Is "Birth of a Nation" Terrible?

Short answer, yes.  Long answer, well...yes.

This is not to say that the film is poorly made, or that it should be chucked into the dust bin of film or cultural history.  The film was obviously a great undertaking, using many production techniques that would be the basis for the modern film industry.  The story caught the public's attention and the film itself is well done, with likeable enough characters and believable enough villains.  It is a simple enough story to follow.  We see the misunderstandings at the beginning that lead to greater sorrow, bloodshed and loss.  Then we see a period of mourning and attempts at reconstruction.  There are disagreements, shady deals, high-minded plans and plots.  Betrayals and in-fights are shown.  Finally, some ideal of loyalty wins out.

The beginning is more or less typical.  Friends and brothers meet in social situations, and later on the battlefield.  They fight.  They die.  Some of them sacrifice themselves nobly for their cause.  The losers are humiliated, doomed to live with the knowledge that their cause was not blessed by the gods after all, and maybe even those they thought beneath them by nature and birthright will rise up to their level, or even surpass them.  The internal social disagreements gain in friction and extremism, until even old enemies can be recruited to the cause.  Finally, they see the true struggle, and who they must defend against who.

The problems are not with the production of the film itself, as is the case with so many others, but with the way the story is presented.  Now, it is based on a novel, and perhaps like A Clockwork Orange the novel was a more reasonable story that was oversimplified and warped into a movie easily interpreted as hateful.  I doubt it, though.

The most obvious problem to modern eyes is the over-the-top acting.  However, this can be explained as simply the way actors were trained at the time, either being stage actors or emulating them.  It does provoke one to temple rubbing to see some of the melodramatic arm flinging, no getting away from that.

Looking at the characters and how they represent their communities, things become more troubling.  While the whites are never shown as being viciously racist, the blacks are constantly looking for revenge against them and ways to humiliate and terrorize them, except for the "good" ones, loyal servants of course.  When released from slavery, in this story blacks immediately take places in local government despite having no education or training, not to mention little interest in governance.  They behave like lazy schoolchildren in legislative sessions.  They demand the former privileges of the whites for themselves.  In short, they try for tit for tat.  While this may be the reaction between individuals, especially children, segments of society that have been abused or repressed do not rise as one to simply turn the tables and create a mirror image of the past.  It cannot be denied that some, perhaps most, will desire revenge; but the majority of any population only wants to live a life without trouble.  There is no reason why freed blacks should try to stir up trouble and commit crimes against their neighbors, now theoretically equal before the law.  There are a few who encourage this provocation, but they seem to belong to the protected class of well-off whites anyway, and the one "mulatto" appears to be an educated man, not a simple man driven by emotion.  At the heart of it, the blacks are not in charge of their own destiny, but used as pawns by educated whites, as they always were, but this time against another class of whites.

The white characters themselves are not much more three dimensional.  They are constantly in some romantic fog of how life should be.  They act out of idealism, not pragmatism.  Even the formation of the Klan is done with some pie in the sky sort of dream of peace keeping through simple symbolic terror.  Again, blacks are portrayed as childish and afraid of ghosts, while the whites are too sophisticated for such silliness, but not above using primitive fears to get their way.  The southern whites in the film never appear to be oppressive or even having negative opinions of the black population until after blacks have inexplicably taken over.  Then, the Klan is created as a mere protective reaction.  Even Union soldiers who have stayed behind agree that southern whites should be protected from the rampaging blacks, and have every right to defend themselves.  The greatest white champion of abolition and black people, the mentor of the mulatto leader, shows his hypocrisy by being horrified with the thought of that protegee being his son-in-law.  Of course, his daughter is not interested anyway, but her desires are of little consequence.  The motivations of every character are purely superficial and self-serving.  Nobody thinks beyond their own desires.  The "nobility" of the Klan, protecting the white population from angry blacks, is merely a return to the old status quo, as seen when blacks are threatened when they try to leave their houses to vote.  Unfortunately, disenfranchisement is not limited to the movies, although it is not so often as blatant.

As a final insult, I'm not sure any of the actors playing black characters were even black!  Some of them are obviously in blackface.  Sources indicate that only "some" of the actors were in blackface, but who knows.

The story looks like the typical reaction of projection; if one person wants to oppress or abuse, they imagine that is what everyone else wants to do, especially the victims of oppression or abuse.  People with this mindset also tend to overestimate their importance to those in other groups.  In spite of being perfect strangers, they assume every member of the oppressed group has a personal grudge against them, merely for being a member of the oppressive group.  While resentment can certainly be present, the person with an unhealthy obsession is the one presuming to be a recognizable and important target for the others.  In reality, it is likely that nobody cares about that person in particular, without any other negative personal interaction.  Yet, we constantly hear the cry that the formerly (more) oppressed want to take the place of the oppressor, simply out of spite, rather than the more reasonable idea that we all just want to live our lives in peace and for ourselves.  The life of the oppressor is hardly the place to find peace.

Birth of a Nation can be found on Youtube and through Wikipedia.  All three hours of it.  Think of the time you will never get back.