D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
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Henry Walthall’s performance as the “Little Colonel” made him one of the first “stars” of the movie industry. He left the Griffith company after Birth of a Nation, however, and as his stardom faded played a series of major roles in rather minor productions. As time went by, he found himself increasingly in demand as a character actor in supporting roles. His discreet and subtle style of acting and fine speaking voice made him equally at home in silent films and talkies; for example, he played the wronged husband in both the 1926 silent and the 1934 sound version of The Scarlet Letter. Walthall was reunited with Griffith in the latter’s production of Abraham Lincoln (1930). He reprised his “Little Colonel” role in the final sequences of Judge Priest (1934), a Will Rogers vehicle. He died while filming China Clipper in 1936, just as he was about to film his character’s death scene. Spottiswoode Aitken (Dr. Cameron) was a character actor who specialized in playing benign old men; he appeared in almost a hundred silent-era films. Two actors in Birth became typecast as villains: Ralph Lewis (Austin Stoneman) and Walter Long (Gus). Long, however, appeared in much better pictures; he played a convict in Laurel and Hardy’s Pardon Us (1931) and was also in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and The Thin Man (1934). He finished his career playing in Westerns. Among actors with more minor roles in Birth, Elmo Lincoln was “White Arm Joe,” blacksmith Jeff’s main opponent in the fight in the saloon. Lincoln, whose real name was Otto Elmo Linkenhelter, later (in 1918) became the first movie Tarzan and continued playing played small film roles until his death in 1952. One of the extras paid to be a fallen Union soldier was Eugene Pallette, later a well-known character actor who appeared in over 200 films, including Shanghai Express (1932), My Man Godfrey (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and The Lady Eve (1941).
An astonishing number of those involved in making The Birth of a Nation would later carve out successful careers as movie directors. Joseph Henabery (Abraham Lincoln) became the director of many silent-era movies. Elmer Clifton (Phil Stoneman) would be a prolific director of (mostly) second features, and Raoul Walsh (John Wilkes Booth), in a career that lasted until the early 1960s, of many action films, including Objective Burma (1945) and White Heat (1949). Walsh would make his own Civil War “epic” in 1957: Band of Angels, starring Clark Gable. Donald Crisp (Ulysses S. Grant) would also have a long career on both sides of the camera. During the 1920s, he directed a series of silents, in some of which he also acted. Less comfortable with directing in the sound era, he thereafter concentrated entirely on acting in films such as How Green Was My Valley (1941), for which he won an Oscar as best supporting actor; Lassie, Come Home (1943); and The Man from Laramie (1955). According to Anthony Slide, one of the group of men surrounding Jeff the blacksmith in Birth was David Butler, later to be director of many films including Road to Morocco (1942) and Calamity Jane (1953).190 Perhaps the two most significant names of all do not appear in most credit lists for Birth. The anonymous man who fell from the roof during the Confederate raid on Piedmont in the first part was Erich von Stroheim, who would direct Greed (1925), The Wedding March (1927), and Queen Kelly (1928) before resuming an acting career that climaxed with the part of the butler, ex-husband, and ex-director of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). And if his own later recollection is true, somewhere among the masked riders of the Ku Klux Klan was John Ford. Knocked from his horse by the branch of a tree, Ford would survive to direct over 120 feature films, winning, in the process, four Oscars.191
Conclusion
In the first years of the twenty-first century, The Birth of a Nation seemed to be experiencing what the Los Angeles Times called “a mini-renaissance.” In 2002, Kino on Video produced a DVD box set of Griffith’s works, including Birth. In 2004, on the eve of the film’s ninetieth anniversary, Paul D. Miller, a New York-based musician, conceptual artist, and filmmaker better known as DJ Spooky, used “footage from the film, graphics, special effects and an original score” to “remix” Griffith’s movie. Miller’s “Rebirth of a Nation” was premièred at the Lincoln Center in New York in July, before setting off on a tour of selected U.S. and European cities. In August 2004, Charlie Lustman, owner of the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, announced plans to show Birth as part of a program of “rare and important silent films.” Lustman, who had tried to screen the movie during the Democratic Convention four years earlier, had withdrawn the film on that occasion because of pressure from pro-black organizations. Local NAACP president Geraldine Washington, conscious of the Rodney King case and the riots of 1992 that had followed the acquittal of the police charged with beating him, had underscored the danger that showing the film might encourage some “to go out and get involved in some of these racist actions.” History repeated itself in 2004: Lustman, confronted with protests, personal threats, and “warnings that his theater would be destroyed if he showed the film,” canceled the screening at the last moment, prompting furious arguments outside the theater between protestors and would-be moviegoers.1
Two weeks after the aborted screening, the Los Angeles Times attempted to discover for itself why the film was still so controversial by arranging a showing followed by a round table discussion. For Times writers, watching the film was a deeply uncomfortable experience. They found many scenes of the film offensive because of their racism. “And yet,” they reported, “the filmmaking craft is undeniable. There are moments of great emotional tenderness as well as masterfully choreographed battle scenes and thrilling action editing.” Earl Ofari Hutchinson, community activist, radio host, and member of the round table, put the matter succinctly when he declared, “If this had been a third-rate film, a 10th-rate film … we wouldn’t be sitting here now talking about it.” According to Hutchinson, The Birth of a Nation broke new ground in cinematic terms, yet at the same time it helped disseminate Southern white views of race and the Civil War and propagated negative stereotypes of African Americans that had never disappeared. Aaron McGruder, author of The Boondocks cartoon strip and another member of the round table, criticized the ways in which Birth not only degraded blacks but also encouraged “delusions of grandeur” on the part of whites. He insisted that the film, by showing threatening black rapists, helped justify lynching: “A lot of people got killed because of this movie.” David Shepard, the producer of the DVD edition of Birth, made a very old point when he insisted that the campaign against the film’s screening had proved “a huge backfire”: many more people had seen the film on video and DVD because of the publicity created by the suppression at the Silent Movie Theater than the 220 who actually had tickets. More subtly, UCLA historian Ellen Dubois suggested that the screening might have been used by the NAACP to instruct people on its own history and its long struggle against both The Birth of a Nation and lynching.2
Those watching or writing about The Birth of a Nation have always faced a classic dilemma. That dilemma was summarized in 1976 by black writer James Baldwin. Griffith’s film, Baldwin remarked, “is known as one of the great classics of the American cinema: and indeed it is.” At the same time, however, it is unrelentingly racist: Baldwin described it as “an elaborate justification of mass murder.”3 Baldwin, of course, was neither the first nor the last to distinguish between the politics of The Birth of a Nation and its reputation as a triumph of filmmaking art. Much the same distinction was made by the Los Angeles members of the NAACP who first protested the movie in early 1915—and by some of those who joined the debate over the withdrawal of the film in the same city some eighty-nine years later.
It was contemporaries of 1915 who first hailed Birth as a major contribution to the emergence of a new art. “This is the greatness of the motion picture, at last realized,” commented George D. Proctor in the Motion Picture News. To Mark Vance in Variety, it was “a great epoch in picturemaking.” The same issue of the show-business journal also described it as “a new milestone in film artistry.”4 “I am a film fan,” declared Dorothy Dix, “but I never had the slight
est conception of what could be done with the moving picture as an art until I saw ‘The Birth of a Nation.’” “A wonderful art, this, the marriage of music and spectacle,” commented Harlow Hare enthusiastically in the Boston American.5 It was not only professional critics who recognized the quality of the film. “Educationally, dramatically and artistically,” observed the National Board of Censorship in its final statement approving the film, “this should prove a great step forward in motion picture production.” Even the executive committee of the Boston NAACP, while deploring its “insidious” influence upon audiences, recognized it as “a most clever combination of spectacular and musical art.”6
The perception that The Birth of a Nation had been crucial to cinema’s development as the newest of the arts was taken up and propagated by later commentators. Birth, to Lewis Jacobs in 1931, “propelled the film into a new artistic level.” Together with Intolerance, argued Herman G. Weinberg at the end of the 1930s, it “established the art of the film in America.” “To watch his [Griffith’s] work,” asserted James Agee in 1948, “is like being witness to … the birth of an art.” “Whether loved or hated,” declared Arthur Knight in 1957, “The Birth of a Nation established once [and] for all that the film was an art in its own right.” Birth, declared French film historian Georges Sadoul in 1952, “was a key film in the history of the cinematic art.” “It is an undeniable fact,” asserted Jean Mitry on similar lines in 1963, “that the cinema as an art was born in 1915 … with Birth of a Nation … the cinema’s first masterpiece.” Michael Rogin concurred, writing in the 1980s that Birth “established film as a legitimate art.”7
In the decades following Birth’s first release, many of its specific shots would become famous. Griffith’s re-creation of the hall of the South Carolina legislature led to what Bruce Chadwick calls “one of the most gasp-inspiring shots in the film … of the empty chamber suddenly filling with people in a camera’s millisecond.”8 The homecoming scene in which the Confederate son, played by Henry Walthall, returns from the war in Griffith’s In Old Kentucky (1909) evolved, in Birth, into the sequence in which the Little Colonel (also played by Walthall) arrives back at Cameron Hall. Walthall, with his tattered clothes and hat, arrives at the gate of his home and dawdles as he inspects the wartime damage. He is met by his young sister, Flora, who has decorated her last good dress with shards of raw cotton. After hugging and kissing her brother, she goes back into the house where her mother, father, and sister are waiting. All the audience then sees of the family reunion, in a scene that would become a byword for cinematic self-discipline, are the arms of Flora and his mother reaching out through the doorway to embrace him and pull him into the house. As Leger Grindon notes, this sequence “embellishes the emotional encounter until it achieves the scope of spectacle.”9 Griffith showed himself equally talented with scenes of mass action. In 1948, critic James Agee described the battle charge sequence in Birth of a Nation as the “most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie.” To film historian and theorist Siegfried Kracauer, writing in 1960, the battle scenes of The Birth of a Nation—in spite of subsequent technical innovations—had never been surpassed.10
While some of Griffith’s favorite camera techniques, such as artificial masking, iris framing, and dissolves, would over the years come to seem outdated and passé,11 they often produced remarkable effects in Birth. In one of the more evocative sequences in the film, an iris shot shows a mother comforting three crying children. The camera pans slowly to the right and the iris opens up to show a detachment of infantry marching in battle formation across a plain (shots 318–322, 325). Shots of the family and the marching men then alternate. “The effect,” observed Georges Sadoul, “is striking, just as easily because of the contrast of shots created by the panoramic view as because of the contrast between the distress of the woman and the implacable machinery of war.”12 The whole sequence demonstrated Griffith’s skill at editing alternate shots sequentially, later known as cross-cutting or intercutting. It was a technique that could help create great dramatic tension—as Griffith switched between, on the one hand, shots of Elsie Stoneman under threat and later the beleaguered whites in the log cabin, and, on the other hand, the Klansmen riding to the rescue. At times, it could be used to do the opposite, injecting lightness of touch into a particular sequence (an early reviewer noted that Griffith at times “relieves the tension of emotions with a timely humorous incident”). Importantly, it could also tie together scenes of crowd action with individual experiences, offering an appealing personal perspective on the “history” it recounted. As Leger Grindon writes of one of the early sequences of the film:
Griffith celebrates the dispatch of Piedmont’s soldiers with street bonfires, an all-night ball, and finally a parade of the troops from the town. The director balances the scale of these social ceremonies with Ben’s goodbye to his little sister, Flora. The cutting from the mass scenes to the intimate encounter maintains an emotional association between the collective experience and the private farewell.13
What distinguished The Birth of a Nation from Griffith’s earlier films was not simply its length and scale or its critical and commercial success14: it was also the contribution it made to the development of American moviemaking. It used to be believed, notes William Rothman,
that Griffith single-handedly invented what is loosely called the “grammar of film”—continuity editing, close-ups, point-of-view shots, iris shots, expressive lighting, parallel editing, and the other techniques and formal devices that movies have employed for over seventy years.15
In practice (as suggested in Chapter 3), precedents have been found for his so-called inventions. Rather than seeing Griffith as a lone pioneer, it would be far more accurate to regard him as engaging in skillful cinematic bricolage—taking the ideas and techniques of others and reworking them for his own purposes. His own most distinctive contribution was in the realm of editing. Even Karl Brown, Bitzer’s assistant, who had been present at all the filming (and whose job it was to keep a record of all the shots made), was astonished at the way Griffith managed to bring together so many disparate sequences into a flowing, coherent narrative.16 In The Birth of a Nation, argued Lewis Jacobs, he “brought to maturity the editing principle begun with Méliès and furthered by Porter.” Birth, Kevin Brownlow asserted, “was the first feature film to exploit fully the extraordinary power of editing. In the truest sense of the word, this was a masterpiece; it served as an example for the rest of the industry.”17 With his alternation of objective and subjective shots, the former conveying the action of a scene and the latter illustrating a particular character’s point of view, Griffith’s editing in Birth of a Nation made him, according to Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, “a key figure in the standardization of Hollywood storytelling form.”18
If early reviewers of The Birth of a Nation were quick to point out its artistic qualities, a small minority also drew attention to its racism. W. Stephen Bush, writing for The Moving Picture World, noted that the New York audience responded not only with applause but also at times with hisses. These hisses, he insisted,
were not, of course, directed against the artistic quality of the film. They were evoked by the undisguised appeal to race prejudices. The tendency of the second part is to inflame race hatred. The negroes are shown as horrible brutes, given over to beastly excesses, defiant and criminal in their attitude toward the whites, and lusting after white women.19
Even Ned Mackintosh, in the Atlanta Constitution, observed that this was a film that “makes you love and hate [my italics].”20 The hatred, of course, was for the mulattoes and blacks depicted in the film. As Donald Bogle points out, Griffith took the demeaning stereotypes of blacks which were already present in American films (the mammy, Uncle Tom, mulatto, and coon) and added to them the much more threatening figure of the “brutal black buck,” intent on forcing his attentions on white women.21 Griffith always insisted that he was not racially prejudiced; he had shown “the old-time faithful
servant” and the progress made by modern blacks (in the Hampton Epilogue) as well as Gus and Silas Lynch.22 But as well as patronizing the “faithful souls,” he failed to understand that in creating the black buck on screen he was helping to shape how white Americans perceived blacks in general. “Griffith’s Negroes,” argues Maurice Yacowar,
were not just individual rotters …; to the general audience they were the metaphors that expressed Griffith’s limitation upon the Negro possibility. Where Griffith thought he meant “one or two negroes at the time,” the image suggested “The Negro—Everywhere and Always.”23
Many of the earliest critics of the anti-black tone of The Birth of a Nation were blacks themselves. “A new art was used, deliberately, to slander and vilify a race,” claimed W. E. B. Du Bois. “D. W. Griffith was the reason I got into film production,” black actor and filmmaker William Greaves would later recall. Birth was so offensive to Greaves in its representation of African Americans that he determined to “start making films that would correct this image.” To black sociologist Lawrence Reddick, it was still (Reddick was writing in 1944) “the most vicious anti-Negro film that has ever appeared on the American screen.”24 Perhaps the most vituperative critic of Griffith’s film, however, was a white film writer. In 1948, Peter Noble observed, “Thirty years ago it constituted an incitement to race riot, and seeing it today still tends to leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth.” Although Griffith was born in Kentucky, according to Noble, “his understandable partisanship [toward the South] provides no real excuse for … his almost malevolent disregard of the real historical facts.” In treating race relations of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, Noble observed, “Griffith concentrated all his patronizing sympathy upon … ‘Uncle Tom’ characters while showing all other black men as vicious rebels and killers.” His film not only was deeply critical in its treatment of full-blooded blacks—Noble referred to the “plundering, raping, and looting of … subhuman exslaves” and the “monstrous caricatures of colored politicians, officials, army officers, soldiers, and servants”—but it was even more vehement in its hostility to mixed-race characters (Lydia Brown, Silas Lynch). Indeed, by devoting “much of its content to Negro villainy,” Noble insisted, Griffith had produced a deeply racist film of “almost unbelievable viciousness” that “deserves all the protests made against it, then and now.”25