(Apologies for the long post, but I reckon the topic deserves it...)
Re:
The Birth of a Nation discussion on the previous page. Tommaso, I like your account of the film’s ‘painterly’ qualities, you point to a lot of the things that make the film so special to me. I’m particularly fond of those warm, gleaming cotton fields at the beginning. And however boring it becomes to ‘spot’ technical innovations/developments, the chase scene involving ‘Gus’, Mae Marsh and Henry Walthall is really cleverly done, and seems so much like a template for later sequences in countless Hollywood thrillers. But, in technical terms at least, I don’t think there’s a scene in the film that isn’t fascinating and brilliant on some level. As to this:
Tommaso wrote:All these marvels don't make me forget the caricature of Stoneman and especially the black people later in the film, though reading the excerpts from Dixon's novel that are provided by Kino on the second disc convinced me that Griffith more or less closely followed the book in this respect. This is not meant as an excuse, of course, but I have always been baffled by the man's stance, not knowing how much he really subscribed to the politics of his film at the time (quite similar to the case of Veit Harlan later on).
I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to read through much of Dixon’s work, although you can find quite a bit of it (certainly
The Klansman) in complete form online. But I do know that
The Klansman begins with Elsie Stoneman playing ‘negro spirituals’ to Ben Cameron in the hospital, and although I’m sure some of the early parts of the film derive from something Dixon wrote, it probably is safe to say that the first half is the more ‘personal’, from Griffith’s point of view. As I’ve watched the film over and over again, the second half has come to seem just as impressive, though in different ways, but it is also the part of the film where the racism really takes over. It would be nice to say that this was just following on from Dixon, and I think that’s partly true: Melvyn Stokes (whose excellent, fact-oriented book on the film I’ve championed around here before now) devotes a whole chapter to Dixon, and he sounds like a fascinating, complex and rather scary figure in his own right. He actually tried, and failed, to make a film of
The Klansman in about 1911 I think. He wrote these books and plays in the hope of correcting what he saw as the ‘myths’ of the Reconstruction period, to set the record straight. He also wanted to pay tribute to the KKK of that era, who were, according to him and Griffith, ‘needed at that time’ – the implication apparently being that there may not be any such need by 1915, or that the present-day Klan was somehow a corrupted form of the original version...but I’m a little unclear on the meaning of this.
The point is, Dixon had a real, burning desire to propagate these ideas, and from what little I’ve read of his work you can feel that axe grinding behind every word; it’s something that makes a novel almost unreadable, I think, when you can just sense that you’re having some ideological point rammed into your head from moment to moment. This is something that came up in the discussion of Lois Weber, and I tend to feel that the problem is less serious in the case of a film. A film, for one thing, is not the creation of a single mind, but a cooperation between a number of artists, which means that in some respects there are likely to be more ‘levels’ to the achievement, more aspects the viewer can appreciate if they’re not too keen on the ideology. A book can make up for its didacticism with a spectacular prose style (cf. Dickens, as good a writer as ever lived, but also an inveterate axe-grinder) but a film can do so with acting, photography, editing, etc – and just as importantly, there is more of an onus on the filmmaker to mediate the lesson to a mass audience, to make it entertaining and commercially viable. This was Weber’s protest to the birth control campaigners who thought
Where Are My Children? was unfocused in its message: from the director’s point of view, compromises had to be made in marrying ideology to drama, and today, when the ideology seems outdated and offensive, it is indeed this incoherence which provides part of the film’s fascination.
Griffith’s case is unlike Weber’s: we’re dealing with a failed actor and writer who drifted into film-making and happened to be astonishingly good at it (and later, by some accounts, grew thoroughly sick of it). I have no doubt that he fully ascribed to all of the ideology being propagated in
The Birth of a Nation, but only in the sense that any number of ‘children of the South’ would have ascribed to the stuff Dixon was spouting, without really having (or wanting to have) a thorough understanding of it. I guess that links to the ‘lack of intelligence’ zedz was talking about. (Incidentally, I’m not sure I agree with you on this point, as I find that I have to forgive a lack of intelligence in an awful lot of films, perhaps especially the ones from this era, whose content is so often childish and/or commonplace, if not actively absurd or offensive.)
That nostalgia that makes the film so beautiful is also at the root of what makes it so appalling. This is very well encapsulated by the scene when Ben and Elsie go for a walk (I think it’s the ‘by way of Love Valley’ bit). In a famous shot, they cradle a small bird (a dove?) between them, kissing its beak, with Ben occasionally stealing a kiss from a slightly outraged Elsie. As they’re chastely making love, Silas Lynch – who if memory serves is first seen, in this episode, trying to strangle a dog – spies on them jealously, like a rattlesnake in the grass, his grubbily made up ‘mulatto’ face representing a corruption of the squeaky clean, whiter-than-white pastoral love scene we’ve just been enjoying. And this tension provoked by his sexual desire for Elsie builds throughout the film, until the hysterical climax.
The heart of the film’s racist ideology is not that blacks are inherently evil – as in Griffith’s other films, there are some very positive and even heroic black characters here – but that they belong in a subservient position, and that trouble will inevitably result when they are given anything approaching equality with whites. ‘The river Tiber will flow with blood’ sort of thing. Hence, Stoneman’s villainy is reinforced by his flirtations with his housekeeper, and the real villain, Lynch, is an emblem of this dangerous miscegenation. Gus is the only thing approaching a black villain, and even he comes across as fatally misunderstood, a victim of those who have given him a false sense of his own rights. Apparently he is more villainous in the books, where he and some others gang-rape the little sister; and interestingly, one of Dixon’s closest friends when he was a child was a black boy called Gus (maybe not Gus, but it was the same name as one of these ‘rapist’ figures in his books).
Tthe problem with trying to separate
The Birth of a Nation’s technique from its ideology is that so much of the technique – the form as well as the content – is geared towards supporting that ideology. This is a good thing, because it means we can’t let ourselves or Griffith off the hook, and it makes the problematic aspects of the film inescapable. More interestingly, though, I get the sense that this insistence upon the racist agenda is all a part of the film’s larger agenda to be ‘the greatest film of all time’: not content with producing a work as technically accomplished as (or more so than) anything that had come before, Griffith also wanted to make sure this wasn’t just a safe, innocuous film with a merely commonplace moral, or some easily digested ‘socially conscious’ message, as in his previous work. Dixon’s plays had caused riots before this, so Griffith knew he was unleashing something politically incendiary, and that it would have all the more impact for being so groundbreaking in aesthetic terms.
Karl Brown tells the story of how, when warned that his film would cause riots if released in certain states (such as Atlanta), Griffith responded, ‘I hope to God it does!’ I like this anecdote because it seems to say an awful lot about the man and the artist: it displays the devil-may-care energy that enabled him to achieve as much as he did, but also what you might see as a terribly irresponsible carelessness (or naivety, if you want to go easy on him). I’m sure he believed in what the film was saying, but that it got him excited more as a showman than as a demagogue.
It’s a little bit like
Citizen Kane: I like to think that Welles stopped work on
Heart of Darkness, not just because of budgetary constraints, but also because the impish college boy in him couldn’t bear his opening salvo to be so unobjectionable. The scandal-mongering is the icing on the cake; there may be some genuine malice towards, or at least fascination with, the figure of William Randolph Hearst in there, but more than anything it just feels like a juvenile delight in stirring up trouble, and in the resulting (good and bad) publicity.
Griffith’s first magnum opus was designed to be noticed and taken seriously, both as a work of art, and as a political statement (hence President Wilson’s involvement, and subsequent denial of his positive statements about the film). As I say, this irresponsibility is almost more offensive than Dixon’s painfully earnest demagogical fervour. It’s hard to measure a film’s impact on society, but in this case it’s safe to say that
The Birth caused an untold number of innocent people to be persecuted and even murdered.
One can hardly imagine a man as gentle and benign as Griffith wanted this to happen, but he cannot have been unaware that his film might have this sort of impact. The lynching of Gus is indeed horrifying, and I think we are meant to have a certain amount of sympathy for the victim – Griffith always abhors violence on some level (cf. Barthelmess’ actions at the end of
Broken Blossoms). But mainly we’re supposed to be so shocked and angry over the death of the little sister that we cheer the Klan on as they take their revenge. It’s horrifying in the sense of ‘this is what happens when races mix too closely’.
The most chilling moment in the film is the shot of Gus’s dead body lying on the porch with the ‘KKK’ sign on it. From that angle, and in that light, Gus doesn’t look like a white actor in blackface: the shot resembles a real-life photograph of a lynching in the Deep South, of the kind we’re all familiar with. How on earth did Griffith expect people to respond to this? The fact that he was willing to let his film incur such consequences, just in order to make it that much more powerful, is less an indicator of how much he personally invested in the doctrines being espoused, to the point of wanting to incite actual murders. It’s more a sad reminder of what can be sacrificed in the cause of ‘great art’ – because like it or not, this horrible sequence is an important part of what makes the film so powerful and provocative, and the film would be less good without it.
I know that sounds awful, and to be clear I want to repeat what I’ve said before on another thread: those who say
The Birth of a Nation should never have been made are probably right. However much it did for The Development of Cinema, I don’t believe it can possibly have made the world a better place, and the account of the interviewee in Father of Film, who recalls seeing
The Birth in a theatre full of loudly weeping black spectators, should be enough on its own to convince anyone what a damaging work of art this was, and perhaps still is. But since it’s there and it isn’t going away, I think the best approach is to meet everything in it that’s beautiful and vile head-on, to engage with it as a whole and consider all the troubling implications for the nature of cinema (maybe for art in general), and for all the great filmmakers who, as Schreck points out, considered themselves disciples of Griffith and of this film in particular. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’m afraid it’s still at the top of my list.
) and invigorating effect.