The Birth of a Nation (United Artists) (1915)

A TRIBUTE TO “THE BIRTH OF A NATION” BY RUPERT HUGHES W HEN a great achievement of human genius is put before us, we can become part¬ ners in it, in a way, by applauding it with something of the enthusiasm that went into its making. It is that sort of collaboration that I am impelled to attempt in what follows. When I saw “The Birth of a Nation” the first time, I was so overwhelmed by the immensity of it that I said: “It makes the most spectacular production of drama look like the work of village amateurs. It reduces to childishness the biggest things the theatre can do.” For here were hundreds of scenes in place of four or five; thousands of actors in place of a score; armies in landscape instead of squads of supers jostling on a platform among canvas screens. Here was the evolution of a people, the living chronicle of a conflict of statesmen, a civil war, a racial prob¬ lem rising gradually to a puzzle yet unsolved. Here were social pictures without number, short stories, adventures, romances, tragedies, farces, domestic comedies. Here was a whole art gallery of scenery, of humanity, of still life and life in wildest career. Here were portraits of things, of furniture, of streets, homes, wildernesses; pictures of conventions, cabinets, senates, mobs, armies; pictures of family life, of festivals and funerals, ballrooms and battlefields, hospitals arid flower-gardens, hypocrisy and pas¬ sion, ecstasy and pathos, pride and humiliation, rapture and jealousy, flirtation and anguish, devotion and treachery, self-sacrifice and tyranny. Here were the Southrons in their wealth, with their luxury at home, their wind-swept cotton fields; here was the ballroom with the seethe of dancers, here were the soldiers riding away to war, and the soldiers trudging home defeated with poverty ahead of them and new and ghastly difficulties arising on every hand. Here was the epic of a proud, brave people beaten into the dust and refusing to stay there. The pictures shifted with unending variety from huge canvasses to exquisite miniatures. Now it was a little group of refugees cowering in the ruins of a home. A shift of the camera and we were looking past them into a great valley with an army fighting its way through. One moment we saw Abraham Lincoln brooding over his Emancipation Proclamation; another, and he was yielding to a mother’s tears; later we were in the crowded theatre watching the assassin making his way to and from his awful deed. The leagues of film uncoiled and poured forth beauty of scene, and face and expression, beauty of fabric and attitude and motion. “The Birth of a Nation” is a choral symphony of light, light in all its magic; the sun flashing through a bit of blown black lace and giving immortal beauty to its pattern; or quivering in a pair of eyes, or on a snow-drift of bridal veil, or on a moonlit brook or a mountain side. Superb horses were shown plunging and rearing or galloping with a heart-quickening glory of speed down road and lane and through flying waters. Now came the thrill of a charge, or of a plunging steed caught back on its haunches in a sudden arrest. Now followed the terror of a bestial mob, the hurrah of a rescue, streets filled with panic and with carnival. Life is motion and here was the beautiful moving monument of motion. “What could the stage give to rival all this?” I thought. “What could the novel give? or the epic poem?” The stage can publish the voice and the actual flesh; yet from the film these faces were eloquent enough without speech. And after all when we see people we are merely receiving in our eyes the light that beats back from their surfaces; we are seeing merely photographs and moving pictures. I had witnessed numberless photoplays unrolled, pictures of every sort and condition of interest and value. I had seen elaborate “feature-films” occupying much time and covering many scenes. But none of them approached the unbroken fascination of “The Birth of a Nation.” The realism of this work is amazing; merely sit at a window and actuality rolls by. The gran¬ deur of mass and the minuteness of detail are unequalled in my experience. And so the first impres¬ sion of my first view of this was that it was something new and wonderful in dramatic composition and in artistic achievement. In his novel “The Clansman,” the Rev. Thomas Dixon had made a fervid defence of his people from the harsh judgments and condemnations of unsympathetic historians. With this book as a foundation, David W. Griffith built up a structure of national scope and of heroic proportions.