language and raising classical Hollywood grammar to its highest level. And of course, Birth of a Nation. For introducing to the world for the first time, a full-length narrative feature. D.W. Griffith, like Abraham Lincoln, was a great man with a character flaw, he was a racist. Richard Wagner made the finest of operas, and he too was an anti-semite, like Griffith. Many artists have bad ideologies. Thank God, that an ideology does not reflect on an artform. After Griffith invented the crosscut and the closeup (as well as a textbook full of language that is now taken for granted) he finally created Birth of a Nation, a silent work of cinema poetry. The war sequences are on a grander level than many today, the love story will make you weep, the assassination of Lincoln will make you gasp for breath. The final hour of the film is notorious, but only a powerfully good film could offend so many people 85 years later. Because people are more racist now than ever before (movies like, Big Momma's House, for example), they have criticized the man who invented the narrative film in order to mask their own problems. It is a shame and disgrace that we are all so sensitive now and politically correct that an artist responsible for the creation of cinema, no longer has an award named after him. The film is flawless, and the man is a genius, in spite of his racism and anti-semitism. View the work of poetry and pure cinema, you will agree that it is a wonderwork. The corrupt capitalistic North, led by Silas Lynch is combatted by the KKK in the South, with the lovely Lillian Gish (her greatest performance until Broken Blossoms, where she dies of heartbreak) caught in between the chaos of war. Certainly there are mature enough people to handle the fact that black men are evil in the film. A masterpiece has to stand the test of time, it does not have to convey a popular ideology. A TIME TO KILL for instance, is a film that is anti-KKK but it is an incoherent, stereotypical pastiche of To Kill A Mockingbird. There is no film cut together with the style, grace, experimentation and audacity of D.W. Griffith. Like Wagner's ring cycle, it stands as a great artistic achievement that does not deserve detractions from liberal, godless, nihilists. A film that ranks high in aesthetic value, being the founder of all of the language used today, has a level of complexity in its history of the American character and racism, creates a beautiful film diegesis of civil war torn south, has the courage of its racist convictions, and is beautifully coherent working with only the moving image of the silent era; a purely cinematic artistic achievement. If you are willing to trade all this because of your petty liberal sentiments that really have no impact but a negative one on our present day racist situation (perpetuated by such films as the Godfather that outright refer to black people as dogs) have been made uncomfortable, then rewrite cinema history to make yourself feel better.