As reported in
The Guardian today: "A silent film cinema in Hollywood has been forced to cancel a screening of the landmark 1915 movie
The Birth of a Nation following protests from members of the public and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The film was due to screen on Monday at the
Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood, California, until owner Charlie Lustman bowed to pressure. Lustman said that he was concerned that customers would have to cross a picket line and was also fearful for the safety of Bob Mitchell, his 92-year old organist."
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, recently toured the country with a
remix of Birth of a Nation. As Ana Finel Honigman writes in
Artnet: "Today, while the film is reviled for its politics, it is revered by film critics and scholars for its cinematic innovations (including the first color sequence). Its power as propaganda remains unnerving and it is reportedly still used as a recruitment piece for Klan membership. During a private screening at the White House President Woodrow Wilson is reported to have exclaimed: 'It's like writing history with lightning.'
"Miller's
Rebirth of a Nation [premiered] in mid-May at the Vienna Festival and [travelled] to the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston South Carolina [prior to arriving] at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York on July 23, 2004. For each performance Miller [mixed] audio and video on-site and a DVD of
Rebirth of a Nation will be released in the upcoming year."
Paul Miller offers the following rationale for his interest in
Birth of a Nation: "[The film] focuses on how America needed to create a fiction of African American culture in tune with the fabrication of 'whiteness' that undergirded American thought throughout most of the last several centuries: it floats out in the world of cinema as an enduring albeit totally racist, epic tale of an America that, in essence, never existed. The Ku Klux Klan still uses this film as a recruiting device and it's considered to be an American 'cinema classic' despite the racist content. By remixing the film along the lines of dj culture, I hoped to create a counter-narrative, one where the story implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out the ashes of that explosion."
Comments (2)
Picketing a film to the point where artists (like the 92 year old organist) and audience are concerned for their safety is reminiscent of Nazi and Soviet tactics. If film exhibitors bow to the fears of an angry mob, they have allowed censorship to take place.
Birth of a Nation's racist message can only be taken seriously by highly uncultured individuals who would be very unlikely to see a silent, black and white film. Hatemongers are much sooner attracted to the color and glitz of websites, hate music, and other such hedonistic forms of "entertainment"
Griffith's film is a valuable record of the progression of American and world cinema. To wipe it from the slate of cinema history for its outdated and racial socio-political incline is a crime in the face of culture and the freedom of artistic expression. History cannot and should not be erased for any reason.
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