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Post by Bret Walker on Jun 22, 2006 12:10:34 GMT -5
Wow. What a racist piece that is. (Birth of a Nation, DW Griffith, 1915, silent). If you believed everything happened the way Griffith portrayed it, you'd think that the conquering North were the Evil Empire and that blacks in the south drove the white man to form the Ku Klux Klan. All in all, it was a very good film but the message is so distorted and contorted to the point of being almost laughable. From the pretty Northern woman (played by gorgeous Lillian Gish) who first breaks off her engagement to her Klansman Southern fiance and later "sees the light" and falls in love again with her man; to the stereotypical "Gus," the maurauding black man who attacks the Klansman's sister and kills her (and by the way, he looked more like Bruno from Black/White than an actual black man); to the way the black-majority South Carolina state senate threw morality to the wind and made up silly laws such as "all members of the state senate must wear shoes." It was trite and boisterous white supremacist propaganda. Still, anyone who wants to understand racism in America at its roots should see this film, at least once, just to see it. It's three hours long (!) but it doesn't seem that long. And the version we had was from 1996, and had a 24-minute featurette on the making of the film that was very interesting. Check it out if you can find it.
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