BIRTH OF A NATION

A few weeks ago I saw a film in which an honorable family was rent in two by the fruits of an unjust society where lawlessness and corruption reigned. The brave and proud protagonist, heir to the family honor, is helpless to watch as the person who meant the most to him meets a horrible death at the hands of an inhuman criminal. In response, the hero is plunged into despair, but pulls himself out of it by dedicating his life to fighting injustice.

One day he happens upon a symbol that strikes fear into the hearts of his cowardly adversaries, so he adopts it as a costume in order to embody the thing of which the craven dogs are most frightened. He finds others who are similarly outraged by the miscarriage of justice and leads a group of operatives who rescue the innocents from the clutches of corrupt warmongerers.

The delicate balance is struck: we're told that the unjust world is a product of greed and stolen pride and that conflict between men descends from that. The hero embodies the desire to create a world without war and pillage, but also clearly stands for the proposition that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. The day is saved, and the costumed hero is left with dreams of a better world which he can serve to bring about through acts of costumed bravery.

Does the above plot summary belong to

(a) Batman Begins,

(b) Birth of a Nation or

(c) both?

Sure, it's a cheap rhetorical gimmick, but consider that only one of those two films had the thumbs up of a sitting president coupled with his stamp of historical accuracy, which meant something given that president's academic inclinations. I'm not talking about the Batflick.

A modern cinephile who watches Birth of a Nation for the first time is likely in for a schizophrenic experience. As the earliest film epic, the sheer scope and scale of vision is admirable. You can see Griffith creating the mode of visual storytelling that is so familiar to every single person living in the modern industrial age. He's showing us how film can walk and run, how it can cover a lot of ground and space and time. Griffith goes from hell to South Carolina to heaven, from melodrama to gritty realism. It's a wild ride.

I wonder if the ride goes down easier or harder if you work as hard to constantly remind yourself that Griffith's up is down. His in is out. And there's a neat opportunity to learn greater awareness of the ways in which the arranged images of film manipulate us when we endeavor to invert Griffith's sympathies. Giving in to the film's length, Ali said, at one point, "I can't think of any other movie where I said to myself, 'I wish the Klan would hurry up and get here.' "

But, wow, there's a scene apparently lifted from a scurrilous political cartoon involving a state legislative assembly that can't adequately be described. And Griffith's decision to make the story's two most treacherous characters mulattos (portrayed by white actors in obvious makeup) kept me wondering throughout whether the decision was spurred by a real belief that interracial mixing was the worst danger to be avoided, or whether there were some outer limits to what Griffith could ask for or receive from his black actors.

It's interesting to observe that as Griffith is creating film language, one of his early innovations is self-promotion. Each and every intertitle card bears his last name in the upper left and right corners, with his stylized initials centered at the bottom.

And then there's that awesome part at the end when they unveil the Klan-symbol.