A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)


Cast: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann, Walter Long, Robert Harron, Wallace Reid, Joseph Henabery, Elmer Clifton, Josephine Crowell, Spottiswoode Aitken, George Beranger, Maxfield Stanley, Jennie Lee, Donald Crisp, Howard Gaye, Raoul Walsh. Screenplay: Thomas Dixon Jr., D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods, based on a novel and play by Dixon. Cinematography: G.W. Bitzer. Film editing: D.W. Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose Smith, Raoul Walsh. 

Is it an overstatement to say that the stench of The Birth of a Nation is more than a subset of the blight cast on American society and politics by slavery? Because Griffith's film informed an entire industry, not only with its undeniable influence on the language and grammar of film, but also in the tendency to valorize bigness above intimacy, action over thought, sensation over understanding that has characterized the mainstream of American movies. It was the first blockbuster. It was both intelligently crafted and abominably stupid. It just might be the most pernicious work of art ever made, a magnificent nauseating lie. Its portrait of Reconstruction warped the teaching of history for generations, and although the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan that it inspired has waned, we still find ourselves swatting down the heirs of the Klan like the Proud Boys, the Promise Keepers, and others who would defend what one of Griffith's title cards calls the "Aryan birthright." Even the reaction against The Birth of a Nation has its dark side: The recognition of the power of movies that followed its release eventually produced calls for censorship that would hamstring the medium. On the right, a suspicion that movies had the power to promote a leftist agenda led to the blacklist era, in which communists, not racists, were the target. And what is the crusade by some against "wokeness" in the media but another call for the kind of ideological purity that would stifle art? So to call The Birth of a Nation an essential film is an understatement. Looking at it as a demonstration of the ability of cinema to profoundly affect society could reveal it to be the most important movie ever made.     

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