February 8, 1915—Posterity knows D. W. Griffith’s epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction as The Birth of a Nation, but its original title when it opened at Los Angeles’ Clune’s Auditorium gives a far better idea of its incendiary nature: The Clansman.
When I saw the film for the first time in a New York City revival house in the 1980s, many members of the audience giggled helplessly at moments undoubtedly intended to be serious by director-producer Griffith. You couldn’t blame them—the stereotypes about carefree slaves, freedmen turning state legislatures into chaotic dens of corruption, and dastardly carpetbaggers were ridiculously out of place in a nation utterly transformed by the 1960s civil rights revolution.
But this silent masterpiece was more than a cinematic catalogue of the alleged abuses of Reconstruction. In its benign view of the Ku Klux Klan, its horror of miscegenation, and its depiction of an attempted rape of a white woman by a black man, it is one of the most blatantly racist films in all of cinema.
Its enormous success (from 1915 to 1946, approximately two hundred million people viewed the film in the United States and overseas) helped spark the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as riots by outraged African-Americans at its Chicago and Atlanta premieres.
Yet, though the film served as a dismayingly effective promotional vehicle for the KKK, it also raised the profile of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then only six years old. NAACP leaders initially urged Griffith to edit objectionable scenes. When his response proved inadequate, they mounted protests against the film. (The L.A. premiere only came off at all because Griffith got a sympathetic judge to overturn a ban urged by the NAACP.)
As I briefly mentioned last month in my post on Gone With the Wind, a film that covered much the same ground as Griffith’s, producer David O. Selznick went to great lengths to avoid the controversy that plagued Birth of a Nation As much as anything, the later Oscar-winning blockbuster represented the attempt by novelist Margaret Mitchell, despite her racial prejudices, to see African-Americans as human beings—an ability utterly beyond the skill set of Thomas Dixon, author of the original source material on which the film was based, or, to a lesser extent, Griffith.
Griffith’s sensibility might have been immersed in hammy Victorian melodrama, but by delivering it in a package containing the most revolutionary elements of a nascent visual art form, he made audiences think they were seeing something fundamentally new: their history rendered in unprecedented verisimilitude. Such is the magic—and illusion—of cinema.
Griffith’s three-hour movie—the longest feature film up to that time—sought to recreate with painstaking accuracy such events as Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Lincoln’s assassination in scenes labeled “Historical Facsimiles.” To film the battle of Petersburg with greatest accuracy, he even called on surviving Civil War veterans to lay out his set and to plan troop movements.
Such realism was so unexpected that President Woodrow Wilson reportedly called the film “history written by lightning.”
Lessening the impact of these scenes is the fact that the major historical figures in them seldom interact with the Stonemans and Camerons, the two principal fictional families in the film, who are really only representative figures of the North and South, not fully rounded characters with whom all audiences can identify.
Birth of a Nation is the first prominent example of Hollywood's tendency to endow the antebellum South with the same tragic grandeur of another fallen civilization: Homer’s Troy. Undoubtedly, much of this retrospective support arises from Americans’ affection for the underdog—in this case, a people who lost almost everything in the war. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that some of this fascination also results from what historians have called “the Southern myth” or “the myth of the Lost Cause.”
The Lost Cause took wing in the popular romances of novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, a former North Carolina Baptist minister. Their work, in the words of David Asbury Pryor, a biographer of Margaret Mitchell, “chronicled the lives of aristocrats associated with vast estates, slavery, and the knightly order of noblesse oblige.”
This vision of wisteria-and-magnolia gentility comforted generations of Southerners with the thought that their civilization was worth all the blood and all the dashed hopes. In picturing Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis as unblemished heroes, it became a kind of civic religion.
Yet, just as most religions have demonologies, so the “Lost Cause” myth stigmatized Yankees who had crushed the South beneath the heel of its industrial might, blacks who were freed at the end of the conflict, and Southern soldiers such as General James Longstreet who were accused of failing the cause at critical moments.
For his tribute to the Lost Cause, Griffith turned inevitably to two novels by Dixon: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (1902), and The Clansman, An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). As a result, the movie, as noted by James Baldwin in his book-length film essay, The Devil Finds Work, “is really an elaborate justification for mass murder.”
Baldwin moves smoothly from the searing criticism of the above remark to the elegant satire of the following consideration of the film’s miscegenation theme:
“Neither of the two mulattoes had any sexual interest in the other; given what we see of their charms, this is quite understandable. Both are driven a hideous by a hideous lust for whites, she for the master, he for the maid; they are, at least, thank heaven, heterosexual, due, probably, to their lack of imagination.”
Griffith’s propagandistic historical fantasia nearly quadrupled its original $40,000 budget, but it more than made up for it with its box office: nearly $18 million made by the start of the talkies. Shrewdly, The Birth of a Nation was not launched so much as a movie as an event. For tickets of $2 apiece—jaw-dropping at the time—viewers could see a film that incorporated all of the following, and far more:
* subtitles that counterpoint imagery;:
* employment of fade-outs and cameo-profiles
* extensive cross-cutting
* use of parallel action and editing in a sequence.
When I saw the film for the first time in a New York City revival house in the 1980s, many members of the audience giggled helplessly at moments undoubtedly intended to be serious by director-producer Griffith. You couldn’t blame them—the stereotypes about carefree slaves, freedmen turning state legislatures into chaotic dens of corruption, and dastardly carpetbaggers were ridiculously out of place in a nation utterly transformed by the 1960s civil rights revolution.
But this silent masterpiece was more than a cinematic catalogue of the alleged abuses of Reconstruction. In its benign view of the Ku Klux Klan, its horror of miscegenation, and its depiction of an attempted rape of a white woman by a black man, it is one of the most blatantly racist films in all of cinema.
Its enormous success (from 1915 to 1946, approximately two hundred million people viewed the film in the United States and overseas) helped spark the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as riots by outraged African-Americans at its Chicago and Atlanta premieres.
Yet, though the film served as a dismayingly effective promotional vehicle for the KKK, it also raised the profile of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then only six years old. NAACP leaders initially urged Griffith to edit objectionable scenes. When his response proved inadequate, they mounted protests against the film. (The L.A. premiere only came off at all because Griffith got a sympathetic judge to overturn a ban urged by the NAACP.)
As I briefly mentioned last month in my post on Gone With the Wind, a film that covered much the same ground as Griffith’s, producer David O. Selznick went to great lengths to avoid the controversy that plagued Birth of a Nation As much as anything, the later Oscar-winning blockbuster represented the attempt by novelist Margaret Mitchell, despite her racial prejudices, to see African-Americans as human beings—an ability utterly beyond the skill set of Thomas Dixon, author of the original source material on which the film was based, or, to a lesser extent, Griffith.
Griffith’s sensibility might have been immersed in hammy Victorian melodrama, but by delivering it in a package containing the most revolutionary elements of a nascent visual art form, he made audiences think they were seeing something fundamentally new: their history rendered in unprecedented verisimilitude. Such is the magic—and illusion—of cinema.
Griffith’s three-hour movie—the longest feature film up to that time—sought to recreate with painstaking accuracy such events as Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Lincoln’s assassination in scenes labeled “Historical Facsimiles.” To film the battle of Petersburg with greatest accuracy, he even called on surviving Civil War veterans to lay out his set and to plan troop movements.
Such realism was so unexpected that President Woodrow Wilson reportedly called the film “history written by lightning.”
Lessening the impact of these scenes is the fact that the major historical figures in them seldom interact with the Stonemans and Camerons, the two principal fictional families in the film, who are really only representative figures of the North and South, not fully rounded characters with whom all audiences can identify.
Birth of a Nation is the first prominent example of Hollywood's tendency to endow the antebellum South with the same tragic grandeur of another fallen civilization: Homer’s Troy. Undoubtedly, much of this retrospective support arises from Americans’ affection for the underdog—in this case, a people who lost almost everything in the war. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that some of this fascination also results from what historians have called “the Southern myth” or “the myth of the Lost Cause.”
The Lost Cause took wing in the popular romances of novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, a former North Carolina Baptist minister. Their work, in the words of David Asbury Pryor, a biographer of Margaret Mitchell, “chronicled the lives of aristocrats associated with vast estates, slavery, and the knightly order of noblesse oblige.”
This vision of wisteria-and-magnolia gentility comforted generations of Southerners with the thought that their civilization was worth all the blood and all the dashed hopes. In picturing Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis as unblemished heroes, it became a kind of civic religion.
Yet, just as most religions have demonologies, so the “Lost Cause” myth stigmatized Yankees who had crushed the South beneath the heel of its industrial might, blacks who were freed at the end of the conflict, and Southern soldiers such as General James Longstreet who were accused of failing the cause at critical moments.
For his tribute to the Lost Cause, Griffith turned inevitably to two novels by Dixon: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (1902), and The Clansman, An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). As a result, the movie, as noted by James Baldwin in his book-length film essay, The Devil Finds Work, “is really an elaborate justification for mass murder.”
Baldwin moves smoothly from the searing criticism of the above remark to the elegant satire of the following consideration of the film’s miscegenation theme:
“Neither of the two mulattoes had any sexual interest in the other; given what we see of their charms, this is quite understandable. Both are driven a hideous by a hideous lust for whites, she for the master, he for the maid; they are, at least, thank heaven, heterosexual, due, probably, to their lack of imagination.”
Griffith’s propagandistic historical fantasia nearly quadrupled its original $40,000 budget, but it more than made up for it with its box office: nearly $18 million made by the start of the talkies. Shrewdly, The Birth of a Nation was not launched so much as a movie as an event. For tickets of $2 apiece—jaw-dropping at the time—viewers could see a film that incorporated all of the following, and far more:
* subtitles that counterpoint imagery;:
* employment of fade-outs and cameo-profiles
* extensive cross-cutting
* use of parallel action and editing in a sequence.
The film's $18 million take by the start of the talkies made it the most profitable film for nearly two decades. But the price in Americans' historical understanding was outrageous.
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