“The Birth of a Nation” was the first major motion picture and is both famous and infamous. It was directed by D.W. Griffith. The cinematography is astounding. The film features “panoramic long shots, iris effects, still shots, night photography, panning shots, and color tinting”. The burning of Atlanta has surreal effects and a split screen for the refugees. The last sequence has intercutting between the town, the cabin, and Elsie. The battle scenes are epic. Some of the shots come from a tower.The highlight is a battle featuring hundreds of extras. Griffith shot 150,000 feet of film. That was about 36 hours that had to be edited to create the 3-hour film. The movie created cinema as we know it today. The script, which was co-written by Griffith was based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman. The novel was a bestseller and Griffith paid Dixon $10,000 (equivalent to over $300,000 today). Relative to its budget, the movie became one of the most profitable films in history. When it opened in New York City on Feb. 8, 1915, tickets were an astronomical $2 (equivalent to about $18 today). The success was in spite of the controversy with regard to its treatment of blacks.
The NAACP encouraged boycotts of the film and it was banned in some cities. On the other hand, the movie became the first film screened in the White House. Pres. Wilson had been a classmate of Dixon’s in college. Supposedly Wilson complimented the film as “like writing with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” There is dispute whether Wilson said this and he later denied it. However, his historical take on Reconstruction appears on a title card in the movie and the plot fits his pro-segregation views.
The movie is the tale of a Northern and a Southern family during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Northern son falls in love with the Southern belle and vice-versa. Scenes include a battle during the siege of Petersburg, the assassination of Lincoln, and the legislature in South Carolina during Reconstruction. The scenes in the legislature are particularly offensive as black legislators (actually white actors in black face) behave like stereotypical white southerner views of blacks. One eats fried chicken, another swigs from a bottle. A pro-shoes law is passed after one of them puts his smelly bare feet on a desk. They got control of the legislature by stuffing the ballot boxes and preventing whites from voting. They pass a law allowing mixed race marriages, which was supposed to invoke outrage in the audience. In a dramatic moment in the film, a black man chases one of the Southern daughters and she leaps to her death. The Southern son creates the Ku Klux Klan to protect white women and maintain white supremacy.
The most negative result of the movie was it made the Ku Klux Klan look like patriots. In some theaters, ushers were dressed in sheets. Not coincidentally, recruitment for the Klan skyrocketed after the movie, even in the North. The Klan had become insignificant going into the 20th Century, but it is going to become a force in the 1920s. There was a sharp increase in lynchings and race riots (whites rioting) after the movie came out.
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