Technically Brilliant Piece Of Pro-KKK Propaganda

Rating: 8/10 (25 July 2009)

"The Birth Of A Nation" is technically brilliant - certainly, even after 95 years, the best film quality I've ever seen in a silent film, and a movie featuring very good acting which, in spite of its 3 hour plus length, is well-paced, never dull and which also features an entirely appropriate musical score. From that perspective alone, it's a brilliant piece of movie-making from the famous D.W. Griffith.
To modern sensibilities, of course, the movie presents a troubling perspective. In fairness, having heard how horribly racist this movie was, I didn't find that it met my expectations of how racist I would find it - which isn't to say that it isn't racist, just that I thought it would be worse. It follows a tried and true Civil War formula of a friendship between Northern and Southern families, with the inevitable romances developing, which is disrupted by the War. The War itself, I thought, was fairly presented. War itself was not at all glorified, although certainly the Confederate soldier was portrayed as a noble one, even venturing into the midst of a battlefield to offer water to a wounded Union officer, while the Union troops are generally portrayed as marauders (and there's a heavy emphasis on black Union soldiers, when in fact there weren't really that many black Union soldiers.) Sarcasm is used against some northern figures - Gen. Sherman being described as the "great conqueror" and then it being pointed out that his great march to the sea was largely against women and children. There's a surprisingly positive portrayal of Lincoln and equally surprising to me was the lack of any portrayal at all of Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, who is usually a figure who lends himself to caricature. The central figure of the movie was a character named Austin Stoneman, representative of the Radicals (and based on Thaddeus Stevens.) The movie eventually portrays him as a hypocrite, delighted when South Carolina's "mulatto" Lieut. Gov. Silas Lynch tells him that he wants to marry a white woman; appalled when he discovers that the white woman is his own daughter. The first half of the movie depicts the Civil War, the second the era of reconstruction, focusing on the rise of the KKK, who are portrayed as the great defenders of Southern society against blacks and northern carpetbaggers. There's also the pretty typical portrayal of southern blacks (both before and after the war) as pretty happy folk who didn't need to be set free at all (after all, they only worked from 6 to 6, and 2 hours of that was set aside for dinner!) I was also surprised to see the use of the word "Aryan," which I hadn't realized was in common usage in the pre-Nazi era.
I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be few actual black actors used in this - the primary black characters looking to me as if they were all white actors in black face. Perhaps there just weren't that many black actors available in 1915. I also thought Griffith cunningly attempted to deflect what he clearly expected to be criticisms of the movie with the use (about halfway through the film, as the second part opens) of a number of writings by Woodrow Wilson - who, of course, was President in 1915.
This is a truly fascinating movie, well worth watching, no matter how troubling the portrayal of the KKK as heroes might be. 8/10