THE BIRTH OF A NATION

The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. (David Wark) Griffith (1875–1948) in 1914 and released the following year, may be the most controversial feature film ever released in the United States. It is also one of the most seen and most influential of all films released anywhere in any period. Following the example of the historical novelists Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, it tells the story of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period from the perspectives of two families, one southern and one northern. Its complexity, popularity, and political impact changed the opinions of film producers and viewers alike regarding the motion picture's role in the production of American identity—an identity that national antagonism over such issues as regionalism, immigration, labor relations, and the citizen status of African Americans made increasingly difficult to imagine as a singular and homogeneous entity.

GRIFFITH AND THE EARLY FILM INDUSTRY

When Griffith directed The Birth of a Nation, the film industry was roughly twenty years old, and Griffith had been part of it for only six. These years, however, had been the most transformative years in the film medium's already tumultuous history. During that time Griffith, more than any other individual filmmaker, helped to change the way both the audiences and the industry itself thought about cinema.

In 1908, when Griffith turned from stage and film acting to film directing for the American Biograph Company, films rarely exceeded two reels (approximately twenty-four minutes) in length and were shown on rotating programs with many other films. Story films had more or less dominated film production since 1905, but as plots became more intricate, critics complained that they were difficult for audiences to follow. The artisanal and disorganized nature of production at that time may bear partial responsibility for this problem; the position of the film director as it is known in the early twenty-first century—the manager of a film's production phase, considered primarily responsible for a film's quality—was not yet clearly defined. But Griffith's very first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908), set attendance records in some movie houses, and critics for the Moving Picture World and the New York Dramatic Mirror took notice of its confident storytelling and deft production of suspense. By 1913 Griffith had made more than four hundred short films for Biograph, and audiences increasingly looked for the company's AB symbol as a sign of a film's quality.

The financial and critical success of his short films emboldened Griffith to quit his comfortable job at Biograph in a dispute over his promotion to a nondirecting position. On 3 December 1913 he published a full-page advertisement in the Mirror touting himself as the heretofore uncredited director of Biograph's greatest successes. As scholars have noted, Griffith's purpose in buying this ad was not to seek work, for he had already secured a directing-producing contract with the Mutual Company. Rather, Griffith sought to shift Biograph's brand familiarity onto his own name and present himself as the undisputed master of the new medium.

Though Griffith certainly bought the ad to enhance his reputation, he also hoped to demonstrate, after a frustrating final sprint at Biograph, that film was a new and unique art form. Griffith had already begun to press Biograph to finance longer features before two Italian historical epics, Enrico Guazzani's nine-reel Quo Vadis? (1913) and Giovanni Pastrone's twelve-reel Cabiria (1914), came to the United States, thrilling American audiences with their spectacular production values. Griffith was furious that Biograph had not allowed him to chart the territory of the play-length feature himself. His attempt to replicate the success of Quo Vadis? with Judith of Bethulia (1913) met with scorn from the Biograph chiefs, who shelved the project immediately. (Once Griffith left, Biograph released the film in a four-reel version that was an immediate success.) But Griffith also saw that Pastrone and Guazzani had merely expanded the shocks and spectacles that had dominated film since its origins; they had not taken advantage of his own contributions to complex storytelling. In emulation of authors like Charles Dickens, Griffith appealed to a broad audience by utilizing complex plots, character identification, and a rigorous (and often puerile) sense of Victorian ethics. He claimed that film was a pictographic language that used reality itself to express ideas and that as such only film, among all the arts, could touch a universal audience. In an interview following the release of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith predicted that film would develop into a medium for teaching history to the masses; after consulting "a corps of recognized experts," a director could confidently film any past event with "no opinions expressed," and viewers everywhere would "merely be present at the making of history" (Geduld, p. 25).

GRIFFITH PLANS HIS EPIC

History—specifically a most contentious event in American history—was precisely the topic of The Birth of a Nation. Griffith had filmed the Civil War from a white southern perspective before in such films as The Guerilla (1908), His Trust, and His Trust Fulfilled (1911), but with The Birth of a Nation, Griffith took the position of a southern Lost Cause ideologue, advancing the myth that the heroic South fought the war in order to defend states' rights. The film was adapted from a 1905 novel and a 1909 play called The Clansman, written by the pastor, legislator, and white supremacist Thomas Dixon (1864–1964). Griffith and his co-scenarist Frank E. Woods revised the material to increase dramatic tension and humanize the characters, and they also included material from another Dixon novel, The Leopard's Spots (1902). To Dixon, the Reconstruction period added insult to the war's injury by showering undeserved rights (political equality, the vote) on the newly freed slave population and retracting the rights of southern whites. According to this widely held separatist view, the tide only turned with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, an "invisible army" of hooded whites who lynched, mutilated, and terrorized blacks back into near-slavery levels of servitude. Dixon's works both reflected and fed the exacerbation of racial tensions at the turn of the century. The "separate but equal" ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) granted federal blessing to state segregation laws, and the ensuing national debate on segregation led to the establishment of the first major black political organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1909.

Griffith sought a subject of sufficient importance and sweep to match his artistic aspirations; he considered The Clansman a perfect candidate for the epic film he wanted desperately to produce. He had by this time, in 1914, set up his own production company, the David W. Griffith Corporation, which would distribute its films through Mutual. Frank Woods secured the story rights from Dixon for an up-front fee and a percentage of the film's gross. Purchasing preexisting literary properties was already a standard industry practice, but nothing previously attempted could match the risks that Griffith was to take. Production companies had achieved some success with multireel features but were wary of financing mammoth productions like the one planned by Griffith; nor were many exhibitors convinced that longer films represented the future of the industry. In fact, because of the abnormal length projected for the picture (it was finally to run more than two and a half hours), no distribution company would handle it; Griffith and Mutual head Harry Aitken had to form yet another company, Epoch, to get the film to theaters, and they depended on individuals to book it regionally as a special "road show" event.

Griffith did nothing by halves. He spent Aitken's original budget of $40,000 just on the battle scenes, filmed in California's San Fernando Valley. Eventually he accumulated $110,000 in expenses and shot 150,000 feet of film; this was edited down to 13 reels, or about a tenth of that mass of raw footage. The number of extras for the battle scenes topped out at five hundred (Griffith's publicity campaign pumped this number up to eighteen thousand). The photography took about four months to complete at a time when salable films could be produced in a matter of days. Griffith rarely displayed doubt about the importance of the production or the inevitability of its completion. He continually borrowed money (even from his cinematographer Billy Bitzer), emptied his own salary from Mutual into the film's production, and oversold stock in the film to various speculators. The cast, not to mention their director, lived a hand-to-mouth existence as shooting continued, with the future film directors Raoul Walsh and Erich von Stroheim acting as assistant directors as well as extras. Perhaps most disconcerting to everyone but Griffith himself was the fact that he had no full shooting script, having effectively pre-edited the film in his head. Not even the actors knew how their performances would fit into the story—but with Griffith's constant reassurance, they did what he asked and put their faith in his vision.

GRIFFITH'S STORY OF THE WHITE SOUTH IN PERIL

The plot of The Birth of a Nation, which draws on conventional representations of the Civil War as a tragic tale of "brother against brother," is both melodramatically simple and formally complex. Dixon said privately that he hoped Griffith's film would stir a greater fear of black men among whites, particularly white women. By centering the viewers' identification on the two central families, both white, and relating in lurid detail their suffering at the hands of the freed slaves of South Carolina and the carpetbaggers (northern Reconstructionists) who encourage them, Griffith accomplished Dixon's agenda.

Part One begins with an intertitle demanding that the film receive the same right granted to the written word, to "show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue." It then introduces the Camerons, a southern plantation family, and the Stonemans, a northern family headed by U.S. congressman Austin Stoneman. Dixon based Stoneman on the Radical Republican and congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens but transformed him into a conventional melodramatic villain. Here Griffith follows suit, making Stoneman a flawed patriarch, marked as such by a crippled leg and a strongly implied sexual relationship with his mulatto maid. This relationship, an intertitle states, will one day "blight a nation." Griffith contrasts Stoneman's decadence with the purity of his daughter, Elsie, and with the gentility of the Camerons, who pet their domestic animals, their children, and their kindly slaves in what one intertitle calls "a quaintly way that is to be no more." The two Stoneman sons go to Piedmont, South Carolina, to visit their friends the Camerons, and there Ben Cameron falls in love with Phil Stoneman's cameo photograph of his sister, Elsie. Tensions over the looming secession arise during the visit, while throughout the Piedmont scene the African American slaves appear as joyous, childlike people who suffer not at all from their lot.

Having established ties of affection between North and South as well as each side's loyalty to its cause, the film moves on to the war itself. Griffith recreates Sherman's march to the sea, replicates the iconic battlefield photographs of Mathew Brady's studio in all their pathos (the strewn bodies of young men who differ only in the color of their uniforms), and carefully pits Northern and Southern forces against each other through his editing; the two sides always attack from opposite sides of the screen, maintaining a sense of confrontation even when only one of the two armies appears in the frame. After much suffering on the battlefield and in the impoverished Cameron household, the war scenes climax with Ben, now known as the Little Colonel, eliciting cheers from Northern and Southern soldiers alike by stuffing a Confederate flag into a Union cannon, even as his battalion falls to Phil Stoneman's own. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox is reproduced, complete with historical footnotes on intertitles. Ben, hospitalized in the North but due to be tried as a terrorist, is visited by his mother, who, with the help of Elsie Stoneman, successfully pleads with Abraham Lincoln himself for Ben's release. The part ends with the assassination of Lincoln at Ford's Theater (accompanied by intertitle historical footnotes) before the eyes of Elsie and Phil. From the now-threadbare Cameron Hall, Ben's father reads of the murder of the "Great Heart," who promised to treat the South as children who had never left the fold. Old Dr. Cameron has the last word: "What will become of us now!"

Part Two shows the Reconstruction period as disastrous for the white South. Austin Stoneman, now the nation's most powerful political leader, sets up shop in Cameron Hall, determined, according to an intertitle, to "put the white south under the heel of the black south" (the words are Woodrow Wilson's). Stoneman oversees the election of black legislators to the South Carolina state house and sets up Silas Lynch, a mulatto, as lieutenant governor. The former slaves immediately abuse their new powers by disenfranchising the whites and publicly expressing their desire for white women. A famous scene in the South Carolina House sets the tone for the rest of the film by focusing squarely on this last issue, miscegenation. As a new law allowing interracial marriage is passed, the black legislators collectively look up to the gallery. This shot is followed by shots of the objects of their gaze, white women watching the proceedings, followed by closer shots of the legislators looking hungrily upward. The sequence ends with a long shot of the black men dancing in celebration, re-emphasizing the link Griffith has built between black political autonomy and sexual threat. This scene is footnoted like the earlier historical set pieces; however, the intertitle fails to mention that Griffith based the scene not on photographs or a historian's account but on a political cartoon.

The scandal of miscegenational desire is contrasted to the white romantic ties that symbolize a political remarriage between North and South. While Ben courts Elsie, Phil falls in love with Ben's sister Margaret. But thoughts of their brothers, killed by men who wore their new lovers' uniforms in battle, keep the women from accepting the men's proposals. Later, Ben watches some white children covering themselves with a white sheet to frighten black children and determines to use force to reverse the white South's humiliation. He employs his parents and sisters to harbor his secret plans and to sew costumes to disguise the members of his new guerrilla organization, the Ku Klux Klan.

Just as the Klan begins to terrorize its enemies, disasters strike. Elsie discovers Ben's Klan costume and rejects his love, though she promises not to reveal his secret. Then Gus, a cowardly and apelike freedman played, like all the principal black and mulatto characters, by a white actor in blackface, pursues Little Sister Flora Cameron through the woods in hopes of marrying her (though his relentless pursuit strongly implies attempted rape), and she throws herself from a cliff to protect her honor. Ben and his invisible army "try" Gus, kill him, attach a card marked KKK to his chest, and leave his body on Silas Lynch's doorstep as a warning. Lynch and his minions impose martial law and attempt to arrest Dr. Cameron, but two former Cameron slaves, who are described by intertitles as "faithful souls," run a diversion that allows the Camerons (aided by a "reformed" Phil Stoneman) to find refuge in a rural cabin inhabited by impoverished Union veterans. Meanwhile, Lynch kidnaps Elsie and announces to Stoneman that he has chosen to marry her. Stoneman, who seems, like many northern white spectators, to approve of racial equality in the abstract, recoils in horror when it appears that his own family will be affected. Griffith uses crosscuts, concurrent shots of simultaneous events occurring in separate places, to show the black militia closing in on the Unionists' cottage while Elsie is assaulted and tied up by Lynch in "preparatio[n] for a forced marriage."

But just as Lynch is about to "marry" Elsie, the Klan breaks into Lynch's quarters to settle the score; and just as the militia corners the Camerons and the Union veterans who have joined forces to defend their shared honor as whites, Ben and the Klan arrive on horseback to defeat the attackers. The film concludes with all political and sexual crises resolved: the Klan scares black voters away from the polls at the next election, and the Camerons and Stonemans exchange brides and bridegrooms across the Mason-Dixon Line. As the newlyweds stare dreamily into the distance, a vision ambiguously attributed to Ben shows an allegorical war beast dissolving to reveal Christ, the "Prince of Peace," who promises what Griffith's Klan promises: "Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!" An additional scene, eliminated after the film's opening (and possibly apocryphal), portrayed "Lincoln's Solution" to the race problem: shipping African Americans back to Africa.

PUBLIC RECEPTION: PRAISE AND CONTROVERSY

The Birth of a Nation opened as The Clansman in Los Angeles on 8 February 1915. It ran an unprecedented seven months at Clune's Auditorium, a 2,500-seat theater normally reserved for live drama. It premiered in New York's Liberty Theater on 3 March 1915 as The Birth of a Nation (a title change taken from advertising copy for the film and suggested by Dixon) and ran there for an even more remarkable forty-eight weeks. Critics, ministers, and political leaders, including Chief Justice Edward D. White of the U.S. Supreme Court and President Woodrow Wilson (whose popular historical account of the United States the film cites in defense of its portrait of Reconstruction), recommended the film as a history lesson and a powerful work of art. Great showmanship went into its exhibition: ushers dressed as southern gentry; printed programs containing photographs of the cast and (often exaggerated) production details; a live orchestra playing the full score that Griffith had compiled with the composer Joseph Carl Breil; an intermission between "acts." Admission cost a whopping $2. Far from repelling viewers, the high price actually attracted middle- and upper-class patrons who might otherwise have avoided this film because of the cinema's reputation as a cheap amusement. Dixon boosted business by persuading his former college classmate, President Wilson, to screen the film at the White House; on 18 February 1915 it became the first film ever shown there, and Wilson endorsed it immediately. By 1920 it had grossed some $15 million, making Dixon, Aitken, and Griffith millionaires.

But if The Birth of a Nation was, in Wilson's words, "like writing history with Lightning," it also electrified the defenders of racial integration. Eight northern states banned it for fear of race riots and other repercussions, and indeed riots did accompany its opening in some cities. The New York Globe, the Nation, and other periodicals charged it with gross falsehoods. Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House condemned its stereotypical representation of blacks and its promotion of race hatred—exactly the qualities that made it a faithful historical account in the eyes of separatists. The NAACP entered multiple lawsuits to restrict the film's release on grounds that it threatened public safety, forcing Griffith to edit out nearly two hundred shots; its protests helped the NAACP gain a truly national presence. Eventually President Wilson withdrew his support and publicly allowed that the film exaggerated events to achieve questionable ends. Professing to be shocked by the outcry, Dixon refused to abandon Birth's supremacist message; he pressed his point by referring to the NAACP as the "Negro Intermarriage Society"—a preposterous claim that only made the NAACP's criticisms seem even more justified.

For his part, Griffith seemed more surprised than angered by the charges; while he fully believed in the myth of the Lost Cause, he did not share Dixon's fanatical desire to defend it. But Griffith's pride as an artist and historian was bruised, as his published rebuttal to the Globe attests: "This attack is an organized effort to suppress a production which was brought forth to reveal the beautiful possibilities of the art of motion pictures and to tell a story which is based upon truth in every vital detail" ("Reply to The New York Globe"). Less convinced of states' rights in their own case than where the South was concerned, Griffith and Aitken challenged the eight-state ban on First Amendment grounds before the Supreme Court (Mutual v. Ohio, 1915), but the Court upheld the states' jurisdiction, stating that moving pictures were not free speech but rather a "business pure and simple" (a ruling that remained in effect until the mid-1950s). The young film industry wished nothing to stand between it and its right to steer itself. Learning from Griffith's example, studios and distributors collectively developed rules governing film content that evolved into the modern MPAA ratings system.

Griffith's major responses to the controversy included a pamphlet, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, and his follow-up film Intolerance (1916). In each case, however, he ignores the charges of Birth's racism and simply defends "freedom" and "tolerance" in vague ways. Intolerance argues against religious and class intolerance by crosscutting among stories set in four different historical eras, and it bears at best a slippery relation to the legislative "intolerance" that punctured The Birth of a Nation's success; one must not forget, too, that Birth's separatist message appears, in fact, to be a plea for intolerance. But without making apologies for Dixon or Griffith, whose film has been faulted with reinvigorating the then-moribund Klan, it should be noted that the film's release and the subsequent debates made the deep racial hatred underlying the Lost Cause myth visible to many whites for the first time.

THE LEGACIES OF THE BIRTH OF A NATION

The film's impact on film history cannot be over-stated. Its technical achievements were immediately recognized, praised, and emulated. The huge battles and historical re-creations attracted admiration for the way they were directed and for combining apparent accuracy with the pure spectacle audiences loved. The emotional impact of the most exciting and heartbreaking scenes of the film, particularly the Klan's climactic ride, were the most commented upon and admired.

But what, exactly, made the film such a breakthrough for the medium? Though the analysis is too crude, The Birth of a Nation's major contributions to film form might be divided into three categories: framing, crosscutting, and associational editing. Framing refers to the distance of camera from subject as well as the composition of elements within the frame. Griffith knew better than any of his contemporaries how to punctuate shots that established settings and portrayed character interactions with close-up shots of reactions and significant objects. Though Griffith did not invent close-ups or point-of-view shots as he claimed in his 1913 advertisement, he intensified their narrative power in The Birth of a Nation by using them to invite spectator identification with the plights of characters, as when Flora and Elsie reach the heights of their distress.

Crosscutting, or what Griffith called "switchbacks" (after the switches that shuttled railroad engines from one track to another), alternates between shots of two or more simultaneous actions that depend on each other for dramatic tension. Griffith had used crosscutting to exacerbate tension in races to the rescue many times before, notably in domestic melodramas like The Lonely Villa (1909). But nothing yet filmed could compare, in suspenseful tension or emotional impact, to the double race to the rescue that concluded Griffith's epic.

But Griffith's most remarkable innovation was also his most subtle, less acknowledged (and less emulated) by the film industry than his framing or crosscutting techniques: associational (or parallel) editing, in which crosscuts produce conceptual parallels that in turn generate themes or develop characterizations. The introduction of the Camerons and the Stonemans in the opening scene, for example, implicitly compares them as representative families of the South and the North. But it also allows the viewer to view the children from both families as collectively sympathetic and loving figures, and it underscores the contrast between the stereotypical villainy of the northern father and the goodness of the kindly southern patriarch.

The film's undeniable dramatic power stems just as crucially from the identification with the protagonists that Griffith so carefully cultivates in his viewers. Critics universally hailed the subtle, emotional performances of the white principals, especially Mae Marsh as the Little Sister, Lillian Gish as Elsie, and Henry B. Walthall as Ben. While the performances may seem exaggerated and frenetic in the early twenty-first century, a comparison of their acting styles with those seen in most films of the time bears out the accolades. But it should not be forgotten that the very elements that made the film such an advanced example of storytelling and characterization worked as well to elicit tremendous sympathy for the Klan and its fictionalized plight, even among white spectators noncommittal on race relations. Critics in the early twenty-first century often attempt to apologize for the film's racism by claiming that Part One represents Griffith's "true" talent for complex, epic storytelling untainted by racism, and writing off Part Two as an unfortunate footnote to Griffith's genius. Other apologists distinguish between the film's form and its content and dismiss its content altogether, in order to praise its formal innovation for proving the artistic mettle of the motion picture. Ironically, each of these defenses slights Griffith's skill as a formalist who made every component of the film function dynamically within the whole. From the introduction of Stoneman's physical and sexual "weaknesses" and the subtle use of close-ups to parallel the white cotton plant with the face of a beautiful but distant white woman (Elsie) as objects to treasure and protect through Ben's anticlimactic fall in battle and the assassination of Lincoln, Part One's unresolved situations all turn on a sense of perpetual injustice done to the Cameron men and their "property," both material and sexual. Multiple viewings of the film make it difficult to imagine Griffith resolving these issues in any way but to punish, violently, his stock-melodrama villains for disempowering the Little Colonel—and then to restore to southern white men their antebellum mastery.

Griffith was, in fact, ahead of his time in technical achievement but squarely with the majority of filmmakers and audiences and indeed even a bit behind both in his sense of the exigencies of both drama and social progress. Not only does Griffith humanize separatism and racism, but he also makes baldly clear that in order to operate effectively, high melodrama must have its Other, a cartoonish enemy that embodies what film producers and the audiences they court profess to hate. Crosscutting, while colorblind in itself, caught white audiences up in Griffith and Dixon's race-baiting by taking their breath away, emphasizing narrative suspense, and dangling its resolution before rapt spectators—at the expense of logic, historical accuracy, or any concern over what might historically have motivated the Others so caricatured here to desire racial equality.

Those who would have been so concerned, of course, were primarily black viewers. While the film invites all white Americans to identify with an idealized nation that could only be unified by hatred for a mutual enemy, its message to black Americans was equally universal and equally clear: this thrilling experience of storytelling, this medium, indeed this nation, is not for you. At the very moment that film seemed to many to have fulfilled its potential as a populist entertainment, The Birth of a Nation actually underscored the cinema's exclusivity—the narrowness and privilege of the "universal" audience it defined for itself. Recognizing the importance of both Griffith and his epic in the history of American cinema means recognizing the mythological character of the Civil War in the national memory and indeed the ability of the cinema to produce national mythologies—to link viewers to otherwise repugnant ideologies through identification with both characters and other viewers in the same theater who also experience the mythology in the form of a pleasurable narrative. Rather than shy away from it or deny its importance or power, one might better return to The Birth of a Nation often, as a reminder of how the cinema has come to stand for "national memory" and of the ambiguous consequences of its position as such.

See alsoKu Klux Klan; Motion Pictures; The New South; Reconstruction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Griffith, D. W. "Five-Dollar 'Movies' Prophesied." Editor, 24 April 1915. Reprinted in Harry M. Geduld, ed., Focus on D. W. Griffith, p. 25. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Griffith, D. W. "Reply to The New York Globe." New YorkGlobe, 10 April 1915. Reprinted in Fred Silva, ed., Focus on "The Birth of a Nation," pp. 77–79. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Griffith, D. W., director. The Birth of a Nation. Performers Henry Walthall, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, Ralph Lewis, and George Siegmann; director of photography G. W. "Billy" Bitzer; edited by D. W. Griffith with Joseph Henabery and Raoul Walsh. Epoch Producing Company, 1915.

Griffith, D. W., director. His Trust/His Trust Fulfilled. Performers Wilfred Lucas, Dell Henderson, Claire McDowell, Edith Haldeman, and Linda Arvidson. Biograph, 1911.

Secondary Works

Allen, Michael. Family Secrets: The Feature Films of D. W.Griffith. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

Barry, Iris, and Eileen Bowser. D. W. Griffith: AmericanFilm Master. New York and Garden City, N.Y.: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1965.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd ed. New York and London: Norton, 1996.

Geduld, Harry M., ed. Focus on D. W. Griffith. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of AmericanNarrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Lang, Robert, ed. "The Birth of a Nation," D. W. Griffith,Director. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Rogin, Michael. "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation." In "The Birth of a Nation," D. W. Griffith, Director, edited by Robert Lang, pp. 250–293. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Schickel, Richard. D. W. Griffith: An American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Silva, Fred, ed. Focus on "The Birth of a Nation." Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Paul Young