The movie “Birth of a nation” (1915) is an American movie directed by D. W. Griffith and produced by Harry Aitken and D. W. Griffith. This movie has totally changed the cinematograph. It has been adapted from the famous novel “The Clansman”, and was released in 1925. The movie is about two families living in two periods of time - the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The impact of this movie is very difficult to overestimate on all subsequent movies, as almost every first American film unwittingly adopted technical and stylistic nuances of the "Birth of a Nation".
The film consists of two parts. The first tells the story of two families, Camerons and Stonemans in the middle of XIX century, they are friends and are planning to intermarry (Stokes). However, the war between North and South began, and it appeared that Stonemans were the North supporters, while Camerons - the South. The second part is devoted to the arbitrariness of black, terrorizing the population. Cameron becomes the head of the liberation of the Ku Klux Klan, Stonemans struggle against Silas Lynch, the head of the black population, and when black already won, the Ku Klux Klan came and made them surrender. After those events the peace between North and South was established.
Openly racist content of the film caused fierce controversy. Many people were opposed to the film because it seemed to them that it promoted racism. Offended by such harsh reviews, Griffith shot the film named "Intolerance" (Stokes). Such disputes were the best advertising for the film, and the film brought huge profits. "The Fall of the Nation" (1916) is a racist sequel and was filmed on the wave of the success of a movie in question. In fact, the movie contains nothing racist, it is rather pacifist. Griffith wanted to show that violence begets violence: aggression of black stems from the aggression of white, who had previously enslaved blacks, in turn, aggression of black gave rise to aggression of Ku Klux Klan, relentlessly carving black population. Peacemaker Griffith aims to show that peace is possible, it is only necessary to stop. This morality comes through in all his films.
As for me, Griffith had no luck. His first monumental pacifist movie was misunderstood by the audience, and the second, in which Griffith abandoned allegory explaining the peacekeeping content, did not have success and was forgotten by people. Movie "Birth of a Nation" has a lot of merits, including the fact that it became the film that would be a prominent example for the US film industry of the early twentieth century (Stokes). Despite the fact that Griffith made a serious movie, he understood the entertaining essence of the cinema, the viewer always needs a show. Therefore, if the first two hours on the screen turn to be a real historical epic of war and peace, the last hour is marked by the historical and adventure farce in the spirit of adventure fiction.
Work cited
Stokes, Melvyn. D.W. Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.
