The campaign against the pre-war state in the south, Nat Turner, an educated and educated preacher, who works for his troubled landlord and treats him with racism, Turner made an offer to use national preaching to subjugate slaves. He did testified to countless atrocities against himself and his fellow slaves and carried out an uprising in the hope of leading his people to freedom.
If you forgive him enough to see it, The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power.
A movie made of patches, fragments of other films about southern black slaves, cruel torture scenes, endless humiliations, outraged adolescents and animalized children. [Full review in Spanish]
A seriously damaged and inadequate movie ... its defects reveal traits of character-arrogance, vanity, and self-importance-that exert an unfortunately strong influence on Parker's directorial choices.
Dramatically shocking, it resorts to a bloody hyperrealism that can be understood as documentary rigor but also as an effective and simplistic manipulative mechanism. [Full review in Spanish]
What if the way to honor Nat Turner is to pay attention to artists who aren't shackled by the Academy's limited definition of what a black Best Picture winner is allowed to discuss?
The Birth of a Nation is a flawed but fairly compelling chapter of the American story that powerfully resonates with how that story is playing out today.
The highly charged arena into which this film about America's bloodiest slave revolt arrives gives it a cachet that, in artistic if not sociological terms, it does not really merit.
