The Birth of a Nation

views updated

The Birth of a Nation

D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent-film epic The Birth of a Nation remained as controversial at the end of the twentieth century as at the beginning, largely because of its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and of white ascendancy in the defeated South during the Reconstruction period following the American Civil War. Galvanized by the film's depiction of the newly freed slaves as brutal and ignorant, civil-rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) picketed the film in many cities when it was released and protested again when the Library of Congress added the classic to the National Film Registry in 1992 (though a year later the Library excluded the film from an exhibit of 54 early film works). Still, The Birth of a Nation is highly regarded as a cinematographic triumph, a benchmark that helped define film syntax for future directors in a newly emerging genre. The ambiguous legacy of this film was capsulized by a New York Times reporter who wrote (Apr. 27, 1994): "Like an orator who says all the wrong things brilliantly … [it] manages to thrill and appall at the same time." Few of its most ardent critics deny credit to Griffith for having achieved a work of technical brilliance. Film historian Lewis Jacobs argued in The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History, that The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, a sequel, released by Griffith in 1916, are "high points in the history of the American movie" that "far surpassed other native films in structure, imaginative power, and depth of content … They foreshadowed the best that was to come in cinema technique, earned for the screen its right to the status of an art, and demonstrated with finality that the movie was one of the most potent social agencies in America."

The iconic status of The Birth of a Nation is based on several factors. It was heavily promoted and advertised nationwide, making it the prototype of the modern "blockbuster." In a nickelodeon era, it was the first to break the $2-per-ticket barrier, proving that mass audiences could be attracted to serious films that were more than novelty entertainments or melodramas. It was the first film shown in the White House, after which President Woodrow Wilson reputedly said, "It is like writing history with lightning." In addition to establishing D. W. Griffith as America's most important filmmaker, The Birth of a Nation also helped to propel the career of Lillian Gish, a 21-year-old actress who, with her sister Dorothy, had appeared in some of Griffith's earlier films. Most importantly, it was a groundbreaking production that set the standard for cinematography and the basic syntax of feature films. Although, in the 1960s, revisionist critics like Andrew Sarris speculated that Griffith's technical sophistication had been overrated, The Birth of a Nation is still revered for its pioneering use of creative camera angles and movement to create a sense of dramatic intensity, and the innovative use of closeups, transitions, and panoramic shots, "all fused by brilliant cutting," in the words of Lewis Jacobs. Even the protests engendered by the film helped Americans find their bearings in the first signifi-cant cultural wars involving artistic creativity, censorship, and identity politics in the age of the new mass media.

The Birth of a Nation was based on Thomas Dixon, Jr.,'s 1905 drama The Clansman, which had already been adapted into a popular play that had toured American theaters. Screenwriter Frank Woods, who had prepared the scenario for Kinemacolor's earlier, abortive attempt to bring Dixon's work to the screen, convinced Griffith to take on the project. "I hoped at once it could be done," Griffith said, "for the story of the South had been absorbed into the very fiber of my being." Griffith also added material from The Leopard's Spots, another of Dixon's books that painted a negative picture of Southern blacks during the Reconstruction era. In a 1969 memoir, Lillian Gish recalled that Griffith had optioned The Clansman for $2500 and offered the author a 25 percent interest in the picture, which made Dixon a multimillionaire. She quoted Griffith as telling the cast that "I'm going to use [The Clansman ] to tell the truth about the War between the States. It hasn't been told accurately in history books." When the film was being shot at a lot on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the first-time-ever use of artificial lighting to illuminate battle scenes shot at night led to public fears that southern California was under enemy attack from the sea.

Although some scenes depicted the early arrival of slaves in America, the decades of the 1860s and 1870s—Civil War and Reconstruction—constitute the historical timeframe of The Birth of a Nation. The film includes enactments of several historical scenes, such as Sherman's march to the sea, the surrender at Appomattox, and the assassination of Lincoln, but the narrative focuses almost exclusively on the saga of two white dynasties, the Stonemans from the North and the Camerons from the South, interlinked by romantic attachments between the younger generations of the two families. An early scene depicts the Cameron plantation in South Carolina as an idyllic estate with benevolent white masters and happy slaves coexisting in mutual harmony until undermined by abolitionists, Union troops, and Yankee carpetbaggers. After the war, Austin Stoneman, the family patriarch, dispatches a friend of mixed-race, Silas Lynch, to abet the empowerment of ex-slaves by encouraging them to vote and run for public office in the former Confederacy. A horrified Ben Cameron organizes the Ku Klux Klan as an engine of white resistance. The film's unflattering depiction of uncouth African American legislators and of Lynch's attempt to coax Elsie Stoneman into a mixed-race marriage fueled much controversy over the years for reinforcing stereotypes about Negro men vis-á-vis the "flower of Southern womanhood." To create dramatic tension, Griffith juxtaposed images of domestic bliss with unruly black mobs and used alternating close-up and panoramic scenes to give a sense of movement and to facilitate the emotional unfolding of the narrative. During a climactic scene in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of the Cameron patriarch from his militant black captors, a title reads: "The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright." Bowing to protests, Griffith excised some of the more graphic scenes of anti-white violence before the film's premiere, and also added an epilogue, now lost, favorably portraying the Hampton Institute, a prominent black school in Virginia. Interviewed by his biographer, Barnet Bravermann in 1941, D. W. Griffith thought that The Birth of a Nation should, "in its present form be withheld from public exhibition" and shown only to film professionals and students. Griffith said "If The Birth of a Nation were done again, it would have to be made much clearer."

The title of the film remained The Clansman until a month before its premiere, and was altered to its familiar title upon Dixon's own enthusiastic recommendation. Both Griffith and Dixon defended their work against an avalanche of censorship threats, as in a letter by Dixon to the Boston Journal (April 26, 1915), in which he wrote "This play was not written to stir race hatred. It is the faithful record of the life of fifty years ago. It is no reflection on the cultured, decent negro of today. In it are sketched good negroes and bad negroes, good whites and bad whites." Griffith also ardently defended his viewpoint, as in a letter to the New York Globe (April 10, 1915) in which he criticized "pro-intermarriage" groups like the NAACP for trying "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."

The Birth of a Nation had its premiere at New York City's Liberty Theater on March 3, 1915, to critical and popular acclaim, though the NAACP and other groups organized major protests and violence broke out in Boston and other cities. Booker T. Washington refused to let Griffith make a film about his Tuskegee Institute because he did not want to be associated with the makers of a "hurtful, vicious play." W. E. B. Du Bois adopted a more proactive stance, urging members of his race to create films and works of art that would depict its own history in a positive light. But response in the mainstream press was generally favorable. Critic Mark Vance boasted in the March 12 issue of Variety how a film "laid, played, and made in America" marked "a great epoch in picturemaking" that would have universal appeal. Reviews in the southern papers were predictably partisan. A critic for the Atlanta Journal, Ward Greene, obviously inspired by scenes of triumphant Klan riders, crowed that Griffith's film "is the awakener of every feeling … Loathing, disgust, hate envelope you, hot blood cries for vengeance … [you are] mellowed into a deeper and purer understanding of the fires through which your forefathers battled to make this South of yours a nation reborn!" Over the years, The Birth of a Nation was used as a propaganda film both by the film's supporters and detractors. Film historian John Hope Franklin remarked to a 1994 Library of Congress panel discussion that the film was used by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan as a recruiting device from the 1920s onward, a point supported by other historians, though disputed by Thomas Cripps, author of several scholarly works on black cinema.

Despite the continuing controversy over the depiction of interracial conflict, The Birth of a Nation remains a landmark film in the history of world cinema and its director an important pioneer in the film medium. Writer James Agee, in a rhapsodic defense of Griffith, wrote of him in a 1971 essay: "He achieved what no other known man has ever achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel…." The Birth of a Nation, continued Agee, was a collection of "tremendous magical images" that equaled "Brady's photographs, Lincoln's speeches, and Whitman's war poems" in evoking a true and dramatic representation of the Civil War era.

—Edward Moran