Field Trip City

Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is presented in two parts - the first concerns the Civil War, the defeat of the South and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and is filmed with a powerful sense of scope and subject matter. It is easy to marvel at Griffith's abilities and to call him the greatest filmmaker working in 1915; he was a man who could not only compose a grand idea but execute it in ways that other directors couldn't via camera movements, transitions, intercutting and an general eye for action. When the North and the South finally end their battle, when the images of the bodies have faded from the screen, it looks as though a war has actually been waged on the field, and Griffith's camera had been sitting atop a high ledge capturing the entire struggle.

Unfortunately, the movie's second part dealing with the Reconstruction of the post-Lincoln South is some of the most flagrantly racist, poorly staged material I've ever seen on film. White actors portray ignorant blacks eating chicken in legislature, turning into unhinged sexual predators and generally lumbering around like dolts until they form a fascist group that terrorizes the "poor white minority" (that's a quotation from one of the title cards). The Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as heroes pushed to the breaking point by a proclamation that did more harm than good in unifying the South as they ultimately hunt down and murder African-Americans, forcibly prevent them from voting and demonizing the notion of interracial coupling. The final act is a long, clumsy and ugly finale to a movie that had initially kept me captivated, and it's one of the strangest examples of a film with a dual nature that I can remember.

So what can I make of it? Is it great? Perhaps some films should simply be regarded as significant by virtue of their own conflicted nature. Birth of a Nation is significant because it shows exceptional innovation in its execution and staging (Roger Ebert's review of the film mentions that audiences wouldn't have been able to focus entirely on the film's plot, given that they would have been awestruck by the intercutting process). But its racist stance - a stance that Griffith spent the rest of his career apologizing for - begs it to be disregarded as "great" and more fundamentally "American." It seems to be one of those (first) cases where style is in direct contrast with substance. Ultimately, it was the first instance of a film shaming its own media while giving everything of which it was capable in the effort.

I read an article of James Naremore's on film noir as a genre, and he calls for the need of a "genre-function" discourse very similar to that of Foucault's, which suits the author. I wonder why art causes us to panic the way it does. We're always attempting to come up with concrete definitions for human expression - both the need for it and the end result - and track periodical trends. Poststructuralism should have made things easier but all it really seems to do is offer a much bigger table on which more critics can toss their two cents. It keeps things fun, I suppose.

I wrote a poem today. The Independent Festival of Authors is coming up. I wouldn't mind checking out Elizabeth Hay, Rudy Wiebe and Will Ferguson. I'm always so lackadaisical and awkward when it comes to festivals, concerts, art shows. Part of me thinks the sole reason I want to publicize them for a living is so that I'm properly able to psyche myself into attending them.

I'm listening to Radiohead's new record at a rate of one song per day. Today's was the fantastic "All I Need." I'm really enjoying the album so far, and keeping it out of reach.