"The Birth of a Nation" Movie Review

Originally Posted 10/23/16

Chris Rock's 2014 movie Top Five features the comedian as a movie star who  headlines the fictional film Uprize as Dutty Boukman, the real-life educated slave who inspired the Haitian Revolution. The Revolution, a slave revolt which resulted in the permanent end of French rule on the island of Hispaniola and the founding of Haiti, has never been represented in an actual movie.

The Birth of a Nation depicts another piece of American history that isn't taught in public schools. The film details, for the first time onscreen, the events that transpired leading up to, during, and following a bloody 1831 slave rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia. The leader of the uprising, Nat Turner, was a literate slave and minister who led an eventual 70 co-conspirators in a house-to-house mutiny that resulted in the killing of approximately 65 wealthy white men and women. Though he initially planned to begin the revolt on July 4, Independence Day, it was postponed due to illness until Turner interpreted an August 13 solar eclipse as a black man's hand covering the sun and took it as a signal to initiate his revolution.

Turner is portrayed by star, co-producer and co-writer Nate Parker in his directorial debut. Nation premiered to a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival back in January where it won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize. It was sold to Fox Searchlight Pictures for a record-breaking $17.5 million following a bidding war for the film's worldwide rights. Subsequently, both Parker and the film garnered widespread critical acclaim and Nation immediately became the front-runner for the 2017 Oscar race. However, in the months leading up to the film's October 7 wide release, the national news media seized upon a chapter of Parker's history that was previously largely ignored by the press, despite his 12-year career in Hollywood.

In 1999, as a Pennsylvania State University student, Parker and the film's co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin were accused of raping a fellow student. Parker was found not guilty on all four counts with which he was charged. In 2001, Celestin was sentenced to six months to one year in prison after being convicted of sexual assault. However, his conviction was reversed in 2005 and prosecutors declined to pursue a re-trial. 

The Birth of a Nation's title, in a bit of intentional irony, is appropriated from a 1915 silent movie of the same name that portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic organization and, in fact, spurred a resurgence in the group's membership and popularity.

Nation is the kind of film that's difficult for African-Americans to watch. Seeing your ancestors being degraded, tortured, mutilated, sexually abused and murdered is no easy thing -- not even when you know that all of these actions are being done to, and carried out by, actors. One particularly disturbing scene details a plantation owner's solution to an attempted hunger-strike. A slave's teeth are broken one-by-one and food is slid down the funnel that is forced down his throat. Another scene reveals an overseer in bed with a little girl. As graphic as they are, not including scenes like these would only serve to further perpetuate a distorted and incomplete view of history. These are the kinds of things that happened to actual people -- repeatedly. And it's important that they be acknowledged -- by everyone.

Nation is by no means the first film to present the horrors of American slavery on the big screen. In fact, 12 Years a Slave, also based on a true story, won the Best Picture Oscar at the 86th Academy Awards. What makes Nation the first of its kind is its presentation of an actual slave insurrection against plantation owners. 

An old adage states: "History is written by the winners." Is it odd that Spartacus, and now Nat Turner, both leaders of ultimately unsuccessful slave rebellions, have made it to the big screen and the Haitian Revolution never has?

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