The Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation
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The Birth of a Nation
Introduction
The Birth of a Nation is perhaps the most ambitious film ever created in the 19th century. The film became highly sensational and successful after its release based on its depiction of the reconstruction era. It has been accused of causing irreversible harm to African Americans by justifying discrimination, racism, and prejudice. Griffith paints the Reconstruction and the sad realities associated with racism and African American identity through specialized and innovative techniques such as parallel editing, flashbacks, camera angles and distance, and other cinematic approaches.
The Birth of a Nation paints the reconstruction era, which bears remarkable historical significance based on its daring experiment on transforming the patterns and institutions of social relations. Reconstruction was a period that followed the Civil War when corrupt northern-born Republicans who had moved to the South, opportunist White southerners supporting the Republican Party, and bitter-formed enslaved people oppressed and plundered the former Confederacy until order was restored by right-minded White Southerners (Schickel, 1996). It could be argued that the film painted Reconstruction as a poor and misguided effort to change the South’s successful order by empowering formerly enslaved people. However, it gave political power to the Black Americans in the South through various constitutional amendments that provided voting rights and extended citizenship to the said people. The federal government was also invoked to establish numerous social welfare programs during the described era (Schickel, 1996). Notwithstanding, the film successfully depicts Reconstruction as an immensely failed but bold effort to adapt to emancipation realities: to forge a just society based on the harms and ruins of slavery by guaranteeing the political and civil rights of formerly enslaved people. Therefore, the film bears historical prudence, given its ability to illustrate the role of the Reconstruction in achieving political and economic equality for formerly enslaved people and their descendants.
The film is both a mark of shame and a source of pride because it is brutally and explicitly racist, mainly when analyzed from its social-political context. Precisely, The Birth of a Nation covers a considerable period in the history of America, including during the Reconstruction of the South, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and the period before the Civil War (Griffiths, 1915). It blames all problems facing Americans before and after the Civil War. The movie is pervaded by the probl...