1) In one scene the part-colored assistant to the Thaddeus Stevens character (Stoneman),is appointed, in the Southern town where most of action as the head of the Freedman's Bureau, i.e., an important federal official, comes by to visit with Elsie Stoneman and the Little Colonel, an ex-Confederate son of a plantation owner. She somewhat distastefully shakes his hand. The Lil Colonel crosses his arms and turns his back. The placard (this is a silent) reads, "The Insolence of the Black." But it's perfectly obvious who is being insolent and who polite, and it's not the "Black."
2. In the mnost famous scene of the film, Gus, the black Union soldier who is interested in, I think she's called The Little Dear One, the ditzy daughter of the plantation owner, offers her a proposal of marriage, saying he's been promoted. She freaks out and flees through the woods. He follows, repeatedly saying he means her no harm and doesn't want her to hurt herself, warning her that her behavior is dangerous. She jumps off a high rock and is killed.
Now, clearly this is meant to be as something as close to a rape scene as Griffith thought he coupld portray. But on its own terms, Gus' behavior is reasonable and considerate and caring, and the LDO is mad. Btw I and most people, I bet, had misremembered the scene as one of attempted rape. It's not, It's an irrational and self-destructive reaction to an undesired proposal of honorable marriage, the correct response would have been to say, Oh, no, thank you, I'm sorry, I just couldn't -- you know, what one says when someone else expresses unwanted but discreet and polite affections.
3. Gus knows he is in trouble and hides out. The Klan hunts him down (he is hidden and defended heroically by fellow blacks), drags him off, and in a terrifying scene at night is given what the placard describes as a "fair trial." In the morning his body is dumped at the door of the Freedman's Bureau as a warning. It is impossible for a modern audience to see the "fair trial" as anythiung but what it is --a cruel farce conducted by a savage lynch mob of brutal racist murderers. My daughter (Hypersentisitive on the subject of racial discrimination) commented that this scene looked like something out of an anti-Klan film.
4.The old plantation owner is discovered to own Klan robes -- by way, not by search of his house but because they are vissible from an external expectation. THe KKK has been banned as a terrorist organization, and the old plantation owner, the Lil Col, and their friends flee, federal authorities (Black troops lead by a white noncom, this is historically accurate) in pursuit. They hole up in a house occupied by white Union vets who make a common cause with their racial compatriots, and fight with the feds in a thrilling battle scene with, however, a fair amount of supposedly comic racial stereotyping.
Though this point is more subtle, what is going on here is the unlawful violent resistance to the duly constituted federal authority of persons aiding and abbetting in terrorist activity, the nature of which is been made clear by Gus' lynching -- it is just taht Griifith has (as with the "insolence of the Black" scene and others -- reversed the value signs.
5. Quite apart from all this the battle scenes from the war are the best very filmed.
The intended ethics and politics of the fim are vile and appalling. MUch the the film can't be read ambiguosuly either. But many key scenese cannot be read other than as the opposite of what Griffith intended. Artistically, from a merey formal point of view, it really does have a claim to be one of the half dozen greatest movies of all time. That goes to show that art and political ethics can come apart in major ways.
With, actually, should not surprise us -- the political ethics and values glorified in the Illiad -- glory in and through slaughter, mercilessness towards the defeated, unjustified anger and selfishness (Achilleus' behavior is childish, especially after Agamemmnon has promished to make good his losses), hierarchy and the mistreatment of commons soldiers who talk sense -- Oddesyeus beats Thersites to the laughter of the assembled Achaeans for saying rather well exactly the same thing that everybody else thinks and says abourt the war, including Achilleus whos peaks of it in almost exactly the same words -- the murder and enslavement of innocents -- are utterly dreadful. But the work is immortal as well as immoral.
jks
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> > joanna wrote:
> >
> >
> > > So I guess you've never seen Birth of a
> Nation, Texas Chainsaw
> > > Massacre or Death Race 2000?
> > >
> > You'd guess right. Tony Kushner's OK, mostly.
>
> You should see Birth of a Nation. It was a favorite
> film of the
> Co-Founder (with TR & JDRsr) of modern u.s.
> imperialism -- Woodrow
> Wilson. It dramatizes what the u.s. was & still for
> the most part is.
>
> Carrol
> ___________________________________
>
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