Birth of a Nation Extra Credit Response

At first, I was not necessarily struck by the film, "Birth of a Nation." I couldn't really understand what made the film so controversial because it seemed to depict the time period effectively. This led me to look further into this film. I watched YouTube clips of some of the controversial scenes in the movie which I did not really notice how controversial they were until I paid close attention to them. I also did a bit of research into the history of the time period.

After re-watching a few scenes and doing research, I reflected back on "Birth of a Nation" and realized just how shocking this movie was. It portrays African Americans as complete savages. They are shown wearing torn up and worn clothes, sloppily eating scraps of whatever food they can find, stealing things they wanted, and often visibly coveting the white women in the movie especially when the law was passed that legalized interracial marriage. It was even shown later in the film that the only solution to America's problems, in the opinion of a white man, was to deport all of the African Americans back to Africa. In reality, all the African Americans wanted at the time was their freedom, and many at the time respectfully worked hard to gain it.

The K.K.K. scene was the most appalling scene in my mind. It gives praise to the members who did awful things to a man who was wrongly accused of killing a white woman after not having gotten a proper trial for the charges against him. The writer of "Birth of a Nation"  praised these awful actions of the K.K.K. when they delivered the corpse of the black man to the lieutenant's door.

All of the white people in the movie (with the exception of the white people in the raid) were portrayed as incredibly wealthy, polite, rule-following, and noble individuals. There were no exceptions to this in the film, as there were no exceptions showing the African Americans in the film as anything but slaves or savages. Maybe this was accurate for a handful of families during this time, but this film shows such a lack of diversity since this was not how everyone living in the south lived during this time.

The heroes of "Birth of a Nation" were made to be the rich white southern men who kept slaves and fought against the freeing of slaves. This film was just incredibly biased and made completely from the writer's closed-minded point of view. There were obviously many other aspects to the people of the time period in this film that could have been brought in the film to make it more dynamic and not so one-sided.

After analyzing this film, I attempted to figure out what it was that made this film so successful. Of course, one of the aspects to its success was the simple fact that it was so controversial. It also shows how people in the south at the time felt about the integration of America. Despite all of this, the more research I did, the more I realized how advanced this film was for its time. "Birth of a Nation" was an absolute box office hit across the country because of how well the director shows the actor's emotions in the film. It was considered to have phenomenal acting, aesthetics, and special effects.