D.W Griffith’s widely acclaimed and equally controversial film, “The Birth of a Nation,” ushered in a new age of American cinema and established its dominance for the next century or more. Before Griffith’s magnum opus, the cinema’s audience was used to one or two reeled movies that did not go for more than thirty minutes. However, with “The Birth of a Nation,” Griffith introduced a film that was over three hours long and featured hundreds of cast members. Although the film was brutally racist and fueled the further persecution of an already oppressed African American population, over a century later, we still perceive cinema as Griffith structured his movie.
The main argument made in Griffith’s film is that African Americans are to blame for America’s problems from the time they first came, through the Civil War, until the film’s present time. To create some level of academic authenticity for his claim, Griffith quotes one of America’s notably racist presidents, Woodrow Wilson’s article, “A History of the American people” stating that the purpose of the reconstruction was to subdue the white South under the black South. From its beginning until the end, the film perpetuates the notion that the African American is less of a human being compared to the Anglo-American, and positions the Ku Klux Klan as the true liberators; noble heroes to free America from its ‘black’ plague. As a racist propaganda film, Griffith’s masterpiece has no grey areas.
Although “The Birth of a Nation” is credited for structuring the motion picture as we know it today and for ushering several film techniques, it is essential to note that the second decade of the twentieth century was a burgeoning era in film technology. Griffith might not have invented all the techniques that he used. Moreover, Griffith’s right-hand man Billy Blitzer contributed to developing some of the methods. The earliest film directors assumed that when audiences paid to see their favourite actors, they wanted to see them whole. However, in Griffith’s film, the camera moves closer to its subject in close-ups, revealing more intimate emotions, expressions, and details, a technique that further personalized the subjects. One successful use of the close-up technique, tying it to a long shot camera distance to express higher expression and emotion as used in the film involves a scene during the civil war that starts with a close-up of a distraught mother and her children mourning on a hillside. Without breaking, the camera pans horizontally to reveal what the family is watching. The audience sees General Sherman’s devastating march; hence, the director ties the historical to the personal by a single shot.
Griffith’s film also shows the first use of flashback as an aesthetic technique by briefly interrupting the linear narrative with brief past scenes. Nothing much has changed when it comes to present use of flashbacks ever since Griffith introduced it. Moreover, the film introduced the technique of parallel editing; cutting between two scenes that coincide, hence proving to the world that films could go places that stage actors could only dream of. Other innovations attributed to “The Birth of a Nation” are night-time photography achieved through magnesium flares fired into the night sky, use of hundreds of extras to recreate battles, and the use of an original score. In conclusion, although “The Birth of a Nation” is one of the racist films ever created, it was a film full of revolutionary ideas, and for that, it is still acknowledged more than a century later.
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Zac Viper 