Deggans joins pre-symposium discussion on The Birth of a Nation
Alumnus, author and NPR television critic Eric Deggans voiced his thoughts on the controversial film The Birth of a Nation at a panel on Tuesday.
“I find the film deeply upsetting, but sometimes we need to look at things that are upsetting as important parts of history,” he said of the 1915 film that depicts black men as criminals while glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.
The panel was in conjunction with this week’s symposium about the film and was designed to allow open discussion about the implications surrounding a present day screening.
From Cinematic Past to Fast Forward Present: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A Centennial Symposium, will “assess its legacy and continuing relevance to transitional, political and cultural affairs,” according to the press release issued last week. The IU Black Film Center/Archive is hosting the symposium Nov. 12-13 at IU Cinema. It will feature discussion and keynotes from film scholars.
Members of the Black Student Union, Black Graduate Student Association and the IU chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists attended the panel discussion, and some said they were worried about the aftereffects of viewing the troubling images and discrimination in the film.
Panelist Maria Hamilton Abegunde, director of the Graduate Mentoring Center and visiting lecturer in African American Diaspora Studies, urged students to think about how they can articulate the pain and emotion triggered by the film through the historical, cultural and societal aspects of the film.
The film has been shown before at IU, with the 1979 screening sparking protest. The third panelist, BFC/A director Michael Martin, attributed that protest to the film being shown out of context. That’s something the symposium will provide for this showing, he said.
“The symposium will help us understand what the film is about in its own time and bring it to the contemporary moment to discuss the racial prejudice that exists today,” he said. “Change is subject and dependent on consciousness.”
Deggans agreed.
“I would say the value is that No. 1, a lot of people know it’s a racial film, but they don’t know how deeply racist it is,” said Deggans, BA’90, who also is author of Race Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation. “How startled we are to look back and see why these images of people of color were accepted.”
He said many viewers of the film do not know how it was revered for its technical structure and ingenuity at the time of production, and that it was shown at the White House before sparking a reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Hollywood has a very long history of making technically excellent films, but creating terrible messages about blacks,” Deggans said.
Demeaning representations of blacks in films continue to affect society today, he said, such as Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained, released in 2012. To examine such films requires not only evaluating the artistic structure, but also consideration of the problematic representations of the black community.
Deggans already was on campus this week as one of the College of Art and Sciences Luminaries, a program that brings accomplished alumni to campus to talk about their careers.
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