The Ku Klux Klan on Screen and the Troubles of Reception

Few directors have dared to delve into the dark waters of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret organization with a political aim which the former Grand Wizard David Duke made public by seeking election to the U.S. Senate in 2016 as a Republican candidate in Louisiana. While D.W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was instrumental in promoting the supremacist ideology of the KKK, being used as a propaganda tool by the recruiters of the KKK (‘the Keagles’) in the 1920s, few films deal with the KKK in a straightforward manner. The threat posed by the ‘Invisible Empire’ is often symbolized by cross or church burnings in films that resist its power through portraying its knights as individuals whose extremist racist rhetoric is confined to fiction and to the past. The Burning Cross (Walter Colmes, 1947), Betrayed (Costa-Gavras, 1988), and BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018) dramatize the activities of the racist sect by drawing attention to its individual members. They adopt different narrative and representational strategies in an effort to show the inner workings of the organization and how its members negotiate their identity as white nationalists. The films show that the KKK relies on visual (performances) and aural tropes (slurs) to construct its supremacist discourse and gather its ranks. Each of them provoked trouble on the level of reception – The Burning Cross was even censored in several states. This article questions the sense of discomfort produced by these films investigating the KKK.