D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is a mind-boggling combination of extraordinary cinematic genius and hideous social attitudes. It’s about the Civil War, and in Griffith’s imagination freed black slaves are unruly, incapable of citizenship and sexual predators. It takes the decent folk of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina to restore order good and true. The film had a tremendous impact on American society then and it has fueled racist attacks on African-American’s into the present.
This new movie, written and directed by Nate Parker, mounts a head-on contradiction of the Griffith film. Like Griffith’s picture, it’s a racial melodrama, but this time it moves our hearts in favor of the black slaves as they suffer rarely filmed horrors of slavery. It also attacks Griffith’s idea that black men are just itching to get at white women. Here, as was true in actual history, it’s the black slaves who are victims of white sexual exploitation.
Parker’s film is about Nat Turner, the slave who led a brief rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Parker himself plays Turner and both the film and the character also go head on against The Confessions of Nat Turner, the 1967 novel by William Styron. Styron described Turner as a lunatic, which angered many people, not only African-American’s, and Styron was also attacked as a white writer who presumed to know the inner thoughts and feelings of an African-American slave in the 19th century.
So right off the bat, Nate Parker and his film have taken on some heavyweight opponents, which I think is all to the good, except that Parker’s The Birth of a Nation isn’t a particularly good film. While Griffith put great cinema at the service of despicable attitudes, Nate Parker does the opposite. His purpose is noble beyond his abilities as a screenwriter and director.
The 2016 The Birth of a Nation looks like the kind of work often made by first-time directors who are primarily actors. It leaves lots of room for the actors to act, to show their cruelty or condescension if they’re slave owners, or their suffering and forbearance if they’re slaves. But visually, the film looks more like illustration than cinema. The movie doesn’t show much sense of the relationships between characters, or between characters and the world they inhabit. Space doesn’t feel dynamic. Griffith may have been wrong about history, but he really saw how characters move and operate physically in their world, what kind of spaces they create for themselves – and that shows who they are.
Nate Parker’s filmmaking is ordinary. You don’t get flashes of insight or the thrill of being awakened to something you never understood. Parker is willing to show a level of horror beyond what most films have done, but while it’s a lesson that deserves repeating, it’s not a new idea that slavery was beyond horrible.
On balance, Parker’s The Birth of a Nation is worth seeing because Parker does indeed confront the legendary D.W. Griffith on questions of history and morality, and Nat Turner deserves to be acknowledged. But Parker doesn’t come to this film without some demoralizing baggage. In 1999, when he was in college, Parker was accused of rape. Details are fuzzy, but the young woman later committed suicide, and Parker’s statements about these events seem inadequate. The African-American writer Roxane Gay wrote about the incident, its aftermath and its implications for the film itself in The New York Times in August. She refuses to see a movie made by Nate Parker.
I come down on the other side of this one. I think you get into a moral labyrinth when you judge a work of art by the character of the artist. One of the great Jean Renoir’s actors talked about Renoir’s sympathy for the French collaborationist Vichy government during World War II. He said that out in the real world, Renoir was disgusting, but on the set a genius.
