History Film / TheBirthOfANation1915

%%* AdaptationalHeroism:

* BoundAndGagged: A [[DamselInDistress white woman]], of course.

* AllIsWellThatEndsWell: For ''[[ValuesDissonance certain definitions]]'' of "ends well."

%%* DefiledForever

%%* AdaptationDistillation

* WhereDaWhiteWomenAt: Sort of. Both Silas Lynch and Gus want White women but the women don't exactly return their feelings.

* AdaptationDistillation
* AdaptationalHeroism:

* ChangedMyMindKid

* DefiledForever

* FramedSubject

* InUniverseCamera

* CloseupOnHead

%%* AdaptationDistillation
%%* AdaptationalHeroism:
%%* AllIsWellThatEndsWell: For ''[[ValuesDissonance certain definitions]]'' of "ends well."

%%* ChangedMyMindKid

%%* ScaryBlackMan:
%%** Gus.
%%** And an even scarier biracial, Silas Lynch.

%%* BoundAndGagged: A [[DamselInDistress white woman]], of course.

%%* CloseupOnHead

* StockFootage: Documentaries and such sometimes use this film's conveniently PublicDomain footage to illustrate Civil War fighting or the Lincoln assassination. Those scenes, at least, are reasonably accurate.

This film is in the public domain and can be viewed in its entirety on [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3kmVgQHIEY YouTube]] or even [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation its article]] on [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]].

%%* TheVamp: Lydia Brown.

* DividedStatesOfAmerica
%%* DoubleInLawMarriage

%%* FramedSubject
%%* GenkiGirl: Flora

%%* InUniverseCamera

%%* {{Melodrama}}: Especially in the second half.

%%* DefiledForever
%%* DividedStatesOfAmerica

%%* EpicMovie

** The Klan killed about 3,000 people over the course of its existence. This is quite a lot, but it's not nearly as many as Gettysburg (which the movie claims; for reference, 46,000 soldiers died there -- 23,055 from the Union, 23,231 from the Confederacy).

* LoveBeforeFirstSight on Ben Cameron's part for Elsie Stoneman, though. Like a proto-[[Film/TheTerminator Kyle Reese]], he acquires a picture of her from her brother Phil and throughout his military career, he holds on to it and looks at it on a regular basis before he finally meets her.
--->'''Ben Cameron''': Though we had never met, I have carried you about with me for a long, long time.

Being one of the first feature films ever, ''The Birth of a Nation'' introduced, refined, and popularized zillions of tropes, and is considered one of the most groundbreaking films ever. However, it is also extremely controversial, as its view of Reconstruction is one that promotes white supremacy, loathsomely demonizes black Americans (especially [[MixedAncestry biracial black-white people]]), and glorifies the KKK. In fact, the KKK had a ''huge'' revival in the years after this was released (it numbered around '''6 million members''' at its peak around 1925), and many people credit this movie as one of the reasons why.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tboan.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350: Next to the film itself, this poster looks almost subtle.]]

Being one of the first feature films ever, ''The Birth of a Nation'' introduced, refined, and popularized zillions of tropes, and is considered one of the most groundbreaking films ever. But it is also extremely controversial - its view of Reconstruction is one that promotes white supremacy, loathsomely demonizes black Americans (especially [[MixedAncestry biracial black-white people]]), and glorifies the KKK. In fact, the KKK had a ''huge'' revival in the years after this was released (it numbered around '''6 million members''' at its peak around 1925), and many people credit this movie as one of the reasons why.

In 2016, he year of the film's 101st anniversary, a film with the same name was release, which was intentionally designed to be a SpiritualAntithesis of this one that's against racism. Info for that film can be found [[Film/TheBirthOfANation2016 here]].

* AllThereIsToKnowAboutTheCryingGame: The climax of the film, where the Ku Klux Klan heroically rides into town to depose the corrupt mulatto Governor Lynch, is the most well-known (and infamous) moment. The average person could be forgiven for not knowing the Klan doesn't even appear until the second half, as the first half concerns the American Civil War.

* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: The Klan; and, indeed, the CSA, which picked a fight when the North was inclined to let them go peacefully, and which committed war crimes over the course of the war (especially giving no quarter against black US troops, and selling free black POWs into slavery).

* NeverMessWithGranny: In ''The Birth of a Nation'', we have an overweight elderly housekeeper leap into action and save her employer, knocking down at least one ruffian and two soldiers in the process. Interesting for a white supremacist racist work, the heroine is black and the man she's saving is white. It was a [[ValuesDissonance common belief at the time, and certainly Griffith's as a Southern whites]], that African-Americans had been [[HappinessInSlavery better off, and happier, as slaves]], until they were "stirred up" by Northern interlopers. This viewpoint was later internalized by Northern politicians who weren't too keen on giving African-Americans the vote so they started buying into the "Lost Cause" view as well. A scene of a black woman leaping to the defense of her beloved employer/master was more acceptable than an African-American judge or soldier (who are shown as cackling villains in the film).

* LesCollaborateurs: Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and freedmen. From the Southern aristocracy's perspective, this really is what they were, but an outside observer might think of [[LaResistance another trope]].

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: The whole entire film is a HUGE example of this. Though at the time, Griffith believed he was being true to history, since the vision of the American Civil War and Reconstruction was more or less the academic consensus in both the North and the South at the time of the film's release; the Lost Cause historiography and the Dunning thesis. Today its discredited and racist DatedHistory but it was common enough that it underlined almost any film about the South until the 60s, including Film/GoneWithTheWind. Griffith made many attempts to prove his point by putting in quotations from historical books in the intertitles, which more or less prove if nothing else that the views presented in the film were shared by many educated academics (and President Woodrow Wilson[[note]]Who may or may not have been misquoted about his feelings towards Birth of a Nation, but a book he wrote on the Civil War, and the Lost Cause is most definitely quoted by Griffith in these intertitles[[/note]]).

* CaliforniaDoubling: The movie was filmed in and around Los Angeles, as was already becoming standard practice by 1915. The Civil War battle scenes were shot in the present location of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. Gus chases Flora through Big Bear Valley in the San Bernardino National Forest and she jumps to her death from the cliffs above Big Bear Lake.