(no subject)
Birth of a Nation: Visual Classic, Revisionist Bunkum
In Birth of a Nation, the viewer is asked to believe a great many unbelievable things, most of them before breakfast. The film is based on a play adapted from the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which reads as simultaneously an appropriation of the Lost Cause ideology of the Old South, and a manifesto of race hierarchy, with the Aryan Celts placed first in the natural world and in civilization. D.W. Griffith’s visuals bear out this triumph of cultured Whiteness over the depravity of Blackness, without once being anything but fantastic.
It may be noted in passing, that the play did away with one of the principal villains of the novel, the romanticized real Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton of Pennsylvania, and the film retained that deletion, though its epic cast required no such minor downsizing; the bewildering array of minor cast members and non-principal roles is still exceptionally difficult to follow. Many of the scenes are edited to repeat actions or angles already depicted, presumably for budgetary reasons, but also for dramatic emphasis. The technique of “coverage” seems to have been invented by Griffith for dramatic purposes, and it is often effective in enhancing the drama of an already-fraught narrative.
The narrative so overwrought, is of the Lost Cause of Southron Civilization, an epic fantasy dreamt of in the sultry days between 1836 and 1877, when Jackson’s democracy brewed up with the sweet tea and Bourbon of the South, while Northern radical Republicans agitated for abolition over unsweetened hot tea and coffee, drinking the bitterest gall of racial equality and Union tyranny over states’ rights. Enter, Mr Stoneman, a radical politician from the middle states and an agitator for racial enfranchisement of the Negro, the principal villain of the film. His aim is to overthrow the civilization of the South entirely, to raise up the barbarous Blacks to rule over the helpless White paragons of civilization and culture, depicted initially by their fondling cats and puppies and wandering tophat-and-tailed among the cotton fields occasionally picking a flower, after a big lunch. The visuals of the antebellum South owe more to the Decameron than to any gritty field-hand’s penciled diary, but this is a romance, not a straight history; most of its elements are stylized well past the point of unrecognizability, though not its themes.
The romance of the film, for the South, for the characters of Elsie and Phil Stoneman, the assorted Camerons, and its revilement of lazy, feckless, drunken Blacks and their scalawag White leaders is striking but uninspiring. The war-lust of hypocritical and grasping Stoneman; the unprincipled and morally unrestrained lusts of the wicked mulatto Silas Lynch, Stoneman’s protégé and the other principle villain, are visualized more boldly and more passionately than the courage, chastity, and chivalry of Ben Cameron, the film’s romantic hero. In one notable scene, Lynch is shown as viciously cruel to a friendly dog while creepily spying on Stoneman’s daughter Elsie, in case the audience needed it underscored that he was of poor and impulsive character, without a kind or moral bone in his body.
Lynch is depicted as a scheming Iago, with all of Iago’s manipulative powers transferred to the treacherous white villain Stoneman, with the explicit intent of creating both a composite villain and a villain possessed of all the poor qualities of a Black man (laziness, impulsiveness, moral laxity and gullibility) without any of the strengths of a White man, all of which have been imputed to Stoneman, with added hypocrisy and cruelty. The film owes a great deal to the novel for this character split, wherein Blacks and mulattoes like Lynch and Lydia Brown are depicted as bestial, and Whites like the Camerons and Stonemans as humane, if on occasion necessarily harsh. The implicit and overwrought racial paternalism drips from the page, and the transparent scheming and moral barrenness of Lynch and Brown is set in sharp contrast to the feckless and ignorant supporting Black characters, mainly played by white actors in the film, but consistently mired in bestial dialect and ignorance, never uttering a considered or cultured word. To raise those mere brutes to the level of citizens, the film shows in many of the later scenes, was both morally corrupt and foolhardy.
The culmination of the two narratives stands in sharp visual contrast, well after the painstaking battle scenes: Flora Cameron, grown up during the war, is pursued to her death by the curiously morally innocent Gus, a Negro soldier for the corrupt Union forces, which drives her heroic brother Ben to form a Klan to avenge her death and right the wrongs of the cruel carpetbagger regime put in place by the Stoneman/Lynch cabal, and Lynch finally kidnaps Stoneman’s daughter Elsie in an impulsive move driven by lust, then asks her father for permission to marry a White woman, whereupon Stoneman shows his corrupt hypocrisy by first congratulating Lynch on his egalitarian choice, then collapsing in horror as he realizes the woman is his own daughter. The lust, ambition, and moral inferiority of Lynch; the hypocrisy, corruption and moral cowardice of Stoneman stand in stark contrast to the moral uprightness and oft-reluctant heroism of Ben Cameron, who rides in white-robed to save the civilization of the White South and restore both the moral and racial order.
The history written of in the novel, and its visual counterpart on the screen, are admitted up front as romanticized. What goes without admission, and requires one, is that the revisionism practiced by the novelist Dixon and its faithful adaptation to the screen is in fact, revisionism. Ben Cameron, Hero of the Civilized South never lived; the lazy directionless tophat-and-tailed Whites were not a positive moral influence on their slaves, and Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens were not well-meaning but misguided in their attempts to raise bestial black Americans to true citizenship. It’s a whitewash, and one as slapdash as if painted by Tom Sawyer.
In Birth of a Nation, the viewer is asked to believe a great many unbelievable things, most of them before breakfast. The film is based on a play adapted from the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which reads as simultaneously an appropriation of the Lost Cause ideology of the Old South, and a manifesto of race hierarchy, with the Aryan Celts placed first in the natural world and in civilization. D.W. Griffith’s visuals bear out this triumph of cultured Whiteness over the depravity of Blackness, without once being anything but fantastic.
It may be noted in passing, that the play did away with one of the principal villains of the novel, the romanticized real Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton of Pennsylvania, and the film retained that deletion, though its epic cast required no such minor downsizing; the bewildering array of minor cast members and non-principal roles is still exceptionally difficult to follow. Many of the scenes are edited to repeat actions or angles already depicted, presumably for budgetary reasons, but also for dramatic emphasis. The technique of “coverage” seems to have been invented by Griffith for dramatic purposes, and it is often effective in enhancing the drama of an already-fraught narrative.
The narrative so overwrought, is of the Lost Cause of Southron Civilization, an epic fantasy dreamt of in the sultry days between 1836 and 1877, when Jackson’s democracy brewed up with the sweet tea and Bourbon of the South, while Northern radical Republicans agitated for abolition over unsweetened hot tea and coffee, drinking the bitterest gall of racial equality and Union tyranny over states’ rights. Enter, Mr Stoneman, a radical politician from the middle states and an agitator for racial enfranchisement of the Negro, the principal villain of the film. His aim is to overthrow the civilization of the South entirely, to raise up the barbarous Blacks to rule over the helpless White paragons of civilization and culture, depicted initially by their fondling cats and puppies and wandering tophat-and-tailed among the cotton fields occasionally picking a flower, after a big lunch. The visuals of the antebellum South owe more to the Decameron than to any gritty field-hand’s penciled diary, but this is a romance, not a straight history; most of its elements are stylized well past the point of unrecognizability, though not its themes.
The romance of the film, for the South, for the characters of Elsie and Phil Stoneman, the assorted Camerons, and its revilement of lazy, feckless, drunken Blacks and their scalawag White leaders is striking but uninspiring. The war-lust of hypocritical and grasping Stoneman; the unprincipled and morally unrestrained lusts of the wicked mulatto Silas Lynch, Stoneman’s protégé and the other principle villain, are visualized more boldly and more passionately than the courage, chastity, and chivalry of Ben Cameron, the film’s romantic hero. In one notable scene, Lynch is shown as viciously cruel to a friendly dog while creepily spying on Stoneman’s daughter Elsie, in case the audience needed it underscored that he was of poor and impulsive character, without a kind or moral bone in his body.
Lynch is depicted as a scheming Iago, with all of Iago’s manipulative powers transferred to the treacherous white villain Stoneman, with the explicit intent of creating both a composite villain and a villain possessed of all the poor qualities of a Black man (laziness, impulsiveness, moral laxity and gullibility) without any of the strengths of a White man, all of which have been imputed to Stoneman, with added hypocrisy and cruelty. The film owes a great deal to the novel for this character split, wherein Blacks and mulattoes like Lynch and Lydia Brown are depicted as bestial, and Whites like the Camerons and Stonemans as humane, if on occasion necessarily harsh. The implicit and overwrought racial paternalism drips from the page, and the transparent scheming and moral barrenness of Lynch and Brown is set in sharp contrast to the feckless and ignorant supporting Black characters, mainly played by white actors in the film, but consistently mired in bestial dialect and ignorance, never uttering a considered or cultured word. To raise those mere brutes to the level of citizens, the film shows in many of the later scenes, was both morally corrupt and foolhardy.
The culmination of the two narratives stands in sharp visual contrast, well after the painstaking battle scenes: Flora Cameron, grown up during the war, is pursued to her death by the curiously morally innocent Gus, a Negro soldier for the corrupt Union forces, which drives her heroic brother Ben to form a Klan to avenge her death and right the wrongs of the cruel carpetbagger regime put in place by the Stoneman/Lynch cabal, and Lynch finally kidnaps Stoneman’s daughter Elsie in an impulsive move driven by lust, then asks her father for permission to marry a White woman, whereupon Stoneman shows his corrupt hypocrisy by first congratulating Lynch on his egalitarian choice, then collapsing in horror as he realizes the woman is his own daughter. The lust, ambition, and moral inferiority of Lynch; the hypocrisy, corruption and moral cowardice of Stoneman stand in stark contrast to the moral uprightness and oft-reluctant heroism of Ben Cameron, who rides in white-robed to save the civilization of the White South and restore both the moral and racial order.
The history written of in the novel, and its visual counterpart on the screen, are admitted up front as romanticized. What goes without admission, and requires one, is that the revisionism practiced by the novelist Dixon and its faithful adaptation to the screen is in fact, revisionism. Ben Cameron, Hero of the Civilized South never lived; the lazy directionless tophat-and-tailed Whites were not a positive moral influence on their slaves, and Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens were not well-meaning but misguided in their attempts to raise bestial black Americans to true citizenship. It’s a whitewash, and one as slapdash as if painted by Tom Sawyer.