Here We Go Again! (hero worship of the KKK?)

http://www.syracusenewtimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4137&Itemid=148

Written by Bill DeLapp


The 95-year-old silent Birth of a Nation is still generating heated hubbub

Jerkz N Da Hoods: The KKK come to the heroic rescue in The Birth of a Nation.

The Capitol Theatre in nearby Rome has been specializing in 35mm screenings of vintage movies over the last decade, showcasing a wide roster of classics starring everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Charlie Chan, James Bond to James Stewart and Joan Blondell to Jean Arthur, all with much gratitude from statewide cineastes who head to the Mohawk Valley bijou.

That generous goodwill dissipates a bit this weekend, however, when protesters with picket signs will probably greet the Capitol’s showing of the 1915 pioneering silent The Birth of a Nation on Saturday, April 14. Hailed as a breakthrough in cinematic techniques and forever damned for its racially charged pyrotechnics, director D.W. Griffith’s Civil War spectacle changed everything about moviemaking at that point, as first-time viewers may well find out. That is, if they can get past some jaw-dropping African-American stereotypes and the film’s hero worship of—wait for it—the Ku Klux Klan.

“It has been the silent film most requested by patrons,” claims Capitol executive director Art Pierce. “We are not showing this film to create racial unrest.”

Indeed, controversy has dogged The Birth of a Nation for nearly a century, and whatever organization attempts to book this film does so at its own peril. On March 22, 1976, the Syracuse Cinephile Society’s Monday-night “Classics of the Silent Screen” movie series encountered some resistance from local picketers during a Birth screening at the then-new Civic Center’s Carrier Theater. Legend has it that Cinephile founder Phil Serling told the press, “I’m Jewish and I’ve shown movies made by {Nazi propagandist} Leni Reifenstahl!” Current Cinephile president Gerry Orlando remarks that “back then Cinephile films were more ‘cinema society’ type of screenings, not the kind of ‘casual night out’ films our Monday-night audiences now enjoy {at the Spaghetti Warehouse}. Plus 1976 was a far different time from 2010.”

There’s no statute of limitations regarding offensive imagery, however, especially with Caucasian performers smudged in blackface to accentuate the worst of African-American caricatures. Those dicey stereotypes don’t really kick in until after intermission with scenes devoted to the South’s Reconstruction period. Griffith, working from the book The Clansman written by avowed racist Thomas Dixon, lingers on shots of newly elected barefoot black congressmen in chambers munching on fried chicken and slugging shots of whiskey.

Meanwhile, unscrupulous Yankee carpetbaggers have also united the former slaves to commit more leering mayhem, which leads South Carolina plantation owner Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), nicknamed “The Little Colonel” during the War Between the States, to create the Ku Klux Klan after watching African-American children being scared by other kids hiding underneath white sheets. Despite the exacting detail that Griffith and director of photography Billy Bitzer bring to the material (just think that the movie was filmed a mere 50 years after the Civil War), The Birth of a Nation also offers a surreal form of revisionist history that auteur Quentin Tarantino also employed in his World War II fantasia Inglourious Basterds.

FULL story at link.