Received: 10/10/2016
Reviewed: 28/10/2016
Accepted: 18/11/2016
791.2
323.14(73)
Original scholary paper
Marija Dimitrovska
Race and the American
Cinema: The Two Cases of
The Birth of a Nation
Abstract: Since its beginnings, the American cinema has maintained a
highly ambiguous relationship with the problem of race. The importance of this issue has a decades-long history in cultural studies and
film studies, based on the stance that the discourse of race as a sociohistorical formation, as groups of individuals who share past and continuing experiences, from group solidarity, to forms of oppression and
privilege, has been sealed on the silver screen. The focus of this paper is
the examination of this relationship through the study of one of the most
notorious examples of racism in early American cinema, The Birth of
a Nation (1915), and the eponymous work by Nate Parker a century
later. The Birth of a Nation (1915), an epic of White supremacy, and
a landmark of the Hollywood film industry, provided the basis for a
century-long dispute in the academic community regarding its aesthetics qualities versus its blatant racism. However, a recent response to the
legacy of this film comes in cinematic form. Nate Parker’s The Birth of
a Nation (2016) represents an attempt to rewrite the history and the legacy of the film title, and provide an African-American narrative of race
in the period of slavery. The paper aims to re-contextualize the works in
the light of Frantz Fanon’s thesis of liberation through violence.
Keywords: race, cinema, The Birth of a Nation, Frantz Fanon
Marija Dimitrovska
| 55
Introduction
Cinema has often been described as being a reflection of the cultural Zeitgeist –
a symbolic marker of the collective social habitus and its structures. For more
than a century, film studies, and their North American fraction in particular,
have yielded what Myrdal called the “American dilemma”, having sustained
an ambiguous stance on the issue of race and cinema. The extraordinary complexity of this relationship is not accidental, considering that the beginnings of
the American cinema are tied to a more or less openly racist ideology (having
in mind the common acceptance of social Darwinism and eugenics at the end
of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century). On the other hand, cinema as
a culture industry represents part of a politics of representation, contributing
to the creation of the wider societal discourse about social phenomena. The
realms of cultural production and reception offer a known means for instigating a “collective catharsis”1, bringing to light energies otherwise denied an
outlet. Moreover, this issue is inextricably connected to the perpetual dispute
of form versus content – or the problem of commitment in art.
The focus of this paper is an examination of the relationship between race
and the American cinema, or more particularly, the presentation of a narrative of slavery on the silver screen and its use as a basis for the conceptualization and re-invention of African American cultural identity. In this context, the paper aims to explore this relationship through an analysis of the
use of intertextuality of the narratives on race and slavery from The Birth
of a Nation (1915) in the debut work by director Nate Parker bearing the
same name. The general assumption of the paper is that the latter represents
an example of how cultural trauma (in this case the trauma of slavery) is
transferred to the sphere of the symbolic struggle in an effort to build a new
cultural identity free from the traumatic event. Namely, the narratives on race
and slavery presented in Parker’s film succumb to Frantz Fanon’s theses on
the trauma of the inferior otherness of the Black Man. Parker, consequent
to these theses, makes an effort for a symbolical recuperation of the African
American identity, contradicting the symbolical representations of race by
the dominant culture.
The Two Cases of The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation, by the legendary director David Wark Griffith, was not
the first American movie which problematized the issue of race. However,
this work represents a striking example of how film narrative and rhetoric
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can be utilized to develop an argument about a nation’s history, a theory of
the natural role reserved for the different races in American society2, which
would have a lasting impact, felt even today.
The Clansman, as was its first title, was the first blockbuster of the age and a
true leap forward in the cinematic world: it was both the most expensive and
the most profitable film of its time; it was the first film ever to be shown at
the White House (due to the long lasting friendship of Woodrow Wilson and
Thomas Dixon, the author of the book); it set a model of cinematic roles for
African-Americans for decades to come; it was a work of art that served as a
major influence in transforming the moving pictures from “a cheap show for
cheap people” into a means for exaltation and entertainment for the higher
classes as well3; and finally, it was a work that demonstrated “with finality
that cinema was one of the most potent social agencies in America”4.
This paper will not engage explicitly in an analysis of racist representations
in The Birth of a Nation (1915), nor with the racial prejudices of its creator
D. W. Griffith (which have been subject to an exhaustive interest of the
scholarly community). It will, however, focus on the film’s lasting legacy
as one of the most notoriously racist works of art and the contemporary
discourse of racism in American cinema. Thus, the paper aims to conjure a
parallel between the legacy of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the work
by director Nate Parker which bears the same title, in the context of the reinterpretation of the black identity in the most crucial stage of its development – slavery.
The Birth of a Nation is a cinematic adaptation of the commercially successful novels The Klansman and The Leopard’s Spots by Thomas Dixon Jr., a
Southerner and a strong opponent of miscegenation. His works were created
with the overt intention of establishing a narrative of slavery juxtaposed to
the one favored in the then hugely popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Dixon wrote a saga of two families whose destinies were
inextricably tied to the devastating effects of the American Civil War and
the subsequent Reconstruction period in the South. Both the novels and the
film glorify the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan as the last bastion against
the Africans whose “bringing to America planted the first seed of disunion”.
The film glorifies the superiority of the clansmen over the savagely depicted
and sexually predatory former slaves. They would receive their “fair” punishment through lynching, and would be stripped of the rights they cannot
live up to, which, in the end, would “restore the civilizational glory” of the
old South. The film is often associated with the re-emergence of KKK almost
Marija Dimitrovska
| 57
to the year when the movie was first released and was used as a means of
recruitment to the organization up to the 1970s.
The film was a result of Dixon’s wish to tell “the true story of the Civil War”
and Griffith’s wish to re-live the experiences of his father as a participant
in the war, but more than anything it was a basis for a spectacle he always
envisioned film to be. The structure, the use of innovations like parallel action, scenes shot from multiple angles, the use of natural landscapes, moving
tracking shots, the “iris” effect, fade-outs and cameo-profiles, the introduction of night photography, original music score, etc., were not groundbreaking as they had been used by other filmmakers, including Griffith in his
works for Biograph. However, their significance lay in their strong support
of the film’s narrative function. As Sergey Eisenstein would note in his essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today”, “Griffith arrived at montage
through the method of parallel action, and he was led to the idea of parallel
action by Dickens”5. Griffith’s directorial genius laid in his incredible capacity for narration, transforming the cinematic work into a means of storytelling similar to the novel.
The sociopolitical environment in the period of the emergence of The Birth
of a Nation (1915) is reflected in the film. The social reality of racism profoundly influenced the development of filmmaking, facilitating a troubling
yet persistent link between cinema and the politics of racism. Praised as the
greatest American film until the 1960s, The Birth of a Nation’s popularity
was overshadowed by mass protests by NAACP (National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People) in many American cities. The impact
of The Birth of a Nation was felt not only in the political and legal spheres of
American life, but the outrage culminated with the creation of The Birth of a
Race6, a cinematic challenging of Griffith’s rhetoric of the Blacks as “uncivilized heathens”. The film was never a commercial or critical success, mostly
due to its mishandling by the production company (The Selig Company)
which completely altered the vision of the creator Emmett J. Scott. In 1920,
Oscar Micheaux addressed The Birth of a Nation when he made Within Our
Gates7. The film’s ending serves as a challenging homage to The Birth of a
Nation, depicting the attempted rape of a black woman by a white man as her
family is being lynched.
Griffith’s representation of Blacks as unwanted, inferior, menacing Otherness became a thesis which would be re-interpreted, contested and revived
in the decades to follow. Griffith was not a pioneer of racism in the American cinema, but due to the pervasive racial discourse The Birth of a Nation
58 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #10
imposed, by the mid-1920s “Hollywood had established a system of visual
and narrative racism that privileged whiteness, and solidified what would
be a century-long version of racial and ethnic stereotypes”8. The ubiquitous
influence of the film imposed a narrative on race and the American Civil War
that would be entrenched in the collective memory of the nation. What needs
to be highlighted is that apart from reflecting the common discourse of race
from the earlier twentieth century, The Birth of a Nation also refracted racial
ideologies in ways that impacted the meaning of whiteness in the future. As
to the relationship between art and ideology, The Birth of a Nation confirms
the assertion that art can be both stylistic and political, brilliant, reactionary,
and racist. In the words of Daniel Bernardi: “In Birth, art is ideological, form
is content, and cinema is simultaneously moving, artistic, ugly and painful”9.
The cinematic battle for the conceptualization of race in the American cinema, which followed in the decades to come10 would not contest the narrative
of slavery and the passive image of the African American slave, whose freedom was given (by his white master), not won. In the scholarly community,
The Birth of a Nation would serve to fuel the old debates on form versus
content, i.e. the aesthetic versus the ideological aspects of the work. Scholars
sidestepped the issue of racism and focused on the film’s undisputed cinematic qualities and revolutionary techniques, placing the issue of race far
from the spotlight and attributing the “latent” racism of Griffith to the spirit
of the age. Others spoke out against the compromise between the discourse
of film studies in the US with racist ideology. Some of them went so far as
to declare that “the passive racism of film studies has led it to neglect the
meaning of Griffith’s national allegory and the role of racism in it, in striking
contrast to the subtle social analysis given to other national allegories like the
Western or the gangster movie”11.
The first decades of the 21st century widely reasserted the contested relationship between race and the American cinema in both public and scholarly
debates. At the 101st anniversary of the creation of The Birth of a Nation, the
directorial debut of Nate Parker which bears the same title had its premiere.
This period drama is focused on the slave rebellion of Southampton County from 1831, led by the slave Nat Turner. The suppression of the uprising
claimed lives on both sides: 60 white men and the killing of 200 slaves in
retaliation. The aftermath of the rebellion had devastating effects on African
Americans – across the southern states, new laws were passed in order to
control slaves and free blacks – prohibition of the education of slaves and
free blacks, restricted rights of assembly for free blacks, and control over
black worship services by white ministers.
Marija Dimitrovska
| 59
The film premiered on 25th January 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival, and
subsequently Fox Searchlight Pictures bought the rights for worldwide distribution for a record sum of 17.5 million dollars12. The film’s premiere at the
height of the dispute regarding Hollywood’s lack of diversity only further
fueled the already vigorous debates on the place of African Americans in the
Hollywood film industry. Despite the fact that The Birth of a Nation (2016)
does make a thematic reference to its predecessor, Nate Parker delivers his
story through a genre which has been used to depict the period of slavery
ever since the cinematic adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin13. This paper will not deal with the artistic qualities of this work, since
its primary focus is on the author’s idea of a historical redemption, and the
fact that the director’s artistry proved to be of less importance to the film’s
initial popularity. Furthermore, the differing views of critics concerning this
cinematic work are fitter subject matter for the debate on political correctness in the domain of art.
The emergence of the second Birth of a Nation is not incidental – it represents a culmination of the disputes about Hollywood’s politics of racial
representation in the period of the greatest racial turmoil in the US in the
last two decades. Its creation also coincides with the tendencies to question
and reinterpret the narrative of the success of the civil rights movement, and
“the durable effects of a symbolic system that constructs and reproduces race
as a form of social difference”14. Director Nate Parker’s overt reference to
Griffith’s work only confirms the potency of the film, and sheds light on the
inability of the black man to transcend the paradoxical “outrage of liberation”, in the famous formulation by Orlando Patterson. The outrage of liberation refers to Patterson’s thesis that the formerly oppressed group’s sense of
outrage at what has been done to them increases as they become more equal
with their former oppressors.15 All liberation begins with the moment of suppression – in this case, it is the fact of slavery.
Slave revolt is not the typical narrative when referring to the empowering
of Blacks – indeed the dominant narrative has been the one of victimhood.
Thus, Griffith’s definition of the Black as the inferior Otherness continues to
be reasserted in slavery period pieces. Contemporary films on the period of
slavery (12 Years a Slave, Amistad, The Color Purple, etc.) continue the narrative of the black, passive victim. Nate Parker aims to use the motif of the
uprising of the oppressed to show a side of enslaved blacks that has no place
in the world of political correctness: the vengeful side, which is displayed
when some slaves refused to wait for a white savior, or for their freedom to
60 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #10
become legalized. Nat Turner is represented as a redeemer, and a redeemer
he is in the rhetoric of liberty through violence. The Birth of a Nation (2016),
thus, goes in line with the theses of Frantz Fanon, according to whom, “man
is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on
another man in order to be recognized by him. As long he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions”16. The black man cannot discern freedom, since he has not fought for
it. Freedom was something that was given to the black man:
Historically, the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by
his master. He did not fight for his freedom. […] The Negro is a slave who has
been allowed to assume the attitude of a master. The white man is a master who
has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. […] But the Negro knows nothing of
the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought
for Liberty and Justice, but these were always white liberty and white justice.
The former slave, who can find in his memory no trace of the struggle for liberty
or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before
the young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence.17
From the perspective of cultural trauma theory18 the fact of slavery and the
gift of freedom have become part of the cultural trauma and a constitutive
part of the African American cultural identity. According to Alexander’s
theory of cultural trauma, the traumatic sequence ends with the creation of
a reformed cultural identity. The reformed cultural identity derives from the
field of contested narratives, and from the establishment of a narrative of the
traumatic event that would provide a representation of the claims made by
the groups experiencing the trauma. Consequently, Parker’s The Birth of a
Nation can be interpreted as an attempt to establish a new narrative on the
essential human qualities of the African slave, his ability to discern freedom
and to strive towards it. In this way, this new narrative introduces a new
stage in the trauma sequence, providing a basis for a relief of the traumatic
memory. The likelihood that this narrative contributes to the normalization
of the traumatic process will depend on its “filtering” through the stratified
hierarchies of society.
Conclusion
Aside from the initial success of the civil rights movement, it has never fundamentally changed the art-culture politics of racial representation, particularly the representation of Otherness, as menacing, inferior or pitiable. Race,
Marija Dimitrovska
| 61
as a form of stratification, has continuously been confirmed on the silver
screen. To this end, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation represents a symbolic rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressors that aims to provide
the ontological basis for the New Black Man. The film’s only pitfall could be
if the proposed new narratives remain trapped in the necessity of the concept
of “race” as an essential category of human experience which possesses as
much ontological validity as the discarded racist notion of biologically distinct groups. If able to transcend this fact, it may provide the basis for the
new birth of a nation; otherwise, it may experience the fate of its predecessor,
and remain recorded in the annals of film history as yet another example of
film propaganda.
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Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 Laura Christian, “Fanon and the trauma of the cultural message,” Textual
Practice, no. 19(3), 2005, 222.
Toby Miller & Robert Stam (eds.), A Companion to Film Theory, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Daniel Bernardi (ed.). The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary
Hollywood Cinema, New York: Routledge, 2008, 15.
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today”, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, Harcourt Inc., 1977, 303.
John W. Noble, The Birth of a Race, United States: Gardiner Syndicate, 1918.
Oscar Mischeaux, Within Our Gates, United States: Micheaux Book & Film
Company, 1920.
Norman K. Denzin, Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence, Oxford: SAGE Publications, 2002, 20.
Daniel Bernardi, “Integrating Race into the Narrator System,”in Film Analysis: a Norton Reader, Jeffrey Geiger & R. L. Rutsky (eds.), New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2013, 95.
Typology proposed by Denzin, op.cit., 26.
Bernardi, The Persistence of Whiteness, 17.
Brent Lang & Ramin Setoodeh, “Sundance: ‘Birth of a Nation’ Lands at
Fox Searchlight in Record $17.5 Deal”, Variety. Available at http://variety.
com/2016/film/festivals/sundance-birth-of-a-nation-1201688520/. Accessed
August 21st, 2016.
Vinson Cunningham, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Isn’t Worth Defending,” The
New Yorker. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/
the-birth-of-a-nation-isnt-worth-defending. Accessed October 4th, 2016.
Mark D. Jacobs & Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to
Sociology of Culture (1st ed.), Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005, 235.
Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in
America’s “Racial” Crisis, Washington: Perseus Books LLC, 1997.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Pluto Press, 2008, 168.
Ibid., 171-172.
Jeffery C. Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004.
Marija Dimitrovska
| 63
References
Alexander, Jeffery C. et al.. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Bernardi, Daniel. (ed.). The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008.
————————. “Integrating Race into the Narrator System.” In Film analysis:
a Norton reader, Jeffrey Geiger & R. L. Rutsky (eds.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Christian, Laura. “Fanon and the trauma of the cultural message.” Textual Practice,
19(3), 2005: 219–241.
Cunningham, Vinson. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Isn’t Worth Defending.” The New
Yorker. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/thebirth-of-a-nation-isnt-worth-defending. Accessed October 4th, 2016.
Denzin, Norman K. Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence.
Oxford: SAGE Publications, 2002.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” In Film Form: Essays in
Film Theory. Harcourt Inc., 1977.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, 2008.
Giffith, D. W. The Birth of a Nation. United States: Epoch Producing Co, 1915.
Jacobs, Mark D. & Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (eds.). The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Culture (1st ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005.
Lang, Brent and Ramin Setoodeh, “Sundance: ‘Birth of a Nation’ Lands at Fox
Searchlight in Record $17.5 Deal”, Variety. Available at http://variety.
com/2016/film/festivals/sundance-birth-of-a-nation-1201688520/. Accessed
August 21st, 2016.
Miller, Toby & Robert Stam (eds.). A Companion to Film Theory. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004.
Mischeaux, Oscar. Within Our Gates. United States: Micheaux Book & Film Company, 1920.
Noble, John W. The Birth of a Race. United States: Gardiner Syndicate, 1918.
Patterson, Orlando. The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis. Washington: Perseus Books LLC, 1997.
Stokes, Melvyn. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007.
Marija Dimitrovska is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje. Her current research is related to the problem
of cultural trauma in transitional societies. In 2013 she defended her Master’s thesis, focused on the cinema as a committed art form. Since 2010, she
has been engaged as an associate at the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje. Her
professional interests are related to sociology of culture, sociology of art,
sociological theory, film studies, and cultural trauma studies.
Email: [email protected]
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