James Snead's handout

I believe we were supposed to read the excerpt from James Snead’s White Screen, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, and I think it is really interesting how as Snead points out in his critique of Birth of a Nation that the alternation between romance and political conflict in the film leads the audience into assuming that the political conflict was “invented to delay a ‘happy ending,’” or essentially Gus, Silas Lynch, and basically every other African American’s fault in the Southern town are completely at fault for why it takes three hours for Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron to get together. Snead seems to see this as a way to combine all the racial tension with the romance and come up for a solution what is essentially a nationwide problem at the time.

Last class I talked about how I felt that Birth of a Nation placed all the blame of the Civil War and post-Civil War separation between the north and south on the African Americans. Snead’s reading seems to agree with this, and he states that the proposed solution to this conflict “is as easy as two people falling in love,” which basically boils down to taking away all the rights African Americans had managed to gain in a few short decades.

Despite the obviously racist reasons for why I cannot tolerate Birth of a Nation, I think another issue I have with the film is that it tries to reduce extremely complex issues. Simply taking away African American rights would not solve these issues. In fact, it would probably complicate them. No one would have been willing to give up their rights. Doing what Birth of a Nation seemed to suggest might have actually landed the country in another civil war, and the nation had barely recovered from the first one. Thus, when Snead talks about how the film pushes its racist ideology onto its viewers with its engaging romance and experimental cinematography, it is doing so in a way that ultimately helps absolutely no one except the people making money off the ticket sales, which is honestly the whole point of making a movie anyway.