D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Read online

  According to Roy E. Aitken, who helped finance it, The Birth of a Nation is indeed “the most controversial motion picture of all time.”16 On the face of it, this seems as outrageous a claim as any of those made by Birth’s publicists in selling their movie. Since the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s, many films have caused controversy. “From white slavery films through films noir to adult art films like Last Tango in Paris,” writes Matthew Bernstein, “movies have provoked multiple interpretations and concerned criticism.”17 In the United States, until the early 1930s, most criticism of home-produced films tended to focus on depictions of sexuality (for instance, She Done Him Wrong, 1933) or crime (including Scarface, 1932). Occasionally, particular groups in society would be agitated by certain movies, in the way that Jewish Americans were angered by what they saw as the anti-Semitism of Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927).18 But with the arrival of the Production Code Administration in 1934, more effective self-regulation of Hollywood’s output reduced the number of films that would stir up controversy. A number still remained, however, that provoked the ire of the Catholic Legion of Decency (founded in 1933) and other mainly religious bodies.

  The disappearance both of the Production Code and the Legion of Decency in the late 1960s was followed by increasing criticism of—and protests against—certain films or types of films. As Charles Lyons has observed, this was inspired in part by a widespread dislike of movie violence and, in some cases, by the belief that films such as The Warriors (1979), The Program (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Money Train (1995) had inspired instances of imitative violence. Other protests were launched by special interest groups and reflected the various “cultural wars” that occurred in the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century. Feminists demonstrated against films depicting violence against women, including Snuff (1977) and Dressed to Kill (1980).19 Gays and lesbians increasingly launched protests at films portraying homosexuals “as psychotic and lonely individuals”: their targets included Windows (1980), American Gigolo (1980), and Basic Instinct (1992). Ethnic and racial groups carried on the tradition of protest launched by the critics of The Birth of a Nation: films targeted in this way included The Godfather (1972), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1979–80), Midnight Express (1981), Scarface (1983), and Year of the Dragon (1985).20 Religious groups picked up the torch that had been laid down by the Legion of Decency and criticized such films as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1980), Jean-Luc Godard’s Je Vous Salue Marie (Hail Mary, 1985), and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Angry attacks on the last of these, in fact, began several years before its actual release and culminated in the storming of Universal Studios in Los Angeles by an ecumenical alliance of 25,000 Roman Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists.21

  There were also, of course, movies made in other countries that created huge controversy on their release. In Europe at times the problem was political: Jean Renoir’s La Régle du jeu (1939) was criticized as too sympathetic to the left and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) as too favorable to the (Nazi) right. In India, the highly successful indigenous movie industry has created controversy from time to time in producing films about mixed Hindu/Muslim relationships (Dharamputra, 1961; Bounty, 1995; Zakham, 1999) or ones that have emphasized sexual themes (Fire, 1997; Bawandar, 2001).22 Sex and violence, indeed, either individually or combined together, are the most reliable indicators of why films become controversial. A list of the twenty-five “most controversial films of all time” currently to be found on a commercial website includes one movie that has prompted considerable debate and condemnation over its depiction of the Kennedy assassination (JFK, 1991), three that have been heavily criticized on religious grounds (Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ, 2004)—and The Birth of a Nation. The rest are on the list because of their treatment of sex or violence—or both.23

  In The Birth of a Nation, sex is implicit rather than overt while the violence is omnipresent if, by today’s standards, unrealistic (the shots of battle-field corpses are the major exception to this since they still convey very well the bloody effects of war). What effectively justifies Aitken’s description of the film as the most controversial of all time is neither of these things. It is the depth of the film’s racism and the fact that, far from ending in the aftermath of its initial release, protests against Birth of a Nation’s racism would continue until the present day. Many other films have encountered disapproval and protest on their initial release; none but Birth has caused as much controversy over so long a period. According to one study, the period from 1915 to 1973 alone saw the film involved in at least 120 censorship controversies. During these years, there were at least fourteen attempts to pass legislation—whether at city, state, or federal level—that related directly to it and at least eight new censorship boards were specifically designed to act against it.24

  Since it apotheosized the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction period, Birth would become closely linked with the new Klan founded by “Colonel” William Simmons in 1915. As the Klan rose and fell in the 1920s, the film functioned as a propaganda and recruitment film. (It would continue to be screened to Klan audiences at least until the 1970s.) By the 1930s, however, argument and protest over the film were starting to develop in new directions. Social scientists argued, as part of the Payne Fund Studies, that The Birth of a Nation showed how great an impact films could have in encouraging audiences’ racism. Subsequently, Janet Staiger has drawn attention to the ways in which the film came to symbolize divisions on the American left during the 1930s and early ’40s.25 The Birth of a Nation was made to look even more racist by the experiences of the Second World War (its invocation of an “Aryan heritage” at one point in its narrative acquired different associations after Hitler and the Nazis).

  One factor that helped keep the protests against the film alive was the ever-present possibility that it might be reissued in a different format (a synchronized “sound” version was released in 1930) or that it would be remade. Even David O. Selznick, a few months before he bought the rights to film Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind, appears to have briefly considered the notion of such a remake. One attempt that appeared to have a good chance of success was made in 1954, when a syndicate formed by financier Ted Thal began to put together the financing for such a movie. After a storm of criticism and adverse publicity, however, the deal fell apart. The idea of such a remake in 1954, the same year in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally—in Brown v. Board of Education—began to move toward the desegregation of American schools, is more than a little ironic.

  Protests at planned screenings of the film continued. In 1972, a performance at the University of Wisconsin was canceled at the last moment. In March 1978, a showing at the Municipal Museum in Riverside, California—the town in which the film had enjoyed its first previews in 1915—had to be abandoned.26 In August 1978, violence erupted in Oxnard, California, when the local Klan tried to show Birth of a Nation; a communist group, the Progressive Labor Party, demonstrated against the screening, and black and Mexican American organizations became caught up in the conflict. In July 1979, the extreme right once again battled the extreme left over Birth at China Grove, North Carolina. Members of the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) mounted a demonstration outside a local community center where the film was scheduled to be shown to a group of Klansmen. The showing was canceled, and during a brief shoving match between the two sides, the CWP grabbed a Confederate flag from the Klansmen and burned it. Just over three months later, on November 3, Klansmen and Nazis avenged themselves by attacking a CWP rally in a mainly black area of Greensboro. In what would became known as the “Greensboro Massacre,” they deliberately shot down several leaders of the CWP: five were killed and one seriously wounded. Though the incident was filmed by several cameramen, all those accused of the crimes were acquitted by an all-white jury. While they were on trial, an attempt to show The Birth of
a Nation at the nearby University of North Carolina was called off when black students demonstrated against it.27

  In more recent times, controversy surrounding the film has shown no sign of abating. A planned showing at Brown University in 1989 was called off after local protests. In 1992, when riots broke out in Los Angeles after the acquittal of members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for their beating of African American Rodney King, Matthew McDaniel shot a video documentary on the rioting and gave it the ironic title Birth of a Nation: 4*29*1992.28 Later in 1992, when an eighteen-member film board added Griffith’s original movie to the Library of Congress’s National Registry of Film, black organizations protested. “To honor this film,” argued NAACP chair Dr. William Gibson, “is to pay tribute to America’s shameful racial history.”29 In 1994, when it was rereleased on video in Britain, the British Film and Video Council decreed that it could be shown only with a 600-word disclaimer emphasizing the movie’s racism.30 In 1995, during the trial of O. J. Simpson, the Turner Classic Movie Channel decided at the last moment to withdraw it from the television schedule lest it provoke racial violence or incidents. In 1998, when the American Film Institute listed Birth as one of its “100 best films of all time,” the response—declared Jill Jordan Sieder—was “a collective groan … [from] African Americans and film buffs … who consider this early film … the apotheosis of racist, historically haywire Southern mythology.”31

  At the end of 1999, yet another dispute over Birth of a Nation erupted when the Directors Guild of America withdrew its prestigious D. W. Griffith award for lifetime achievement since Griffith—although a “brilliant pioneer filmmaker”—had also “helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes.” Critics of the decision argued that it was unfair to judge Griffith simply on the basis of The Birth of a Nation and that persecuting him for his politically incorrect views was quasi-McCarthyite (one correspondent suggested that to be politically correct, the Guild should name its award after a woman—he facetiously suggested Leni Riefenstahl). Another pro-Griffith correspondent went so far as to argue (apparently with no sense of irony) that by forcing American society to confront racial issues it had otherwise ignored, Birth was “a pioneering factor” in what would later become the civil rights movement!32 In contrast, those who supported the Guild’s action pointed out that Griffith himself was undeniably racist, that an African American director would find it very difficult to accept an award named after him, and that retiring the award would—rightly—change the standard by which a future director’s work would be honored.33

  As might be expected of a movie that is so controversial—and at the same time so crucial in the history of American cinema—The Birth of a Nation has attracted considerable attention from film scholars.34 Pioneering studies appeared during the 1960s and ’70s dealing with the intellectual, social, and cultural influences that went into the making of the film,35 its status as a “war” movie,36 its claims to disseminate “history,”37 the film’s reception in particular localities,38 the black response to the film at the time of its first release,39 and its role in the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.40 Birth also featured prominently in Donald Bogle’s study of black representation on screen, Robert M. Henderson’s biography of Griffith, and William K. Everson’s broader study of silent film.41 The same era saw the publication of the first shot-by-shot analyses of the film—by Theodore Huff (1961) and John Cuniberti (1979)42—and Fred Silva’s collection of reviews and essays concerning it.43

  The first years of the 1980s witnessed published reflections on the film as history,44 its involvement in censorship controversies,45 and the attempt of its producers to defuse criticism by adding a short pro-black film at the end of the program.46 This period also saw the publication of a study by Martin Williams of Griffith’s work as filmmaker and a new and definitive biography of Griffith by Richard Schickel.47

  In 1985, however, Michael Rogin published a seminal article that began to move the debate on the film in new directions. “American movies,” Rogin argued, “were born … in a racist epic.” Unlike many previous scholars, who had preferred to separate the aesthetic form of the film from its racist content, Rogin insisted on exploring the meaning of the latter by analyzing Birth in its social, political, and cultural context.48 His argument that Griffith’s film should be held to account for its racism was echoed in 1991 by Clyde Taylor, who practically blamed the entire discipline of film studies for failing to recognize that by separating Birth’s aesthetics from its racism it had effectively colluded in the perpetuation of white racial supremacy.49 In 1993, in a broader study of Griffith’s films, Scott Simmon emphasized Birth of a Nation’s fall from grace in the decades since its first release: it had changed over time “into one of the ugliest artifacts of American popular art”—an artifact, moreover, that now failed audiences “on every ethical, emotional, and perhaps even artistic level.”50 In subsequent years, scholars began to analyze The Birth of a Nation to lay bare the techniques and mechanisms through which the structures of the film promoted racism. Richard Dyer, in an essay published in 1996, drew attention to the manner in which lighting was used to accentuate the “whiteness” of the principal white female characters.51 In 2000, Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner wrote of the way in which the original musical score of the film by Joseph Carl Breil greeted the appearance and reappearance of crowds of supposedly primitive blacks by using a theme labeled “The Motif of Barbarism.”52 Also in 2000, Vincent F. Rocchio examined sequences in the film that by showing “the black inability to interact competently with modern Western culture” constructed blackness as synonymous with being “naturally uncivilized.”53

  Rogin’s landmark article of 1985, with its analysis of various melodramatic tropes in Griffith’s film, also foreshadowed an increasing interest in Birth of a Nation as melodrama. James Chandler, in a work first published in 1990, traced back the melodramatic lineage of Birth to the fiction of Sir Walter Scott.54 In an essay of 1996, Jane Gaines compared the melodramatic narrative and structure of The Birth of a Nation with those of Within Our Gates, a newly rediscovered movie by black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.55 In Playing the Race Card (2001), Linda Williams argued that in Birth Griffith succeeded in blending the appeal of the “Tom” tradition (based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antebellum novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the plays that came to be based on it) with Thomas Dixon’s racial melodrama of the post–Civil War period. In 2005, Susan Courtney examined the gender politics underlying the film’s preoccupation with what she termed “American cinema’s primal fantasy of miscegenation.”56

  The last few years have seen further studies of the film’s reception. In an article published in 1987, John Inscoe compared North Carolinian responses to the stage-play The Clansman with those to The Birth of a Nation a few years later, noting that criticism of the play did not translate for the most part into criticism of the film. In 1992, Janet Staiger compared debates over Birth between critics and defenders of the film at the time of its first release with those that broke out among American left-wingers in the late 1930s and early ’40s. In a highly original study of the politics of protest (and censorship) relating to Birth of a Nation, Jane Gaines noted that “there is the distinct possibility that the film was banned in many towns not because of its ideological message but because of general white distaste for and paranoia about anything black.” In Returning the Gaze (2001), Anna Everett analyzed some of the intellectual difficulties and ambivalences in the response by black film critics to the film’s first release.57

  Recent scholarship on Birth of a Nation has also examined the film from a number of other perspectives. Russell Merritt revisited Birth in an essay of 1990 in which he argued, on the basis of a formal reading of one major scene, that Griffith’s film at times becomes open to a range of readings. These “spasmodic outbursts of uncontrollability,” he concluded, helped keep Birth “such a resilient text that defies the banalities and offenses of its source material.” In 1994, Robert Lang edited a volume that
together with his own excellent introduction to the film, brought together a continuity script, articles, and reviews from the time of Birth’s first release; a selection of scholarly articles (including the above-mentioned articles or chapters by Staiger, White, Chandler, and Rogin); and a Griffith filmography. In 2001, Bruce Chadwick devoted three chapters of his book about the representation of the American Civil War on film to Birth of a Nation. In 2003, Kris Jozajtis argued that the basis of Birth’s appeal to 1915 audiences had not been the film’s endorsement of white supremacy so much as a series of religious images that attempted “to revitalize the traditions of Protestant America via the modern technology of film.” In 2004, Paolo Cherchi Usai edited a volume on Griffith’s films of 1914–15 that included a series of short essays on Birth of a Nation by Griffith scholars Eileen Bowser, Charlie Keil, Joyce Jesionowski, David Mayer, Philip C. Carli, J. B. Kaufman, and Linda Williams.58

  Clearly, there is already a voluminous scholarship surrounding The Birth of a Nation. Why, it might be asked, is yet another scholarly book on the film needed? There are a number of answers to this. In the first place, so much has been written about Birth that there is a considerable need for a synthesis. Second, many false myths and legends have grown up around Birth of a Nation and continue to find their way into discussions of it. Many of these had their origins in claims by the film’s publicists or D. W. Griffith himself. Joyce Jesionowksi, for example, seems to accept Griffith’s claim—a preposterous one—that 4,500 blacks were used in shooting the film.59 Others can be traced back to the unreliable testimony of self-appointed Griffith “expert” Seymour Stern. Third, most analyses of Birth have been grounded in an examination of the movie itself. Film scholars have at times seemed unaware of both historical research relating to aspects of the film’s career60 and the existence of archival materials. In reality, there are many questions about the film that can be answered only by examining manuscript sources, particularly the D. W. Griffith Papers and the papers of the film’s main organized opponent, the NAACP. Both Pierre Sorlin and Eileen Bowser, almost a quarter of a century apart, thought it impossible to unravel the details of the film’s financing.61 Yet The Birth of a Nation was distributed by a corporation, the Epoch Producing Company, which kept detailed accounts of expenditure and income, and those accounts are available for scholarly investigation.