How Birth of a Nation’s History is Slanted: The Civil War & Slavery
by Donato Totaro, Offscreen.com, Volume 8, Issue 2 / February 2004
As part of Black History month, on February 22, 2004, the Montreal based “Film Society” is presenting a special double-bill screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The Film Society is clearly going out of its way to present Birth of a Nation and Intolerance in the way they were meant to be seen: on a big screen, with live piano and with the spirit of the big theatre ‘palace’ experience. I thought it would be fitting to give some necessary context that is missing from the event’s promotional material which can be accessed at the dedicated website (www.cinemuet.com). To begin, Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905), which was used by Griffith as the main source for the film (along with a play based on the same novel) deals only with the Reconstruction period, not, as the website claims, “before, during, and after the Civil War.”[1] In fact, most of the first part of Birth of a Nation was written exclusively by D.W. Griffith.
The film is a historical fiction – with an emphasis on the latter – from a Southern/Confederate point of view, beginning with the events leading to the Civil War and the War which took place between the Union/North and the confederacy/South (1861-65). The second part deals with the post-Civil War Reconstruction period and the rise of the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) as the “saviours” of the white south from black hegemony. A few historical matters are important to an understanding of the film and how it reflects a biased/racist Southern perspective. This will serve as set-up for a discussion of how the film’s usually lauded ‘formal greatness’ can not, as it so often is, be so easily ‘separated’ from the film’s racist content....
