Despite the storm of criticism leveled at his best-known film, Griffith has never lacked defenders. According to James Agee, he “went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them.” (Lillian Gish, a lifelong champion of her former director, made clear in her autobiography just how Griffith understood blacks. She quoted him as saying “they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all our lives.”) William Everson also claimed that “Griffith displayed considerable restraint in controlling Southern prejudices and in being fair to the Negro.”26 One of the more detailed attempts to play down the racism of Griffith in recent decades has been made by his biographer, Richard Schickel. According to Schickel, Griffith shared with most of his white contemporaries an “unconscious racism” that was “not especially passionate or vicious.” Most of the racism in Birth, he argues, came not from Griffith but from Dixon’s story. Indeed Griffith, Schickel argues, managed to limit the racism in the Gus/Flora chase sequence by having Gus played by a white man whose makeup and “weird less-than-human movements” made it impossible in any real sense to perceive him as black. Schickel concedes that Birth does display a degree of “moral insensitivity,” but he blames this on a series of extraneous reasons: much of the shooting schedule was improvised at the last moment rather than planned in advance; Griffith bore enormous burdens of logistics and finance; he was isolated in California and distant from organizations such as the NAACP and the black press; and his very independence meant there was nobody present on set to criticize what he was doing. Schickel also argues that once “he became aware of the (to him) surprising objections” to Birth of a Nation, “Griffith busied himself with the shears, trying to modify those sequences that had raised the greatest outcry.” Finally, concluding his defense of Griffith’s film, Schickel maintains that “there appears to have been no visible upsurge of conscious racism in the film’s wake.”27
Although Schickel’s biography of Griffith is still the best available, his defense of his subject’s role over The Birth of a Nation is far from convincing. Griffith may have been expressing an “unconscious racism” he shared with millions of white Americans, but it was a mistake to do so in a mass cultural form for which Griffith himself had such high aspirations. Everett Carter argued that Birth, far from encouraging the development of a cinematic art that would elevate those it touched, “served the ugliest purposes of pseudoart—giving people a reflection of their own prejudices, sentimental at best, vicious at worst.”28 It is true that the second and most controversial part of Birth of a Nation was based on Dixon’s fiction and that Griffith did tone down Dixon’s racism in some respects (for example, there is no outright mention of rape in Birth, whereas blacks rape white girls in both of Dixon’s novels The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman). It is also the case, however, that Griffith shared some of Dixon’s racial attitudes (he was opposed, for example, to miscegenation).29 The argument that having Gus played by a white actor in makeup somehow diminishes the racial character of his pursuit of Flora is dismissed by Scott Simmon, who notes that “audiences today usually find the blackface casting intensifying, not mitigating, the sequence’s racism.”30 The notion that Griffith revealed “moral insensitivity” because he was working under too many pressures and isolated in California—essentially that afflicted by strain and remoteness on the West Coast, he resorted to lazy racial stereotypes and failed to challenge comfortable received ideas—is unconvincing at best. He chose the project himself and, since he was so much in control of bringing it to the screen, must be assigned most of the blame for the final product. His remoteness in California does not wipe out the fact that, since 1899, he had lived mainly in the North and must have been aware that a race problem now existed there as well as in the South, a race problem his film could only exacerbate. To suggest that Griffith willingly cut the most controversial scenes is simply not correct: in reality, as discussed in Chapter 6, he was usually slow and reluctant to respond to censorship pressures, attempting to avoid, delay, or minimize changes wherever possible. Asserting, finally, that Birth produced no upsurge in “conscious racism” is to ignore the actions of the revived Ku Klux Klan and the increased number of lynchings that coincided with the film’s initial release.31
With some notable exceptions, film scholars and critics, rather than confronting directly the racism expressed in The Birth of a Nation, have traditionally preferred to concentrate their attention on the aesthetics of the film. This tendency to privilege style over substance proved infuriating to the NAACP, which resented the growing tendency, from the 1930s onward, to ignore the ideological dimension of Griffith’s masterpiece by constructing it as a film “classic.” Preferring form over content also angered Sergei Eisenstein. In the early 1940s, as American left-wingers quarreled over Birth,32 the Soviet filmmaker made his own position clear. “The disgraceful propaganda of racial hatred toward the colored people which permeates this film,” he wrote in 1940, “cannot be redeemed by the purely cinematographic effects of this production.”33
Only within the last few years have scholars begun to follow Eisenstein’s lead by criticizing the artificial style–substance dichotomy. In an article of 1982, Brian Gallagher argued that Birth’s “ideologically determined montage” was “not a distraction from its endorsement of mass murder, but instead a demonstration of the kind of illogical reasoning that makes mass murder appear reasonable.”34 In 1985, in an extended essay on Griffith and his most notorious film, Michael Rogin observed that the two strategies pursued by most scholars and critics were “either [to] minimize the film’s racialist content or separate its aesthetic power from negrophobia.” Rogin, declining to separate form from content, set out to investigate the close relationship between the two by placing the film in its social and political context.35 Clyde Taylor, in an article published in 1989, similarly questioned what he saw as the divorcement between the aesthetics of Birth and the ideological approach adopted by the film in its very negative social construction of blacks. The two, he argued, were closely connected: The Birth of a Nation’s aesthetic strategies had really been used to reinforce the film’s ideological stance, in reality helping to normalize racism.36 More recently, other writers have attempted to implicate Birth’s aesthetics in the film’s politics, in effect rejecting the notion that its racist substance was somehow separate from its artistic and technical style. “We see the two as interdependent,” argued Penny Starfield in 2000: “the form is placed at the service of the content and the innovations are largely necessitated by the construction of the racist discourse.”37 In 2004, two scholars blamed Griffith personally. Donato Totaro saw Birth’s form as subordinate to “Griffith’s racist ideology” and Charlie Keil described the film as “the product of a mind determined to use style for racist ends.”38
The Birth of a Nation has now remained fairly constant across more than nine decades as a signifier of racist attitudes. The film itself has not changed; once in the vanguard of cinematic innovation, it now, in spite of sections of surpassing visual appeal, seems creaky and antiquated when viewed by modern audiences.39 This in fact is the key: the film has not changed; what has changed is the world around it. In 1915, it was recognized by the NAACP and other organizations as a racist attack on black people. At the same time, there can be little doubt that the attitudes expressed in the film were unexceptional to the vast majority of the white American population. Most critics who viewed the film could not understand why it generated such controversy, and it is probable that ordinary spectators reacted in much the same way. As the twentieth century moved on, however, racial attitudes began to change: the increasing success of the obsessive NAACP campaign against the film functioned as a barometer of this evolution. In reality, by the 1930s screening The Birth of a Nation was no longer commercially profitable, and by the 1940s and 1950s, the prospect of protests and picketing was sufficient to deter all but the most determined of theater managers from the attempt to do so. Over the years also, support for the film declined: t
he fact it was The Birth of a Nation weakened the position of those who, like the ACLU in the late 1930s, might otherwise have been tempted to defend the right to show the movie in terms of civil liberties. During the course of the twentieth century, what had been mainstream acceptance of the racism on which the film was based turned to mainstream rejection. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the film stands as a monument to once-dominant cultural attitudes over race and, in terms of most people’s reaction to it, as a reminder of just how much has changed since 1915.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. There are no accurate figures available either on the profits of the film or the size of its audience. In 1960, Variety estimated that it had grossed more than $50 million since 1915. In 1977, it revised that figure downward to $5 million. Russell Merritt estimated that the film had made $18 million by 1931. Seymour Stern, self-appointed Griffith “expert,” claimed the film had earned $48,000,000 by 1948. Richard Schickel, in his biography of Griffith (1984), suggested total profits from the film’s first run of $60 million. Audience figures are equally unreliable. Everett Carter estimated that 3 million people had seen it in the Greater New York area by January 1916. Carl E. Milliken, secretary of the MPPDA, estimated that “probably” 50 million people in all had seen it by 1930. The 200 million figure (by 1946) is given by Russell Merritt. Variety, April 13, 1960, cited in Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 198; Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” Cinema Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 1972): 27 and note 2; Seymour Stern, “D. W. Griffith: An Appreciation,” Sight and Sound 17, no. 67 (Autumn 1948): 109; Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith and the Birth of Film (London: Pavilion, 1984), 281; Everett Carter, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly 12 (Fall 1960): 347–57, reprint in Focus on “The Birth of a Nation,” ed. Fred Silva (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971): 133–43, citation from 133–34; Carl E. Milliken to Will W. Alexander (Director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation), August 9, 1930, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress, henceforth NAACPP); Merritt, op. cit.
2. See Martin M. Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65–68, 71.
3. See Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 59–79; Robert C. Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon,” Cinema Journal 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 2–15, reprint in Film before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 162–75.
4. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 125–29, 131–32; Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley: University of California, 1990), 10.
5. W. Stephen Bush in the Moving Picture World, 23 (March 13, 1915), reprinted in Silva, Focus, 25; George D. Proctor in Motion Picture News, 11, no. 10 (March 13, 1915), reprinted in Anthony Slide, ed., Selected Film Criticism, 1912–1920 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 21; Mark Vance in Variety, March 12, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 22; “W,” in the New York Dramatic Mirror, 73, no. 1890 (March 10, 1915), reprinted in Slide, Selected Film Criticism, 24.
6. Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 175; Proctor review, op. cit., 18; “W” review, op. cit., 21; anonymous review in The Moving Picture World, 23 (March 13, 1915), reprinted in Silva, Focus, 29; Ned McIntosh, The Constitution [Atlanta], December 7, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 34; Harlow Hare, The American [Boston], July 18, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 37.
7. Graham Greene, “A History of the Film, 1896–1936: [The Birth of a Nation]. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Secret Agent,” Spectator (May 15, 1936), in David Parkinson, ed., Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993), 101; Anthony Lejeune, ed., The C. A. Lejeune Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1991), 125; Christopher Cook, ed., The Dilys Powell Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1991), 357; James Agee, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments by James Agee (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 314.
8. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture, 1 vol. ed., (London: Frank Cass, 1964, first pub. 1926), vol. 1, 641–42; Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies (New York: Covici, Friede, 1931), 129, 137; Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 187.
9. Georges Sadoul, Histoire Générale du Cinéma: Tome III: Le Cinéma Devient un Art (1909–1920): Deuxième Volume: La Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1952), 24–25; Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art:A Panoramic History of the Movies (New York: Macmillan, 1957, rev. ed. 1978), 23; Jean Mitry, “Naissance d’une Nation,” in “Griffith,” Supplement to L’Avant Scène du Cinéma, 45 (February 1, 1965): 89; Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), 281, 26.
10. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1973), 35; Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41; William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 87.
11. For a detailed study of attempts to censor The Birth of a Nation, see Nickieann Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: Controversy, Suppression, and the First Amendment as It Applies to Filmic Expression, 1915–1973 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), passim.
12. On early demands for movie censorship in the United States see Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Nickel Vice and Virtue: Movie Censorship in Chicago, 1907–1915,” Journal of Popular Film 5, no. 1 (1976): 37–55; Stephen Vaughan, “Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code,” Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (June 1990): 40–42; Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 8–12; Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), passim.
13. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (Oxford: Roundhouse Press, 1994), 16–18; Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Vintage, 2002), 8.
14. Gerald Mast, ed., The Movies in Our Midst: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213, 333. Only in 1956, when the Production Code was revised, was the prohibition on showing miscegenation dropped.
15. Daniel A. Lord, Played by Ear: The Autobiography of Father Daniel A. Lord, S. J. (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1959), 250.
16. Roy E. Aitken (with Al P. Nelson), The “Birth of a Nation” Story (Middleburg, Va.: Denlinger, 1965), 4.
17. Matthew Bernstein, ed., Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 12.
18. Richard Maltby, “The King of Kings and the Czar of All the Rushes: The Propriety of the Christ Story,” in Bernstein, Controlling Hollywood, 80–81.
19. Charles Lyons, The New Censors: Movies and the Culture Wars (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 14–15, 18–19, 53–80.
20. Lyons, The New Censors, 20–23, 81–145.
21. Lyons, The New Censors, 23–25, 146–82.
22. “Bollywood’s Most Unwanted,” www.rediff.com/entertai/2002/sep/11fil.htm website [November 5, 2005].
23. “Listmania! 25 Most Controversial Films of all Time,” www.amazon.com website [November 5, 2005].
24. Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 483, 518, 533; cf. Edward de Grazia and Roger K. New
man, Banned Films: Movies, Censors, and the First Amendment (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1982), 5–6.
25. See Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139–53; reprint in The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director, ed. Robert Lang (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 195–213.
26. Goodwin Berquist and James Greenwood, “Protest against Racism: The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Journal of the University Film Association 26, no. 3 (1974): 39; Slide, American Racist, 199. Slide also notes that showings of the film at the Richelieu Cinema in San Francisco in June 1980 had to be abandoned when the theater was vandalized. Slide, American Racist, 199.
27. Gladwin Hill, “Polyglot City Is in Shock after a Melee,” New York Times, August 3, 1978, A-14, quoted in Staiger, Interpreting Films, 139; Mark I. Pinsky, “Racism, History and Mass Media: Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, The Greensboro Massacre,” Jump Cut no. 28 (1983): 66–67.
28. “Cancellation of a ‘Nation,’” Variety, May 31–June 7, 1989: 7; Jane M. Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 96–97.
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 43
