Ince had nothing to reproach himself for with regard to Giffith. He had already produced and directed a lavish and highly successful civil war epic two years before A Birth of a Nation - The Battle of Gettysburg (sadly now lost). It was a subject he had made very much his own also in a series of fine shorts in the early teens. Unfortunately by 1915 he was seemingly producing rather more than directing and relying heavily on Reginald Barker.
Around 1914-1915 there develop in US film an irksome fashion for the overuse of the close-up and the close medium-shot. There is nothing old-fashioned about it per se (it is in fact one of the consequences of the increasing dominance of Griffith-style editing) but it was retrogressive in encouraging a revival of "the facial", the old vaudeville technique of concentrating on facial expressions to express different emotions and this comeback of the facial (quite common in very early shorts) in dramatic films at this time is a serious error and quite contrary to Ince's own earlier directorial style. It was entirely typical of Barker and is even worse in The Italian which came out the same year (reviewed separately). It encouraged an increase in melodrama (which one sees equally in the films of Griffith) at the expense of any broader context.
As regards the theme, too, it is false to see this "paternalistic" view as in any way opposed to the racist notions of Dixon and Griffith. This is to confuse attitudes towards the ante-bellum and the post-bellum situations. It is in a fact absolutely a continuation of their "revisionist" view (in reaction essentially to the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin which expressed a much darker view of Southern slave-owning) and so for that matter is Mitchell's later Gone with the Wind. It was a view that established itself firmly at precisely this time (see the difference between the 1914 and 1927 versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and was entirely a piece with the racist views of Dixon and Griffith and the contemporaneous refounding of the Ku Klux Klan.
As for the war than, that does not even have the virtue of originality. Novels and films about cowards nearly always follow broadly the same pattern and there had been plenty of them. Quite apart from the A. E. W. Mason classic The Four Feathers (filmed by Dawley for Metro in this same year) and the 1910 Griffith film The House with Closed Shutters (which has considerably more originality), this film also resembles an earlier Ince production, the 1913 short Silent Heroes (directed by Walter Edwards).
So here we have fashionable neo-melodramatic acting and fashionable ante-bellum nostalgia for a slave-owning society and a highly unoriginal story - a long way from the sharper, more thoughtful work that Ince himself was capable of.
It would be wrong however to equate this style or these attitudes with early film in general. They are quite specific to the US and that taste for "satisfying melodrama" has changed very little over the years.
For the completely opposite tendency stylistically compare with the contemporary Russian films of Yevgeny Bauer. Bauer was notorious for not allowing his actors to act, in other words for forbidding them to make facial grimaces and grand gestures. For Bauer, one of the first genuine geniuses of the cinema, the work was done not by the actors but by the camera and the mise en scène. In essence this notion was at the origin of what later came to be called "the Kuleshov effect" (Lev Kuleshov was originally Bauer's décorateur). Later it became associated with Soviet "montage" but the important element, what you might call the principle of "non-acting" had already been promulgated by Bauer.
Around 1914-1915 there develop in US film an irksome fashion for the overuse of the close-up and the close medium-shot. There is nothing old-fashioned about it per se (it is in fact one of the consequences of the increasing dominance of Griffith-style editing) but it was retrogressive in encouraging a revival of "the facial", the old vaudeville technique of concentrating on facial expressions to express different emotions and this comeback of the facial (quite common in very early shorts) in dramatic films at this time is a serious error and quite contrary to Ince's own earlier directorial style. It was entirely typical of Barker and is even worse in The Italian which came out the same year (reviewed separately). It encouraged an increase in melodrama (which one sees equally in the films of Griffith) at the expense of any broader context.
As regards the theme, too, it is false to see this "paternalistic" view as in any way opposed to the racist notions of Dixon and Griffith. This is to confuse attitudes towards the ante-bellum and the post-bellum situations. It is in a fact absolutely a continuation of their "revisionist" view (in reaction essentially to the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin which expressed a much darker view of Southern slave-owning) and so for that matter is Mitchell's later Gone with the Wind. It was a view that established itself firmly at precisely this time (see the difference between the 1914 and 1927 versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and was entirely a piece with the racist views of Dixon and Griffith and the contemporaneous refounding of the Ku Klux Klan.
As for the war than, that does not even have the virtue of originality. Novels and films about cowards nearly always follow broadly the same pattern and there had been plenty of them. Quite apart from the A. E. W. Mason classic The Four Feathers (filmed by Dawley for Metro in this same year) and the 1910 Griffith film The House with Closed Shutters (which has considerably more originality), this film also resembles an earlier Ince production, the 1913 short Silent Heroes (directed by Walter Edwards).
So here we have fashionable neo-melodramatic acting and fashionable ante-bellum nostalgia for a slave-owning society and a highly unoriginal story - a long way from the sharper, more thoughtful work that Ince himself was capable of.
It would be wrong however to equate this style or these attitudes with early film in general. They are quite specific to the US and that taste for "satisfying melodrama" has changed very little over the years.
For the completely opposite tendency stylistically compare with the contemporary Russian films of Yevgeny Bauer. Bauer was notorious for not allowing his actors to act, in other words for forbidding them to make facial grimaces and grand gestures. For Bauer, one of the first genuine geniuses of the cinema, the work was done not by the actors but by the camera and the mise en scène. In essence this notion was at the origin of what later came to be called "the Kuleshov effect" (Lev Kuleshov was originally Bauer's décorateur). Later it became associated with Soviet "montage" but the important element, what you might call the principle of "non-acting" had already been promulgated by Bauer.