Birth of a Film Archive

The Nation Goes to the Movies: Browse the complete film archive

This is my inaugural post as The Nation's official archivist. For the last five years, I have been The Nation's unofficial archivist, toiling for the magazine's Classroom program, where I write a weekly teaching guide. Each week, I dig out an article from the archive--which goes all the way back to 1865--that relates to a piece in the current issue. It's great fun. For example, to accompany the moving batch of letters from jobless people that appeared in our February 23 issue, I found a 1913 tribute to Jacob Coxey, who led the 1894 march on Washington, demanding help for millions of American suffering in the depression that was strangling the country's economy. Earlier this year, when Daphne Brooks's somewhat critical commentary of Amy Winehouse was publish in our Books and the Arts section, I dug up a review from 1964 of the Beatles' historic appearance at Carnegie Hall (The reviewer didn't much care for the show, calling the Fab Four "an anachronism" and "derivative.")

Archivist work is a natural fit for someone who as a college student liked nothing more than scrolling through old microfilms or sitting on the floor in the library stacks, poring through bound volumes of Time, Newsweek, The Nation, hell, even Commonweal. Sadly, the musty smell of those old books cannot be replicated on my Mac, but the searchability of The Nation archives more than makes up for it. (Besides, I can always not vacuum my office for a few weeks if I really get nostalgic for dust mites.)

Most of this magazine's rich archive is locked up in what are known as pdf documents--digital images of the original print magazine grabbed from microfilm--and available free to subscribers of the magazine. (Non-subscribers can purchase these documents from our digital archive for a modest fee.) Beginning this week, The Nation is liberating those locked-up documents in the form of curated selections from the archive that will be searchable on the Internet and available to all. First out of the archival box is our film vault, The Nation Goes to the Movies. I've pulled a treasury of more than 100 movie reviews, written by some of the world's most renowned critics. Curated highlights from this extensive archive can be found on this page. In weeks and months to come, expect to see more curated selections from our archive: eyewitness accounts and analysis of historical events, book reviews and profiles of the artists, writers, political leaders and activists who have profoundly impacted our lives.

The Archivist blog will appear weekly. With each post, I will offer up another selection from our archives that I hope will interest you, amuse you, challenge you and demonstrate to you how so much of The Nation's and our nation's history continues to be not just relevant, but vital to understanding the knot of issues and events that too often continue to confound us.

Are you curious about what The Nation had to say about something that piques your interest? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com and I'll poke around in our past to answer your question.

For example, is it true that Adolf Hitler once wrote for the magazine? It is, in a way--but that's for another post. This week, to honor the launch of a curated selection of more than 100 great film reviews from The Nation's archive, I thought I'd discuss one of the films not on the list.

When D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, it was the film industry's first epic, with a budget that topped the then astounding sum of $100,000. Griffith and cameraman Billy Bitzer introduced radical technical innovations that are still used today. But its reconstructed view of Reconstruction, in which free blacks steal elections--when they're not out raping white women until the Ku Klux Klan returns civility to the region--prompted waves of outrage in the former Northern states, while emboldening a rejuvenated Klan throughout the South.

The Nation did not review "The Birth of a Nation" at delivery, although a 1915 editorial did take note of the controversy. Shortly after Griffith's death in 1948, however, the magazine's brilliant critic, James Agee, offered an appreciation of Griffith's career. Agee, the Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author, with Walker Evans, of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was himself a Southerner, and while he marveled at the film's achievements (With perhaps a modicum of hyperbole, he called it "the birth of an art" and the equal of "Lincoln's speeches and Whitman's war poems), he also minimized the film's racist message, calling such criticism "vicious nonsense." He goes on to say, "The accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does." While Agee acknowledged that he didn't entirely agree with Griffith's point of view, Griffith's "absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture."

It was? Since I was putting together the list of 100 film reviews, I thought I better see this one. And I can report that after being battered for three hours and six minutes by unrelenting, vile bigotry, my brain felt bruised from the experience.

After recounting the experience to a friend over dinner, she compared Griffith's work to that of Leni Riefenstahl. Sure, they both were technical geniuses, but so were the Nazis, and no one I know calls the Holocaust a masterpiece of population control.

When I compiled my film list, I also thought of a conversation I had soon after I went to work for the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in the 1970s. At the time, the Nazis were making some noise in Skokie, Illinois, and the ACLU had come to their defense. I asked someone in the office why we didn't take the case, and he explained that while the NECLC was a civil liberties organization, we also had a relationship with the left, and there were cases we just didn't want to defend. That policy was certainly arguable, but I was okay with it, and I'm just as comfortable leaving The Birth of a Nation off my list.

Comments (1)

1. Birth of a Nation is almost like two different films at the same time and it's difficult to talk about them both in the same breath - one of the most racist examples of American popular art; and (arguably) the most important film of the medium's first two decades.

   The chase scene through the forest (when one of the former slaves, now an army officer, pursues a 'chaste' southern belle with nefarious intentions) encapsulates the dichotomy. The depiction of the oversexed black male (who, incidentally, was played by a white actor in blackface) and his savage lust for the pure white girl is, as you aptly described the film, vile.

   But the intensity with which the chase is filmed and edited, the cuts from closeups to medium shots to the wonderful (aesthetically) long shot of the girl surrounded by looming trees, is a marvel of technical virtuosity and the prototype of nearly every chase scene ever shot since.

   The film is a fascinating, disgusting, beautiful mess of wonderfully filmed and incredibly influential hatred.

   Posted by Rintrah at 02/23/2009 @ 1:20pm