For decades, Birth of a Nation was presented to film students as a mildly problematic classic, an unavoidable landmark in cinema history (which: perhaps) that singlehandedly invented the language of film—which is all wildly overstated. From roughly 1907 on, directors like Reginald Barker, Yevgenii Bauer, and Lois Weber were laying the groundwork for everything that D.W. Griffith accomplished in Birth of a Nation, and often using the new cinematic techniques with a fair bit more nuance. The movie was a hit, of course, the most successful film to its time, but that has as much to do with its reframing of the post-Reconstruction era as the triumph of perfidious, scheming northern whites who manage to trick the movie’s drunk, gullible, and relentlessly horny Black characters into thinking that slavery was a bad thing. It is rough.
But it’s also not a new controversy: time has actually dulled the (rather justifiable vitriol) directed at the film, which was widely protested before, during, and after its release; prominent civil rights leaders, social reformers, and religious groups denounced the film and riots greeted its release in major cities, while reviews were generally positive, but not nearly as rapturous as its modern reputation might lead you to believe. Such was the controversy that President Woodrow Wilson spoke out of both sides of his mouth when discussing the film, praising it in some circles and denouncing it in others. It’s revisionist history to suggest that the movie is only troubling to our modern eyes, when, if anything, we’ve cushioned it with a veneer of academic respectability.
Where to stream: YouTube