A Film Canon

This is a powerful, sophisticated inversion of Birth Of A Nation. Although Micheaux provides a number of basic narrative counterpoints - including a substitution of white-on-black for black-on-white rape - his real negotiation with Griffith's vision lies in his refusal to dichotomise race relations. To an extent, this occurs in narrative terms, with the turn of events conceding the real possibility of white sympathisers, as well as African-Americans who betray their people by strategically performing stereotypes; that is, by becoming literal 'blackfaces'. But it also translates into a certain prescience for the extent to which cross-editing can be used to generate and maintain these dichotomies, sending Micheaux in search of a more genuinely synthetic montage. This is clearest in the final scenes, where the disparate parallelism of Birth Of A Nation gives way to a juxtaposition of two events that are sufficiently superlative in their violence, proximal in their geography, and related in their narrative significance to render the connection between them entirely porous. The (relative) restraint with which this is handled signifies another distinctive feature of the film - its pervasively rational, intellectual tone, diametrically (and probably intentionally) opposed to Griffith's amorphous, frequently incoherent moralising. Not only does this accord well with the pleas made for African-American education, but it tends to allow otherwise melodramatic figures and topoi to transcend melodrama, particularly clear in the agency granted to women, who couldn't be more distinct from Griffith's hysterical objects.