The Birth of a Nation by Paul McEwan

Author:Paul McEwan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Film Institute

Gus approaches the little sister on the mountain top

Even by the standards of traditional femininity in play at the time, this scene is extremely conservative in terms of gender. While we have noted how the fear of black men attacking white women was used as an excuse to control both groups, this title makes explicit that, had she chosen to live, the rape would have been, in some ways, her fault. The ‘stern lesson of honor’ is that honour is more valuable than life, and that it is preferable to die rather than to be raped. Thus, the safeguarding of honour is a strong incentive for women to stay in the house. Not only are there risks if they leave, but anything that happens to them endangers their purity, which is their most valuable asset. This fetishisation of purity is taken to a more bizarre extreme in a later Klan ceremony, where Ben dips a flag in what is apparently Flora’s blood, then uses it to quench the flames of a burning cross, calling it ‘the sweetest blood that ever stained the sands of Time!’ He also refers to the cross as ‘the fiery cross of old Scotland’s hills’, the only time the film makes explicit the Klan’s frequent use of a mythical version of Scotland to establish its history and foundations.39

In between Flora’s death and the ceremony, there is an action sequence of Gus’s arrest and ‘fair trial’. The variations in this scene are about continuity and clarity, but may be caused in part by damage to one of the prints. As Ben enlists townsmen in the hunt for Gus, two young men in the carriage shop decide to join the search and one, in a white shirt, sets off to the gin mill where he suspects (correctly) that Gus is hiding. His friend, wearing a darker shirt, goes off in another direction. White shirt finds Gus in the gin mill and in an extended sequence fights off all of its patrons, only to be shot by the bartender as he leaves and then be finished off by Gus. Dark shirt witnesses all this and sets off after Gus. It is this same young man who shoots Gus off his horse a minute later. In many versions of the film, this is not very clear, since some of the shots of the two young men together are truncated or cut completely, and they look similar other than their clothes. In some versions, the dark-shirted man raises his gun to shoot Gus, and we see Gus fall off his horse, but the smoke from his shot has been cut, presumably because it was considered too violent.

Some other scenes were cut and are now lost, most famously a sequence from the end of the film that showed ‘Lincoln’s solution’ of repatriating blacks to Africa. A review in the trade journal Motion Picture World on 13 March 1915 mentions this and several other segments or titles that do not survive, including a

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