We're Living History Right Now
I meant to post something this over the weekend but kept freezing from indecision and confusions about what to write. If you were offline this weekend, you might have missed that one of the most important films of all time, Birth of a Nation (1915) hit its Centennial anniversary. As you know we love to celebrate centennials at TFE but how to even deal with that one? Hideously racist though it was and is, D.W. Griffith's blockbuster informed and shaped much of this artform, the movies, that we all love today. I first saw it in an Introduction to Film type class in my freshman year of college and as creepy as it was to see the lovely crucial silent superstar Lillian Gish used as a pawn to trump up its racial hatred as she is saved from a rapist (a white actor in blackface) by the Klu Klux Klan, it was also startling to see what a technical and narrative leap it was in terms of early cinema.
And the exact same weekend that that film, which has long been a (deserved) target of the NAACP was hitting 100*, The NAACP was holding their annual Image Awards. Selma won big at (but let's pretend that bizarre director snub -- the guy who made The Equalizer beat Ava DuVernay? -- didn't happen. But the NAACP hasn't been the only group cheering Selma on. It's been enjoying a very healthy if unspectacular box office as a Best Picture Oscar nominee, Ava received a historic Folden Globe nomination late last year, and her films Original Song "Glory," also Oscar nominated, was performed at the Grammys yesterday.
At first I was all... this is such a gross coincidence and I'll just send people to fine articles at the New York Post and Vulture. But then I realized how beautiful the juxtaposition was in terms of progress.
100 years of tumultuous history have passed between those two films and when the smoke clears we see that America has come a long long way. These battles for basic human dignity and equality are never fully won of course (Black History is hardly the only history plagued with civil rights violations and demonization of "the other") and you have to keep fighting them. But for all the nostalgia the past can bring to people, sometimes the now is vastly preferrable.
'Selma' beauties enjoying their big NAACP night
And, wouldn't you know it... Martin Luther King Jr said it best himself.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice
* There are different dates online for when Birth of a Nation premiered. Wikipedia says February 8th, the bulk of internet articles about its Centennial appeared on February 7th, but a lot of articles on the film mention a March 3rd premiere.