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The Birth, of a Nation
1915
Writing a few paragraphs on The Birth of a Nation and hoping to do it some kind of justice is like trying to condense the Bible, or all the plays of Shakespeare, into a short synopsis. The film warrants a complete volume, and one day possibly it will get one.
Undoubtedly, The Birth of a Nation is the most important single film in the evolution of the screen, although not necessarily the greatest. But it is the film from which all movie grammar derives, and most important of all, it is the film which overnight won worldwide respect for the motion picture medium, and raised it from a mere novelty entertainment to the status of an art.
A vignette of Sherman's march to the sea.
16
David Wark Griffith, creator of The Birth of a Nation.
The first American film of any real size and scope, and certainly, at three hours, the longest up to that time (1915), The Birth of a Nation dramatizes the events leading up to, and following, the Civil War of 1861-65. Part One includes a prologue depicting the introduction of slaverv into America in the seventeenth century, and the rise of the abolitionist movement. From there it goes into the outbreak of the Civil War, and finishes with Lee's surrender and the assassination of Lincoln. The second part of the film— the half that has always aroused so much controversy over its alleged anti-Negro bias— concerns the effects on the South of Lincoln's death, the exploitation of the newlyfreed Negroes by unscrupulous Northern politicians and industrialists, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to save the old South from anarchy. It is essential to point out that the Klan of that period was vastly different, both in conception and activities, from the sheeted bigots of today. Whether or not the Klan of the postCivil War period was justified is something that we'll leave to the historians, but it was essentially a patriotic and not a terrorist force.