Why I Saw The Birth of a Nation: A Movie-Watcher's Manifesto

The Birth of a Nation is a three-hour silent movie. It doesn't exist in a very good print, and the subject matter is explicitly and purposefully racist in a way you don't get these days outside of white power rallies. Frankly, it wasn't very pleasant to watch. It was a groundbreaking movie at the time (because it practically invented the language of film), but ninety years later, there's really nothing in it that would be, by itself, worth watching. It's all "historical context" this and "nobody had ever seen cross-cutting" that.

And yet, I'm glad I did it. For one thing, it was an educational experience, and I mean that literally: The Birth of a Nation is an Important Film, and if I want to claim to be literate in film, I feel that I need to have seen it. It's not enough just to read about it and see clips; it's the entire three-hour experience that I want to be able to refer to. I realize that hardly anybody I know has seen it (except for my girlfriend Rhias, who watched it with me), but that's not the point. At some point, I may well find myself surrounded by hardcore film nerds, and at that point, I don't want to be bluffing when I talk about the crosscutting in this one scene, or the way the Civil War battle scenes, or how the actual black actors are behaving relatively normally in the background while white guys in blackface cavort in excruciatingly stereotypical fashion in the foreground. I don't have to rely on Roger Ebert's word for how the movie is constructed (Part I: The Idyllic Prewar South; Part II: War!; Part III: The Evils of Reconstruction); I've seen it.

In fact, it's already paid off; we were watching Forrest Gump today (for the same reason; it's one of AFI's "100 Greatest American Films", but Rhias had studiously avoided seeing it), and we recognized the scene with the Ku Klux Klan as having been taken from The Birth of a Nation. Now maybe you already know that. But I maintain that it's different when you actually recognize it.

Of course, there's an aspect of smugness here. Anyone can (and should) watch Casablanca . It's hardly any work at all! But I've made it all the way through The Birth of a Nation. This demonstrates my determination to know more about film history. It won't convince other people, but it makes me feel good about myself.

The important thing is that I do not watch movies just to enjoy myself. I mean, the two hours of transitory enjoyment I get while in the theater (or in front of the television) is only the first part. And it's not even the important part. Really, the part I enjoy is talking about the movie afterwards. Discussing it with other people is usually more fun than the actual movie provides. Given the option of seeing a great movie but never discussing it, I would far rather watch a movie I hated and then spend hours dissecting it with people, explaining why I disliked it, hearing why they had a different film-going experience than I did, listening to their take on it, and so on. I don't regret the experience of seeing Kill Bill, Vol. 1, even though I hated it, because it has been the basis for a number of interesting conversations (although I'd recommend skipping the comments on that entry; they degenerate pretty quickly).

If there are movies I love that none of my friends have seen (like, say, Kill and Kill Again), I want them to see it. Not because I think it would be "good for them" (well, sometimes it is, but in the case of an obscure South African karate flick, it's hard to make that argument) but because I want to talk to them about it.

That doesn't really come into play here, because there aren't many people to talk to about The Birth of a Nation. But I'm not stopping there; I'm watching all the movies on the AFI list (the ones I haven't seen, anyway) as well as the movies that IMDB claims are the best. That set is determined by popularity, not critical acclaim, so it's a little different in that it has more Aliens and Memento and less The Jazz Singer. There are two goals here: to see movies that are widely considered Great, and to ensure that I will be culturally literate.

Incidentally, I don't want to give the impression that I'm only seeing these movies out of a sense of duty. I watched Annie Hall the other night, and I liked it a lot. I've always enjoyed Woody Allen, and this was, in fact, better than the other Woody movies I've seen, which are mostly of the Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose era. I didn't like it as much as Bullets over Broadway, but that's a pretty high bar to clear. My point is that if you start with a list of "The Greatest Movies of All Time", the odds are good that I'm going to like a few of them. And the ones I don't like are at least good for something.

Now, you might well ask why I'm letting the American Film Institute and the Internet Movie Database decide what movies I'm going to see. There are two answers to that: first, obviously, these aren't the only movies I'm seeing; it's just that I've filled a Netflix queue with these movies that have been designated "classics", whether it's by critics or popular acclaim. I'm also going to see movies based on my own idiosyncratic criteria. The second answer is that I don't think I can usefully disagree with a list unless I'm familiar with its contents. If I'm going to say that a movie isn't one of the hundred greatest movies, I need to not only have seen that movie, I need to have seen the other movies that might be on the list.