The Birth of a Nation
In January, 2000, the National Society of Film Critics issued a blistering statement of protest that “deplores the rash decision” made by the Directors Guild of America’s National Board a month before to retire the name of its highest (lifetime achievement) honor, the D.W. Griffith Memorial Award, citing as their reason the racist stigma attached to Griffith’s 1915 Civil War landmark, The Birth of A Nation (available on DVD), the second half of which depicts sympathetically the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The Film Critics went on: “The recasting of this honor, which had been awarded appropriately in D.W. Griffith’s name since 1953, is a depressing example of ‘political correctness’ as an erasure, and rewriting, of American film history, causing a grave disservice to the reputation of a pioneering American filmmaker...The DGA’s national board might spend its time on more significant business: as a watchdog pressuring the industry to improve on its shameful record of employment of minority filmmakers.” In other words, the racist aspects for which Griffith’s name was being removed perhaps still prevailed in current industry hiring practices.
And, of course, not only American film history was being rewritten, but American history itself. Certainly it was not the fault of The Birth of A Nation that it took another nearly fifty years for the civil rights movement to start making big differences. Griffith was being used as scapegoat not only for an industry but for the country as well. Remember, in 1915, the First World War having just begun, women—-black or white—-still didn’t have the right to vote. Do we no longer revere Washington or Jefferson because they kept slaves? In his brilliant documentary on the black heavyweight Jack Johnson of the 1910s, Unforgivable Blackness, Ken Burns quotes lengthy, virulently racist passages from such contemporary newspapers as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. As Robert Graves has pointed out, it is impossible not to be a part of your times, even if you are against them.
When The Birth of A Nation opened—-an independent film, the world’s first $2.00 screen attraction, the first three-hour epic and, in terms of attendance, the most successful movie ever made—-it was immediately greeted with a storm of controversy, considered by some white liberal and black groups as “a flagrant incitement to racial antagonism,” authorities being urged in several states to ban its exhibition.
Griffith was deeply shaken by the accusations of prejudice. Being a Kentucky Southerner, born only a decade after the end of the Civil War, he had learned his slanted history from members of his own family, reduced to poverty by conditions during the Reconstruction, acknowledged by all historians as an extremely turbulent and tragic era for the South. As an answer to the outcry against The Birth of A Nation, Griffith put all the money he had earned into his next picture, a $2.5 million colossus (an unheard of cost for its time), Intolerance (1916), charting the course of prejudice through four ages of history from Babylonian times to the present. Though certainly very influential to filmmakers, Intolerance was not a success, and while Griffith still would have several more box-office hits, he actually never recovered his own financial equilibrium.
Despite every valid attack on the biased history presented by The Birth of A Nation, there also can be no denying the unsurpassed artistic impact it had on virtually all subsequent pictures. It was the first film ever screened at the White House; after seeing it President Wilson said, “It is like writing history with lightning.” Nevertheless, D.W. Griffith’s career neither began nor ended with this one notorious movie. In the seven years preceding, he made over 450 short films, which formed not only the essential alphabet, vocabulary and grammar of moviemaking, but were acknowledged as state of the art before there was an art; introducing a new, more intimate, acting style, bringing numerous stars to pictures, from Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish to Mae Marsh and Richard Barthelmess.
Of the almost thirty features he made after The Birth of A Nation, there are several humanist masterworks such as Hearts of the World, Broken Blossoms (an interracial love story), True Heart Susie, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm. When I asked the great filmmaking pioneer Allan Dwan how he had learned to direct, he said he went to see Griffith’s movies and just tried to do what Griffith did. Nearly everyone did that. John Ford is unthinkable without Griffith, of course, but so is Hitchcock. Orson Welles told a Spanish critic who was starting a film magazine that the most appropriate name for a definitive publication on cinema would be Griffith, and that’s what it became.
Since movie directing really begins with D.W. Griffith, the choice of his name for a director’s lifetime achievement award was not only apt but inevitable. The removal of his name, though addressing belatedly both a personal and a national sin, diminishes the artistic heritage of the prize. To see The Birth of A Nation today—-much of which remains remarkably affecting, like the battle sequences, the murder of Lincoln, the homecoming of the Southern colonel—-is all the better to witness afresh the terrible divisions that ravaged the country in the worst war of its history---at a toll of 600,000 deaths---the aftermath of which plagues us still. We can see as well how far we had to go, how far we have come, and how much farther we have yet to travel.
15 Comments
FDWG | October 10, 2011 7:59 AM
"Certainly it was not the fault of The Birth of A Nation that it took another nearly fifty years for the civil rights movement to start making big differences."
Oh, really? Because The Birth of a Nation led to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which absolutely hindered the freedom struggle.
Lisa Davis | May 12, 2011 9:35 AM
I like Griffith very much.
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M.T. Fisher | May 6, 2011 8:47 AM
Godfrey - Interesting post.
Peter - I think BOAN is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever. Take a look at the battle scenes and compare them to the CGI trash we have today. Griffith was indeed a master storyteller, and is sorely missed. He wasn't perfect in what he did, but who is? Any film maker who says they haven't picked something up from his work lies.
Steve Lanigan | May 3, 2011 4:10 AM
Very dispiriting. I suppose next on the politically correct list will be the banning of any future screenings of Fritz Lang`s M, or Metropolis, due to the fact that Thea Von Harbou went over to the Nazis.
Speaking of Nazis, It feels like it will only be a matter of time before the spectre of (politically incorrect) book burning rears it`s head again. As for me, I`m going to do my bit by never enjoying the sight of a Caravaggio painting ever again - he was a murderer, after all.
Bruce Lawton | April 28, 2011 12:26 PM
Thank you for putting so eloquently why Mr. Griffith should not continually be remembered and judged solely for The BOAN. Like the recent misstep to censor 'Huck Finn' - the current vogue for blind political correctness should not relegate the considerable accomplishments of "the Father of Film" to the dust bin of history.
A few years back I stumbled upon an online petition to restore Mr. Griffith's name to the DGA award. At the time, I informed Kevin Brownlow and a number of others of it's existence. Here is the link:
http://www.petitiononline.com/dwaward/petition.html
Gene Zonarich | April 28, 2011 5:23 AM
Mr. Bogdanovich, and Commenters, I'm glad to read that others have similar opinions about this atrocious act by the Guild. I recently posted an essay on this issue, and other related facets of it. It may have been a bit overheated, and it disturbed some people, but it expresses my true feelings on Griffith and racism, and was written after the broadcast earlier this month of "Birth" on TCM:
http://violdam6.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/griffith-racism-tcm-and-the-myth-of-classic-movies/
Dugansmith | April 27, 2011 12:57 PM
Well if you want to talk racist films how about "Transformers Revenge of the Fallen" with it's clearly racist caricatures.
PB | April 26, 2011 1:26 AM
All your comments have been very interesting and illuminating, in particular
Godfrey's fascinating report. (And I admire your film work.)
JeanRobie | April 25, 2011 5:40 AM
A lot of scholars doubt that Woodrow Wilson really said that thing about "history written by lightening," by the way.
Elas Nahmias | April 25, 2011 2:24 AM
If you think about it, Griffith is the most important American artist with Edgar Poe.
Christopher Stilley | April 22, 2011 4:26 AM
..another brilliant decision from the politically correct of who can never seem untangle themselves from their contradictions...Got me to thinking of the line delivered by Mandy Patinkin as Alfred de Musset in IMPROMPTU ."Art does NOT apologize"
David Ehrenstein | April 22, 2011 3:19 AM
The success of "The Birth of A Nation' revived the then-failing fortunes of the Ku Klux Klan. It is therefore the celluloid equivalent of a noose. I greatl admire Mr Cheshire's documentary "Moving Midway," which conerns his family's planation house and its history, and deals with American racism in a far more thorough and complex way than any number of films I could mention.
No surprise that those black student wanted "The Birth of a Nation" shown, Mr. Cheshire. Way to "shove it down their throats."
The only truly honest commercial film about American racism is "Mandingo."
Godfrey Cheshire | April 22, 2011 1:54 AM
Hello and great post, Peter.
When I taught a course in the History of Film at the University of North Carolina a few years ago, The Birth of a Nation was naturally the first feature I screened. I was interested in what the reaction of contemporary undergraduates would be, and the first thing I noticed was they were riveted; they seemed to sit unusually still for the whole three hours. It's amazing to see a film from 1915 still able to transfix an audience -- a young one no less -- like that.
I later asked if they thought the film should be shown, given its extreme racism. It was interesting to me that while some white students were obviously made very uncomfortable by the film and said maybe it shouldn't be shown, black students insisted, much to the contrary, that it SHOULD be seen, as widely as possible, not just due to its artistic brilliance and historic importance, but as a great object lesson on the racism that still undergirds American society.
I think of that reaction whenever I contemplate that DGA decision, which was so transparently and shamefully an effort on the part of WHITE filmmakers to (literally) whitewash their own history. As a member of the National Society of Film Critics, I still wish the DGA would reverse that decision and, in doing so, sponsor annual discussions on the continuing problem of racism in the American film industry, in terms of hiring, content and institutional culture.
Incidentally, I recently received Kino-Lorber's second Griffith box set and am especially looking forward to seeing Kevin Brownlow's Griffith doc.
PB | April 21, 2011 9:22 AM
MM---you said it very well---and your examples are choice. Thanks so much
for your thoughts.
Mythical Monkey | April 21, 2011 3:10 AM
It's a pity that the undeniably racist content of The Birth of a Nation has overshadowed everything else D.W. Griffith has ever done. Because he really was the pivotal figure in terms of turning movies from a novelty into an art form.
I've been watching a lot of very old silent movies recently, starting with Le Prince and working forward. It's a great way to learn both the history of movies and also something about film technique. Each time a director adds to film's vocabulary, it tends to jump off the screen. And I have to say, during the first thirty years of film history, it's Griffith's work that jumps off the screen most often. At a time when most everybody else was using a static camera to passively capture whatever action was taking place in front of it, Griffith was routinely using camera movement and editing to shape his audience's emotional response to the story.
For example, at the beginning of 1909's The Country Doctor, the camera pans across a valley to a house where the doctor, his wife and their child are already emerging from the front door to walk straight toward the camera, which by itself was more sophisticated technically than anything I'd seen in the twenty years of film that proceeded it. But when Griffith reverses the same shot at the end, to pan from the now empty house where the child has just died back across the valley where you know nothing is ever going to be the same, it's heartbreaking, maybe the first time a director had broken his audience's heart.
And it wasn't just a one-time thing. He advanced the ball over and over again in those Biograph shorts -- the intercutting between three points-of-view in The Lonely Villa, the compositions in A Corner in Wheat, the classical continuity editing in Judith of Bethulia ...
Would somebody else have eventually stumbled across the same techniques? Well, maybe. But Griffith figured out how to tell stories at a moment when the long-term commercial viability of cinema was still in question. The Lumiere brothers had bailed, Reynaud had thrown his camera into the Seine, Melies was about to go bankrupt and Edison would soon sell his studio, all because they couldn't make movies work financially. Sure, movies had a guaranteed short-term novelty appeal, but so did the hula hoop. There's no guarantee they would have been around long enough for someone else to figure out the things Griffith did.
Once Griffith taught the world how to tell stories -- and once The Birth of a Nation did blockbuster business at the box office -- nobody questioned the long-term appeal of movies ever again. And he inspired a generation of filmmakers such as Chaplin, Ford, Hitchcock and Welles to make their own movies, the men who basically defined what we think of as the movies.
Maybe that's not everything, but, boy, it sure is enough.