To Screen or Not to Screen: Birth of a Nation gets the boot

At First, when there's nothing but a slow glowing dream
That your fear seems to hide deep inside your mind
All alone I have cried silent tears full of pride
In a world made of steel, made of stone

Spot on! It's uncanny.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had protested the planned showing, said the movie “poisoned racial relationships in America for nearly a century.”

ultimately this is the same logic that tipper gore used againt rap in the '80s. and possibly the poisoning was done by eg segregation more than by a film?

enrique have you seen birth of a nation? the racism here is hardly genteel. one scene has mae marsh leap from a cliff to her death to be spared the "fate worse than death"--being raped by a black man. the whole film is driven forward by a terrible fear of miscegnation. and its tied to a vision of history that is profoundly unsettling and perverse (although common enough back then).

to revisit my comments above, i agree that the NAACP is being foolish in trying to prohibit this film's screening publicly. but i guess that i also feel that given all the furor it inevitably causes when being shown in this manner, maybe people could program it more discreetly and less often (which they in point of fact do in general)--as noted above, the film is very easily seen on video.

Yup, Lilian is one hott mama.

(I heart her btw)

(Possibly the NAACP were not big on the "contextualizing debate" idea because they knew it would be TOTALLY BORING.)

There’s also the issue that screening this is sort of an “academic” issue that doesn’t translate to the person on the street, which is possibly a consideration that those who object have in mind. It’s a consideration the organizer has in mind, too, clearly—hence the offer to make it explicitly academic, with discussion and such.

-- nabisco (--...) (webmail), August 11th, 2004 2:32 PM. (nabisco) (later) (link)

that's why i suggested that this film can be quietly screened at a theater attached to a museum or school, and hackles are typically only raised when a commercial cinema (no matter how marginal) wants to show it to the public. few would be likely to think MoMA or the national archive were endorsing the film's worldview, but it gets potentially more ambiguous when it's a commercial cinema. of course this particular cinema did a fine job of trying to advertise the screening in such a way as to placate those concerns, but i guess it didn't work.

that's why i think that, in the real world, it's probably best that places like the silent movie theater not try to show this film. (another reason: there are a million silent films that never get screened publicly that are just as exciting and historical interesting.)

s1ocki: the chicago summer silent film festival tends to show the same things year after year after year. well, there are always one or two curveballs. but otherwise it's: one german expressionist classick (NOSFERATU/METROPOLIS/CALIGARI/GOLEM), one colleen moore-type flapper romance, one Fairbanks swashbuckler, one louise brooks films, one buster keaton, and one other slapstick (maybe harold lloyd).

i don't really blame them, because they need name-value films that will attract paying customers (they rent out a huge old theater so the operating costs must be high), but still it's a little disappointing to see the same thing--or more or less the same thing--year after year.