Cinema's Original Sin

Cinema’s Original Sin arrives at a moment when the need to grapple with the instruments of racism and their history has never been more pressing. It resolutely ties The Birth of a Nation to our present period of contestation and emerges all the stronger and more relevant for grappling with the challenges that this canonized work presents. Paul McEwan begins from the premise that Griffith’s masterwork underwrote arguments positioning motion pictures as more than mere entertainment; in so doing, he finds a novel way to retell the story of Birth’s tortured relationship to both art and race. That retelling renders this book pertinent and valuable.

— Charlie Keil, editor of A Companion to D.W. Griffith

With an impressive scope and a novel approach, Cinema’s Original Sin contains many insights and details that even readers who are well-versed in American film history will find revelatory. If any reader came to the book with skepticism about The Birth of a Nation’s seemingly outsized role in the psyche of film studies, there’s no way to come away from this book without a deep—and haunting—understanding of its overlap with American cinema and cinema scholarship. It is a highly ambitious project that really delivers.

— Allyson Nadia Field, author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity

Cinema’s Original Sin is a fascinating, authoritative, and essential text for anyone interested in film history, the history of racism and its on-going echoes, or examining the history of ongoing social conversations from the public, press, and academia...The Birth of a Nation is not a masterpiece. It’s well-executed propaganda. It’s time to call that out and acknowledge it, which Professor McEwan definitively does with flawless scholarship and inarguable logic. It’s an essential read and an essential contribution to numerous on-going cultural conversations.

— Mastering Modernity

Few films in the history of the medium have been as widely discussed as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation...Yet it is this very excess of existing commentary that makes Paul McEwan’s contribution in the form of Cinema’s Original Sin so worthwhile and, ultimately, compelling...Tracing a long and contentious reception history that begins before cinema’s widespread acceptance as an art in its own right, McEwan delineates with rare authority how changing ideas about racism, artistic expression and film culture have been intertwined since the very earliest years of feature filmmaking in the United States.

— Early Popular Visual Culture

Alongside the history McEwan keeps track of how film criticism might contribute to and ameliorate the contours of white supremacy—film criticism that includes his book and now this little review.

— CHOICE

McEwan presents an enchanting and well-researched historical past . . . and argues that this controversy inside movie historical past has formed understandings of movie, race, and artwork.

— Hetflix

Cinema’s Original Sin is expansive, particularly for students who think of racism and the cinema solely in terms of representational strategies. Once it becomes clear that the issue is structural, adjusting representational strategies appears an insufficient solution to the issues that led—and in some instances continue to lead—to Griffith’s defense.

— Film Quarterly