The D.W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation premiered on this date 90 years ago as The Clansman. The Library of Congress tells us:
Griffith’s story centers on two white families torn apart by the Civil War and reunited by what one subtitle calls, “common defence of their Aryan birthright.” Promoting a skewed historical vision of a wartorn South further abused by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and radical Republicans, the film remakes Lincoln as a friend of the South. “I shall deal with them as though they had never been away,” Griffith’s Lincoln says. In The Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan rushes in to fill the void left by Lincoln’s untimely death and the chaos of Reconstruction.
Ambitious in its reach, Part I of the film begins in the antebellum period, takes viewers across bloody battlefields of the Civil War, through the burning of Atlanta, and ends with the assassination of Lincoln. Yet, the director never loses sight of the human side of these sweeping events—at least where white Southerners are concerned. The movie is as famous for its tender portrayal of family life as its imaginative use of the camera.
The Birth of a Nation advanced the art of cinema even as it enshrined racist stereotypes and historical myth in the new and powerful medium of film. Assisted by cameraman Billy Bitzer, Griffith packed his film with a virtual catalog of innovative film techniques. The Birth of a Nation introduced or remastered total-screen close-ups, night photography, outdoor photography, fade-out, panoramic long shots, as well as liberal use of cross-cutting between scenes to build suspense. Surgical editing and imaginative camera work were necessary to propel Griffith’s three-hour-long epic. The film cost $500,000, employed 18,000 actors and 3000 horses, and required meticulous recreation of historic details.