The review.
Dr. Krawczynski had a personal copy he'd had to order, so he loaned it to me to assuage my burning curiosity. (And I decidedly wouldn't have been able to rent it anywhere in town.)
It's a blatant rewrite of history, is what it is. I completely understand why (1) no one keeps this "classic" around to rent or loan, and (2) why African Americans came from together when they found out that it would be shown at all, let alone that it would be shown during African American History Month.
Yes, I understand that the history professors at AUM were using it as an honest lesson in something that was had profound influence on African American history, but this movie is...insulting. It perverts history and misrepresents blacks and (most appallingly) misrepresents the rise of the Klan and its activities.
In this movie, the Klan are the (haha) white knights who save the day. The heros, as it were.
The movie is silent, having been released in 1915. It has a musical background, as these films do. You can distinctly hear "Dixie" at key moments.
Throughout the film, black people are portrayed as blatantly stupid, slow, lazy, and ignorant. They beat their children. They don't know what to do unless some white person is there to order them around. They leer at and try to take liberties with white women. Conversely, there's a couple of "faithful" blacks who remain the servants of the leading white family in the film (one of which presumably formed the Klan) and even save the kindly ex-master from certain flogging/death at one point.
The entire film perpetrates the myths of black ignorance/perversion, as well as the myth of Klan righteousness and how they only responded to extreme provocation from the freed blacks. I suppose they're hoping we'll forget that the Klan was and is a white supremist organization that, in those days, terrorized and slaughtered blacks (not to mention Republicans in general) in order to "reclaim" the South during Reconstruction. Precious few of the lynch victims (by the Klan and just mobs of ordinary citizens who knew they could get away with it) were even accused of rape, in reality--let alone convicted of it.
What's frightening about this movie is that...I'm not sure how to explain this. Dr. Berlinger, a wonderful man who taught me Shakespeare at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, pointed out that when you're reading a play in which the main characters are Catholic, it doesn't matter whether you're Catholic or not in reality; for the duration of the reading (or watching the play), you're Catholic. That is, you identify with Catholics. You see the world through their eyes. You cringe where they've been wronged. You're pleased when they're justified.*
* It's really neither here nor there, but if you're curious why this pertains to Shakespeare, he used the fact that we so closely identify with characters to pointedly disappoint us. Shakespeare got a bang (apparently) out of giving his audience the denouement they didn't expect. He seems to have enjoyed laughing at his audience, or at least making fun of them. --It's all part of the eternal joy of the Shakeman.
So anyway, when you watch Birth of a Nation, you identify with the genteel Southern family who are kind to their slaves (presumably) and everyone lives in harmony...until some Radical Republican decides blacks will be emancipated. Ah yes. The movie makes it appear as though this wasn't Lincoln's idea. It was the doing of those dirty Radical Republicans. Grrrr. (One in particular who'd fallen in love with a mulatto, thus signaling the downfall of the Union.)
In the film, the leader of the Klan comes up with the idea for the white sheets when he sees children playing, when two white children hide under a sheet and the black children who are chasing them are frightened away when they see it, because they think it's a ghost. So it seems that the white sheets were to make those ignorant black people think they were ghosts.
Um, right. Then it goes on to depict the Klan visiting one of the known "bad" negroes in town and doing nothing more than appearing on horseback out of nowhere in their white sheets and speaking to him, and him trembling in fear and running away. No violence. Just scared the bejeebers out of him.
Right. Right?
Ugh. The most frightening aspect of this movie was that I had to remind myself as I watched it "that isn't how it happened." I know the history, but I still had to remind myself. Why? They paint a sympathetic picture, and you identify with the protagonists. Poor things...it was all about love and joy and peace and unity and then...those awful Radical Republicans gave the blacks their freedom, and then the blacks took over*.
* No they didn't. Not even close.
The fact that movies like this are out there, and people are watching them and getting their education--when they haven't had any--about Reconstruction and the Klan from them is terribly frightening.
In the presentation that was planned for Black History Month last year, Dr. Krawczynski was going to show the movie, then give a lecture on what it got wrong and its effect on civil rights and the resurgence of the Klan, but never got to do it. I would have loved to attend that presentation (although, it was scheduled for a night I had another class and wouldn't have been able to, anyway). At the same time, I fully understand why the African American community came unglued when they heard this film would be shown at all.
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