Posted on 02/08/2015 8:25:02 AM PST by Borges
D.W. Griffith’s film was released on 8 February 1915.
One hundred years after it was made The Birth of a Nation still has the power to both enthrall and appall. The film is as confounding as ever, both brilliant and repugnant. Groundbreaking in its use of innovative cinematic techniques, it remains tainted by its brazen racism.
The Birth of a Nation was the creation of DW Griffith, who had tried his hand as an actor and playwright but whose real genius lay in film-making. Nothing on its scale had even been attempted before. It was the epic story of the relationship between two American families, one Union, the other Confederate, at the time of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed. The film ran for more than three hours and employed (according to a New York Times report from the time) 18,000 people and 3,000 horses. By 1922 it had been watched by more than five million people. It was the first blockbuster.
“It was a box office success – a mainstream film, so utterly mainstream,” says Professor Alan Rice, a Birth of a Nation expert at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire, who has been organising a series of symposia on the film.
It made history by becoming the first film ever to be screened at the White House. But it was revolutionary for another reason: “It was very important in [that] it was the first full-scale long narrative using a lot of the new techniques of film-making,” says Rice.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
I used to think so, but given what is occurring today in America and the world, am not so sure.
Wilson was born and raised in Virginia before moving to New Jersey.
As an amateur film buff, I’d always heard about this film and finally watched it a few years ago. I admired the many innovations and techniques, especially for a silent film.
BUT
A weird thing happens toward the end. The damsel in distress at the cabin, and to rescue comes (and here’s the weird part) - you start cheering here comes the cavalry! Yay-— um what the heck? The Klan?
It’s kind of like that moment in Hitchcock’s Psycho where Bates is trying to sink the car in the swamp and it stops. You sit on edge - oh no!. Then you realize he’s manipulated you into rooting for the villain for an instant, something you would never otherwise do.
Yes, the BBC left out that nugget. How convenient. Wilson, hero of the left and leader of the ‘RAT Pack, was a virulent racist.
The klan of that era was never stronger than they were here in the north. Primarily centered on Illinois I believe.
A while back I found that my great grandmother’s uncle was in the Antrim County Klan here in Michigan right around that time.
No it’s “Dear White People”.
Indiana. And it was in the 20's. But at it's height the Klan was as big in the North as it was in the South.
The last hour of Birth of a Nation gets dicey. I saw it first at the DW Griffith in NYC and a crazed yenta stood up and denounced it. But it has many fine things in it and is completely innovative. To be a film buff, one has to see everything in the context of the time. But that last hour is wild!!!
Naw, not the most racist, I’d say Roots has that honor.
I’m so sick of these endless cries of racism. The bias is so extreme, no scholarly study of race even exists anymore. All of it, every last shred of it, is naked hated of whites on behalf of forwarding socialism. Anyone who doesn’t see that, no doubt also believes Islam is a religion.
The way the Revs. Al and Jessee, Obola, and Holder suck up to odious criminals like St. Trayvon of the Skittles (SBUH), Michael Brown, and the New Black Panthers gives reason to think the movie may have been right. Also, just look at the Ferguson terrorists buying their own business district.
Did you tell her to sit down and shut up?
No sense of irony on the left that they, with their bigotry of low expectations, are today’s racists. [As slave-owning and segregationist Dems, they were yesteryear’s racists, as well.] And too many blacks, through their policies of self-separation and victimhood, are the reverse racists.
It should’ve been called Birth of The DemocRAT Party.
Yup.
Here comes the Klan! Led by the late Robert Byrd!
Yeah. You don’t make noise in a NYC theater without getting your head handed to you.
On the same page I saw this little nugget.
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