The Birth of a Nation, is considered a landmark of the American cinema. The film has been praised for its technical virtuosity and damned for its demeaning and racist depiction of black Americans. Birth was a kind of rite of passage for American movies, marking a transition from crude infancy to a robust adolescence. The film is considered to be the first great silent film, the one film that transformed cinema from mere entertainment into an art form. In an era when even feature films were under an hour in length, the 190 minute running time was unheard of. Most films were one or two reel shorts, and were base comedies, romances or action films. The ambition, scope and political messages of "The Birth of a Nation" created a sensation, and the film grossed $18 million, far more than any other film of its era.
It is necessary to consider the film's strong political messages before its quality can be analyzed. Obviously, "The Birth of a Nation" is racist. Black men, portrayed by white men in blackface, are generally depicted as beasts: lawless, abusive and lusting after white women. Director D.W. Griffith tries to balance this characterization by blaming this behavior on white "scalawag" carpetbaggers, and by having a few "good" black characters. These "good" blacks are former slaves still loyal to their former white masters. The Ku Klux Klan, a murderous, racist vigilante organization, are presented as heroes for restoring "order" and white minority rule. Scenes suggesting that blacks should be shipped to Liberia were deleted from the film after protests. The film was released in 1915, during a time when WWI was raging in Europe, and the U.S. was attempting to stay out of it. Many of the dialogue cards for "The Birth of a Nation" deplore war and its waste. Woodrow Wilson was President at the time, and excerpts from a racist history book that he had written are quoted in the film.
Abraham Lincoln is depicted heroically in the film. This is curious given the pro-South, anti-war, Jim Crow sympathies of the film. Griffith's first talkie would be "Abraham Lincoln", a warm tribute to the Civil War President. Lincoln's assassination is blamed for the excesses of reconstruction. "The Birth of a Nation" is mostly the story of two families. Not content to stick to the plot, Griffith inserts scenes presenting historical moments, such as Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination. Griffith takes pains to re-create the architecture of Ford Theater and the Appomattox Courthouse (and is proud to tell us so), which is ironic given his polemic interpretation of American history. The characters are simplistic. Besides the depiction of blacks, the three main female characters are lovely simpletons, the subject of lust from blacks and heroic rescue from whites. The white male heroes are a stereotype of chivalry and bravery. We are left with reconstructionist congressman Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) as the only character with some depth. The action scenes are many. There are Civil War battles, lynchings, black mobs, and Ku Klux Klan rescue missions. Admittedly, these scenes add excitement to the film, but they are sometimes muddled and sometimes lack credibility due to the extreme characterizations. One scene has a white man taking on, and defeating, a dozen black men. "The Birth of a Nation" remains an historically important film, but it is not a great film. Its major theme, the effect of the Civil War and reconstruction on wealthy white Southern families, was much better realized a generation later in "Gone With a Wind."
I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it, honestly. "Witin Out Gates" adds new insight into the workings of Oscar Micheaux, an incredibly prolific African American filmmaker, writer, producer, novelist, and businessman. Since so few of Micheaux's estimated forty-eight feature films survive, it is difficult to generalize about the entire oeuvre. However, Within Our Gates is a stunning film, the first surviving feature by an African American director, and an example of his silent-era work. I wish to concentrate exclusively on Within Our Gates not as a fragment from an elusive career, but as a complex, self-sufficient text that stands alone. Accounts of Oscar Micheaux's directorial style invariably address his rough approximation of Hollywood narratives; even the most sympathetic reviews cite the ways in which Micheaux was constrained. In many renderings of Alain Locke’s moment, historians and intellectuals remember the Harlem Renaissance as typified by disagreements and antagonism. However, this project ascribes to Locke's rendering of this movement. Rather than understanding these seemingly disjointed expressions of life as distractions from a unified black American agenda, this project understands this diversity as the catalyst of the movement and wealth to black American history. He employs metaphors of movement to represent that this New Negro "transformation" is an essentially American phenomenon of reinvention through transplanting. Locke's essential project is one that seeks to expand the parameters of what is Negro leadership. He essentially debunks the way Americans remember the Negro past in order to redefine and relocate what leadership is as well as who is eligible to lead. Separate as it may be in color and substance, the culture of the Negro is of a pattern integral with the times and with its cultural setting. The achievements of the present generation have eventually made this apparent. Liberal minds to-day cannot be asked to peer with sympathetic curiosity into the darkened Ghetto of a segregated race life. That was yesterday. Nor must they expect to find a mind and soul bizarre and an alien as the mind of a savage, or even as native and refreshing as the mind of the peasant or the child. That too was yesterday, and the day before. Now that there is cultural adolescence and then approach to maturity, there has come a development that makes these phases of Negro life only an interesting and significant segment of the general American scene.
As Blacks were fighting for their rights, the Civil Rights movement were in full force after U.S. Supreme Court passed the bill of Segregation to be unconstitutional. This led to the intense and furious fight among Whites and Blacks in the late 50s and 60s. President Kennedy gave the speech regarding Civil Rights in 1963, which became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, after the assassination of Kennedy Brothers, Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr. This led to a militancy approach. It’s important to remember that before the film came out, there was a book of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, by Sam Greenlee, which was released in 1966. Greenlee’s book, while containing many espionage elements, had an underlying message for black America. The message seems harmless enough, doesn’t it: the ability to think and to act for oneself without handouts and welfare from the state. But in 1973, when the film was released, it still was a message that many white American communities didn’t want to hear. While I am hardly an expert on Black Civil Rights, it seems that a fictive story with espionage genre trappings should barely raise a ripple. But for Black population that didn’t have the right to a voice, seeing the militant stylization in the movie was a powerful statement. So powerful in fact that the movie was rumored to be pulled from distribution. For many years the only way to see it was underground screenings or on bootleg video. Today’s audiences may see this film as a low budget blaxploitation film from the early 70s that has little to offer the genre. But that isn’t quite so. It's about Black Empowerment "By Any Means Necessary" as Malcolm X would put it. The film provides discussions around Black militancy and the violent reactions that took by White American in response to the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. As one of the quotes from the film explains it "What we got now is colony; what we want is a new nation."