The silent movie, The Birth of a Nation, appeared in 1915. In spite of old imperfect technologies and shooting techniques, this movie was a great step towards new art and new understanding of a movie. For this work, D.W. Griffith used a well-known novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon’s. It is important to note that the work began in total secrecy in late 1914, and, in spite of the imperfect and unfinished scenario created together with Woods, Griffith worked without a written script. The main controversy and debate was caused by description and portrayal of Ku Klux Klan and white dominance during the Civil war.
The first part depicts the pre-war America and describes social and economic relations inside the nation. This part concentrates on two families and such characters as Elsie, and the Southern Camerons(Margaret and Flora and three sons, most notably Ben. The main themes are abolitionist movement and political climate. The core of the second part is Reconstruction era. A special attention is given to Southern whites and the formation and organization of Ku Klux Klan. In general, both parts reflect Griffith’s personal undertaking of the Civil War (Stokes 33).
The preparation stage lasted for six weeks, and the shooting lasted nine weeks. The uniqueness was that Grifnth carried around in his head every minor detail of the plot and script including unique titles, settings, costumes, and props. Like Griffith himself, many actors and team members seeing the film after its first release knew personal details of the military operations from parents who had survived the war, and the political and social issues produced by the conflict still ran very deep.
The cast of the movie and team were amazed at the number of camera set-ups Griffith wanted for a single scene, and no one imagined how Griffith intended to pull together into a single monies the thousands of separate shots the director was taking. Griffith did definitely have a grand plan for his movie, because he was quite deliberately involved in creating the greatest money ever made, but this should not vague the fact that Griffith was a great entrepreneur whose finest talents were often improvised on the set to meet some detailed requirement of the narrative or the shooting scenes. Originally, the movie involved more than 1,544 separate shots. It was impressive number as in the silent movie epoch in which the most sophisticated of foreign spectacles contained fewer than one hundred as in The Clansman. When the final changes were done, Griffith had achieved on a huge scale the almost total incorporation of every narrative technique he had ever used in movie and in partnership with the composer Joseph Carl Breil Griffith had involved an orchestral sounds from the music of Grieg, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Liszt, Rossini, Verdi, and American folk and some popular songs, which noticeably paralleled the editing permanence of the movie (Stokes 54). The Birth of a Nation was the longest and most expensive movie pf this period, and because of its length the existing exchanges refused to allocate it. In order to overcome this difficult, Griffith and Aitken started their own company, the Epoch Producing Corporation, to ensure distribution of Griffith’s movie.
Critics admit that The Birth of a Nation was the first film ever to control the two-dollar entrance price of the lawful theater, and its extraordinary popularity made it one of the top movies of all time. The controversy of the movie was that it was an issue of historical record that the movies glowing representation of the Ku Klux Klan was directly accountable for the modern revitalization and development of that organization, whose association had reached five million by the time of World War II. Certainly, because of the Klan’s political and ideological leaders, The Birth of a Nation was used as a main tool of enrollment and programming well into the 1960s. At the same time, the movie was so clearly a work of art, though imperfect, that it conferred great reputation upon the new standard of the feature film when it most needed it. The Birth of a Nation was the first film ever to be highly praised as a great work of art and at the same time hated as a harmful misrepresentation of the truth, The Birth of a Nation is the cinema’s influential work of art, and its inconsistency is the contradiction of cinematic description itself (Stokes 65).
The popularity of the movie was explained by innovative approached used by Griffith and controversial topic of narration. By 1948, the movie had been seen in theaters by 150 million citizens all over the globe and, according to one business fable, had collected nearly forty-eight million dollars, or more than any movie made anywhere in the globe up to that time. From its very first viewing in Los Angeles, the critics were common in their appreciation of the movie’s technical excellence. But the Griffith’s extraordinary success was linked to controversy and scandal. Several weeks after the screening, Griffith capitulated to pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and city officials demanded that the movie’s most obviously racist scenes were excluded. Griffith unwillingly removed some 558 feet, reducing the total number of shots from 1,544 to 1,375. Unfortunately, these scenes and shots were never recovered, but they certainly involved scenes of white women being sexually attacked by rebel blacks as well as the final scene suggesting that the solution to America’s racial problems was the extradition of the Negroes to Africa. In spite of this compromise by Griffith and President Wilson’s support, critics began to attack the Griffith’s distorted opinion of Reconstruction; and well-known citizens and social leaders such as the president of Harvard University, Jane Addams of Hull House, and the editors of radical urban weeklies started to assail the movie. Today, critics underline that The Birth of a Nation for its racial prejudice and demand its suppression portrays reality of life and the epoch of the Civil war (Stokes 34).
The reality is that in many scenes and episodes the movie simply confirmed the historical narratives and social stereotypes of his period of time. The Birth of a Nation exactly follows the legend of Reconstruction propagated by politicians and historians alike in the 18th century and early 20th century. The social economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen underlined that, after viewing the movie in 1915, “Never before have I seen such concise misinformation”(Stokes 33).; but much of the propaganda enclosed in The Birth of a Nation belonged to a whole generation of Americans. In its epic scale, in its absorption of a crucial moment in American history, in its combination of historical and imaginary characters, in its stable narrative faction between the historical and the individual, and, most considerably, in its precise description of an American community predicated on race, This movie is described as a truly American epic. In spite of the fact that critics accuse Griffith for faultily distorting the historical facts of Reconstruction, for unconscionably stereotyping the African- American as either dupe or beast, and for glorifying an antisocial organization like the Klan, modern audience cannot deny the strength and power of this historical vision and understanding of the epoch by its witness (Stokes 45).
In sum, the movie is a real work of art as it reflect the history of America and the Civil War from different perspectives, combining tremendous long shots of the military operations with medium and close shots of bleeding hand-to-hand fighting to evoke the hostility of combat itself. Griffith added the emotional tension of these scenes by unreliable duration of each shot and by cutting on opposing actions. In general, The Birth of a Nation is a great work of art as it reflects unique opinions and views on the problem of Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy. The importance is that the large portion of the movie deals with the military operations themselves and is very practically self-contained. In spite o the debate and controversies, The Birth of a Nation is a movie of about military operations and historical events. It is this very part of the movie which most often called the “epic,” for it combines a complicated narration of historical actions with display on a massive scale. From the minute the Piedmont regiment marches off gaily and honestly to its first fight, to the murder of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, viewers are swept along on a story plot so powerful and fascinating that it is impossible even today to escape its magnetism. The siege of Petersburg, Atlanta in fire, and Sherman’s march to the ocean are all reflected in military operations whose strength is still compelling, despite eight decades of scientific modification.
Works Cited
Stokes, Melvyn, ‘D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time”‘ New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.