29. Gibson, as quoted in Peter McDonald, “Birth of a Nation Award ‘Is Racist,’” Evening Standard [London], December 9, 1992. There were protests a year later when Birth was screened at the Library of Congress. J. Hoberman, “We Must Remember This,” Village Voice, November 30, 1993, 2–4.
30. Slide, American Racist, 201. Previously, PBS and WNET had withdrawn a new Photoplay Productions version of the film from its planned showing in the “American Masters” series. Channel Four television in Britain did broadcast the film, but only between the hours of 11 P.M. and 3 A.M. David Gill, “The Birth of a Nation: Orphan or Pariah?”, Griffithiana, 60/61 (October 1997): 27.
31. Robert Edwards, “Turner Pulls Plug on Silent Classic,” Classic Images no. 246 (December 1995): 14; Jill Jordan Sieder, “Within our Grasp … The Legend of Micheaux,” Oscar Micheaux Society Newsletter 9 (Spring 2001): 10.
32. “Time to Move On,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1999, F2; “DGA Blundered by Removing Griffith’s Name from Award,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1999, F4; “Putting the Historical Spin in Defense of D. W. Griffith Award,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2000, F3. I owe special thanks to Denise Warren for bringing these reports to my attention.
33. Robert W. Welkos, “Debating an Icon’s Genius, Racism,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2000, A19; Philip J. Ethington, “D. W. Griffith,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2000, M4; Ted Elliott, “The DGA Is Right, D. W. Griffith Was Wrong,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1999, F3.
34. What follows does not pretend to be a complete accounting of scholarly writing about Birth of a Nation. It is intended only to draw attention to some of the more significant contributions.
35. Carter, “Cultural History Written with Lightning”; Raymond A. Cook, “The Man Behind The Birth of a Nation,” North Carolina Historical Review 29 (October 1962): 519–40; Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 26–45.
36. Norman Kagan, “Two Classic War Films of the Silent Era: Birth of a Nation and Shoulder Arms,” Film and History 4, no. 3 (September 1974): 1–5, 18.
37. John Hope Franklin, “The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History,” Massachusetts Review, 20 (Autumn, 1979): 417–33, reprinted in Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988, ed. John Hope Franklin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 10–23.
38. John Hammond Moore, “South Carolina’s Reaction to the Photoplay The Birth of a Nation,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association 33 (1963): 30–40; Berquist and Greenwood, “Protest against Racism: ‘The Birth of a Nation’ in Ohio,” 39–44.
39. Thomas Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, Birth of a Nation,” The Historian 25, no. 3 (May 1963): 344–62, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 111–24; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 41–69.
40. Maxim Simcovitch, “The Impact of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation on the Modern Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Popular Film 1, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 45–54.
41. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, first pub. in 1973, esp. 10–18; Robert M. Henderson, D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), especially 141–65; Everson, American Silent Film, especially 72–89.
42. Theodore Huff, A Shot Analysis of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961); John Cuniberti, “The Birth of a Nation”: A Formal Shot-by-Shot Analysis Together with Microfiche (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1979).
43. Silva, Focus. Some material on The Birth of a Nation was also included in Harry M. Geduld, ed., Focus on D. W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
44. Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Totowa, N. J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 83–115; Mimi White, “The Birth of a Nation: History as Pretext,” Enclitic 5 (Fall 1981/Spring 1982): 17–24, reprinted in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 214–24.
45. Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”; de Grazia and Newman, Banned Films, 3–6, 180–83.
46. Nickie Fleener, “Answering Film with Film: The Hampton Epilogue, A Positive Alternative to the Negative Black Stereotypes Presented in The Birth of a Nation,” Journal of Popular Film and Television no. 4 (1980): 400–25.
47. Martin Williams, Griffith: First Artist of the Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), especially 61–78; Schickel, D. W. Griffith, especially 206–302.
48. Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 150–95, reprint in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 250–93, quotation from 251. Rogin also engaged in a detailed psychoanalytical reading of Griffith himself.
49. Clyde Taylor, “The Re–Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” Wide Angle 13, nos. 3 and 4 (July–October 1991): 12–30, reprinted in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U. S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 15–37.
50. Scott Simmon, The Films of D. W. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 104–105.
51. Richard Dyer, “Into the Light: The Whiteness of the South in The Birth of a Nation,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 165–76.
52. Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner, “The Orchestration of Affect: The Motif of Barbarism in Breil’s The Birth of a Nation Score,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 252–68. For more on Birth’s musical score, see Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies.
53. Vincent F. Rocchio, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 29–54, quotations from 36, 39.
54. James Chandler, “The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood: Scott, Griffith, and Film Epic Today,” in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 237–73, reprinted in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 225–49. Chandler intended his essay as an alternative thesis to that advanced earlier by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein that Griffith’s view of the world had been heavily influenced by Dickens. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), 195–255.
55. Jane Gaines, “The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates: Two Tales of the American South,” in Dixie Debates, 177–92.
56. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 96–132; Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xvi, 5, 26, 40, 61–99, quotation from 19. Both Williams and Courtney (like Chandler) trace melodramatic elements in Birth of a Nation to earlier cultural forms: the “Tom” tradition in Williams’s case and a prior tradition of films dealing with racial exchanges and misidentifications in Courtney’s.
57. John Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen: North Carolina Reacts,” North Carolina Historical Review 64, no. 2 (April 1987): 139–61; Staiger, Interpreting Films; Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 219–57, quotation from 235; Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 59–106.
58. Russell Merritt, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Going After Little Sister,” in An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 215–37, quotation from 219; Lang, The Birth of a Nation; Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 107–50; Kris Jozajtis, “‘The Eyes of All People Are upon Us’: American Civil Religion and the Birth of Hollywood,” in Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythma
king, Culture Making, ed. S. Brent Plate (London: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2003), 239–61, quotation from 247; Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, Films Produced in 1914–15 (London: British Film Institute/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004). In 2006, Michael R. Hurwitz published a revised version of his MA thesis on the film as D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: The Film that Transformed America (North Charleston, S.C.: BookSurge, 2006).
59. Jesionowksi, “Performance and Characterization,” in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, p. 73
60. For example, David Mayer—in an otherwise excellent essay on the theatrical sources of Birth of a Nation—is apparently unaware of the existing scholarship on the reception of Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman. Mayer, “Theatrical Sources,” in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, 85.
61. Sorlin, The Film in History, 106–107; Bowser, “Production,” in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, 60.
62. Kaufman, “Distribution and Reception,” in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, 92.
CHAPTER 1
1. Schickel, Griffith, 246–47. The injunction granted was narrowly drawn. It forbade only the matinée performance and neither the evening nor any later showing. Ibid.
2. William H. Clune, the owner/manager of Clune’s Auditorium, had contributed $15,000 toward the cost of completing the film. Billy Bitzer, the main cameraman on the film, had invested $7,000. Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (London: W. H. Allen, 1969), 144; G. W. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer: His Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 111.
3. William De Mille, elder brother of director Cecil B. De Mille, probably expressed the conventional wisdom inside the movie industry when he wrote to producer Sam Goldwyn that “even if it’s a hit, which it probably will be, it cannot possibly make any money. It would have to gross over a quarter of a million dollars for Griffith to get his cost back and, as you know, that just isn’t being done. The Clansman certainly establishes Griffith as a leader and it does seem too bad that such a magnificent effort is doomed to financial failure.” Quoted in Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 105.
4. Schickel, Griffith, 247.
5. Karl Brown, assistant cameraman on Birth of a Nation, recalled that Joseph Carl Breil conducted the orchestra playing the score he had composed at the Los Angeles première. But Brown was wrong: the Breil score would not be performed until the New York opening in March. At Clune’s Auditorium, the orchestra on the opening night was led by Carli Elinor, playing a score he himself had compiled. Joseph Henabery [“Lincoln” in the film] considered the Elinor score—“an arrangement of popular music, well-known standard music and semiclassical work”—to be much more effective than the later Breil score. Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, Kevin Brownlow, ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 87–88; Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 131–35; Anthony Slide, ed., Before, In and After Hollywood: The Autobiography of Joseph E. Henabery (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 82.
6. Brown, Adventures, 88.
7. In 1979, in the aftermath of the Paul Killiam-Raymond Rohauer affair discussed in Chapter 8 below, Killiam presented further Birth of a Nation materials to the Library of Congress, including “more than 8,000 feet of 1915 negative, cut apart for the 1921 reissue.” Until the work of film reconstruction can be completed, notes J. B. Kaufman, “there remains the breathtaking possibility that those long-lost 1915 scenes may have survived after all.” Kaufman in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, 112.
8. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 11.
9. Cited in Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 15.
10. The number of such changes made by Griffith himself after the original première at Clune’s was, according to Cuniberti, “ultimately incalculable.” Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 16. Moreover, according to Billy Bitzer, further film footage was shot after the première in Los Angeles. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 112.
11. Brown remembered a sequence with Lillian Gish running across a battlefield from body to body looking for her lover that was actually from Griffith’s Allied propaganda film, Hearts of the World (1918). Brown also recalled that the hospital shots had been in the second part of the film (which made no sense, since they clearly had to precede Lincoln’s grant of a pardon and his later assassination) and that the scene in which Flora Campbell died followed Stoneman’s refusal to let his daughter marry Silas Lynch, the black leader (whereas it actually came much earlier in the film’s narrative). Brown, Adventures, 80, 89, 91–93.
12. Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 37. As Karl Brown pointed out, there was simply one original negative: “The rule was to shoot with one camera, cut one negative, and that was that.” Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 17. When it came to assembling release prints, girls working at Epoch spliced together sequences by scraping the nitrate free of emulsion with a razor blade and then joining the two pieces of film together. Since it was not possible to remove all the emulsion, the joint of the two sections of film was never completely welded together and had a tendency to curl up at the edges and, later, often to break in the projector. “With production methods of this kind,” comments Cuniberti, “it is inconceivable that any two release prints would ever be exactly identical.” Ibid., 17.
13. For an assessment of this print in comparison with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 16mm circulating print, see Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 8–20. Cuniberti himself uses the Library of Congress print as the basis for his shot-by-shot analysis of the film, whereas Robert Lang based his reconstructed continuity script on the MOMA print. In view of the relatively small number of differences between the two and the greater availability of Lang’s work, references to shots in this book are taken from the analysis in Lang’s book. When Cuniberti’s book was published in 1979, he was probably unaware of the existence of a print owned by private Minneapolis collector Lawrence R. Landry, a tinted version of the 1921 reissue. This would become the principal basis of Photoplay Productions’ new version of the film, prepared by Kevin Brownlow, Patrick Stanbury, John Allen, and the late David Gill during the 1990s. J. B. Kaufman in Usai, The Griffith Project, Vol. 8, 111–12; David Gill, “The Birth of a Nation: Orphan or Pariah?” Griffithiana 60–61 (1997): 16–29.
14. In the New York American, March 5, 1916, the Reverend Thomas B. Gregory observed that the opening part of this shot depicted a Dutch slave ship arriving in Jamestown, Virginia. Karl Brown later confirmed the existence of this sequence. There was probably also a shot in which it was made clear that Northern traders had been mainly responsible in the first place for bringing black slaves to America and selling them. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 36; W. Stephen Bush, review from The Moving Picture World, 23 (March 13, 1915), reprinted in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 176.
15. This shot is in neither the Library of Congress nor the MOMA print but was attested to by two of the film’s earliest reviewers. See Francis Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” The New Republic, 7 (20 March 1915) and W. Stephen Bush, Moving Picture World, 23 (March 13, 1915), both reprinted in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 162, 176.
16. According to reviewer W. Steven Bush, the original version of the film had Stoneman kissing the mulatto. Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 176–77. Karl Brown, however, contended that no such kiss took place. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 49.
17. There is evidence that some early versions of the film cut away from the battle to show two parallel scenes: one of a “Northern lady waiting,” the other of an African depicted in the jungle. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 72. Cuniberti points out that if the shot of the black man in the jungle had occurred earlier in the film, it might perhaps have been a reference to raids on African villages by Yankee slave owners. Since it was located in the midst of the Petersburg battle sequences, it is unclear what Griffith’s purpose actually was. Ibid.
18. Seymour Stern contends that three Civil War actions besides Petersburg were shown in the earliest prints: the firing on Fort Sumter and the battles at Cold Harbor and Antieta
m. Stern, “Griffith: I—The Birth of a Nation,” Film Culture, 36, Special Griffith Issue (Spring–Summer 1965): 82.
19. The earliest prints showed Lee trying to find a pencil to make some notes on the papers of the surrender document and finding that none of his officers had one. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 82. The incident was based on fact. Wanting, with Grant’s agreement, to add a word to the surrender document, Lee “felt for a pencil, but could not find one. [Union] Colonel Horace Porter stepped forward and offered his.” Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), vol. IV, 138.
20. Brown, Adventures, 88–89.
21. Brown, Adventures, 92–93.
22. Brown, Adventures, 90–91.
23. Carpetbaggers were postwar Northern immigrants to Southern states. The term had its origins in the widespread belief of Southern whites that Northerners of this type were all unscrupulous adventurers carrying their scanty possessions in a single carpetbag. This stereotype was untrue: the carpetbaggers included, for example, many idealistic Northerners, such as men and women who came to teach in the South.
24. Seymour Stern claimed that the original print of the film also contained the actual rape of Flora by Gus. This is extremely unlikely. Although rape sequences were fairly common in films by 1915 [see Sarah Projansky, “The Elusive/Ubiquitous Representation of Rape: A Historical Survey of Rape in U.S. Film, 1903–1972,” Cinema Journal 41, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 63–90], the program summary of Birth of a Nation for Clune’s asserted that Flora jumped off the rock to “escape with honor intact.” Karl Brown later insisted that there was no such rape sequence. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 125. For a detailed and subtle analysis of the Flora-Gus chase sequence, suggesting a much less malevolent, alternative reading of Gus’s motivations, see Merritt, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Going After Little Sister”: 215–37.
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