Rachel Plassmeyer
Staff Writer
“THE BRINGING of the African to America planted the first seeds of disunion.”
Now, with a catchy opening title card like that, white supremacist D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” has got to be a movie worth seeing, right? Not so fast, especially judging by the audible sighs and moans of disgust from audience members in the theater of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on Saturday. The entire three-hour-long film continued, with people fidgeting uncomfortably in their seats through depictions of the Civil War battle scenes and the ensuing Reconstruction.
If one were to evaluate this production solely in terms of the film industry, no doubt it would float somewhere near the top of any “100 Best Movies of All Time” list. It was the first “blockbuster”—people lined the block to get in, eagerly paying $2 for their ticket. It was the highest-grossing film until the 1950s, and is still discussed in American film classrooms today.
If only it weren’t for the awful ideology behind it. The plot follows two families—one from the Confederacy, one from the Union—through the Civil War and then the Reconstruction. Before the Confederate family found out about the trouble Lincoln was brewing in the White House, long scenes on the plantation portray the slaves—or, “faithful souls,” as Griffith calls them—as happy to be working for their masters. The slaves, of course, are portrayed by white actors in blackface, and their racist portrayal becomes painfully obvious as the actors try unsuccessfully to express their “characters” as sneaky and submissive, their light eyes shining through the dark paint.
Until the second part of the film, which focuses on the Reconstruction Era, Griffith’s work is only bordering on offensively uncomfortable, but this changes quickly as the director’s ideology comes to the fore.
Griffith creates Reconstruction scenes that drew sharp breaths from even Saturday’s audience. Portraying abolitionists as naïve and stating that the “charity” of the Freedman’s Bureau from the North was “misused to delude the ignorant,” Griffith shows freed slaves stealing food and refusing to leave ration stations without extra bags of grain. Some of his more blatantly political portrayals even caused a few moviegoers actually to leave the theater. Proposing the corruption of the House of Representatives, Griffith depicts barefoot African Americans drinking alcohol and dancing on their desks in the chamber room, as a silent white minority sits in nice clothes, shaking their heads.
The climax of the film involves a group of renegade African American men invading and wreaking havoc on the once-quaint city of Piedmont. Having the white-robbed men ride in on horseback to defend the once-quaint city of Piedmont to Wagner’s “Flight of the Vulcan,” there is an almost-religious metaphor to Griffith’s work—the whites are the Christians, suffering at the hands of the black “demons.” Griffith then proceeds to end his epic with a promise that “the Prince of Peace” (and certainly Griffith couldn’t think He’s a Klansman, could he?) will come again.
At least one man was able to find humor in the racist irony of Griffith’s work, and he shared his thoughts with another audience at the Panel Discussion on Tuesday, October 2.
Mr. Paul Miller, also known as “DJ Spooky,” is a conceptual artist with a knack for seeing art as just a set of different perspectives. He was aware that he was again bringing up a touchy issue with the release of his remix, “Rebirth of a Nation,” and when asked why the past isn’t just left in the past, Mr. Miller replied: “You can’t avoid history. It’s an unstable narrative, where people misinterpret and translate differently the facts and their memories. There are layers and layers of decoding to be done, and by seeing our past, we are able to get a better perspective on today’s issues.”
Along with Bill Purcell, the Associate Director of the Center for Social Concerns, Richard Pierce, the head of Africana Studies, and Pam Wojcik, a professor in the department of Film, Television, and Theater, DJ Spooky gave reasons as to why this movie is still such a popular topic. Being the first three-hour epic of its kind, Griffith’s project was a cinematic accomplishment in 1915. In the South, the ideas he put forth were not radical, and thus it is possible that the next generation of Confederates were eager to see what the past had ‘really’ been like.
Beyond that era, however, Griffith extended his influence by re-producing the movie in the 1930s. Pam Wojcik remarked that as recently as 1988, she watched a KKK recruitment video that played this movie in the background. Because some still believe that what this movie depicts is historical fact, Griffith’s film has had a long shelf life.
Instead of focusing on negative aspects, however, Professor Richard Pierce pointed out that we must teach the past in order to learn from it. DJ Spooky concluded the panel by also showing a few clips of his reworking of the film, which drew the parallels of the past into recent and current events.
The film causes action in its audience, whether that means being repulsed by its racist message or enticed by it, and that is one of the main reasons it is still around. Birth of a Nation is apparently still valuable as a tool for learning from the past in an effort not to repeat it.
Contact Rachel at rplassme@nd.edu.
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