Historical interest is the next thing to a yawn

Rating: 6/10 (29 November 2001)

Judged on the basis of this film alone - which would not, of course, be fair - D.W. Griffith shows no signs of being a great director. He may have been a pioneering director, but that's not the same thing.
The techniques on display in "Birth of a Nation" don't show a lot of promise, anyway. The one modern audiences will immediately notice is tinting (battle scenes are red, domestic scenes are sepia, etc.). But although monochrome remained the industry default for about thirty years after the first appearance of three-strip technicolor (in 1932), tinting had completely vanished by 1930 or so - because, however fashionable it may have once been, it's a lousy technique. Griffith's trick of drawing our attention to something by blacking out the rest of the screen - destroying the sense of frame on which cinema depends - also deservedly vanished from the common repertoire. (Not that it was used to much effect.) And while Griffith may have "invented" the close-up (between you and me, he didn't), his meagre use of them in this particular film doesn't prevent the work from being uncomfortably stagy.
I stress again that it would be unfair to judge Griffith from this film alone. I haven't seen his later work; no doubt he improved. But it would be ridiculous to give him a reputation by making allowances for the fact that he lacked the technical and cultural resources that were around a generation or so later. You might as well call W.S. Gilbert a great director, or Charles Dickens - very likely they, too, could have made good films if they'd had the resources. Let's keep the debate above board and judge by actual results. ...My remarks above refer to part one, which wasn't, exactly, BADLY made, and at least pleasant to watch. But part two makes up for this. Yes, I know a work can be morally evil and aesthetically great, and racism needn't be an artistic flaw. But sometimes it IS an artistic flaw - for instance, here. Does the blatant racism of the second half weaken the characterisation? YES. Does it make the conflict between the good guys and the bad guys seem hopelessly contrived? Yes. Do we get the curious feeling that we're watching cartoon blacks pasted on top of a photo-realistic painting? Yes again. This is all quite apart from the fact that Griffith (unlike Tolkein in "The Lord of the Rings", who exhibits artistically justified racism towards orcs) purports to tell a more-or-less true story about the real world.
There's a difference between learning to respect conventions that are different from later ones, and learning to respect conventions that are inferior to later ones. "The Birth of a Nation" demands that we do the latter - with regard to both moral AND cinematic conventions. We can only regard it as a great work of art by being dishonest with ourselves. An epic like "Metropolis" belongs in cinemas; "The Birth of a Nation" belongs in a museum.