Not Racist?
Director D.W. Griffith was supposedly shocked by accusations that his film was unabashedly racist. Apologists and “explainers” forward the proposition that Griffith’s obliviousness is attributable to an ideological blindness informed by a mythical embrace of a view of southern history clouded by a history of personal stories handed down by family members and a mainstreaming of unacceptable ideas as normalcy. Perhaps so, but the imagery following the title card “The riot in the Master’s Hall” seems fairly impossible to view as anything other than the most horrific example of demonizing an entire race.
Newly elected black legislators in the wake of Reconstruction are presented as barefooted drunken animals leering with unrestrained and aggressively sexual desire directed toward young white women looking on from the gallery above. Even worse is another title card accompanying prefacing this imagery: “Historic incidents from the first legislative session under Reconstruction” as it were recreating actual recorded fact.
Lincoln’s Assassination
Those wanting to see for themselves just the style of Griffith as a filmmaker without the baggage of his racist ideology are encouraged to watch the sequence leading to the assassination of Pres. Lincoln. What is essential to keep in mind is that it was only just a few years earlier that movies were essentially nothing more than a stationary camera filming an unbroken scene enacted upon what was really the equivalent of a stage. Had the five minute sequence of Lincoln’s assassination been made during that period, it likely would have been little more than Lincoln and his wife seen sitting in their theater box seat with John Wilkes Booth suddenly opening the door behind, appearing and shooting his pistol.
In Griffith’s hands, editing opens up the events to allow him to cross-cut from a medium-close-up of his fictional protagonists to showing the performance of the play on the stage to the arrival of the Lincolns to the President’s bodyguard falling asleep in the hallway outside the box seat to John Wilkes Booth creeping his way past the snoozing bodyguard into the box seat to shoot the President which then causes the entire Ford’s Theater to erupt in chaos. The sequence is filled with a singularity of individual imagery that focuses on the joy of the romantic couple, the illusion of the stage performance, the dignity the Lincolns, the tragedy of the bodyguard and the cowardly evil (yes, Booth is actually presented as a villain despite the aforementioned racism) of the assassin which all coalesce to produce a remarkably effective level of tension considering how everyone already knows how it turns out.
The Birth of the KKK
A single image captures the entire birth of the Ku Klux Klan. Despondent over the behavior and consequences of the black legislators, Ben Cameron looks out over a valley and down below witnesses the spectacle of two young white children scaring a group of black children by putting a white sheet over themselves and pretending to be ghosts. The subsequent title card tells it all: “The Inspiration.”
The "Epic Heroes"
From that point forward in the film, its heroes (from a racist perspective) become clearly and unambiguously presented. The white-shrouded members of the KKK are presented as the very image of valiant American knights who are situated as the only agents standing between the “black south” and America’s “defence of their Aryan birthright.”
