Birth of A Nation 2016

>Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation simply isn’t emotional or visionary enough to erase the impact and importance of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation. It takes more than chutzpah to make a great movie or to overrun the contradictions accumulated around a film that did more than tell a one-sided story but revealed the enormous ambition, the deep, enraging imperfections, and the idiosyncrasy of America’s racial heritage. Parker’s attempt to elevate the 1831 insurrection and mass murders by the black slave Nat Turner suggests a juvenile, way-late, equal-time riposte — as if to answer Griffith’s old slander with an even older, bloodier slander. Sadly, it proves Parker doesn’t understand either Griffith’s film or Turner’s revolt.

>Even though Turner acted out the savagery that Bernie Sanders supporters never connect to the buzzword “revolution” (William Styron controversially narrated Turner’s uprising in his 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner), Parker depicts the slave rebellion as an inevitable redress of evil. (He trades Griffith’s artistically innovative eye for his own jaded indie-movie eye. The white villains seem colorless and the black victims seem featureless.) Through Hollywood-style and Obama-era egotism, this angry, naïve epic about what was actually a failed insurgency is both Parker’s Reds and his self-martyring Braveheart. Lacking both radical form and revolutionary content, it’s an overinflated action movie.

>Parker’s own feral naïveté works best in his performance as Turner, showing agonized radicalization — a curse stemming from the misfortune of gaining literacy and tragic enlightenment. Turner learns to read and is permitted to preach in order to pacify other slaves. He interprets scripture beyond the opiate that slavemasters imagined, as a call to self-respect and self-defense based on the Children of Israel’s perseverance. Turner’s sermons go from calming slaves to arousing them. But when this paradox drives Turner mad, Parker’s writing and directing implies a sense of righteousness. He only touches on the complexity of African-American religiosity but succumbs to purely secular politicization. Jonathan Demme’s film of Toni Morrison’s Beloved should have taught him to take a spiritual, existential approach to slavery’s horrors and the intelligence by which blacks prevailed. It’s also unfortunate that Parker didn’t learn how Christianity affected the transplanted Africans’ resistance (as seen in the next century’s civil-rights movement) that Steven Spielberg showed in Amistad.

>Instead, the film’s references to ancestors’ religion (“The boy is a prophet. You are a child of God. You got purpose.”) are used to demean Christianity as a part of racist-capitalist control. But where’s the reformist charge of Haile Gerima’s pan-African slave epic Sankofa? (Elder Gerima didn’t buy into the Marxist panacea.) Ultimately, Parker cheats the internal battle between rage and faith that turned Turner into a killer.

Is this Armond? It's not a bad write up.

BASED ARMOND WHITE

WTF? I love Armond now!

Who is this Armond, you speak of?

>So it’s no surprise when “Strange Fruit” — and not some old-timey Negro spiritual — crops up as an angry-chic anachronism (in Nina Simone’s rendition). The heart-tugging lament is heard during a tableau of black bodies swinging from trees in choreographed, color-coordinated motion, representing the white retaliation that quashed Turner’s revolt. But that symbol-laden song itself has become irritating: Liberals seem to love “Strange Fruit” for its protest against the lynching of black Americans more than they demonstrably love black people — whose living and working conditions still contrast with the real-life advantages of those privileged song-lovers. The song congratulates protesters’ pity, and pity is always for the weak. Parker falls into that liberal trap by ripping off Griffith’s masterpiece without the insight and vision to inspire filmgoers beyond the patronizing “Strange Fruit.” Parker displays Obama Effect egotism, which is just about exhausted — as mounting frustrations, protests, and mediocre race films prove.

That's oddly coherent for Armond.

>first critic I've seen recognize Birth of a Nation's impact and artistry
Wow took them long enough.
It's like people forget the fact that without Birth of a Nation there wouldn't be feature length films.

Oh there's the rambling Armond we all know and love.

plenty of crititcs recognize Birth of a Nation's impact, but you cant go around praising a KKK movie today

Is this a joke?
An old mixed lady showed this movie to my class in my wattle and daub high school praising how revolutionary it was for it's time.

A try hard nigger pretentious autist.

>One hundred years ago on this date, February 18, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation — the first movie epic — was shown at the White House. That screening occasioned President Woodrow Wilson’s famous quote, “It’s like writing history with lightning” — an accurate description of a problematic movie that is, upsettingly, full of hysterical historical fabrications. Wilson’s response to Griffith’s still-amazing innovations of cinematic storytelling was also an ideological endorsement of then-commonplace racial attitudes.

>Today, Wilson’s endorsement (not the darkest part of his own regrettable legacy) is scoffed at because of modern distaste for the film’s Civil War and Reconstruction drama — for its scurrilous depiction of black slaves while it lionizes the creation of the white-supremacist mob known as the Ku Klux Klan. The two myths, double-barreled offenses, have lived in the American consciousness partly through Griffith’s film — an indelible work of art and so an ongoing test.

>But in the decades since The Birth premiered, we should have learned more than that we are superior to it. That self-serving attitude has been the point of several recent articles recognizing the film’s centenary, as if the shameful or honorable social events (lynchings, legal reforms, and incremental civil-rights developments) that followed The Birth force single-minded dismissal of the film for its embarrassing and enraging faults.

>To approach this as a political as well as a cultural problem: Any attempt to erase The Birth — and rewrite movie history — also threatens our own presumably enlightened social standards. The trouble is, present-day smugness loses sight of The Birth’s aesthetic brilliance, which is the basis of its powerful challenge to our moral sense — not simply the necessary rejection of racist attitudes but the too-easy disavowal of the prejudiced reflexes and bigoted ideology still embedded in our national institutions and social habits.

>Watching The Birth in 2015 (as on last week’s helpful C-SPAN broadcast) makes the movie more real than recent “not-me” renunciations allow; more real, in some ways, than current movies and TV dramas that boast “progressive” attitudes on race and American history. The Birth’s iconographic representation of timeless human experience is overwhelming for its glories and its insufficiencies: Griffith’s powerfully homiletic subtitle “War’s Peace” before a shot of dead bodies; the Little Colonel’s movingly discreet homecoming; the sexual frankness of Lillian Gish’s bedpost-stroking frustration (and the Altmanlike moment of a Union soldier eyeing her at a hospital); the startling battle scenes emulating Mathew Brady’s photographic realism but adding clouds of white and black smoke rolling kinetically across the battlefields; the combining of actual black bit players with white actors in blackface, following and flipping minstrel tradition; the intense expression of fear in the women’s barricade sequence; and, yes, the unsettling yet undeniably vibrant ride to the rescue by the Klan — a moment that sweeps you up in its fervor as all mob-related hysteria does even to this day. Think of it all as an epic — and dangerous — metaphor.

>“As a film it’s astonishing, as a social history it’s still astonishing but in a different way,” Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress told C-SPAN. The Birth offers that unique quality vintage photography has of engaging your awe and fear, of past lives being made vivid alongside the simultaneous specter of mortality. But the film’s second half (its Reconstruction falsehoods, with lynch-mob scenes and Klan mythologizing) starts to pull away from you, offending basic sensitivities the same way as the caricature of criminal blacks in Liberty Heights (1999), or as Halle Berry’s degraded black mother in Monster’s Ball (2002), or as Precious and her mother’s being made into ghetto monsters in Precious (2007), or as the patronizing ghetto clichés in HBO’s The Wire (2002–2008), among other post-Griffith examples of Hollywood defamation.

>It’s important to fully confront the history of our cinema and media, to measure their earliest falsehoods by their present racist lies and realize how we often mask and defend contemporary political presumptions. Otherwise, hindsight becomes duplicitous — a way to fend off honest self-examination.

>Few Birth detractors (call them anti-Birthers?) concede any validity to Griffith’s presentation of white American personality or admit that it’s more insightful than his neurotic caricature of blacks. Griffith includes an inadvertent (easily ignored) truth in the character of the Little Colonel (Henry B. Walthall); the “gallant” Southerner shown as inventing the Klan parallels the likable “good people” who harbor racist thoughts and actions. Almost Dickensian in sentiment as well as psychological and social ramification, Griffith is more authentic than the strictly moralizing, largely partisan ideas of good/bad behavior found in today’s “enlightened” media work, such as 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, or The Help.

>That self-flattering mainstream-media perspective was typified when The New Yorker claimed: “The worst thing about [The Birth] is how good it is.” That’s all wrong, an example of liberal sophistry wrought to distance and patronize white racism. The fact is: The best thing about The Birth is how good it is, how its revolutionary techniques changed modern art — a forerunner to Griffith’s ultimate masterpiece and humanist plea Intolerance (1916). The worst thing is that such innovation was put to the service of racist ideology — and to the diminution of the sensitivity and aesthetic genius that made Griffith a great artist. To say otherwise is intellectual censorship. But as Hari Jones, assistant director of the African American Civil War Museum, advised C-SPAN: “We should not ban this film. We should not be afraid of this discourse.”

>Black Americans, well familiar with the calumnies the media use against them, are sometimes bemused even while recognizing the vile intent. For instance, one high point of The Birth’s racist hysteria has a young white girl (Mae Marsh) escape submitting to a lecherous black villain by jumping off a cliff. A subtitle proclaims: “We should not grieve that she found sweet the opal gates of death.” In my experience, both Black Panther and Columbia Graduate Film School colleagues found such absurdly racist sentimentality — including ludicrous scenes of free blacks’ buffoonery in the Reconstruction legislature — offensive and laughable, equally. It’s part of the process of getting accustomed to white racism and defying it — armoring oneself against it wherever and whenever possible.

>During film school, classmates and I laughed at a documentary where Lillian Gish insisted “But Mr. Griffith loved the Negro.” At that time, I had a dream of being kidnapped by Griffith and forced to watch new footage he had recently filmed. Orson Welles burst into the dream to rescue me, but I resisted his tug, pointed at the screen, and urged him: ”Look! Look how beautiful it is!” Welles sat down and enjoyed the show.

>I have always felt it essential to reckon with the paradox of Griffith’s genius and his racism, just as a critic must reckon with the racism of lesser present-day filmmakers and do-gooder hypocrites, as when the Directors Guild of America stripped Griffith’s name from its annual awards in 2000, a misguided act of politically correct self-righteousness.

>The beauty and ugliness, the truth and lies of The Birth of a Nation haunt all Americans. How it haunts us is valuable and should never be forgotten.

>>The beauty and ugliness, the truth and lies of The Birth of a Nation haunt all Americans. How it haunts us is valuable and should never be forgotten.

That's what perpetuates the white guilt PC stuff he hates.

No they only talk about the bad and never the good, and never use the bad as an excuse to strive for something better, but to stir revenges and ratings

There's a reason the majority of hollywood's "serious" black movies are all about how they can depict black suffering the most

Based

But it's largely irrelevant to today's society, the only reason it is at all is because of the money and political potential of stirring up white guilt and racial revenge.

There nothing to own up to, to strive for the better. Vast majority of people alive today weren't involved in shit, and have no reason to care.

It's been ripped apart by SJW's not even for Parker's historic rape but because it's shit and self serving. Tuners wife gets gang raped by slave patrollers (never happened), which is what supposidly pushes him to revolt (contrary to historical record) and she doesn't speak once in the entire movie. Parker just wants to live out his fantasy of killing whitey and roleplaying a badass mandingo

...

But they still find reason to use slavery and oppression as an excuse to commit vile actions instead of striving to be something better than a stereotype

That's on them.

>Parker just wants to live out his fantasy of killing whitey and roleplaying a badass mandingo

At least when Tarantino did it with Django he wasn't pretending it was Oscar material. He just wanted to make a big, gory Western with banter and blood.

Yeah, it wouldn't be as bad if it wasn't being presented as something serious and important.

Who did he have to rape to get that score?

Some jew's wife

Sundance, mostly.

There's always one big Sundance movie that every critic there praises at the festival for being an absolute masterpiece of cinema and once it's actually released out into the real world everyone realises it's shit and it gets roundly bashed.

Film festival bubbles are real.

>Parker doesn’t understand either Griffith’s film or Turner’s revolt

Yet Tarantino's film did in fact get an Oscar

Wow, went down quite a bit.
At least Django was a fun revenge story.