BFI London Film Festival – The Birth of a Nation, review: Facts make way for pure propaganda

 The Birth of a Nation is certainly well enough acted, shot and edited, says David Sexton, but it's also a mess
David Sexton13 October 2016

Here’s a fine mess. Let’s leave aside, so far as possible, the director Nate Parker’s personal record and consider this film on its merits. Made in Savannah, Georgia, The Birth of a Nation is certainly well enough acted, shot and edited, albeit at the level of a good TV drama rather than that of Steve McQueen’s masterpiece, 12 Years a Slave.

Punkily reclaiming the title of DW Griffith’s 1915 racist epic (originally called The Clansman), it claims to show not just a true story but a founding fact of American life.

In August 1831, Nat Turner, 30, a Bible-inspired, self-appointed prophet, led the first-ever revolt of enslaved and freed African-Americans, killing 60 or so white people, not sparing women or children, in Southampton County, Virginia.

The rebellion was suppressed within two days and those involved swiftly arrested and tried, some 56 being executed, while white mobs killed more than 200 other black people. Turner hid in a hole for two months before being tried and hanged himself.

Although even more repressive new laws were soon passed after the revolt, Turner has subsequently become an inspiration for black liberation, which is what Parker celebrates with this film.

There is one main source for the story, The Confessions of Nat Turner, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R Gray, published in 1831 (consultable online), fully acknowledged by Turner in court. Surprisingly, he says little about race or slavery. Instead, he complacently explains his deranged religious visions, spoken by the Spirit, who told him “the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent.” He was, Gray concluded, “a complete fanatic”.

This is not the film Nate Parker has made. To a conventional biopic, full of crassly symbolic imagery, he has added scenes in which Turner is hired out by his owner (Armie Hammer) to preach obedience to slaves on other plantations, thus giving him a regional tour of the cruellest conditions, to fire him up.

True story: the film follows the rebellion led by Nat Turner

Two off-camera rape scenes have been added as ultimate insults, one in which Turner’s wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King) is gang-raped by slave-catchers, another in which the wife of his fellow rebel Hark is forced to have sex with a plantation guest. The women have nothing to say, except for Cherry brokenly giving her husband’s rebellion her blessing. Parker has appropriated these horrors to justify Turner’s nobility.

And throughout, Parker, having written, directed and produced the film, also himself plays Turner, as an image rather than a character, a righteous martyr. He has assiduously organised his own sanctification, in other words.

On the gallows, he looks to the heavens and a winged angel appears — and a tearful boy in the crowd is inspired to become a soldier for freedom in the Civil War 30 years later. The Birth of a Nation is propaganda, simply — perhaps for a good and urgent cause — but it is propaganda all the same.

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