Film Review: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

'My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen shall sit by my side.'  So says Silas Lynch, the psychopathic mulatto antagonist of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.  You never know what you might find in your local library and this epic from 1915 is a startling example. An adaptation of  Thomas Dixon Jr's novel The Clansman, it was the highest grossing film in the U.S.A until the release of that other civil war behemoth 'Gone with the Wind' in 1939, and while its status as 'entertainment' is now highly questionable, as a historical document, it is priceless.

The film charts the fortunes of two families, the Camerons and the Stonemans, linked by love and friendship but divided by their support for the opposing Union and Confederate sides in the civil war. The first half of the film covers the period just before and during the civil war and contains a lot of stirring and energetic battle scenes featuring literally a cast of thousands.  The second half deals with the reconstruction period after the war, a  account in which the now enfranchised black population of the south are portrayed as savage and threatening and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan is presented as an inevitable and heroic response.

Some will find the very idea of the Klan riding to the rescue and restoring stablility hard to stomach but it's fascinating to see the white hooded figures as avenging angels, the founding clansman as the dashing hero who gets the girl (Lilian Gish, no less). It is also incredible to watch white actors in black make-up dancing wildly, drinking heavily, bullying white actors without black make-up and lusting after the white female stars. White actors play mulattos as diabolical schemers and in crowd scenes, there is a mix of blacked-up white actors and actual black people - it all makes for wonderfully weird watching.

In some regards, it is a dystopian film for white supremacists, as it appears to do away with historical accuracy in its second act and depicts what might happen if black people got the vote and went on to dominate local governance. Among the horrors envisaged are the legalisation of mixed race marriages, black people being allowed to walk on the same footpath as white people and black people laughing freely at whites.

It also contains some of the most inflammatory intertitles of all time: 'The town is given over to crazed negros', 'Helpless whites look on', and 'KKK sympathisers - victims of the black mob'.  

Despite its enormous box office success, over the years, the shine came off 'The Birth of the Nation' especially when it was used as a promotional tool by the revived KKK though Griffith himself was unapologetic and poured scorn on attempts to censor or ban the film.

But it's worth seeing for various reasons, not least for the quality of the silent acting (what amazing faces the lead actors had to have), the fast pace of the narrative and the enormous setpieces. But perhaps the main reason why anyone should investigate The Birth of the Nation is to experience an unabashedly racist film that was obviously loved by many people - an intriguing snapshot of the time in which it was produced.