Birth of a nation (1915)

What do you say about a film that attempts to say that Ku Klux Klan saved America from degeneration and chaos, along with pseudo-democracy in the hands of primitive blacks and evil mulattos? Birth of a nation is the most racist movie I've seen, ever. Its whole structure builds upon a racist agenda: depicting whites as the saviors of civilization and blacks as the threat to enlightened culture. The racism of the film is bafflingly consistent (in its own terms) and Griffith creates an entire ideology of race. This is undisguised racism that is not mollified or softened in any way.

The only decent black people in the film are those who stand up for their former slave owners, the "faithful souls". The most evil creatures on earth are mulattos, who emulate the intelligence of whites, but who are nonetheless ruled by dark instincts and violent sexuality. Mulattos, we are told, are sneaky, and their innermost desire is to deride the virtue of whites and to violate white women's virginal sexuality. The civil war tore America out of the old ways, and only Ku Klux Klan restored order and stability, in which each race goes back to its given roles.

This film is bad in plenty of way. It is melodramatic and almost all scenes are totally outrageous. A black man assaults a white girl! (Or that is what we are supposed to think) A mulatto, sister/wife of a black politician, suddenly bursts into ecstatic dance! The idyllic family life of pre-war South! Ku Klux Klan members form a holy army to fight for their Nation! The north and the south are reconciled when northerners are called back to reason by their gut reactions (we can't marry off our daughters to black men) and stop being foolish "rebels", "carpetbaggers"! And so on, and so on.

But The birth of a nation is still an interesting film to watch. It developed filmmaking in lots of ways and technically it is a very enjoyable film. Its use of color tinting is quite radical and works very well as a technique to embellish some parts of the story as well as to create variety in atmosphere. Its use of editing (intercuts) & cinematography is also very interesting. The pictures often have an eerie rhytm adapted to the significance of a segment within the overall story.

The temptation when watching a film like this one, a demonstration of blunt racism, is to think that Griffith was merely uneducated, a man trapped in his own times. Now, we are tempted to think, we know better than to be racist.
Here, you might say two things: Griffith made a square-edged film that is less sneaky than many other films that display a more secret racist agenda. To most viewers today, Griffith's movie is obviously racist. But the risk is that it is taken too lightly, that it is dismissed as obviously stupid. Well: think about things like revenge and what it is to say that a country has reached a state of harmony. This is not things that belong to an uneducated past. These structures of thinking are present in contemporary political debate and disentangling these structures is not always easy.