The 1915 motion picture "The Birth of a Nation" can be found on youtube broken into 20 nine minute segments. I'm not asking you to watch the whole thing. However, the clip below is the final 9 minutes of the film. The premise of the movie is to depict the civil war as seen through the eyes of two brothers. In the first few minutes of this last 9 minutes, the Ku Klux Klan is given heroic role, rescuing the poor white citizens from the menacing black invaders. By the end of the film, all of the black soldiers are dead and the white characters are now able to live their lives in peace.
Now, it would be a stretch for me, white, middle class, 2010 Jeff to say that "yes, this is blatantly racist" or "no, it's merely a recreation of history". There is a LOAD of literature about this film, if you care to dive into it. However, the point of this post is to inquire as to whether time period is a valid excuse for something so point blank racist. It has been nearly 100 years and I think it is safe to say things have changed since then. The civil rights movement, NAACP, etc. But can we look at a film like this and appreciate it for a piece of art: it was a very revolutionary film (one of the first full length films of its time, one of the first to try to depict war etc) and without films such as this (racism aside) we might not have the Hollywood of today. Or, is it impossible to see beyond the images and intolerance?
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