A combination of innovative film techniques and outright racist content

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2013)

The Birth of a Nation is quite unique in its combination of innovative film techniques and outright racist content. It has sometimes been praised by American critics as the birth of an art, but this is ignoring what had happened before outside of the United States with films such as Cabiria. Griffith will be even more creative with his masterpiece created the following year: Intolerance.
The main interest of The Birth of a Nation is for me historical. It shows the deep conviction of white people in 1915 that black people could not be equal to them and that they did not even feel this was a racist attitude. Griffith was born only ten years after the end of the Civil War, at the end of the Reconstruction era, in Kentucky, one of the border States which initially declared itself neutral and only eventually affirmed its Union status. His father served as a Confederate Army Colonel. Griffith apparently sincerely believed that the Ku-Klux-Klan would be the saviour of America. As quoted by actress Lilian Gish in her book The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, he famously answered when he was accused of being anti-Negro: "To say that is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives." According to the film, the inspiration for the KKK was white children dressed as ghosts to scare black children.
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