D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time”
MELVYN STOKES
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Copyright © 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stokes, Melvyn.
D. W. Griffith’s The birth of a nation : a history of “the most
controversial motion picture of all time” / Melvyn Stokes.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-533678-8; 978-0-19-533679-5 (pbk.)
1. Birth of a nation (Motion picture) I. Title.
PN1997.B55S76 2007
791.43'72—dc22 2007022263
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Dedicated in loving memory to my parents
Alice Stokes (1906–1983)
Bernard Stokes (1908–1988)
and to Nahed and Sarah with love
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help I have received in writing this book. Much of the research was accomplished with the aid of a research grant from the British Academy. I would like to thank my friends Dawn and Don Clarke for their hospitality in Washington over many years. Almost half the book itself was written during a period of sabbatical leave I spent in Paris. I am very grateful to François Weil and Francis Bordat for helping to make this possible. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues in SERCIA (the Societé d’Études et de Recherches sur le Cinéma Anglophone), especially Alain J.-J. Cohen, Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, Gilles Ménégaldo, Zeenat Saleh, Dominique Sipière, and Penny Starfield, for listening to perhaps too many papers over the years on The Birth of a Nation. For other opportunities to discuss the film and/or for hospitality they offered, I would like to thank Annie Baron, Trudy Bolter, Christopher Clark, Nicole Cloarec, Alain J.-J. Cohen and Denise Warren, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Richard H. King, Marie Liènard, Iwan Morgan, Jacques Portes, Irmengard Rauch, Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia Hilton.
The staff of many libraries have helped greatly toward the writing of this book. I would like to single out especially the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the British Film Institute Library, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale and Bibliothèque du Film in Paris, the University College London Library, and the London University Library for their assistance. I would also like to thank my editor at OUP, Shannon McLachlan, her assistant Christina Gibson, who was particularly helpful over the illustrations, and production editor Keith Faivre. Leigh Priest prepared the index with her usual speed and skill.
Many individuals have also made suggestions or answered research questions that helped along the way. I would especially like to thank Robert C. Allen, Bruce E. Baker, Rhiannon Cain, Nancy Cott, Amy M. Davis, Thomas Doherty, Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, Jane Gaines, Arlene Hui, Barbara Klinger, Mark Meigs, Adam Smith, Tom Rice, Gregory A. Waller, and Denise Warren. Richard Maltby kindly became the first reader who was not also the writer. He, the three anonymous readers for Oxford University Press, and copyeditor Patterson Lamb have saved me from many errors. Those that remain are all mine.
Finally, on a more personal note, I would like to thank my parents, who first encouraged the idea of a scholarly career. I owe a huge debt also to Nahed and Sarah, who have provided so much support during the eight years it took to research and write this book.
Contents
Introduction
1. Première in Los Angeles
2. Thomas Dixon Jr.
3. David Wark Griffith
4. Making The Birth of a Nation
5. Transforming the American Movie Audience
6. Fighting a Vicious Film
7. Griffith’s View of History
8. After Birth
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
Introduction
In 1915, a movie was released that changed the history of American cinema. Directed by David W. Griffith, it was originally known as The Clansman. Soon after its West Coast première, however, it was renamed The Birth of a Nation. This film would bring about a revolution in American moviegoing. The Birth of a Nation was the first American film to be twelve reels long and to last around three hours. It was the first to cost $100,000 to produce. It was the first to be shown mainly in regular theaters at the same admission prices of up to $2 that were charged for live performances. It was the first to have a specially compiled musical score to accompany the film’s exhibition. It was the first movie to be shown at the White House, the first to be projected for judges of the Supreme Court and members of Congress, the first to be viewed by countless millions of ordinary Americans, some of whom had made long journeys to see it, the first to run in so many places for months at a time, the first to attract viewers who returned to see it, sometimes again and again, and the first to have its existence treated as a story in its own right in local newspapers. Although it was not the first motion picture in the United States to be distributed by means of road shows, it was the first to be shown so extensively this way. The men who advertised and publicized it created ways of promoting movies that would soon become standard across the American movie industry. In many ways, in fact, Birth of a Nation was the first “blockbuster”: it was the most profitable film of its time (and perhaps, adjusted for inflation, of all time), it helped open up new markets (including South America) for American films, and it may eventually have been seen by worldwide audiences of up to 200,000,000.1
To understand the impact of The Birth of a Nation, it is necessary to see it in the context of early twentieth-century U.S. cinema. Before Birth was made, most American films consisted of one reel. They lasted around fifteen minutes, cost a few hundred dollars to produce, and were mainly shown in the cheap storefront theaters known as nickelodeons. Films of this type were viewed mainly by members of the urban working class. While these short films usually told stories, the stories themselves—given the time constraints on their development—were fairly simplistic. Feature films made up only part of the program of most nickelodeons; other items might include lectures and sing-a-longs. Nickelodeon films were normally accompanied by music (usually from a piano). In the beginning, such music had no particular connection with the film being shown. From around 1909/10 onward, however, film producers�
��realizing that music could be used to emphasize the film’s narrative—began to publish albums of “mood” music and cue sheets.2 Also from around 1910, movie exhibitors were clearly trying to broaden the audience for their films by attracting middle-class families.3 This involved building new, more spacious, and comfortable movie theaters, such as the Columbia in Detroit (1911) and the Regent (1913) and Strand (1914) in New York. Yet there were still comparatively few such large movie theaters by 1915 and 300-seat nickelodeons were still being built.4
Film critics of 1915 clearly sensed that, in terms of scale and ambition, The Birth of a Nation was very different from earlier American productions. W. Stephen Bush complimented “the splendor and magnificence of its spectacles.” George D. Proctor hailed it as “the greatest picture yet produced.” “Mr. Griffith,” observed Mark Vance, “has set such a pace it will take a long time before one [movie] will come along that can top it in point of production, acting, photography, and direction.” “W.,” the anonymous reviewer in the New York Dramatic Mirror, said much the same thing when he wrote skeptically that “If there is to be a greater picture than The Birth of a Nation, may we live to see it.”5 Beneath many critics’ expressed admiration, however, lay something deeper: a recognition that, with Birth, various elements of moviemaking—from acting through editing to the musical accompaniment—had come together so that the picture represented a quantum leap forward in what could be expected from the cinema. Clearly, a number of critics were self-conscious about reviewing films, which they perceived as ephemeral, rather downmarket entertainments designed for the masses—certainly nothing to be compared with more traditional performing arts, such as opera and stage performances. To these men, The Birth of a Nation came as a validation and legitimation of their own role and of the possibilities inherent in motion pictures. As a number of them pointed out, it was the first film to challenge the artistic supremacy of live theater, its emotional impact on spectators was much greater than that of the theater, and the synthesis of images and music it offered could truly be interpreted as the birth of a new form of art.6
Compared to American films produced earlier, it is unsurprising that critics of 1915 should have been impressed by The Birth of a Nation. What is much more impressive is that some critics—fully aware of changes that had taken place in movies and the movie industry—continued to praise its aesthetic and technical qualities for many years after its first release. “The only film I have seen with any real excitement during the last fortnight,” Graham Greene declared in May 1936, “was made in 1915 … The Birth of a Nation … has hardly dated at all; it is still in advance of the popular film as it exists today.” Two years later, Caroline Lejeune compared it to The Jazz Singer and Snow White as “the sort of film that happens once in a generation.” “Nobody could say it had been essentially diminished by the perspective of time,” Dilys Powell wrote, after seeing the movie, shown straight through and without any musical accompaniment, in 1945. Leaving the screening, Powell recalled, “one had the sensation of coming out of a thunderstorm.” American critic James Agee (Greene, Lejeune, and Powell were all British) reacted in a very similar way. “Among moving pictures it is alone,” he insisted in 1948, “as the one great epic, tragic film.”7
Pioneering historians of American film also paid tribute to the film’s vast popularity, its artistic qualities, and its influence both on audiences and later filmmakers. Terry Ramsaye, in A Million and One Nights (1926), described it as “the world’s greatest motion picture, if greatness is to be measured by fame.” Its New York opening demonstrated, he believed, that the movie “had [now] taken its place on a parity with the drama.” Benjamin Hampton, in A History of the Movies (1929), saw Griffith’s film as “an astonishing revelation of camera possibilities.” The “first film to be regarded seriously by many intellectuals and sophisticated stage patrons,” it had been a major influence in transforming the movies from “a cheap show for cheap people” into entertainment for the entire population. According to Lewis Jacobs, in The Rise of the American Film (1939), Birth of a Nation “propelled the film into a new artistic level … So rich and profound in organization was this picture that for years thereafter it directly and indirectly influenced film makers everywhere and much of the subsequent filmic progress owes its inspiration to this master achievement.”8
Historians of film in the second half of the twentieth century continued to write fulsomely about Birth’s crucial pioneering role. To Georges Sadoul (1952), its release “marked an outstanding date in the history of American cinema. For the first time in the New World the art of film reached its maturity.” Sadoul also emphasized two other consequences of Birth: through its great commercial success it helped reconfigure the American movie industry (“the building up of Hollywood could now begin”) while simultaneously liberating it from any continuing sense of inferiority vis-à-vis European productions. To Arthur Knight (1957), it was a picture “of extraordinary eloquence and power” that “took its audiences by storm.” To both Jean Mitry (1965) and Kevin Brownlow (1968), it was a “masterpiece” that launched the cinema as an art and brought about “revolutions in every field affected by motion pictures.”9 “No one who saw it,” Marjorie Rosen (1973) observed, “could deny its potency. With The Birth of a Nation the movies came of age … they became an art.” Thomas Cripps (1977) concluded that Griffith’s film “in a single stroke synthesized all of the devices and advances developed in the first generation of cinema.” It was, remarked William K. Everson (1978), “quite possibly the single most important film of all time.”10
In spite of the praise it attracted from critics and film scholars, The Birth of a Nation also generated intense controversy. Like earlier European-made spectacular films such as The Fall of Troy (1911) and Queen Elizabeth (1912), it claimed to tell a historical story. What made Birth unique was that it was the first such attempt to make a film about American history. Set in the United States during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, it supposedly told the “true” story of how the white South had been defeated in the war and, during the subsequent Reconstruction era, had been oppressed by a powerful Republican politician attempting to force black rule and full social equality on the region. Encouraged by such policies, black men began to pursue white women in order to marry them. To save Southern whites, and especially Southern women, from this dangerous situation, a new organization emerged: the white-sheeted “knights” of the Ku Klux Klan. Using considerable violence, gallant Klansmen eventually managed to subdue the aggressive Southern blacks, and white supremacy was restored.
Many people at the time of the film’s first release attacked its racism and challenged the validity of its claim to represent “history.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, and other pro-black organizations organized protests across the country against it. Largely as a result of such pressure, The Birth of a Nation was banned for some time by state censorship boards in Ohio and Kansas. Other attempts to suppress it at the time of its first release, however, either through local censorship or political action, invariably failed. The efforts of mayors and police chiefs in a number of American cities to ban it were usually short and fruitless: the film’s producers applied to the courts for an injunction to overturn the ban, and such injunctions were usually quickly issued.11
The difficulty facing the NAACP and other protest movements was that while demands for the censorship of motion pictures were growing in this period, such demands for the most part grew out of anxieties that movies were encouraging immorality (people of both sexes were sitting in the dark together and many of the films had sexual themes) or stimulating crime (by dealing too closely with matters involving crime and delinquency). Demands for censorship on the whole did not usually—at least before The Birth of a Nation—focus on unflattering representations of racial and ethnic minorities.12 In a sense, therefore, the problem posed by Birth was new, and neither local censorship boards nor what was in effect an
early attempt at movie industry self-regulation—through the inaccurately named National Board of Censorship—were really able to deal with the issues raised.
Protesting the film, moreover, it could be argued, was doubly countereffective. The controversy generated by the protests themselves in the short run created publicity that may have persuaded more people to see the picture. In the longer term, it made Hollywood extremely wary of dealing with the difficult subject of race. For many years after The Birth of a Nation, few blacks appeared in mainstream American films and most of those who did were confined to stereotypical roles as happy servants (mammies, butlers, porters, carriage-drivers) and entertainers.13 Another long-term effect of Griffith’s film was to discourage the representation of interracial relationships on screen. In 1927, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) issued guidelines to its member studios under the title “Don’ts and Be Carefuls.” One of the don’ts was the depiction of miscegenation, described as “sex relationships between the white and black races.” The Production Code adopted in 1930 (often known as the “Hays Code”) renewed the ban in the same words.14
Daniel Lord, the Jesuit priest who played a role in drafting part of the Production Code, had first realized how vast the impact of cinema could be when, as a young man, he saw for the first time The Birth of a Nation. “I sat and sensed the beginning of a new era,” Lord recalled in his autobiography. Lord left the movie theater convinced that he had witnessed the emergence of a whole new means of communication strong enough to “change our whole attitude toward life, civilization, and established customs.”15 From the beginning of its career, Birth was seen as a hugely powerful picture, a triumph in filmmaking art. Yet, to many of those viewing it, it also seemed a deeply controversial movie in terms of its politics.
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 1
