Week 6

This week we watched The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), a film that is shocking not only because of its horrifically disgusting and overt racism, but also because of how successful it was in its time. This film further fueled hatred against Black and Brown people in America as well as a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. In this post I’m going to focus on a few of the reasons why this film holds so much unfortunate power.

Firstly, D.W. Griffith creates a world for audience members that portrays white southerners before the civil war in a very romanticized light. They are generous and kind, they fall in love, they sit within glorious gardens and magnificent homes. They smile at their slaves—who smile back whilst working in their homes and fields. They bring in friends from the more liberal north, and romp around fields with them among their slaves. Everyone is portrayed as happy and peaceful. Then, the civil war begins, and we watch as these same “sweet” white southerners are put through the undeniable horrors of war. They give up their belongings, they lose loved ones. Its all unfortunately very humanizing of their evilness. The film uses classic spectacle and tragedy to relate to audience members and gain sympathy. For an uneducated and ignorant audience, this film possesses all of the right pieces to spark injustice and deepen racism in viewers. It’s involvement of historical events that we all know of allows for easy persuasion—that the white southerners being portrayed might have once actually lived.

This film’s immense power also comes from being a mere product of it’s time, where feature length motion pictures were new and were allowing for audience members to forge a much deeper connection with cinema. It felt real, it looked, to those watching it, real. “developments in staging, set design, lighting, camera movement, and editing created a new expressive repertoire of filmmaking which lent atmosphere, meaning, and suspense to films and worked to deepen the spectator’s emotional involvement.” (188, Feature Films and Cinema Programmes, Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer). One particular cinematographic technique that relates to this and in my opinion was extremely powerful is the reverse tracking shot around 2:53:00 in the film portraying the clansmen galloping in to rescue white southerners. This scene is powerful because, especially during this time, it made the audience feel as though they were galloping with them, thus forging an emotional bond.

This film, while a powerful example of cinema’s great power, must also be a reminder of its ability to create great injustice when matched with a crowd of ignorant and/or uneducated viewers, and therefore can be used to consider our duty as filmmakers to understand and know societal constructs that may influence audiences.