MovieChat Forums > The Birth of a Nation (1915) Discussion > Very outdated, poorly executed, and poor...

Very outdated, poorly executed, and poorly developed


It's very hard to distinguish the characters from one another as they all look the same, especially in a black-and-white film, thus immediately eliminating any impact when major characters are killed like the brothers. You see someone die. "Okay?" And then the captions tell you that it's one of the brothers. "Oh, okay."

reply

The quality of a movie must be judged based on the time it was made. BOAN is to 1915 as Star Wars was to 1977, or Gravity to 2013.

Saying that BOAN is a bad movie because it's in B&W, uses captions, and (gasp) is outdated, is beyond stupid.

reply

have you seen any better movies from 1915 or before? that's what i thought...

reply

The execution and development are what translated the film's (obviously outdated and offensive) social messaging so potently and efficiently.

reply

[deleted]

[deleted]

I think a lot of people want to over look the content of the film for its so called technical merit. Well Frankly i don't believe that being the first at anything is a virtue in and of itself. I mean nobody would suggest that your common cave painting is as good as Leonardo Da Vinci works. Ill admit that the movies made in 1914 were pretty standard with everything being shot at a wide angle. But i don't find these Techniques impossible for others to develop. And i would give more credit to Billy Bitzer than D. W. Griffith. If Birth of a Nation had ended an hour in. I could take it seriously a nice little Anti-War Film. But when the movie dives into blatant over the top racism that is so bad its laughable. Not to mention the melodramatic acting that runs through the whole movie. Its hard to take it as some kind of Masterpiece. Regardless of its importance to film history. But frankly i think this movie is more important to real history than film history. As it show just what Black People had to deal with in the 1915. Sure it was a leap forward at the time. But i don't see a reason to praise a movie for its techniques. When its content is just so bad. Also the fact that people have made millions of better movies by the end of the 70's. Being the first, Doesn't mean you are the best.

P.S. I think the most laughable thing in is movie is the way that Abraham Lincoln was portrayed. As if he was going to allow everything to stay the same. A few days before Lincoln died. He gave a speech from his white house window talking about giving blacks the right to vote. Hell John Wilkes Booth was there that night and almost got his friend to shoot him.

reply

See I would never call for a film to be banned, but I have serious issues with this movie being sold for profit... Films that inspire crimes are not guilty if the movie was not meant to inspire those acts, crazy people do bad things; yet this movie was clearly made to inspire violence agasint blacks. The fact that so many were killed after showing and the repercussions that the film had, it like Triumph Of The Will is something that yes needs to be preserved and seen by historians, yet why on earth would anyone need to profit from these films? I am not a SJW or the moral police, but come on, does it not seem a bit sicking to think that two films that are responsible for real harm, that was intended to happen, like this is not Natural Born Killers where the message was something else... These are films that did what they meant to do, and people died as a direct result. If the films intent is this evil, why would you ever want to sell it? Show it to teach history of racism sure, but anything else is some major cognitive dissonance.

Do you like Huey Lewis and the news?

http://megamediaoverload.blogspot.com/

reply

What is your plan Bogart? Gonna have a film board assembled for each release to determine if a film has "evil intent"? Silly.

reply