Well said, Schreck; I just wanted to respond to this bit.
HerrSchreck wrote:Some discuss films like BOAN-- and films very much similar to it-- almost as though their very souls were at stake if they allow themselves to dissolve from their armchair and fall into the film's narrative. One slip into the narrative, no matter the intent on the part of the viewer, and they're stained forever, or so the fear seems to go... and the moral hammer is always publicly brandished as a matter of social obligation and ready to come down on those who wish a selective abd quailified recognition of a salutary quality. Any discussion of the film must be preambled with the obligatory hi-volume disclaimer of rampant disgust at the obviously racist qualities the film contains.
I admit that as far as BOAN goes, it's highly unusual territory, as there are very few inflammatory films which have weilded such enormous power and influence over not only our own personal heroes and their era, but the industry entire.
I propose that it's okay to sink into these films, even to allow yourself-- if your moral compass is well magnetized towards the better angels of human impulse-- to be carried away by them, even to try to feel them in the manner of an old bigoted viewer so one can truly comprehend what it is that these people are made of. There is no bad information out there, really-- what matters is what you choose to do with this information, and how you integrate it into your life. If it is in the world, then there can be a beneficial place for it in your mind, if only to broaden the width of your comprehension of human beings and what they are capable of.
First of all, about this fear of 'staining oneself'. I think people (and I guess I can only really speak for myself here) are justifiably insecure about engaging with any part of themselves that is capable of empathising with such prejudices, partly because they are conscious that these prejudices remain in force today, and that they, in one way or another, through action or inaction, are helping to perpetuate them. So it's partly white guilt/self-loathing.
I, for instance, am uneasily conscious that I react more strongly - I mean in an involuntary, emotional way, rather than in a rational capacity - to real-life animal cruelty than to racism in films. So yesterday, while watching
The Last Days of Pompeii again (terrific film by the way, overshadowed by
Cabiria but it still deserves to be on a few lists for its grandly decorated and animated compositions), I flinched and cringed when the cute little lizard got whacked on the head, and asked myself whether I had really been that upset by the lynching sequence in
The Birth. One difference is that you're not seeing actual violence and murder in Griffith's film - and a film which did show such things would surely be a challenge to those who want to keep morality out of aesthetic judgements - but then the knowledge that it
caused actual violence and murder, on a large scale, ought, surely, to be even more upsetting. No offence, but I'm not aware that the members posting in this thread are anything other than middle-class white guys, and I can't help but think that, if I were black, I would find it a lot harder to regard
The Birth as I do now, or to pontificate about it in such objective terms. This navel-gazing 'armchair agony' of the liberal is pretty tiresome, and I'm slightly embarrassed to air it here, but it's certainly a 'deserved' agony on most levels.
More interestingly, and a lot more sympathetically, this hesitancy to engage with the emotions and ideas behind Griffith's film stems from an unwillingness to
participate in something which resulted in such atrocities. To feel roused by the riding of the Klansmen at the end is to put oneself, however momentarily, into the shoes of people who then went out and persecuted, murdered, etc; one gets the same awful
frisson from Nazi propaganda, of course, and the knowledge that the reactions it elicits so skilfully were to issue in genocide. And this links to the point about the artist's perspective, because another thing that characterises an artist - one who takes their art seriously, in any case - is a willingness, even an eagerness, to take oneself into these dark places, to find out how it feels to lynch someone, to hate or despise an entire race of people. You need to be able to do that in order to write/portray certain characters, mindsets and situations. And there may well be a genuine danger in taking this sort of 'research' to extremes, not in any melodramatic sense ('oh dear I'm a fascist now') but just in terms of a disordering of one's inner moral sense.
And, as I was saying earlier, one further reason for wanting to step back from all this and revile it is that to engage with it can mean facing some unwelcome truths about the nature of this artform one is so used to thinking of as good and beautiful. But I'm turning into a stuck record now, so I'll stop.
Mr_sausage wrote:But I don't like Birth of a Nation; not only because it contains material that is not humanly acceptable to me, but because on top of that great fault it contains another: Griffith has no taste nor sensibility. I think the few Griffith movies that I've seen are the product of a great technician and innovator who plain lacked good sense. So while I can overlook this aspect in his other films, it cripples Birth of a Nation because one has both it and racism to deal with.
This sounds very much like my own reaction to the film the first few times I saw it, and part of me still feels this way - more so about his other films, in fact, because I think in
The Birth Griffith is dealing with subject matter that mattered to him personally, and there is an authenticity to the whole thing that I think
Broken Blossoms, for instance (despite its many wonderful qualities), lacks. But this issue of 'taste' is something that affects nearly all the films from this era, so many of which are characterised by a mawkish, quasi-tragic sensibility I normally can't stand, but which I have learned to love as it is handled by Griffith, Sjostrom and others.