A Movie You Might Have Missed Last Year

With the Academy Award film season starting in a few months, I felt like it would be a good time to talk about one of the best and most powerful films of last year’s season that didn’t get any spotlight.

In the summer of 1831, Nat Turner, a preacher and slave, led the first and only slave rebellion in the United States. The rebellion lasted a few days and resulted in Turner’s hanging. The rebellion instilled fear in the slaveholding elite and inspired slaves to take action against injustice. Nate Parker’s film, The Birth of a Nation, tells the story of Turner’s rebellion to a culture still plagued by racial exclusion and injustice with movements such as #OscarSoWhite and #BlackLivesMatter.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2016 and found immediate success due to its discussion of issues still relevant to today. Following the premiere, Fox Searchlight Pictures bought the film for over seventeen million dollars, a festival record. At the same time that the film’s buzz grew, allegations resurfaced regarding a 1999 accusation of rape against Parker and Jean Celestin, co-writer of the film.

The news left those anticipating the film’s release in the following October conflicted. Do they refuse to see the film as a statement against sexual violence? Or do they see the film because of its relevance to the racial tensions today in America? The Birth of a Nation is an important film to watch due to its application in relevance to not only today’s racial tensions but also feminist issues.

The Birth of a Nation uses silence as trope throughout the film to create an intertwined gender and racial hierarchy in which black women are subordinate in gender and race. Throughout the film, silence is used as metaphor for the lack of power that a female slave has over their own bodies and narratives against their husbands and masters.

The Birth of a Nation illustrates the complex intersectionality between race and gender hierarchies prior to the Civil War through the trope of silence. The film illustrates the effects that these gender hierarchies have on subordinating female slaves to their masters and husbands in terms of both race and gender. In addition, following the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, the dynamics between former female slaves and white men as well as black men did not improve and still placed black women at the bottom of race and gender hierarchies. White men continued to sexually abuse black women in order to signify their power as a white male. Black men continued to struggle to demonstrate their power over their wives that they thought the deserved. These issues are still incredibly relevant to today’s social climate. In a time when racist rhetoric plagues media and the country is divided more than ever, the film is a visual call to action for a viewer. The Birth of a Nation calls for viewers to see that 186 years after Nat Turner challenged the slave system the US is still dealing with similar forms of racism. However, now one has different tools to evoke change.

The film is an interesting discussion in today's landscape with the discussion of sexual assault in Hollywood. It brings to question of where art and scandal can separate themselves.