There was no mistaking the heroes of The Birth of a Nation in the most widely used of several posters.
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The premier of D. W. Griffith’s
epic The Birth of a Nation on
February 8, 1915 was just the beginning of its vast influence for good
and mostly bad. One of the most celebrated films in cinema
history it has been lauded and reviled. On one hand the schizophrenic flick was a stunning
technical and artistic breakthrough from
America’s most accomplished director—an
epic on a scale never before seen chocked full of camera and editing
techniques that exploded the visual vocabulary of the medium, made long-form cinema viable, and raised
the ante on the low-brow comedies, turgid melodramas, and shoot ‘em ups that had dominated the silver screen. On the other hand it was proudly and avowedly racist,
romantic propaganda for night riding terrorists, and the inspiration for a resurgence of lynching and
wide-spread attacks on Black Communities like East St. Louis that year; the race
riots of 1919 in Chicago,
Washington, D.C., and elsewhere; and the destruction of the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa in 1921 and the town of Greenwood, Florida in 1925.
Fresh American racial tensions and the rise
of neo-Jim Crowism in the new Alt-Right and the empowered voice of a new
generation in the Black Lives Matter
movement have revived attention to this powerful cultural skeleton that can’t be kept in the nation’s closet.
Symbolic of that is the PBS Independent
Lens film Birth
of a Movement which premiered in 2017. The documentary chronicled:
…Boston-based African American
newspaper editor and activist William M. Trotter [who] waged a battle against
D.W. Griffith’s technically groundbreaking but notoriously Ku Klux
Klan-friendly The Birth of a Nation, unleashing a fight that still rages
today about race relations, media representation, and the power and influence
of Hollywood. Birth of a Movement, based on Dick Lehr's book The
Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights, captures
the backdrop to this prescient clash between human rights, freedom of speech,
and a changing media landscape.
D.W. Griffith, right, directs a scene as his trusty cinematographer Billy Blizer cranks the camera.
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Griffith was born the son of a Confederate officer on January 22, 1875 in rural Kentucky. His father died when he was 10 leaving the
family in poverty and costing them
the family farm. His mother’s attempt to operate a Louisville boarding house collapsed and
Griffith was force to leave school
at 15 to support the family clerking in
a dry goods store and then a bookstore. The bookstore offered an opportunity at self-education. Later, he became stage struck and signed on to one of the touring companies that came through town working his way up from walk-ons and bit parts. He also dabbled unsuccessfully as a playwright.
In 1907 he submitted a script to the
Edison Studios in New York.
Producer Edwin Porter was not
impressed with the script but gave the young actor a part in Edison’s most ambitious picture to date, Rescued
from an Eagles Nest. The next
year he landed a small part in a Biograph
film. After the company’s main director Wallace McCutcheon took
ill and was unable to work, company
co-founder Harry Marvin tapped the young man as his replacement. It was a testament
to how new the medium was and how little
regard those who ran the business had for directors and actors, who were
considered disposable and interchangeable.
After his first short, The Adventures of Dollie Griffith
churned out 47 more one and two reelers at Biograph’s assembly line. Each film was an on-the-job education and Griffith was a fast learner working with innovative camera man G. W. “Billy” Bitzer.
Griffith’s films were successful helping to establish the struggling
studio as an industry leader. He was
given his own quasi-independent
production unit.
In 1910 Griffith took the unit to
the West Coast where he shot Old
California, the first film shot in the Los Angeles development of Hollywood
Land and which first paired him with Biograph’s rising young star Lillian Gish. Griffith stayed out west enjoying the reliable sunshine and good weather for outdoor shooting frequently working with Gish.
But Griffith itched for more ambitious projects. In 1914 he pushed the reluctant studio into
allowing him to make his first feature
film—one of the first ever shot in the U.S.—the Biblical epic Judith of Bethulia
starring Blanche Sweet and
Griffith’s favorite leading man, the
diminutive Alabaman Henry B. Walthall. But it was an expensive film costing more
than $30,000 to shoot to his exacting standards. Biograph was appalled and resisted his
efforts to make more features causing him to exit the company. Still, when the film was released, it was a hit and made money.
Griffith took his entire unit and stock company first to competing Mutual Films and then formed a studio with the Majestic Studio manager Harry Aitken
which became known as Reliance-Majestic
Studios, later renamed Fine Arts
Studio. To launch his new venture,
Griffith searched for source material
with the epic historical sweep that appealed to him. What he found was Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s 1905 novel
The Clansman and the successful play that
Dixon had penned based on it.
The title page of Dixon's The Clansman in its first edition.
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The book was already famous—and both controversial and notorious for
its portrayal of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction era as the heroic
defenders of pure White womanhood
and valiant resistance to tyrannical oppression by carpet bagging Yankees and their crude and dangerous Black political
puppets. Griffith resonated with the tale with every fiber of his un-reconstructed Confederate being.
Although some claim that he was naïve about the backlash that making the film would cause, Griffith was eager to
use the property to shovel the last
spadesful of dirt onto the corpse of Black
equality. Dixon was at first
skeptical about making the film, but Griffith won him over with an offer
$10,000—a huge sum—for the rights to the
play and Dixon’s work on a film script.
It was money Griffith didn’t have
and couldn’t pay especially as production costs for the epic piled up. He had already had to borrow much of the
capital from the savings of his cinematographer
Blitzer. When he could not make good on the promised payment, he
instead offered Dixon 25% of the profits—the
first such arrangement if film
history. It turned out to be a very good
deal for Dixon when the movie became the biggest
money maker of all time, a claim it held unchallenged until the release of Gone
With the Wind in 1939. Dixon made millions from the film—far more than Griffith who owed everybody to
pay for it.
As production got underway, Griffith
and Blitzer collaborated on the innovative techniques that would thrill and captivate cinema buffs for generations including close-ups, fade-outs, and certain kinds of tracking and panning
shots. A carefully staged battle sequence made with the technical
advice of West Point instructors who
also lent Civil War era artillery pieces
and authenticated arms and uniforms employed hundreds of extras carefully staged to look like
thousands. The long form allowed the script to carefully build tension over time to a dramatic climax and the film was one of the first to mix fiction with historic scenes and personages.
In post-production tinting was used
for dramatic effect in some scenes and a score
for full orchestra was composed by Joseph
Carl Breil to be performed with screenings of the three hour epic.
In addition to stars Lillian Gish
and Henry B. Walthall as the “Little
Colonel”—the heroic Confederate officer who rallies oppressed Whites to strike against Reconstruction and uppity Negros in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan—the cast
included several notables including another major female star, Mae Murray, and future stars and character actors Wallace Reid, future
director Joseph Henabery as Abraham
Lincoln, Donald Crisp as Ulysses S. Grant, future Tarzan
Elmo Lincoln, Eugene
Pallette, directing great Raoul
Walsh as John Wilkes Booth, and western reliable Monte Blue. Blacks were sometimes portrayed by white
actors in blackface like George
Siegmann as the mulatto henchman
to a carpet bagging Yankee , Walter Long as a lusty
renegade who attacks a pure white woman, and Jennie Lee as Mammy
helping to invent an enduring cinema stereotypes.
Even as shooting and post-production was underway, intense publicity
about the upcoming epic began to stir concern and opposition,
especially from the infant National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) which had been founded only six years earlier
by W. E. B. Dubois, Ida B. Welles, Mary Ovington, Henry Moscowitz, and
others. Defiant and undaunted Griffith
push ahead with plans to unveil his film.
The NAACP objected to scenes like this where a would-be black rapist is
terrorized, The miscreant was played by white actor Walter Long in
blackface.
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The film opened at Clune’s
Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles still bearing the
title of the book and play, The
Clansman. The very name was a red
flag to Blacks and their liberal allies.
The public furor intensified, especially in Northern
cities where newspapers editorialized against it, petitions were
launched to ban it, and noisy public meetings were raising a
ruckus. The South, on the
other hand, was in rapturous anticipation of its release to their
theaters and it was hailed as vindication.
Much of the country was simply eager to see the much talked about
spectacle.
Before bringing his film east,
Griffith re-named it The Birth of a
Nation. Some saw it as an attempt to
placate critics. But Griffith stuck by
his opinions he just tried to finesse
them by claiming that the U.S. emerged from the Civil War and Reconstruction as a nation unified by a common faith in White racial superiority and the
necessity of suppressing Black animal
urges. “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense
of their Aryan birthright” a title card at the end of the picture
reads. From a public relations stand
point he reaped the box office
benefits of the original title in the South while placating the qualms of
the least aware white Northerners.
After the film's release rioting erupted in Philadelphia, Boston, and
other cities with mobs of whites attacking Black that they found on the
streets.
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The film opened in New York and other major cities
beginning on March 3 and was greeted by NAACP pickets. Major and minor riots erupted in Boston, Philadelphia, and
elsewhere, mostly attacks on protestors
and any Blacks that White mobs could
lay their hands on. A number of murders around the country of Blacks
were attributed to men who had
recently seen the film. Despite, and
probably because, of the violence and controversy record crowds thronged theaters.
And Griffith still had an ace up his sleeve. Dixon was a former college classmate of President Woodrow Wilson.
The former Princeton President,
New Jersey governor and leading Democratic
progressive was the son of a Virginia
mother with unreconstructed Confederate sympathies. As President he had already dismantled the tattered shreds of voting
rights enforcement and other protections
under the 14th Amendment
effectively driving a stake into the
heart of remnants of
Reconstruction. He had also re-segregated all Federal agencies and services. Wilson was more than happy to host a screening of The Birth of a Nation in the White
House—the first film ever shown there—and to enthusiastically tell the press it was “like writing history with
lightning.” Not only did Griffith
exploit the endorsement in his well-oiled
publicity campaign but he added a title
card to the film quoting from Wilson’s History of the American People.
A title card exploited Wilson's reported praise of the film by quoting from his History of the American People.
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Although some cities, including Chicago, did ban the film in fear of
explosive racial unrest, huge crowds in other cities more than made up for
it. And even in most of those cities,
the movie was eventually screened after the initial wave of protests subsided.
Griffith marketed the film as no
picture ever had been before. He
invented the road show. Instead of being shown in the shoe box movie houses of the era,
little more commodious and comfortable than the nickelodeons of the film
industry’s infancy he rented the leading auditoriums, legitimate theaters, opera
houses, concert halls, and vaudeville palaces in each city. Instead of plucking down a nickel
or a dime at the box office, movie goers were advised to
buy reserve tickets at up to $1 a pop. That might not seem like much today, but it
was 20 times the cost of most movie admissions. Local orchestras
had to be engaged and rehearsed in the elaborate score. Meanwhile
the city was flooded with handbills, posters, and newspaper
advertising. The local elite turned out in white tie and tails, furs and ball gowns
as if attending the opera. The working
class scrimped and saved for reduced admissions at Saturday and Sunday matinees
and showed up in their best mail-order
suits, celluloid collars and
most stylish dresses. The film ran not just for two or three
days, but for as long as the crowds kept coming—weeks in some cities.
Griffith had several units touring
the country visiting the big cities first and working their way down to smaller
burgs in the sticks. In this way it remained in circulation for
two or three years, sometimes returning for second engagements in some
towns. Afterwards it remained available
for renting for special screenings by private groups.
The cost of all of this was
enormous, but so were the profits. The film played at the Liberty Theater in New York City for 44 weeks with tickets priced
at a jaw dropping $2.20. Total revenue from the film is difficult to gauge because of the
various agreements and splits with local theater owners and sometimes state
distributors. Estimates vary
widely. Epoch picture reported to its shareholders cumulative receipts of $4.8 million for all of
1917 which would have represented about 10% of total ticket sales. By 1919
that had grown to $5.2 million in world-wide
revenue. Some estimate that first
run box office sales ran to $50 million.
And money continued to pour in.
The movie’s success changed the
whole industry. Studios shifted
production to feature films. And exhibiters began to build ever larger
and more elaborate movie palaces to
accommodate the films and the expanded audience for them, a trend only briefly interrupted by World War I. The powerful operators of theater chains
became the owners of the most
important Hollywood studios, all a
direct result of the astonishing success of The
Birth of a Nation.
The film also boosted the reputation
of cinema as art rather than as low brow novelty entertainment. Newspapers added movie critics to their stables along with those covering the
theater and fine performing arts
including reporters like Carl Sandburg in Chicago. Performers like Lilian Gish, once semi-anonymous were catapulted to the glittering status of movie
stars. Griffith himself became a lionized celebrity.
But there was a much darker side to
all of this success. On the revived
interest in the Reconstruction era night
riders William Joseph Simmons inaugurated the so-called second Ku Klux Klan on Stone Mountain in Georgia where on Thanksgiving
night 1915 15 men in robes burnt a
cross. The new Klan grew slowly in
its first five years but used showings of The
Birth of a Nation as a major recruitment tool. Membership exploded in 1919 and after during
the Red Scare and during the 1920’s
the Klan was a major national
organization with widespread membership not only in the old Confederacy but
in many northern states like Indiana where
Klan members actually captured the state government. Much of the continued revenue stream
generated by The Birth of a Nation in
that decade came from Klan sponsored private showings.
By the mid 1920's the revived Ku Klux Klan that The Birth of a Nation inspired was large and powerful enough to stage an impressive march in Washington D.C.
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As for the NAACP, the nationwide
campaign against the film failed in the sense that it prevented the racist
movie from being shown. In fact their
adamant opposition probably sold more tickets than it discouraged. But it was the first major effort by the
organization that attracted wide-spread public attention. It rallied
many Blacks, especially among the small, but influential urban professional middle classes to join the organization
swelling membership and establishing new chapters. Likewise white liberals flocked to the
organization and bridges were built
to the more radical elements of the labor movement and the Socialist Party.
The NAACP continued to picket revivals of The Birth of a Nation like this demonstration in 1947.
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Despite all of the accolades and profits the film earned,
Griffith was still stung by the
criticism. His answer was his next blockbuster
Intolerance. Griffith’s many admirers for his undoubted creative innovation multiple contributions
to the advancement of film as art have tended to become his apologists and often assert that Intolerance was made as a kind of atonement for the offences of The Birth of a Nation. Even as acute
an observer as Roger Ebert, who
usually had a nose for bullshit and
a sharp political and moral consciousness fell into the trap
of this interpretation—“... stung by
criticisms that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its
glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith
tried to make amends in Intolerance (1916), which criticized prejudice.”
But Griffith regretted nothing. Instead he felt he was the victim of intolerance by critics of his
film. He reiterated this feeling of wounded self-righteousness in multiple
interviews promoting his new film.
Although Intolerance is today best remembered for its stupefying grand
scenes of the Fall of Babylon it intertwined
four separate morality tales
spanning millennia—the Babylonian tale, a Judean story picturing The
Nazarene brought to crucifixion by
intolerance, the French St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestant
Huguenots, and a modern tale of a working class family destroyed by greed and busy-body
do-gooders. In his interviews
Griffith often compared his persecution to Christ’s.
The two newer stories are instructive. The blame for the persecution of the
Huguenots was, of course, laid straight on the shoulders of the Catholic
Church, the object of scorn and prejudice of many of the same folks
that upheld Jim Crowe violence.
Catholics also meant dirty
immigrants to many. The newly reborn
KKK made a point of adding Catholics as well as Jews to their list of enemies
and indeed it was anti-Catholicism as much as anything that spurred its growth
in the North in states like Indiana. The
chief villain of the modern story is a liberal moral uplift society which precipitates
a deadly labor strike when a capitalist
cuts wages to give money to his sister’s charity. Later the same
charity intervenes to take the beloved
child of the innocent Dear One
when the family falls on hard times.
They stand for all of the white liberals who allied with the NAACP and
especially do-gooders like pioneering
social worker Jane Adams who had harshly criticized the film.
Star Mae Murray struggles to keep her baby from the clutches of The
Uplifters--the busy-body liberal lady villains of the modern tale in
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance.
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Intolerance
cost a record shattering $2.5 million to make—far more in relationship to
the value of the dollar than the extravagant costs of the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton version of Cleopatra or the legendary fiasco Heaven’s Gate both of
which nearly ruined and bankrupted their studios. Intolerance
did the same. The film was not the
complete box office failure of legend, but it failed to match the success of
The Birth of a Nation and came
nowhere near recouping its costs or paying
off its investors. Griffith’s studio collapsed and was sold off at fire
sale prices. He had financed most of the
film himself with his earnings from The
Birth of a Nation. He was personally ruined and never recovered
financially. Also the failure made other
studios reluctant to work with him.
He continued to make films, most
notably the Lillian Gish vehicle Way Down East, but he had to
relinquish his absolute control over his product and could never again attempt
a grand scale epic. In 1919 he joined Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas
Fairbanks to form independent United
Artists. The company produced Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm
successfully, but other films failed and by 1924 he left the company. He never had another hit but continued working sporadically into the early sound era. Abraham Lincoln starring Walter Huston as Abe and Una
Merkle as Ann Ruttlage with a script partly written by poet Stephen Vincent Benét was a critical
and popular success, but like The Birth
of a Nation played fast and loose with the facts around the Civil War and
was highly colored by Griffith’s pro-Confederate bias.
Griffith then made The Struggle,
an alcoholism melodrama inspired by his own battles with the bottle for
a minor studio financed by what was left of his own money. It flopped.
Griffith never made another film.
He died on July 28, 1948 of a cerebral hemorrhage in the lobby of
the Knickerbocker Hotel in
Los Angeles, where he lived alone. He
spent his last years embittered and dissolute largely forgotten by
Hollywood.
He remained, however, honored by
film buffs. His greatest creation, The Birth of a Nation is high on any
list of the greatest and most influential films of all time. Because
it reflected the dominant pro Southern, anti-Reconstruction, and racist
interpretation that was central to almost all American high school and college
texts of the era, the themes of the film were little challenged until well
into the 1950’s when historians like Eric
Foner began a reassessment of
the Reconstruction era in light of the Civil
Right Movement. By the late ‘60’s
the film was under full frontal attack by
Black scholars and sympathetic critics.
Although it retains admirers on a
technical level and several restorations
have been made and are available on CD, screenings
usually result in protests. In 1995 Turner Classic Movies (TCM) canceled a
showing of a restored print during racial tensions over the O.J. Simpson case, although it has subsequently
been shown.
None=the-less the film was selected
for preservation by the Library of Congress’s National Film
Registry. The American Film Institute (AMI)
lists it as #44 in the 100 Year….100
Movies list. Rotten Tomato, the film buff’s web page that compiles reviews gives The Birth of a Nation a rare 100% rating.
So there you have it—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Take your choice.
Today dozens of Klan sects are active and flourishing under Trump's wink-and-nod approval of white supremacist organizations. And many of them still use The Birth of a Nation as a recruiting tool.
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By the way some of the dozens of KKK
splinter sects that fester in the White supremacist swamp still use the film, or clips from it as a recruiting
tool and on their web pages.
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