Overview:
The Birth of a Nation is a silent film from 1915 directed by D.W. Griffith depicting the Civil War and Reconstruction eras of American history. Widely regarded as the beginning of narrative film, The Birth of a Nation set standards that run to the core of the film industry today, from styles in film editing to the basics of cinematography. Its advances in early cinema are commonly overshadowed by the racist portrayal of blacks in the film, but many important aspects of film making today can be linked back to Griffith's first feature-length narrative.
Style:
As Griffith's first feature length film, The Birth of a Nation employs various filming techniques and editing styles that made the storyline flow seamlessly for audiences. Griffith's goal was to tell a story in a way that drew audiences in to the experience of cinema, almost a precursor to contemporary big-budget summer action movies that seek to entertain their audiences first and foremost. To do this, Griffith used some of these techniques in The Birth of a Nation (Dirks):
- Continuity editing - Now commonplace in film editing, Griffith used this to keep the storyline flowing easily. Cuts were not meant to jar the viewer's eye, but move naturally with the action of the scene.
- Parallel editing - The basic principle behind all chase scenes, The Birth of a Nation employs this technique in famous scenes like the clansmen galloping into town and out to the cabin to save the day. Parallel editing shows separate actions scenes together to give the viewer the notion that the events are occuring simultaneously.
- Establishing shots - To set the stage for the action of the story, many settings are first viewed from a wide angle to give audiences a scope of the setting in which the action takes place. A wide shot of a battlefield tells us first that the characters are part of a larger battle before moving to a medium closeup of just a few people fighting.
- Closeup shots - Though used in earlier short films, Griffith uses closeup shots to focus on the more subtle emotions of his actors. He also uses them to direct a viewers attention to important parts of the story, i.e. the picture of Elsie Stoneman or the letter between the Camerons and Stonemans.
- Color tinting - The Birth of a Nation varies in color as the movie progresses (though traditionally being called a "black-and-white film"). Early scenes in the south are filmed with a more sepia tone as life is peaceful and harmonic, but later scenes are a harsh black and white as black soldiers fill the streets and the clansmen come to break them up.
- Matte - Covering some of the shot in black was one way Griffith would spotlight characters or objects of importance, like cotton picking or John Wilkes Booth's gun.
Perception:
Though The Birth of a Nation was an important step in the history of filmmaking, it was also made with an obvious racial bias. Roger Ebert, at first reluctant to critique the film, says that "certainly "Birth of a Nation" is a film of great visual beauty and narrative power... Yet when it comes to his version of the Reconstruction era, he tells the story of the liberation of the slaves and its aftermath through the eyes of a Southerner who cannot view African-Americans as possible partners in American civilization" (Ebert). Today, many people overlook the impressive filmmaking techniques of the time and see the film as a glorification of Southern white supremacy, but the fact remains that Griffith's work in film layed some of the basic groundwork that is still seen in narrative film today.
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