The Birth of a Nation (Die Geburt der Nation)
One of Germany's leading experimental filmmakers, Klaus Wyborny, began making films in 8mm in 1967. In the early Seventies, he made two films - Dallas Texas, After the Gold Rush (1971) and The Birth of a Nation (1973), which have become classics of avant-garde experimentation. His films deal with the nature of film language and narrative structure.
“Only the first half of the film is ‘Birth of a Nation' proper; it depicts, in an anecdotal, quasi-anthropological style, the efforts of a group of men in a desert to achieve some kind of social organisation. An opening title locates the action in Morocco, in 1911; the date evidently refers to the work of D.W. Griffith, 1911 being the year that he began to introduce montage complexities that rendered his ‘meaning' ambiguous for the first time. Wyborny unfolds his narrative in the style of early Griffith, shooting chiefly in long shot, maintaining fixed focus and a static camera, editing sequentially and using only unequivocally direct cross-cutting. He acknowledges technical advances since Griffith's day by showing occasional shots in colour, and by adding sound in the form of music and an intermittent, mumbled commentary.
“Watching this section of the film is like rediscovering the essence of cinema, locating and defining its extraordinary potency.... The second half of the film is an appendix to the first, using off-cuts as well as the edited material.....” --Sight & Sound