Birth of a Nation

When working on your term paper, you may consider The Birth of a Nation a complex film for its time. Several themes run through the film, and it especially shines light on the development of identity categories such as race, class, gender, and regionalism during the early twentieth century. As I viewed the film, I noted several connections that Griffith makes. He makes differences between African Americans those as "good blacks" (still loyal to their masters) and as "bad blacks" or what Griffith terms "faithful souls" and "renegades" in scene sub-title frames. This sheds light on his construction of race and racial relations: segregation. Two families, the Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South are created to illustrate the conflicts in the film's theme. Griffith takes a decidedly Southern viewpoint in depicting a defeated and vanquished South being ravaged by white carpetbaggers and Negroes lustful for white women. The film uses threats of rape and depictions of sexuality to illustrate racial politics and the pastoral idealism of Griffith's portrayal of ante-bellum plantation life. It is obvious that even in the making of this film African-Americans were viewed so separate that white actors were used to play African-Americans when their characters came into close contact with white actresses.

A custom essay may address a contrast between ante-bellum and post-bellum African-American behavior as turning from faithful to renegade due to their new found freedom, a freedom the whites in the South lost. The Southerner way of agricultural life "required" slaves to build their empire in the same vane that much of civilization had done in the past. Besides the battle action some memorable and scenes include, Lillian Gish emerging from a hospital visit where a sentry, gaping in ecstasy, sighs a sigh of devotion and a title proclaiming "War's Peace" is followed by a close-up of a young dead soldier. Another is a classic Black stereotype in one of the Reconstruction scenes where black members of Congress are portrayed as arrogant, lustful, and drinking heavily. They are depicted going about the business of the country coarsely reclining in their congressional chairs, with bare feet propped upon their desks. The final scenes where the Ku Klux Klan is depicted as heroic charging to the farm house to rescue the 'good white folk' from the Black Union soldiers during the Reconstruction is especially memorable in representing the ethnic alienation and the implication for segregation that Griffith wanted to establish. A pro African-American North using former slaves to "threaten" already demoralized and property stricken White Southerners certainly exposes contrasting ideologies in attempting to incite pity for those "poor Southerners".