By Paul Weiser
It is truth as well as truism that D. W. Griffith’s silent epic “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) was a landmark in cinematic history. We tend, however, to view its brilliant technical innovations as separate from its (to moderns, unacceptably) racist theme. In fact, this is a significantly false dichotomy.
The film’s innovations - not all new, but masterfully applied - form the foundation of moving-picture story-telling whether on film or video. Most telling are conventions of montage - for example, cutting between outside and indoor shots as an actor appears to walk through the door from one to the other. In fact, the images were recorded at different places (one on location, the other on a studio set) with no relation to their order in the final film. Extensions of this principal (cut from actor’s reflective face to images of his thoughts, whether flashback to the past or visions of souls in Paradise) abound.
This point is worth belaboring to emphasize the complete falsity of film and video: they lie. This actor is not thinking what you see; that actor fell weeks before the shot that appears to kill him, and miles away. The sequential images of film construct a story that never happened - a story as false as Griffith’s heroic Ku Klux Klan, who were in fact slinking, contemptible terrorists as bad as anything in Iraq.
And that is the larger, unifying point: film, video, was corrupt at its birth. All its conventions were invented to purvey untruth. Griffith used them to make heroes of the Klan’s terrorists; television uses them today to make villains of heroic American soldiers.
The purpose of distorting reality is to distort reality. There is no dichotomy between false message and video technique: the techniques falsify, for that is their purpose.
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