Tausi Insider

1915 Film “The Birth of a Nation” Clip For decades, Birth of a Nation was presented to film students as a mildly problematic classic, an unavoidable landmark in cinema history (which: perhaps) that singlehandedly invented the language of film—which is all wildly overstated. From roughly 1907 on, directors like Reginald Barker, Yevgenii Bauer, and Lois Weber were laying the groundwork for everything that D.W. Griffith accomplished in Birth of a Nation , and often using the new cinematic techniques with a fair bit more nuance. The movie was a hit, of course, the most successful film to its time, but that has as much to do with its reframing of the post-Reconstruction era as the triumph of perfidious, scheming northern whites who manage to trick the movie’s drunk, gullible, and relentlessly horny Black characters into thinking that slavery was a bad thing. It is rough . But it’s also not a new controversy: time has actually dulled the (rather justifiable vitriol) directed at the fi...