I had wanted to watch The Birth Of A Nation, so finally went ahead and did it. Some bits were good, others were surreal and unbelievable. Also I wasn’t always thrilled with the acting style; too much tossing hands in the air and wringing clothing. Anyways I may as well tell you the plot:
The Stoneman family lives in the North. The dad is a senator. He has a daughter and two sons. Their kin in the South are the Cameron family. There are two daughters and several sons. We see them meet (for the first time?) and the younger generation all become friends. I would put all the kids in the age group late teens to 20’s. Also I guess they aren’t THAT close of kin since the dudes from one family are totally digging on the girls from the other family and vice-versa. After their visit the Stonemans head home. At this point the Civil War begins and we see the boys of both families enlist to their particular sides. There is one very poignant scene where one of the Stoneman boys meets one of the Cameron boys on the battlefield and they have a mutual moment of recognition and horror, before both dying of their wounds.
So the Civil War ends and the South is supposed to get some aid for rebuilding, but Lincoln is shot and suddenly everyone is worried that won’t happen. In the context of the film, the person who ends up spearheading the changes in the South is Senator Stoneman. He is clearly a bad dude with some bad ideas if I read the music cues correctly. He thinks that blacks and whites should have the same rights (the nerve right?) and he puts a “mulatto” guy named Silas Lynch in charge of setting up some blacks in the South into some power. Again, if I’m reading the music cues right, this can only lead to disaster.
The next parts of the film and until the end are the most disturbing, and it strikes me as strange that anyone could believe them. With Lynch in the South to help enforce changes, blacks get the vote and a bunch of seats in local government. We even see on election day that blacks are voting more than once and whites are being shoved away and not getting a chance to vote even once. The government building is a circus, the black elected officials are disorganized and basically act like a bunch of animals. They pass a law stating that whites and blacks may intermarry. Everyone in the building goes crazy like it’s New Years and the 4th of July because apparently marriage to a white girl is the dream of every black man. This sets up a scene in the woods in which the younger Cameron girl encounters a black man who is a captain. He tells her he’s interested in marriage, ostensibly to her. She freaks out and runs deeper into the woods and eventually to a cliff. The black Captain follows her (I’m uncertain if that’s for creepy reasons or if he’s worried about her) and she threatens to throw herself over if he comes any closer. Unfortunately, he does come a bit closer and she throws herself off. Her brother, who’s been looking for her finds her, then she dies. The movie let’s us know (on a title card) that we should not mourn, because death is a better fate for her.
So because of all this trouble the black people are causing, the young Cameron decides to do something about it. He invents the Ku Klux Klan. He happens to notice that some kid hiding under a white sheet is able to completely freak out a group of black kids. WHAT? Matt and Trey were right? Black people are afraid of ghosts!? Seriously, there are several times in the movie when a black person completely freaks out from the sight of a person dressed like a ghost, and for no other reason, since the KKK has really just formed and has no reputation yet. Wow. So yeah.
Anyways, not trusting the law to get it right and punish the black captain who made his sister jump, Cameron gets the KKK together. They capture the black captain and give him a “fair trial”. The fair trial scene has to be a creepiest scene of the entire movie. Mainly because the movie purports it to be a fair trial. It is basically a lynch mob going wild. The scene is done in a horrible red color (as opposed to sepia or grayish blue) and is just so obviously about vengeance instead of justice, I can’t get my head around what they were thinking here.
Because of his involvement in the KKK, young Cameron is wanted by the law and has to hide out in a house on the edge of town. Meanwhile, in town things are getting out of hand as black militia members run wild, doing what they like. Silas Lynch is attempting to make the Stoneman girl marry him, and Senator Stoneman is starting to realize giving power to Silas was a bad idea. Luckily (for the context of the movie) the rest of the KKK show up to restore order, save Cameron, and stop Lynch from marrying Senator Stoneman’s daughter. At the end of the movie we read a title card that basically explains, things are still in a less-than-perfect state, but we have hope someday the Prince of Peace will rule and we will have paradise. They even show what that will look like; sort of like ancient Greece wall-to-wall with people and some dude (Jesus?) superimposed over them with his arms outstretched. I’m not really sure why the religious theme was tossed in at the end like that. Pretty weird, but then the whole movie was…
What do you say about a movie like this? Much of it was really strange and unbelievable, the acting style was odd to me, the story line had a strange flow and the message was racially skewed to amount to propaganda. Reading up on the movie I found out the battle scenes are famous for being done well and most people don’t seem to mind the acting. The story itself is full of stuff that’s plain false and offensive, but I knew that. When the movie came out in 1915, however, enough people were influenced by it to create a resurgence in the KKK groups around the country. That’s nearly a hundred years ago now, so I guess I should feel very removed from it. But to me, movies are the thing of now, and I can’t help being a little frightened that this movie exists and was ever met with any type of praise.