The Birth of a Nation dir. by Nate Parker (review)

Released in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was a national box office sensation. The plot included a white maiden leaping to her death to avoid defilement at the hands of a ravenous slave-turned-Union-soldier; loyal, “happy slaves” who refused to turn against their white benefactors even after receiving legal freedom; and southern men, led by the dashing Colonel Ben Cameron (Henry Walthall), rescuing silent starlet Lillian Gish in the process of violently redeeming the South’s shattered honor. President Woodrow Wilson—once an academic historian himself—allegedly remarked of the film’s white supremacist narrative that, “my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Thus all at once and with the full force of a Hollywood epic, Griffith’s picture glorified Ku Klux paramilitarism, legitimized Jim Crow rape-politics, and spread Lost Cause mythology to new bounds.

A century later, writer/director/lead actor Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016) attempts to turn the table on Griffith’s magnum opus. More indie than epic—but boasting double top honors from the Sundance Film Festival—this depiction of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt features black women sexually assaulted by ravenous white men. It portrays African slaves commodified and abused, in full, disturbingly graphic detail, by their white owners. These atrocities culminate not with a final victory for the heroes, but with a group of desperate, hopelessly outgunned men being slaughtered while trying to salvage some vestige of their humanity from the slavocracy. Wilson certainly would have regretted this depiction of southern history, too. (Because this time, much of it was so terribly true.) And the commandeering of Griffith’s title is as symbolic as it is intentional. To be sure, this constitutes a bold and timely gesture on Parker’s part; a try at reclaiming part of slavery’s historical legacy in American popular culture by undermining the ultimate indictment of abolitionism and Emancipation on film. With this in mind, the questions most relevant to any review of this film are: Whether or not the new The Birth of a Nation’s historical scaffolding is sturdy enough to support its political message. (It is.) And whether or not anyone is willing to accept that payload, however valuable, from Nate Parker. (Per the film’s lackluster revenue, they don’t appear to be.)

Assessing the historical accuracy of The Birth of a Nation is complicated—and depends mostly on scale. On one hand, in terms of Nat Turner’s actual life and the revolt, there are myriad problems. The film’s narrative revolves around the relationship between Turner and his wife, Cherry; it even goes so far as to suggest that a brutal sexual attack on Cherry is what finally prompted Turner to rebel. In reality, Turner was not married—nor did one individual case of abuse or rape spark the rebellion he led. (This fabrication highlights a broader inability of the film to develop female characters independent of their influence on male behavior.) The film depicts a rebellion betrayed from within; a frightened child alerting his master to the approaching rebel band and then a massacre in the final showdown over the state arsenal in Jerusalem. As far as the historical record is concerned, there is no evidence that a child informed on Turner’s slave army. And logistically speaking, the rebellion was crushed long before making it anywhere near an arsenal.

On the other hand, whatever micro-authenticity the film sacrifices to dramatic effect, it seems to regain on the macro-level. The Birth of a Nation illuminates as well as any other film in existence how the institution of slavery systematically extracted labor from men, women, and children by way of terror, physical punishment, and prolonged emotional trauma. Audiences witness beatings, collars and torture devices, attack dogs, sexual assaults, and other, almost unwatchable incidents, such as a slave on hunger strike having his teeth knocked out with a...