Critique of The Birth of a Nation Film Directed by D.W Griffith - Movie Review Example

Final Film Critique al Affiliation) Final Film Critique The movie under critique is “The Birth of a Nation”, written and directed by D.W Griffith. The film, which was mainly set in a town, in South Carolina, prior to and subsequent to the Civil War, portrays slavery in a calm light, depicts black people as being good for little but compliant labor, and demonstrates them, in Reconstruction, as having been pushed by the Radical Republicans into affirming an offensive dominion over Southern white people. It portrays freedmen as interested in intermarriage, being involved in legally authorized vengeful and excess violence mainly to force white women into relations of the sexual nature. It depicts Southern Whites establishing the Ku Klux Klan to protect themselves from such outrages and to incite the “Aryan” cause overall. The film affirms that the white-sheet-clad death squadron served up justice rapidly, and that, through denying the black people the right of being engaged in voting and placing them generally subordinate and apart, it restored civilization and order to the South. Therefore, in the film “the Birth of a Nation”, the author gave his well-plied audiences the message that black people did not only want their freedom, but also that liberation had been the greatest disaster of America. The art of Griffith presents moments that are humanly profound, whether delicate and graceful or rhetorical and grand, that disengage themselves from their situation to investigate nearly worldwide circumstances, like the blend of pride and shame in a returning Confederate soldier’s face. This is when he returns home in tatters meeting his sister in tatters too, or the strong adventures of Lillian Gish, a Union Girl sending her brother to war before breaking down into tears when the two are just out of view. The magnificent shot that begins close to children and their mother, high on the hillside, and thereafter progresses to the advance of the army of Sherman, seen from the elevated refuge of the family, movingly portrays the intimate damages of war (Lang, 1994). Throughout the movie, the pro-Confederacy feelings of Griffith are grossly evident; yet his portrayal of events, his demonstration of reality as understood by him, involves the addition of much that goes away from his intentions. The essence of the realism of Griffith is multiple action planes, complex staging and open frames, all of which put forward far more than the descriptive title cards that Griffith would allow (Lang, 1994). The general subject of the Birth of a Nation movie is the original proximity sin of the black and white races. The introductory scene, where Africans are brought into America and gotten rid of as slaves, is given a description in a title card: “The taking of an African to the United States of America was the plantation of the first disunion seed”. The problem, from the beginning of the film, was not slavery but the unwarranted combining of races- and the original ending of Griffith was to give the viewers an idea about returning of freed men to the African continent. The very conception of racial wholesomeness is at the center of the Birth of a Nation Film. However, the essence of the aesthetic power of the movie and of its significance that is enduring is its inherent heterogeneity (Stokes, 2007). Apart from the visualization of history, the “Birth of a Nation” offers a guide for the enormous, world-embracing abilities of the movie. It provided tools that were extraordinarily powerful for its own negation. The real offence was not for Griffith, but for the world. The actuality that the greater part of the individuals viewing the movie did not know much about slavery, and did not also know much about Reconstruction, Klan and Jim Crow, and were all very willing to swallow the movie’s very worst without question, all give an indication of the importance of Griffith’s ideas. They only saw what was intended to be said by Griffith as opposed to what was showed by the movie. Accepted and ambient racism left the viewers of the film uninformed of the film’s facts and prone to concur with the racist version of Griffith as authentic. The “Birth of a Nation” looks remarkably authentic and genuine, almost of the quality of a documentary, brilliantly reconstructing a significant period in the history of America. Its story consists of the events that led to the split of the nation. The events include the era of the civil War, the era from Civil War’s ending and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Reconstruction Era of Post-Civil war giving details of the Congress’ control during the presidency of Andrew Johnson and Radical Republicans’ actions to enfranchise the slaves that were freed, and KKK’s rise (Stokes, 2007).. While the “Birth of a Nation” film deserves the place it takes up within the filmmaking history for the manner in which it brought changes to cinema language, it is essential to note that Griffith was not the inventor of every technique applied in the film. Various innovative directors including the primary collaborator of Griffith, Billy Bitzer, created these techniques. Griffith often improved upon techniques invented by other directors. The film “Birth of a Nation” is a representation of the result of visual strategies aimed at communicating a narrative that the industry of filmmaking had been developing for first 20 years it had existed. Several film directors owe their technical know-how of filmmaking to The Birth of a Nation’s cohesiveness. Before the film Birth of a Nation, the making of films was under the assumption that if the members of the audience paid to watch a star, there expectation would probably be to see the complete person. However, Griffith made the realization that through bringing the camera nearer to the person into a close-up, there was a revelation of more intimate details of the face of the subject, personalizing the expression of the character in a way that was much more valuable. In contrast to the close-ups, long shots were of added value. One of the film’s most celebrated shots begins with a relatively intimate, tight view of children with their mother wailing on a hillside (Stokes, 2007). Griffith productively ties the individual one to the historical one. In addition, actions happen in several planes, and the person watching is believed to be processing action taking place simultaneously in the background, the middle ground and the foreground. This takes place both in the battle scenes and busy interiors, heightening the sequences’ authenticity. Griffith masters using dissolve as transition of a scene. From a camera position that is fixed, dissolving from a courtroom that is empty to a full courtroom of black representatives that had been newly elected, Griffith gives a suggestion that they overran the court, and the entire room was smeared with their traditions (Frost, 2009). Griffith was the inventor of what is today known as a flashback, though he referred to it as the “switchback”. In a flashback, a short return to a scene of the past disrupts a linear narrative’s progress. The Birth of a Nation film also uses parallel editing, which involves a cutting forth and back between two scenes that take place simultaneously. Eager to show that the things done in a film could not be done in staged plays, Griffith perfected the art of parallel editing. By accelerating the shots’ duration, and by fastening cuts between the shorts, each storyline’s resolution is brought to an exciting climax through both intensity and suspense. The final Klan rescue mission sequences are groundbreaking applications of parallel editing (Lang, 1994). The film is outstanding for most of its innovative strategies of production. Billy Bitzer was the very first cinematographer to use nighttime photography, an accomplishment he achieved through firing of magnesium flames into the darkness of the night for the split-screen chain of Atlanta’s sacking. Birth of a Nation was the earliest film to make use of hundreds of extras for the recreation of battle scenes. The film was also the first film to contain an original score. Under normal circumstances, a two-reeler would be shown in the theater and a piano player would be hired to make up general mood music for each screening to have a different soundtrack. Griffith also makes use of past references to adjoin documentary authenticity (Frost, 2009). The Birth of a Nation film is regularly used to establish the narrative film’s beginning generally. What makes a distinction between this particular film and previous cinema explorations was its unbelievable, long story narrated with the smart use of editing in creating fundamental events’ connections and setting up a very solid narrative. The narrative approach of the film depends on the editing utilized to relate single shots into a comprehensible and firm storyline to be followed by audiences. A significant part of constructing the narrative by continuity editing as done by Griffith was the cutting of shots together in a manner that will help audiences in inferring connections between events. Title cards emerge as the first instance of guiding the audiences through the film’s narrative (Lang, 1994). Here, the white men who were looking for Gus capture him. After they are in control of him, a title card saying, “the trial”, appears. Subsequent to this shot, Gus is seen again in a comparable position to when he was last being captured by the white men, although this instance he is subdued and surrounded by Ku Klux Klan members. Here, a transitional role is played by the title card, informing the viewers of the adjustment that has taken place and moving the viewers through the double shots with a clarification of the contributory connection. Gus was arrested and subsequently tried by the members of the Klan. This is an effective method, and it might have been essential for the time when the viewers were not used to watching movies that functioned in such a way (Frost, 2009). As Klan members are holding Gus, the editor makes a cut to Elsie, though Elsie is not anywhere close to the scene taking place. This is done by Griffith as a substitute to title cards, demonstrating instead of telling that the trial of Gus is for the probable murder of Elsie. Instead of a title card saying, “Miss Cameron was murdered by you”, a shot of her dead body is put in the scene hoping that the viewers will conclude that the image of the body is what is being discussed by the members of the Klan in this “trial”. This is a perfect illustration of continuity editing, which makes the scene more powerful with a dead girl’s image as opposed to a small number of words written on a clear screen. The sequence portraying the assassination of Lincoln involves many significant types of continuity editing and creates the chaos and tension seen on screen. First, several match-on-action cuts of the scenes that allow viewers to presume connections between different shots are made. This can be seen through Boothe’s walking past the door, going into the balcony, hopping to the stage, among other actions. These are all basic and significant shots used in describing the flow of events through expecting the viewers to understand the connections shown by Griffith. Griffith focuses on Boothe’s gun to set it steadfastly in the mind of the viewer of just what the intentions of Boothe are, and this scene can be considered as foreshadowing, giving the viewers a hint of what action may take place next (Frost, 2009). The editing of Griffith does not create tension within the scenes all the time. Often in the film, Griffith edits more romantic or personal scenes in a manner that focuses attention on the more soft emotions that are evident. Whereas some of the cuts may technically be the same as those utilized for the scene of the assassination of Lincoln, which was much more tense and chaotic, their artistic inferences differ greatly. The above sequence involves a formula of close-ups that is calculated to set the glowing emotional tone as well as give those acting the chance of expressing their emotions cleverly in their faces (Frost, 2009). The first part of the sequence is a close-up of the hands of slaves picking cotton, closely followed by another close-up on a more wealthy white man holding a flower. This contrast makes use of both the close-up shots to match those two contrasting images, and their ideas, in the mind of the viewer. Synchronized sound effects and music soundtrack was added to the Birth of a Nation film for an American release in 1930. The Birth of a Nation uses a range of editing styles and filming techniques that led to the seamless flow of the storyline for audiences. The goal of Griffith was to narrate a story in a manner that drew viewers to a cinema experience, almost an originator of the current big-budget action films that seek out to entertain their viewers first and foremost (Frost, 2009). A good amount of historians deem that the Birth of a Nation played a major role in the recurrence of a Klan that was even more powerful subsequent to the release of the film in 1915 (Stokes, 2007). For instance, a white supremacist chose the film’s opening in Atlanta, Georgia, to make an announcement of the new Klan’s rebirth. The supremacist would regularly parade around with many weapons showcasing his readiness to face America’s enemies. The film’s release happened as several blacks were moving to the Northern part, and it was not difficult to convey the film’s anti-black message to Catholics and Jews and the many southern and eastern European immigrants coming to America. Actually, in Atlanta during the 1915’s late summer, two weeks prior to the showing of the film, a mob of men who were armed killed and mutilated Leo Frank’s body. Leo Frank was a Jewish American, who had gone through trial and convicted on false evidence of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year old white girl (Stokes, 2007). The Birth of a Nation served to support this type of mob mentality. The black Americas who were able to watch the movie believed that the Birth of a Nation had a pervasive effect on individuals. The release of the film was coupled with rioting threats, although part of the most race vicious race-rioting in the history of the Nation took place in the Northern cities, in the year 1919. The film was an echo of the violent racial history of America and Ku Klux Klan’s roots, which dated back to late 1860s. When the twentieth Century began up to 1920s, the Klan had expanded from few members to over 100,000 members and continued to grow all through the country, nearly taking control of the Indiana estate in the 1930s. Paradoxically, the organizations of white terrorists that surfaced in Reconstruction subsequent to the Civil War were only concerned with the Old South’s political restoration. Organizations like the Pale Face, the White Brotherhood, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Klan and other organizations wanted to create a disruption to the radical rule and rescue of the Southern part from clutches of what they considered as traitorous scalawags, Northern carpetbaggers and incompetent blacks. From the year 1867 to the year 1871, secret societies’ terrorists shot, lynched, murdered and flogged Republicans and their white and black supporters. Finally, the increasing violence as well as near anarchy in the Southern part compelled United States Congress to pass the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which imposed jail sentences and heavy fines on the people convicted of terrorist acts in federal courts. The Klan and some secret societies were a minor problem in the Northern part until the Progressive Era. Although Race was not a successful venture of the film, it encouraged other Africans Americans to create their own movies that would depict blacks as human beings who were normal as opposed to the black misrepresentations so pervasive in the Birth of a Nation film. In the year 1916, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was founded by the Johnson Brothers. This was among the very first companies for black films, and it created and released two films, Trooper of Troop (1916) and The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916). The company did not exist for long, and it did not produce many films. However, black film companies like The Birth of a Race Company, Ebony Pictures, and other companies quickly joined the fray of filmmaking. In the film “the Birth of a Nation”, the author gave his well-plied audiences the message that black people did not only want their freedom, but also that liberation had been the greatest disaster of America. The lasting implication of the film is that it engraved a Reconstruction story, and a story of dignified restoration of supremacy of whites, into American consciousness. Indeed, the Birth of a Nation is the most controversial American film in the cinematic history of America. References Frost, J. B. (2009). Cinematography for Directors: A Guide for Creative Collaboration. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions. Lang, R. (1994). The Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffith, Director. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Stokes, M. (2007). D.W. Griffiths the Birth of a Nation : A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time. 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