watched THE BIRTH OF A NATION for a thing i’m doing and that movie is both a genuinely impressive technical marvel and the most insanely racist thing you can imagine
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The Birth of a Nation was such effective propaganda (for people needing a universalizing vocabulary and mythos for their racist anxieties). So unlike anything before it- we don’t even have a way to account for how financially successful it was- but it was so well received by mainstream America.
We had to watch it in every film lit class I took way back in the day for that very reason. It is a brilliant piece of horrible propaganda and also broke new ground in how we make movies to this day.
Yes, but eventually you forget the technical marvels and only the stink of racism lingers!
I still remember both in film school.
You summed it up EPICALLY!!💙💙💙🤔
I teach it in short contextual clips in my History and Film class, because that class is about how films shape our understanding of the past. But we also talk about the person who left the theater to go murder a random Black man, its effect on the KKK, & Griffith/Dixon's explicit historical erasure.
The oldest extant American film by a Black director is Within Our Gates by Oscar Micheaux, which was deliberately made as a rebuttal to Birth of a Nation. In an inversion of the climax of Birth of a Nation, a crazed White man chases a Black woman in an attempt to rape her.
I watched it a couple of times for historical research purposes, the racism is outrageous and obscene. The movie was screened by Woodrow Wilson at the White House when it was released! Also outrageous and obscene.
Same with triumph of the will. Hearing happy, hopeful music while seeing buildings covered in swastikas is a very hard thing to comprehend on a fundamental level.
That sums up DW Griffith. He did so many amazing things technically/visually in film, and he was a big effing racist. Lillian Gish's memoir is great because she explains so much of what he did and envisioned. But christ.. what a racist.
It's the one exception to the rule that movies can't substantially influence real world events, because it was the first one out of the gate - no one had seen anything remotely like it, which meant that it was the most perfect piece of propaganda you could ask for
Which is itself interesting because it's based on a book, but inverts the message at the end. Doubly ironic because it actually includes the monologue about how they're blaming Jews for their own greed and gullibility! My head was spinning after watching that.
it was not the only film to have an associated secret society craze - some insurance promoters actually bought the rights to set up The Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur
He followed it up with Intolerance, which he made clear was NOT an apology, but a swipe at his critics for being the intolerant ones, so basically the "reverse-racism" charge on a monumental scale that ended up building Hollywood
Even Riefenstahl, coming two decades and an epoch of film down the line, couldn't begin to have the same effect - no one who wasn't already sympathetic to fascism could be converted through Triumph of the Will
Purely regarding her effectiveness as a propagandist, she got a lot of undeserved credit simply because of confirmation bias - Hitler was already in power by the time she made Triumph, and most of Germany was already Nazified
Slightly different flavor but same food group— science fiction literature and film has a significant influence on real world events. Like most things, the impact depends on the audience, timing, relevancy & ease of access.
That's true - science fiction has always been divided between those who see their work as an adjunct of fantasy literature and those who actually do want the Torment Nexus built, so to speak (Clarke, Asimov, etc.)
i have never seen it but i tried watching it like 3 days ago and realized it's not the first time i have tried to watch it. i'm pretty sure i never made it to the insanely racist parts so i can't claim that's why i never finished it. it's just boring to me. (the technical feats are lost on me.)
one thing that was not lost on me, btw, in the 15 minutes or so that i watched, was how much of the soundtrack was just subtly lifted from the 19th century repertoire.
A colleague who teaches film studies says there are other films from the era with same/similar technical feats and there's no reason for that film to have central place it does in film history. No need to compound racism by passing it on, he says.
Even if you have to show some Griffith, he made plenty of other films, including literally hundreds of short films if you don't want to spend a lot of time on him.
Not to go too far off topic, but I still love me some old-fashioned camera slate action.
With the rise of video and automatically synced sound that old tradition became a lot less common towards the end of my documentary career. Warms the cockles to see it here.
I'm reminded of a story my editor told me. In an early job she had to sync 16mm film w. perf mag tape shot by the legendary Fred Wiseman. Who shot what was in front of him, w./w-out a head slate...and routinely let the mag run out w/out a tail slate.
Fun fact, I briefly studied film editing in university. I thought I might want to be a film editor. But I had to choose between that and acting, and acting won. Now in my tv job, I get to work on AVID, doing story stringouts for the actual editors. (and find myself wanting to learn editing again!)
I'm no editor--in my film making days I was a documentary writer-producer-director. But I'm working with Premiere because...well, it's fun. (And it's the program our students use, and I figure I ought to be able answer at least a few of their questions. ;-)
After 4 years of WFH I just started a new job where I sometimes have to go into the big city and dress a little more fancy than I'm used to, and I will absolutely take any other clothing tips if you feel like sharing.
I remember seeing it in undergrad, in a film history class, and my posture throughout was pretty much Munch's The Scream. It was prefaced by the instructor as being a brilliantly-crafted piece of racist propaganda .
Another angle. This film did many of these things first, but that does not make it best. It's the 'a lie can circle the globe before the truth gets its coffee' of storytelling merits. Also, a reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, racism aside, helped end slavery. 2nd most translated book on Earth.
I've heard that movie invented cross burning because it was cinematic, and it was only after the movie came out did people started doing it in real life
I remember watching it in college, and having a momentary urge to cheer for the Klan cavalry as they ride to the rescue, before recoiling in horror at the thought. Griffith is incredibly talented, and Jesus do I wish he'd put his talents to use on something less repulsive.
maybe people with a more historical perspective on film can find more to hook them but literally couldn’t even finish birth of a nation. it is more recognizable as a movie than most of its peers (except maybe trip to the moon) but that didnt make it watchable for me as a layman
Back on the Bad Place before it became Bad, I think it was Movies Silently who had a whole thread about how BIRTH OF A NATION being the source of so much film grammar is actually just more propaganda. He had examples of films that did all those things BEFORE 1914.
Luckily for me (I guess), I saw it only after I saw all the other major Griffiths, so I'd developed a massive appreciation for his work that this indeed insanely racist thing couldn't entirely undo.
FWIW It aids development of human perspective when one can (A) cross-reference an evil narrative like BOAN & (B) see how [inadequately] far we've come. I'm old enough; my kids can't imagine 1950s racism. They can't believe. Bad Stuff like this helps open eyes—to see how far remains to go.
I sometimes use this film review site called Criticker that has a 100 scale rating system and when it comes to THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) i could only ever reason to give it a 50 because it's a 100 for technicals and a 0 for content
I finally watched it last year and even having read so much about it in film school and seen clips somehow I still wasn't prepared for how racist it is. And how utterly watchable it is. Like marveling at it on two separate levels.
Wrote my MA dissertation on reception (in white and black newspapers) of the book and play it was based on. Needed to bleach my mind with trashy detective fiction each evening. Thankfully only the detectives have stayed with me.
I taught the BoaN to my Film History students the day after January 6th when there were claims that J6 was the first time a confederate flag was flown in the hallowed halls of the White House. I remember thinking "hm, it's clearly important that we keep teaching this film and its impact in the US."
Had this same discussion with a friend - can you really isolate the technical advancements the film had from the supremely racist premise of the film? Feel like you have to keep them both in the same breath like you did in your skeet.
Or, the inescapable fact that America’s first “movie” in the modern sense, with it’s grandeur, scale, longer form narrative, as well as a beginning, middle, and end… is racist as hell and foundational to 20th and 21st century media.
Michael Rogin's essay, "The Sword Became a Flashing Vision" argues this very point. He argued that pre-Griffith films (such as Keystone Cops two-reelers or French films that played in U.S. nickelodeons) were more anarchic than the more bougie form & content of Griffith's films.
Widely protested at the time. What scares me is that 24 years later, there were zero protests of Gone With the Wind. Jim Crow got even more powerful between 1915 and 1939.
After watching Birth of a Nation and reading about the public backlash about the film, I watched his 1916 epic stemwinder "Intolerance." That movie was a technical marvel but three and a half hours of an epic whinge about how he was treated over the previous movie.
I think Intolerance is great as an example of one of the first movies that linked narratives thematically rather than chronologically, but one section is basically him creating a fake history where Jane Addams caused the Ludlow Massacre instead of Rockefeller?!?
it's almost impressive how it manages to be even worse than your expectations. you can go in expecting the most racist thing you've ever seen and the sheer gleeful quality of the hatred still catches you off-guard
Funnily enough, Griffith was apparently confused that folks like DuBois were calling for boycotts (which incidentally activated the Streisand effect), as he thought it was historically accurate. Intolerance, his next movie, was him going “I’m not racist, I swear!” Redemption era emplotment ran deep.
Three of the first 7 or 8 features I had to watch for undergrad film studies were NATION, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, and TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. "Are movies... evil?" I wondered.
I watched the same films in a cinema course in college as well, 40 years ago. With Citizen Kane, Grapes of Wrath, a Hitchcock, a Roberto Rossellini, Ken Loach’s Kes, a few French Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut, Godard, Malle, Varda) , and local Québec films.
it’s weird cause usually racists are dumb as rocks and not at all creative but then there’s this odd exception for “technical innovation in early filmmaking”
lived with someone whose undergrad thesis was on lost cause mythology and spent six months watching long old racist movies and it’s INSANE. gone with the wind should be launched into the sun and it’s also a visual wonder.
William Cameron Menzies, its production designer (a term that was specifically invented for him on that film, although the modern use of the term doesn't really cover his responsibilities, since he literally designed every shot in it) was a genuine lunatic genius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cameron_Menzies
it is one of the craziest things i have seen with my eyes! our culture would be better in every way if we took every copy of it and every knickknack associated with it and put it in an incinerator!
Way more racist than I think clips of it that people see give the impression of. It's quite sophisticated in how it explores its primary theme - that theme being that racial integration/mixing is the original sin of America and must be expunged. As you say, it's also shockingly well made.
Before I changed majors I was a film school kid, and you could see the joy of cinema leach out of the professors when it came time to watch and discuss “birth of a nation”
Just imagining every semester, deep sigh, “Ok, so this film…”
You can tell that Griffith had never, a single time, questioned or examined any element of his racist beliefs. The film is set on a foundation of “well as we all know and universally agree, [most insane racist thing imaginable].”
Are you familiar with Griffith’s essay “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America,” written in response to NAACP protests of Birth? Really fascinating in relation to contemporary right-wing “free speech” discourse.
I have to show my intro to film students a few brief clips from it because just me saying it’s racist does not in any way get across how shockingly racist it is.
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I still remember both in film school.
You summed it up EPICALLY!!💙💙💙🤔
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/birth-of-a-movement/
literally just invented all of the aesthetics on film
I’ve always wanted to know more about that movie. I’m into that, too.
With the rise of video and automatically synced sound that old tradition became a lot less common towards the end of my documentary career. Warms the cockles to see it here.
I must admit to using my hands to clap sync more than I should have, back in the day.
That's train you up in a hurry!
https://media.tenor.com/yt4rC3NAC0gAAAAM/no-david.gif
https://tctugger.com/
Did you ever see Peter Bogdonovich’s Nickelodeon? The climax of that film is Ryan O’Neal watching Birth of a Nation
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-birth-of-a-nation-1915
https://twitter.com/MoviesSilently
It is viscerally thrilling monstrousness.
(($; -)}™
Just imagining every semester, deep sigh, “Ok, so this film…”
school
i promise i’ll stop bitching about having to watch Bladerunner once a week for a year, damn