"The blight of war does not end when hostilities cease"

Rating: 7/10 (10 July 2010)

D.W. Griffith's epic three-hour Civil War extravaganza is one of the seminal works of early American film-making, cementing many of the cinematic techniques with which Griffith had been experimenting in recent years, among them the cross-cut and the facial close-up. 'The Birth of a Nation (1915)' was also history's highest-grossing movie for three years (before being superseded by the Mabel Normand comedy 'Martin (1918)'). There's just one small problem... the film kind of celebrates the Ku Klux Klan. A lot of people have trouble getting past that. I don't think we should be too hasty in condemning Griffith as a racist: his career is peppered with sympathetic portrayals of African Americans ('His Trust (1911)'), Native Americans (The Red Man's View (1909)') and Asians ('Broken Blossoms (1919)'). One suspects that, in Thomas Dixon's novel "The Clansman," Griffith simply came across a story that he believed would translate well to screen, and did so accordingly.
Regardless of Griffith's intentions, the second half of 'The Birth of a Nation' is rather unforgivably skewed towards Black vilification, depicting the KKK as a band of heroes valiantly restoring social order in the American South, after the freed Black slaves create a sort of dictatorial anarchy. Still, if this is considered evil ideology, then at least it's impeccably-crafted evil ideology. Griffith's mise-en-scène remains stage-bound in many aspects (the stage at Ford's Theatre even resembles one of the director's film sets), but I was surprised by the emotional strength of multiple dramatic sequences. Perhaps for the first time in his career, free from the constraints of the two-reeler, Griffith depicts characters whose emotions feel genuine. He constructs breathtaking battle-sequences using hundreds of extras, and creates suspense through the cross-cutting of parallel sequences: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre is brilliantly edited, strongly reminiscent of Hitchcock's Albert Hall montage in both versions of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934/1956).'