Birth of Cinema ?

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2006)

"Birth of a Nation" is a disturbing paradox : it is one of the most important movie ever made, but also an absurd demonstration, from both a historical and artistic point of view.
The movie is divided in two parts. The first one introduces two American families, who share love and friendship, before the civil war tears them apart and transforms the bound between the two families in epic battles full of blood and tears, where the two friends of yesterday are now leather enemies and have to kill and die in each other arms. To those bloody war images, Griffith wants to oppose an universal peace message, and that's how he introduces art in cinema : the cinematographic images are now for the very first time able to support and carry an universal message. Cinema is now considered as an art, with the equal pretensions that literature could have, as the opening citations of the "Bible" or Shakespeare's shows it.
In 1915, Griffith is the all Cinema and his art has no rival.
In this first part, the support of Griffith for the south reinforces the humanistic aspects of the movie : we are on the losing side, which goes with the romantic tone of the movie. And above all, the other characters are treated with the same compassion and respect than the south. For it's indeed the southern families who lost the more in the civil war (I mean in the in the movie...), as one of the most moving and sensitive frame of the early cinema underlines it : the Cameron's son, the only survivor of a family of three children, comes back in the family mansion in rags, where his coquette sister is awaiting for him. She lost all here precious beautiful clothes for the war effort and is now miserably dressed. He hesitates on the front door,the brother and the sister are afraid to look at each other, she shyly shows him her dress with a sad smile and they finally kiss each other. The artistic and sublime conception of Griffith cinema succeed in those poetic and melancholic images.
However, the second part absolutely and definitely ruins all this artistic efforts. And it's the same elements which lead the movie from the grandiose to the stupid. Griffith, indeed, has a very American point of view on art, which has to be "bigger than life". That's why the movie can't end with the melancholic defeat of the south, but as to show its re-rising. And this "second chance" will be the doomed the movie to the worth stupidity and racism.
That's because of this narrative reasons that the movie sacrifices the universality of its message for a a racist and historically absurd vision of the past. Griffith interprets Lincold's death like the starting point of a kind of "black regime", that the North tries to establish in the South, in order to create chaos and anarchy (?!!). This ridiculous theory is shown like a historical fact in the movie, and legitimates racist and stupid images, which contrasted with the humanist message of Griffith. We can for instance see the deputy's room of South Carolina controlled by alcoholic and sexually depraved colored men, actually eating chicken wigs ! In order to fight this imaginary "black insurrection", the Cameron's son, don't have any choice : he creates a group of white knights to fight it, the Ku Klux Klan. And the worth of it is that this group is in the movie the real heroes of the American union.
Even the right to lynch black people is given to the KKK by the stupidity narrative point of view of the movie. There're always in Griffith' a naive woman, who represents purity, and who dies from a tragic death. In BOAN, it's the little Cameron daughter, who committed suicide to save her honor, after a black asked her to marry him (certainly a metaphor of a rape). The black man is killed by the KKK, who "only reestablish justice".
It is strange to see that somehow, the racism of the movie doesn't have any impact of some judgments on this film. Sadoul writes for instance in his "Histoiry of Cinema" that "Even when the racism of the movie chocks the spectator, he's even more shocked by the beauty of the images and the absolute perfection of their editing." Pierre Leprohon also thinks that what's Griffith may think doesn't really matter, the only fact that Griffith sees the cinema "as something which can carry his thoughts" is important. And I can't disagree more. Of course, I don't deny the importance of the movie in cinema history, but the fact is, that because of its racism, it doesn't archive to be what it's meant to be : a universal and humanist movie, and a piece of art. It's not a moral point of view on the film, but a artistic one : BOAN ISN'T A GOOD MOVIE. Where a sublime effect must arise in the spectator's soul, only indignation stays. No, the "beauty" of the movie doesn't erases its stupidity and its incoherence but only makes his pretensions more absurd. And that's why what's some see as one of the most important movie in film history is also, and mainly, a bad movie.
Fortunaly, one year later, an absolute masterpiece would actualize everything BOAN failed to do and really give birth to cinema as an art. This movie will be done by the very same Griffith and he will call it "Intolerance".