No more Nickelodeon

Rating: 1/10 (16 December 2011)

I have finally seen this landmark movie. The DVD version is in reasonable shape for such an old picture and is almost complete, so provides a good basis for judgement.
The subject matter has been extensively discussed elsewhere on this site so I will confine myself to a few comments on its technical qualities.
It is difficult to evaluate very early movies, because cinema was still being invented. Only 15 years before Birth of a Nation, people were still watching two minute clips of horses eating hay and trains coming into stations. Clearly, cinema had taken huge strides in a very short time, but when I view this film I am less conscious of how far cinema had come than how far it still had to go.
The only real benchmarks I have for this movie are two Louis Feuillade serials (Fantomas and Les Vampires) made at roughly the same time that I have on DVD.
In one respect Griffiths was no more advanced than Feuillade. They both shot their lengthy movies almost entirely with a still camera. I assume that some of the shots of the KKK on horseback were taken from a moving truck, but I did not notice any other camera movements (although I might have missed a few slight pans). Griffiths injects movement and vitality into scenes through the staging and the performances rather than with the camera and this is done so effectively that I was rarely aware of how static the camera actually is.
However, Birth of a Nation does represent an advance over the Feuillade movies in terms of editing. There is noticeably more cutting within scenes and (particularly) cross-cutting between them. This is especially effective in the final few reels when Birth achieves a dynamism that the two French films cannot match. On the other hand, it feels even more primitive in its use of inter titles.
Each scene is introduced by a title card that explains what you are going to see. This is unavoidable for scenes where two people are simply having a discussion, but there are many scenes in which the action is self-explanatory and the title cards are a pointless intrusion. More revealingly, there are also cases where the card is needed but could have been avoided if Griffith had shown a bit more imagination in the writing and staging of scenes. Two examples will illustrate this.
In the assassination scene, the inter-titles tell us that Lincoln's bodyguard deserts his post in order to watch the show. This card is needed to make sense of what happens, but this is because the action is not clear enough in the way it is staged. If Griffith had established the man's status as bodyguard more unambiguously and had given us a few shots of him getting bored and restless and periodically peeking through the curtain, then no explanations would have been necessary.
Later, we see two KKK spies discover Elsie's imprisonment and this leads to her rescue. Again, the two spies have to be identified by a caption which could have easily been avoided if we had first seen the two men donning their disguise and sneaking into the town. These missing scenes would have made the action flow more smoothly so it would nave required no explanation. It would also have helped if we had actually seen them conveying their news to Colonel Cameron. As it is, there is something of a yawning gap between Elsie's discovery and her rescue.
In 1915 Griffith still had a lot to learn about basic visual story telling.
However, I suspect that the real reason for all these inter titles was simply that Griffith was in the grip of a stylistic convention that demanded a title card for each scene, whether it needed one or not. The trouble with this convention is that makes the movie feel like a series of vignettes or 'tableau vivants' strung together chronologically, rather than a continuous narrative. As a result, it feels as if the titles that are telling the story and the visuals are merely illustrations.
Of course, this is an overstatement that ignores the film's greatest merit; the fine performances of many of the cast. George Siegmann's Cyrus Lynch is just a grimacing bad guy and Joseph Henabery is simply striking poses as Lincoln, but most of the performances are excellent and many of the scenes are much more subtle and nuanced than the bald statements of the inter-titles would suggest. Often, it is better to ignore what the captions say and just watch what the actors do.
In conclusion, Birth of a Nation does have some real cinematic merit but there is no denying that it is still a somewhat primitive piece of film-making and I suspect that Griffiths was much less of an innovator and a pioneer than his reputation suggests.
I don't think this movie can be regarded as a major work of Art but it is undoubtedly of great historical importance and is worth a view for that reason alone. However, I think its importance has more to do with its impact on the movie industry than the movie art. It was a huge investment and a big financial risk that succeeded triumphantly at the Box Office. If there had been any lingering doubts about whether or not cinema was just a transitory sideshow attraction, they had been decisively answered. Cinema was here to stay and the sky was the limit for ambitious film makers. The Birth of a Nation was also the death of the Nickelodeon.
It's just a shame that cinema's commercial potential had to be demonstrated by such a nasty, rancid, foul-smelling pile of ordure as this.
PS In fairness, this final judgement relates mainly to the second half of the picture.