Cinema's Original Sin: D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture 9781477325506

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Cinema’s Original Sin

CINEMA’S ORIGINAL SIN D. W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture

Paul McEwan

university of texas press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Some material related to the film Intolerance in chapters 2, 3, and 4 previously appeared in substantially different form in Paul McEwan, “The Legacy of Intolerance,” chapter 21 of A Companion to D. W. Griffith, edited by Charlie Keil, © John Wiley & Sons, 2018; reproduced with permission of the licensor through PLSclear. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. LCCN 2022005696 ISBN 978-1-4773-2548-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2550-6 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2551-3 (ePub) doi:10.7560/325483

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 chapter one

A New Art, 1895–1915 13 chapter two

Film Art, Intolerance, and Oscar Micheaux, 1915–1925 52 chapter three

Little Theatres, MOMA, and the Birth of Art Cinema, 1925–1945 84 chapter four

From American History to Film History, 1945–1960 110 chapter five

In Search of Legitimacy and Masterpieces: Film Studies in the Academy, 1960–2000 136 chapter six

Race, Reception, and Remix in the New Millennium 162 Epilogue 192 Notes 199 Index 219

Acknowledgments

This book began with a question from one of my thesis supervisors, Chuck Kleinhans, during my PhD defense at Northwestern University in 2003. My dissertation was on ideas about the social construction of science and history and the effects of those ideas on film and media studies. I had used The Birth of a Nation in one chapter to make a point—that film scholars who tended to be social constructivists would never apply that argument to this film, would never claim that it was merely a version of history, or that its distortions were not important. When Chuck asked me what my next book would be about, I said I thought it would be interesting to write a history of the reception of The Birth of a Nation. When I returned to the room to be told that I had passed my defense, all three committee members agreed that this book was a better first book than my dissertation, which was an amorphous and sprawling work whose implied territory was the entire history of epistemology. Thanks to Chuck and Mimi White and Scott Curtis for letting me write that overly ambitious dissertation and for pointing me toward this project. I have thus been writing about The Birth of a Nation on and off for much of the last eighteen years, and while I am always convinced there is more to say about it, I am grateful to everyone who may not have been so enthusiastic about the topic but encouraged me nevertheless. My friend and graduate school colleague Andrew Douglas has listened to me talk about this film more than anyone else, and has even provided me numerous public venues to talk about it some more. As someone with an intimidating grasp of the scope of American film, his intellectual contributions to this project have been endless. My colleagues in the media and communication department and film studies program at Muhlenberg, in particular Jeff Pooley, Amy Corbin, and Roberta Meek, have been sounding boards as I tried to work out ideas or pitch chapters. I am grateful to all of my departmental and program colleagues for their support and camaraderie: Aggie Bazaz, Franz Birgel, Michael Buozis, Tom Cartelli, Irene Chien, Francesca Coppa, Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Anthony Dalton, Susan Fredericks, Sue Jansen, Amanda Jenkins-Ford, Susan Kahlenberg, Daniel Leisawitz, Linda Miller, Elizabeth Nathanson, Kate Ranieri, David Romberg, Harry Simón Salazar, John Sullivan, David Tafler, Lora Taub, and Sara

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Vignieri. In addition, my students at Muhlenberg College have heard me lecture on this film a bit more than they probably needed to, and their reactions to the film have shaped this book. Almost all of this book was presented in chapters over the years at conferences of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and I am grateful to co-panelists and attendees who asked insightful questions and provided encouragement. Much of what I know about the context for D. W. Griffith’s work and silent cinema I have learned through my annual attendance at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, particularly from the multiyear Griffith Project organized by Paolo Cherchai Usai. I have also learned a lot from my festival friends, who have shared their expertise and wisdom over the years: Julie Turnock, Allison Whitney, Allyson Field, Dan Morgan, Laura Horak, Gunnar Iversen, Sarah Keller, Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Katharina Loew, Caitlin McGrath, Oliver Gaycken, Christina Petersen, Doron Galli, Maggie Hennefeld, Joshua Malitsky, Theresa Scandiffio, Sara Levavy, Joel Westerdale, Matt Hauske, Tami Williams, Brigitta Wagner, Jenny Horne, Albert Steg, April Miller, Kaveh Askari, Lilya Kaganovsky, Rob Rushing, Brenda Austin-Smith, Bill Beard, and Donald Crafton. Any scholar would be blessed to have an intellectual community this rich, and I am doubly blessed to count these impressive people as my friends. I have saved countless months of archival work because of the availability of The Lantern, a website hosted by the University of Wisconsin that offers searchable early film magazines. The Lantern has been led by Eric Hoyt, who was an undergraduate student at Northwestern when I was a graduate TA there years ago. Eric and his colleagues have done more for silent film research than almost anyone else in recent years, and I am eternally grateful to them. I know I am not the only one. Film historians will also know how fortunate we are to have the staff of the Library of Congress Moving Image Section, under the direction of Mike Mashon. I spent fruitful time there watching 16mm prints of The Birth of a Nation and learning how the film had changed over time. I am also deeply grateful to David Fortin and the staff of the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal, whose rich clippings files helped me shape this book, and who were extraordinarily helpful and kind. Several scholars whose work I deeply admire provided encouragement and feedback at crucial moments. Jane Gaines regularly inquired about my progress and provided benevolent approval when I dearly needed it. Charlie Keil invited me to be part of a Griffith anthology and provided

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thoughtful feedback on my writing. Thomas Doherty has repeatedly been an encouraging sounding board and provider of details from his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood history. I owe a debt far more than the usual to Haidee Wasson, who opened her files on the Museum of Modern Art to me, allowing me to benefit in an afternoon from archival work that had taken her a year. It was those documents that convinced me that the story of film’s journey from low culture to high was the ideal frame for this book, so it might not have been possible without her. I had originally intended this book to be a history of controversy, and then Melvyn Stokes’s excellent book appeared in 2008. Melvyn and I have since become friends and collaborators, and I am grateful for his many insights. The conference that he organized on the centenary of the film in 2015 taught me much about the film’s international reception. I am grateful to both DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) and Christopher Harris for sharing their artistic responses to The Birth of a Nation with me and for being patient and thoughtful with my questions. I owe a deep debt to my editor at the University of Texas Press, Jim Burr, who has supportively and patiently guided this project for several years. In addition, Sarah McGavick; Joel Pinckney; Gianna LaMorte; Robert Kimzey; Lynne Ferguson; Angelica Lopez-Torres; Bailey Morrison; and my talented copy editor, John Brenner, have all helped make this project better than it would have been without their help. Thanks are due as well to my indexer, Leigh Priest. I have been lucky to spend my career at Muhlenberg, a liberal arts college where research is supported without an extreme publish-orperish ethos. Much of this book was written during a leave provided by the Class of ’32 Research Professorship in 2016, during a sabbatical in 2019, and on various summer research grants. Support for indexing was provided by the Daniel J. and Carol Shiner Wilson Fund for the Completion of Scholarly Projects, and am I grateful to Dan and Carol for endowing the fund and for being supporters of my work. The Griggs Collection was purchased by Muhlenberg for my research, and I am grateful to Randy Helm, Marjorie Hass, and the media and communication department for quickly agreeing to fund what was, for this book, an essential purchase. My group of friends includes many smart people and talented writers, from whom I have learned much about how to think and write. I am grateful to Greg Bonnell, Mark Toale, Steven Sandor, Jennifer Vanasco,

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Michael Barclay, Tom Cragin, Hartley Lachter, Vik Iyengar, Philippa Gates, Lisa Funnell, Liz Clarke, Mark Bristol, Jim Peck, Will Straw, Paul S. Moore, Ara Osterweil, Molly Schneider, Jonah Horwitz, Andrea Comiskey, Andrew Burke, Murray Leeder, Aaron Taylor, Andy Owens, Mike Zryd, and Liz Czach. I am most grateful to my family, including my parents and my sister; my in-laws; my wife, Eileen; and my children, Grace and Max, who have supported me and encouraged me always. This is a complicated and ugly film, and I have tried to do its history justice without praising it, while grappling with the fact that its “quality” was what allowed it to do so much damage. I have been mindful always that I have the privilege of shutting the hard questions of this film out of my life when I choose to, which gives me even more respect for those for whom this film is an attack on their identity. This film has become unfortunately relevant in recent years, and I hope that this book can contribute in some tiny way to an understanding of a more just world. This book is dedicated to Trayvon Martin, to Eric Garner, to Tamir Rice, to Emmett Till, to Breonna Taylor, to Ahmaud Arbery, to George Floyd, and to the thousands of others whose stories were not told, who have paid with their lives for the lies that this film helped to propagate.

Cinema’s Original Sin

introduction

A novel, sir, is a mirror carried along a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure of the sky, sometimes the mire of the puddles in the road. stendhal, The Red and the Black

This oft-quoted line from Stendhal has been a source of much scholarly discussion, hardly surprising for so rich a metaphor. It reminds us of literature’s realist aspirations, the way that art can tell us something about the real world, for better or for worse. In the case of The Birth of a Nation, the metaphor could hardly be more apt. Here is a work that claimed to be history, and an objective mirror of the past, even though it was itself based on a novel. Its creator intended it to be received as history better than a book, and his wish was generally granted. It has been a constant source of controversy in the century since it was released, inspiring endless arguments precisely because it shows us the azure of artistic achievement and, simultaneously, our basest and ugliest human instincts. There are few other texts in human history that are, like this one, such beautifully constructed tributes to evil, ignorance, and fear. David Wark Griffith of course did not intend his film to be any such thing. To him it was a paean to brotherly love and understanding. For the purposes of this book, then, Stendhal’s mirror “carried along a highway” seems most apt. The mirror is in motion, reflecting changing views along the way. The Birth of a Nation is unique in film history in that it has been in continuous circulation for a century, allowing us to follow its reception over a long period with relatively few gaps. If it were a more pedestrian film, such an exercise might be of limited interest, but few films have had such dramatic shifts in their reception over

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their lifespans. More importantly, The Birth of a Nation allows us to chart the ways that people understood film itself at various moments in the past century. During that century, cinema has transformed from a new medium to an old one, so old that we now often fret about its survival. In between, it rose from popular entertainment, generally looked down upon, to an art form with many of the trappings of high culture, including museum exhibitions, serious criticism, and academic study. While scholars now know quite a bit about the history of film itself, they do not know nearly as much about the history of film’s place in the culture. It has been written (and written well) here and there, by authors who have charted the beginnings of the Museum of Modern Art film library, or the relationships between universities and the Hollywood studios, or the interactions at key moments between American cinema and European “art” cinema. What is more difficult to assess, because it happened slowly, is cinema’s rise from low to high culture. We can mark the milestones, but it is more difficult to figure out where the thinking changed, given that it happened at different times and places for different groups of people. The transition is slow, and diffuse, and often happens only because of subtle changes in attitudes and ideas. What any historian needs is written records of that transition, preferably ones that reflect vigorous debate in each decade since the early years of film. This is where The Birth of a Nation can serve us well. The controversies that have dogged it for more than a century are one of the few ways to see evidence of what people thought film was and should be. The two closest precedents for what this book seeks to accomplish are Peter Decherney’s Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American and Alison Trope’s Stardust Memories: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood. Decherney’s book traces the history of film’s rise from low to high over the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, he illustrates the myriad ways in which cultural and educational institutions had something to gain by adopting Hollywood film into their purview, while the studios in turn stood to gain by having their output regarded as something worthy of study by serious scholars. I have always thought of this exchange (following Pierre Bourdieu) as one that involves two different kinds of cultural capital. Trope’s book traces the interactions of art and commerce in Hollywood history, from film museums to theme parks. In the first few chapters of my book, I revisit some of the same moments that Decherney and Trope do, but with a narrower lens, since I am interested in tracing the evolution of

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one film’s reception, and by extension the relationship between film reception and racism. Because I am tracing the development of a film released in 1915, the Hollywood studios are much less important to this story. It seems obvious to me that the complete story of film’s rise from low to high culture is far too large for a single book, and this one is only intended to be a piece of a larger historical and critical puzzle. In addition to Decherney’s and Trope’s books, two other important models were Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema, upon which I am heavily dependent in chapter 3, and Tino Balio’s The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973. These books were models for the type of story I am trying to tell, with the key difference being that both are deep dives into a particular period rather than longitudinal histories. There are also longitudinal and period histories of African American responses to the racism of The Birth of a Nation. Key among them is Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Stewart points out that analyses of The Birth of a Nation have never accounted fully for the complexities of Black representation in cinema before 1915. Allyson Field’s Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity covers the many ways in which cinema was used to counter harmful stereotypes, and there are several excellent books on the work of Oscar Micheaux, including the collection Oscar Micheaux and His Circle edited by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, as well as Gaines’s Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era. Linda Williams’s foundational Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson wisely situates The Birth of a Nation in the tradition of American melodrama that both predates it and continues to the present day. Melvyn Stokes’s indispensable D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation focuses on organized resistance to this film by the NAACP and other African American groups. I pray that I am not being too bold in trying to weave a narrative that fits between so much exemplary scholarship. Offering a book on Griffith and The Birth of a Nation after these works and hundreds of others on race and representation in film means that this book is defined in part by what is not here. It is not a close reading of the film itself, which I offered in my volume in the BFI Classics series published in 2015. It is also not a history of legal or public “controversy” in general, since Stokes covered that ground so well. It is definitely not a history of the representation of Black people in American

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cinema, as it does not deal with later films in any significant depth. Although it cannot be a general history of the development of film culture, it can be a reasonable facsimile of one, in the way that the biography of a prominent individual can also function as a portrait of a time and of a society. This is a history of the ways in which participants in film culture wrestled with the film, and in doing so came to understand what film itself was and could be. It centers discussions of race and racism in the development of that culture, and tries to demonstrate the ways in which that culture has been defined by how it talks about racism. Conscious and unconscious racism hid itself in the cracks and mortar of the world of film culture as it was being constructed. The past thirty years of historical research on film’s first decades has taught us a great deal about all aspects of film’s creation, distribution, and reception. One of the most profound notions to come out of this work is a sense of the openness of film’s potential in its first half century. Before narrative became the default, before films were considered the products of auteurs, before actors were stars, and before film had found its place in American culture, there existed a sense of possibility around cinema, when this new cultural object was not yet defined in the way it would soon be, in the minds of both its audience and its creators. D. W. Griffith was both a product of this early period and someone who did as much as anyone else to bring it to an end. Launching his career in film at the beginning of what we now call the “transitional” era of American cinema, he did more than anyone to push cinema toward narrative, what Tom Gunning calls “an unambiguous subordination of filmic discourse to narrative purposes.”1 This was a process that developed between 1908 and 1915, when Griffith poured everything he had learned into The Birth of a Nation and found both commercial and artistic success beyond what he could reasonably have hoped for. It brought him substantial riches (most of which he sank into making Intolerance the next year) and extensive critical accolades. Most importantly for the history of film, it helped to solidify the shift to feature-length films and created a template for historical epics that would last a century. No matter what the content of The Birth of a Nation had been, the film would be historically interesting for the place it occupies in the development of cinema. If it were a different story that we now read as just a dated melodrama, it might still find a place in film history surveys and cinema courses. One can imagine an alternate history of the film

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in which it becomes a staple of retrospectives and a source of critical discussion for decades. Its distribution and reception would still teach us much about cinema audiences in the silent era, and we might find ourselves, a century later, considering the ways in which its meaning had shifted slightly in the passing years. But it is, of course, the racist content of The Birth of a Nation that sets it apart from nearly all other films. There is no film whose meaning has shifted so completely in the time since it was released, and no film that has caused more controversy, more legal action, or more argument. It occupies an absolutely singular place in film history because it is both controversial and, unfortunately, a cinematic milestone. This is now taken for granted, but in fact it is an extremely unlikely occurrence: this story could have been told a decade later, when it might have been quickly forgotten, and some other story might have been the one to capture the audience’s imaginations in 1915, as many other stories have since. From this perspective, the film might seem like a historical fluke, a chance overlap of people and events that would otherwise have been separate threads of a broader tapestry. To some extent, it is a fluke. This happenstance now looks like a particularly unfortunate one for film history. Film scholars have a story to tell about the development of a popular medium, but have not outgrown the need to justify studying it. How much simpler it would be if this milestone film really had been a tribute to brotherly love as we now understand it. The Birth of a Nation presents a dilemma to everyone who tries to consider it. How to balance its content with its form and historical place? Is such a balance even possible, or desirable? Is it better to consign the film to a historical footnote, or to show it and talk about it? How should we talk about it? Does it depend on who we are and to whom we are speaking? Why dig up such an ugly artifact, especially one that was designed to be entertainment? Unlike a somber museum or memorial to a historical travesty, it is still clear that The Birth of a Nation was intended to be entertaining, to be fun, in the sense that such epic adventure films have long been described as “thrill rides.” None of these complicated conundrums are new to us in the present day. From the moment of its release in the early part of 1915, the film’s critics were at a loss for what to do with it. There was the usual dilemma of those who wish to ban something—that to call attention to it is generally to encourage others to go to see what the fuss is all about. Even in 1915, though, the problem was that the film was actually good.

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While many doubtless went to see it because its racist messages appealed to them, this would not have been the primary motivation for most of its viewers. They would have enjoyed seeing their own racist attitudes reflected in the film, of course, but that was not primarily why they had paid their money, which was in most cases much more than they had ever paid for a film before. They were there because the film was an event, a new level of spectacle unlike anything most of them had ever seen, married to a complex and compelling narrative that offered, to white people, a balm for the national wound of the Civil War. This impasse remained for all of those who tried to have the film suppressed in its first fifteen years. What they were up against was not simply a popular film. It was the first true blockbuster, playing for years in the United States and around the world to large audiences in the best theaters in each city it visited. It would have been impossible to stop, and the controversy seemed only to provide a lot of free publicity. The quandary of The Birth of a Nation grew much more complicated in the 1920s and 1930s, as film itself became old enough to be a medium with a history. Those who wished to preserve and recount that history had to figure out what to do with so troublesome an object. From that period until the present day, The Birth of a Nation has created a predicament for everyone who has tried to tell the story of cinema. Examining that predicament allows us to see how various groups of cinema lovers and critics thought about film in various decades. It becomes a litmus test for how one thinks about film and what it is for. In the earliest retrospectives of cinema presented by the Little Theatres or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the hundreds of amateur cinema clubs that sprang up around the world in the middle of the century, in the burgeoning academic field of film studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the culture of remix and revision that has taken root in recent decades, The Birth of a Nation has been grappled with, argued about, set up on pedestals and then ripped back down again. It has been, for a hundred years, the dilemma that every lover of cinema must face, a bind that is intellectual, critical, and moral. The Birth of a Nation’s singular place in the history of film means that it offers us the best point of comparison for how people have understood and thought about film over the past century. One need not use a single film to have a sense of this, of course, but it is especially revealing to pay close attention to people having essentially the same argument for a hundred years, each time with new and different ideas about the nature of film, the purpose of art, and the morality of racism. The shifts

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over time are slow and may occur without a clear sense of “progress,” even if people generally become less tolerant of racism over time. Ideas about art have changed over the century, but not nearly as much as ideas about film. In the simplest sense, film has been “raised” over time into the pantheon of art forms. The move to include such a popular and populist art form inevitably changes the meaning of art, and that definition changed very much over the twentieth century even without help from cinema. It is fair to say, though, that while our notion of art has become less hierarchical and more democratic, the acceptance of film as an art form has had much more to do with the perception that film has met traditional definitions of artistic practice and reception than with a wholesale redefinition of art. In its first decades, film was generally not recognized as an art. In the United States, no less of an authority than the Supreme Court had made it official, coincidentally in the same month that The Birth of a Nation was released. Asserting in its Mutual decision that film was “a business, pure and simple,” the court held that films could not claim exemptions from state censorship laws on free speech grounds because they were not works of art, a ruling that remained in effect until the court reversed itself in the Burstyn case in 1952.2 By the 1950s, the court was only recognizing a cultural shift that had already taken place, in which at least some films could reasonably claim to be art and thus could be afforded the broad protections of the First Amendment. If film was not widely recognized as an art in 1915, D. W. Griffith was leading the charge to change that. He repeatedly wrapped himself in the flag of artistic freedom and made explicit connections between film and other types of creative expression that were already considered art. The most prominent of these was an appeal included in the opening credits before the film’s title. Most likely added after controversy had arisen,3 it is “A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE” that reads, “We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word—that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.” This is a high claim indeed. It was not enough to draw a parallel to the written word in an era when novels could still be banned as obscene; cinema had to be connected to the pinnacles of the written word without explicitly claiming that this film was equivalent to the Bible or Shakespeare. It involves two rhetorical steps: film is like the

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written word, and the written word includes the Bible and Shakespeare. This mental leap from film to high art would have been aided by the environment in which most early viewers saw the film. Eschewing movie houses, which often still had shady reputations and catered to working-class audiences, Griffith booked The Birth of a Nation into legitimate theaters. There he would attract a middle-class audience accustomed to watching and thinking about art and able to pay the legitimate theater prices they were being charged, which peaked at $2 each in New York and some other cities. For comparison, that would be the equivalent of about $50 a century later, and at the time it was a dramatic increase from the ten-cent admissions that would have been common in many places. To be received as art, it helps to be in the places where audiences find art, and to have them pay high art prices. Early copies of the film also had no cast credits in the titles, instead directing audiences to the printed program in their hands. Those programs contained photographs and essays about the film, as well as a range of critical endorsements that did their best to encourage audiences to see The Birth of a Nation as something other than the simple entertainment that regular films provided. Griffith’s defense of his film as high culture also had a second and related argument. The Birth of a Nation was not simply a work of narrative art; it was a work of verifiable history and offered viewers an important and accurate lesson in the development of the United States. He was adamant that his version of Reconstruction was historical truth, even though it was an adaptation of a novel and stage play. Most of the accepted written histories of Reconstruction that existed in 1915 would have supported the background to Griffith’s fictional version of events, at least in part. The group of historians who came to be known as the Dunning School, after William A. Dunning of Columbia University, argued that Reconstruction had been a terrible mistake in which African Americans and northern “carpetbaggers” ran wild until order, in the form of white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, was eventually restored. This was the accepted view for at least the first half of the twentieth century. In censorship battles over the next decade, Griffith and his attorneys could argue that it did not matter if the content of the film annoyed or offended people, because it was an unfortunate historical truth.4 This “truth” has been corrected over the decades by contemporary historians, who tend to see Reconstruction as a noble if flawed effort to give African Americans the rights that had

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been promised to them, rights that were later revoked and not restored until the civil rights movement.5 For my purposes, the arguments about history are most useful for what they reveal about film’s stature. Griffith claimed that in a library of the future, students and researchers might not need to read competing versions of historical events. Instead, they would simply press a button to watch a carefully prepared film of the event, and then see it as it actually happened.6 Such a claim conveniently ignores the fact that the films would be subject to exactly the same biases as written books, and while films are very good at giving audiences a feel for a historical period and the broad sweep of action, their lack of footnotes or rhetorical markers of certainty means that they are not very good on the details.7 In a film scene, the carefully researched details are mixed indiscriminately with the invented ones, and publicly documented events lead directly to private and unwitnessed ones, with the audience rarely having a way to tell the elements apart. Film was novel enough in 1915 that such contradictions may not have been evident. One of the critics cited in the printed program for The Birth of a Nation claimed, “You see, exactly as the angels looking down from heaven would have seen, exactly what took place 50 years ago.”8 Such an opinion seems hopelessly naive now, given that moviegoers generally know (and accept) that historical films will take liberties with the truth, and the presence of film stars means that we are always intermittently aware that what we are watching is a construction. What was important about this claim was the idea that film could fulfill an educational function, and that it could potentially displace books as a method of learning. If so, then it was at least the equal of a book. Like the comparison to Shakespeare in the credits, this argument had the dual effect of comparing film to the written word and then invoking an important and recognized use of that word: the learning of American history. Film was thus not just an art, but a patriotic one. This emphasis on patriotism was much less evident by the time The Birth of a Nation was recut for a sound-era re-release in 1930. Hollywood—and America—were now very different places. While the First World War had cast a long shadow over American culture, the United States had survived with its industries intact, and the film business had benefited from the years in which its European competitors were unable to compete, so much so that Hollywood assumed a lead in the film industry that it has not relinquished since. The rise of the studio

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system in the 1920s made Hollywood both efficient and popular. Griffith himself was never fully at home in this system, even as he continued to make films throughout the decade. His cofounding of United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin in 1919 was an attempt by these four artists to create a space for themselves that would allow them the kind of artistic freedom they all craved. While Griffith never repeated the commercial success of The Birth of a Nation, the type of epic filmmaking he had pioneered became the dominant and lucrative model of the Hollywood system. With the money rolling in, Hollywood might have been content with its role as a “business, pure and simple,” but the actors and creative personnel who made up the industry were not. It became clear that they also sought cultural recognition as artists, and the founding of the Academy of Motion Pictures in 1927 with its accompanying awards was a way to increase the cultural standing of their own work. The coming of sound that same year was a brief setback for film’s artistic potential, as the fluidity and freedom of visual storytelling took a backseat to the need to record audible dialogue. Even though those artistic restrictions were overcome relatively quickly, sound created the sharpest break between eras in cinematic history. Griffith was already in a late phase of his career, so for him this was not a defining moment in terms of what he was able to produce. It did, however, coincide with the first film retrospectives. Sound helped to reinforce a notion only beginning to take shape in 1927: that film had a past, and this past might be interesting in the way that the pasts of other arts are. Such an idea, well established now, was genuinely new in film in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Cinema had developed very quickly over its first thirty years, so that older films quickly looked dated, or were read by audiences as primitive or amusing. The differences in style and structure between silent films circa 1915 and those at the end of the silent era a dozen years later are astounding, to say nothing of the gaps between late silents and the shorts made between 1900 and 1915. Films also had almost no way to circulate among individuals in the way that stories and songs could, so it was generally impossible to see them once they had exhausted their initial theatrical runs. They had so little commercial value that the vast majority of them were destroyed or left to rot. The earliest film retrospectives in the United States, beginning around 1926, were likely the first opportunities for people not in the business to look back at earlier productions. Those who wished to do so were not always motivated by a high-minded desire to study

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the development of a nascent art form. By the late 1920s, a generation had been raised watching films, and some of them would have been nostalgic for the things they had watched when they were younger. Whatever drew individual spectators to older films, there was now a chance to see a range of them. As we will see, over the next hundred years, cinephiles of all stripes would be dealing with the same questions. How can we think about the development of film? What place does nostalgia have in our assessment of the cinematic past? How is film like other art forms? In what ways is it new and distinctively modern? How can we think about an art form that has, since its earliest days, been something expensive and complicated to produce, usually requiring industrial-style organization and pools of capital? What obligations does the film industry have to society? How much can cinema direct the attitudes and politics of those who watch it? Should it try to do so? Griffith himself seems to have grasped many of these questions from the outset, but could apparently never see the questions that have ended up framing much of the discussion around his films for a century: How has film promoted and expanded American racism? What does it mean to make a racist work of art? How should we think about the racism of our own past and present? What Griffith could not see himself has now been seen and reseen and endlessly debated over the past century by cinephiles, critics, and scholars. Because the stakes of the discussion were so high, we can watch people grapple with the interplay of a lot of complex issues and chart the changing tenor of the discussion over time. Just as this debate does not move linearly from racist to not-racist over the course of a century, we should be wary of seeing ourselves as the enlightened endpoint of a hundred-year argument. As this book was being completed, the country and the culture were being reshaped by anger over the killing of George Floyd, and many white Americans were finally seeing the extremity of the racism that had been all around them their entire lives. The quotation from The Red and the Black with which this introduction began pushes the metaphor of the novel-as-mirror even further and provides a sort of warning for historians and readers alike: “And the man who carries the mirror on his back will be accused by you of immorality! His mirror shows you the mire, and you blame the mirror! Blame, rather, the road in which the puddle lies, and still more the road inspector who lets the water stagnate and the puddle form.” I did not include this part of the quotation at the outset because it would be too easy to read it as an excuse for the film and for Griffith, a claim

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that they are merely the reflectors of a racist society. I am in no way making such a claim. Treating The Birth of a Nation and Griffith this way would manage to be both condescending and historically dishonest. As much as Griffith’s sense of his own film changed over his life, it is impossible to convince oneself that he would ever have disavowed it or apologized for it. There is, however, much to be reminded of here. First, the narrative voice is defending the novel itself against those who attack it. Such a position felt necessary in the nineteenth century as the novel began to be considered an art form. In the twentieth century, film went through the same transition from low culture to high, so those who defended The Birth of a Nation were often defending film itself. Sometimes in their zeal to promote an art form they loved, they might have been less able to see the consequences of their position. At other moments, they might have been hesitant to say what they knew or thought. We have only traces of written communication and memory on which to base our historical judgment. We must avoid a moral neutrality as carefully as we avoid laying easy blame on historical actors. We must move humbly through the past, mindful that judgmental eyes might one day be turned on us.

Chapter 1

a new art, 1895–1915

While D.  W. Griffith was shooting and editing The Birth of a Nation in 1914 and dreaming of elevating film to the status of high art, a court case was winding its way from the courts of Ohio to the Supreme Court of the United States that would address the question directly. It seems probable that Griffith would have been aware of the case, even though it was in Ohio, because it concerned the company that was helping to finance his film. The Mutual Film Corporation, led by Harry and Roy Aitken, had emerged as one of the most powerful film distributors in the country and had launched a court challenge to the state censorship law in Ohio, which had been passed in 1913. The Aitkens challenged the Ohio state censorship board on several grounds—that the board itself was making legal decisions that should only be made by the Ohio legislature, that censorship of films arriving from out of state constituted an unfair infringement of interstate commerce, and that film censorship was unconstitutional under the First Amendment, which ensures freedom of the press and of expression. The first two of these complaints could be dismissed relatively easily, and only the third raised any kind of question for the court, although not nearly enough for Mutual to prevail. The case, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, was heard by the Supreme Court on January 6 and 7, 1915, only weeks before the debut of The Birth of a Nation in early February, and decided on February 23, between the film’s Los Angeles and New York City openings. Mutual lost the case on all grounds, and the film industry suffered a setback that would take decades to overcome. The court ruled unanimously that “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit like other spectacles, and not to be regarded as

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part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion within the meaning of freedom of speech and publication guaranteed by the constitution of Ohio.” It was the “pure and simple” part that did the most damage. It was self-evident that film was a commercial enterprise, as many art forms sometimes were, and as newspapers and magazines nearly always were. But the court ruled that films could not claim to be anything more than this, a dubious argument that would later seem ridiculous. With the nascent film industry just beginning to explore the artistic possibilities of its medium, the court ruling was a major blow. Whatever its legal merits, it is difficult to argue that the court’s decision did not reflect public opinion in early 1915. Film was indeed very new, and for all the marvel it had engendered in its twenty years of existence, it was not seen as an art form to rival theater or literature. Film was generally perceived to be part of the culture of amusement, a new technology that was one of the many distractions of modernity. Its connections to vaudeville, the relative simplicity of its early subject matter, and the perception that nickelodeons were not places for the refined middle or upper classes all contributed to the sense that film was entertainment and not art. The court’s assertion that it was “like other spectacles” and not “part of the press of the country” would have seemed self-evident to most Americans, just as the inverse seems selfevident to us now. Mutual had tried to emphasize the highest ideals of film form in its appeal, and the decision largely accepts that description. The justices write, [Films] depict dramatizations of standard novels, exhibiting many subjects of scientific interest, the properties of matter, the growth of the various forms of animal and plant life, and explorations and travels; also events of historical and current interest—the same events which are described in words and by photographs in newspapers, weekly periodicals, magazines, and other publications . . . thus regularly furnishing and publishing news through the medium of motion pictures under the name of “Mutual Weekly.”1

While the first item here is novels, it is more telling that the case emphasized the connections between film and science and between film and press photography.2 While there certainly were dramatizations of novels and stage plays from film’s first decade, very few of them rose to the level of art themselves. Typically, the silence and brevity of early

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films meant that they could only act out scenes from famous books or plays that the audience might already know, rather than function as dramatic works in their own right. And it is certainly true, as Tom Gunning has pointed out, that early cinema was more oriented toward spectacle than narrative.3 It was hard to make the case that most films in 1914–1915 were telling complex stories to rival novels and plays. Thus it made more sense to try to link films to science and to the press. The court accepted the idea that films could be used for noble and educational purposes but held this to be irrelevant because the Ohio statute specifically stated, “Films of a moral, educational or amusing or harmless character shall be passed and approved.”4 By this reasoning, the good films would always be able to pass, and thus no harm would be done. “But they may be used for evil,” the court wrote. “They take their attraction from the general interest, eager and wholesome it may be, in their subjects, but a prurient interest may be excited and appealed to.”5 The court also referred to the general perceptions of the population in another line from its ruling, when it affirmed that “the judicial sense, supporting the common sense of this country, sustains the exercise of the police power of regulation of moving picture exhibitions.” If film did not have First Amendment protection, then it was subject to police power. This power was of course intensely local and variable, creating a patchwork of rules and restrictions that dogged the industry until the Production Code era. It is an incredible historical coincidence that the Mutual Film Corporation ruling was written in the same month as the release of a film which would do more than any other to change ideas about whether film was an art form. It may even be that the Aitkens, seeing the potential in Griffith’s work, were too optimistic about their chances for success in the court system and got ahead of themselves. This is not to argue that the results would have been different a year or two later, even after Thomas Dixon had managed to arrange screenings of The Birth of a Nation for both the president and the Supreme Court. It is possible that a justice or two might have been swayed, but probably not the majority; as it was, the court’s decision was unanimous, and it would stand until the early 1950s. It would take a lot more films that could claim to be art before the court would change its mind. Thus, the events of 1915 provided some of the outlines of a discussion that would continue for the rest of the century, but this was not the origin of the debate about film and art. While it is impossible to know who first conceived of film as an art form, the idea had been

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circulating for years before 1915. Beginning around 1910, there is more and more evidence of that discussion in public forums. In general, when films were first claimed to be “art,” they were art by association. That is, there are references to “film art” or “art film” when what is being written about is a film of art: a film of a stage play, an opera or dance performance, or an adaptation from literature. Additionally, before 1915 many of the references to film as art appeared in advertisements rather than in reviews or criticism, reflecting the aspirations of filmmakers and distributors more than any kind of cultural consensus. Typical of these two trends is an ad in Moving Picture World in February 1908 for a film called The Butterflies, a “beautiful hand colored film” made in Italy: A delightful novelty embodying a musical development of the rhythmic art, as typified by the Japanese Butterfly dance which is now being presented in all European centers. In this beautiful film the “Cines” are endeavoring to develop a new idea in film art; the musical score is a brilliant composition and in conjunction with the film a most pleasing production is offered. . . . A feature film with feature music. Composed, staged and presented at a lawn fete given by the King of Italy.6

This was “a new idea in film art,” but one rooted as closely as possible to the arts of dance and music, and to the high-culture versions of those forms—the ones “now being presented in all European centers” and performed for the King of Italy. In Europe itself, notions of film and art were developing differently. The connection between film and “high” European culture was fully exploited by the Pathé company of France, which formed relationships with two new production companies that had been founded in 1908 under the names “Le Film d’Art” and SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres / Cinematographic Society of Authors and Men of Letters). SCAGL was oriented toward films that were adaptations of literary novels and theater, while Le Film d’Art focused on historical and mythological works as well as theatrical adaptations. Both groups’ films seem to have been released in the United States as films d’art, and according to Richard Abel were received as such in the American press. As Abel notes, “The term film d’art soon had such cachet that the Mirror bestowed it on exceptional films like A Pair of White Gloves not advertised as such—because ‘the story [was] so clever and subtle and the acting so finished and nearly perfect.’”7 The term film d’art soon

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Figure 1.1. Advertisement for The Butterflies, Moving Picture World, February 1908.

spread to other marketing copy for films. A Pathé Frères ad from 1910 calls Love Ye One Another “a colored art film that will be the film of the year.”8 The film tells the story of a desperate young man who is angry that no one in his village will feed him and is about to take revenge on a fellow villager when Jesus appears before him. While there was an obvious promotional imperative for filmmakers and distributors to advertise their offerings as art, it was not merely a case of selling with superlatives. In the same period, we begin to find written explorations of the ways in which film might become an art form and be recognized as one. A May 1909 article in The Nickelodeon (a periodical aimed at exhibitors) examines the question of “Art in Moving Pictures.” The author, David S. Hulfish, is extraordinarily tentative in his claims and begins his essay with a dictionary definition of art: Lest there be some difference in opinion as to the meaning of the word art as used from time to time in the following lines upon the subject of art as expressed and as possible of expression in motion pictures,

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the definition of the word is taken from [Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary (1905)]. “Art (noun). The skillful and systematic arrangement and adaptation of means for the attainment of some desired end.”9

He then walks through the various applications of “Motography” (cinematography) for science and entertainment, exploring its connections to photography, pictorial art, literature, and drama. He argues, for example, that since photography is only a “handmaiden of the other arts” we should not consider cinematography to be part of the art of cinema. Cinematography is only akin to legible printing of a literary work, and “the relative art in two motion pictures is not changed by the photographer’s care or negligence.” In Hulfish’s view, film is an art form when it follows the rules of narrative and communication found in other art forms: In literature, the drama, and in pictorial art, the masterpieces consist mostly of simple stories simply told. Singleness of purpose, simplicity in plan, skill in execution; these make a masterpiece in any art. The art of making motion pictures is no exception, cannot be an exception, to the principles which underlie all arts. The artist who manifests his art in the making of motion pictures must select a simple story, plan to tell it simply, and then skillfully adapt his means to that end.10

Significantly, filmmakers would eventually ignore much of this advice, shifting to increasingly complex storylines and an emphasis on visual spectacle. Indeed, Hulfish is oddly unable to see the connections between the artistic possibilities of pictorial representation and the cinematographic potential of film. In the same issue of The Nickelodeon, the editors dedicated their lead editorial to rebutting the criticism of C. H. Claudy, who had written in the April issue of Photo Era about “the general disregard for art” in filmmaking. Claudy had claimed that “nobody will contend—unless, indeed, it be the manufacturers of moving picture films—that most of such films have much claim to beauty of any kind,” which the editors rebut with reference to Hulfish’s article in that issue, repeating his claim that photography is merely a handmaiden of the other arts. “If beauty is presented,” the editors write, “the photograph,—properly handled technically—must be beautiful.”11 In all these cases, film has the potential to be art or to be beautiful,

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but only if it is channeling something that is itself artistic or beautiful. Film can elevate itself only by not interfering in the transference of art or beauty to an audience. Indeed, one of the key concerns of the article by Claudy is whether the technical limitations of cinema interfere with its ability to convey art. He cites two elements that are both related to the fact that film cameras of the era were hand-cranked and thus did not run at precisely consistent speeds—the flicker of the images and the fact that the motion of people and vehicles often appears to be unrealistic. The editors of The Nickelodeon concede this point somewhat, but call for patience given that “motion picture machinery is showing as rapid development as in the mechanics of any new industry.”12 It was not just the mechanics of the industry that were changing. Film in the nickelodeon era was a popular entertainment that appealed to diverse urban audiences and to newly arrived immigrants who could enjoy films with limited English. For this reason, they were often perceived by middle-class whites as a low-class and disreputable form of entertainment. Theater owners began to chase more “respectable” audiences over this period, which meant white audiences who preferred segregated theaters and wanted to see their prejudices reflected on screen in the form of bumbling and subservient stereotypes of Black people and immigrants. As Cara Caddoo has noted, “It is equally important to acknowledge that the racial division of moving picture audiences was a pre-requisite for [a cross-class market for moving pictures], not just an unfortunate consequence.”13 The push to make film into respectable, artistic entertainment was always racialized, and always had more to do with pulling film up in a cultural hierarchy rather than doing anything to disturb those hierarchies. There was no version of “art film” in this period that was not also a white or “European” film, even if that connection was not always stated explicitly. It was instead part of the fundamental assumptions of most white people, even those who were otherwise progressive for the time on racial issues. Reception of film for Black audiences was much more complicated. As Jacqueline Stewart has noted, the pervasive racism of the period expressed in film titles and scenarios has “forestalled the kind of critical engagement that would expose how the ‘unsettled and unsettling’ Black presence (to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison) influenced the cinema’s early social and aesthetic development.”14 Her book Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity traces the many ways in which African Americans responded to films that often demeaned them. This was not simply a matter of protest or dismissal, but a set of

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complex relations that took place in the context of the rich culture of Black urban life. Stewart points out that “African Americans could not possibly respond to every public insult they suffered at the turn of the twentieth century, and long-standing stereotypes proliferated despite their constant attempts to discredit them.”15 Cinema became a new site for these negative images, but it was not immediately clear how cinema would function in the construction and maintenance of a racist culture: “African Americans recognized that stereotypical media images worked hand in hand with other ‘images’ of Black people in the white imagination (i.e., in legal discourse, political debates, public policy, social custom) to determine the treatment of Blacks in the real world. But where, exactly, did the cinema—in relation to other media—figure into the politics of producing Black images for mass, public consumption?”16 In Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949, Anna Everett analyzes the complex ways in which African American film critics responded to the development of cinema, often seeing its potential and its dangers.17 Among the most prominent early Black critics was Lester A. Walton of the New York Age, who as early as 1909 wrote insightfully about cinema as well as the dangers of the form for Black people in the United States. In an article called “The Degeneracy of the Moving Picture Theatre,” published in August 1909, Walton wrote of a sign outside a theater promoting a film of a Black man in Texas being burned at the stake. “The promoters of moving picture theatres make the assertion that their pictures are of an educational nature,” he wrote. “We would like to know where do the elements of education come in so far as the picture in question is concerned?”18 Walton saw the propagandistic potential of cinema and the ways in which its exploitation of Black suffering might become central. He wrote, “If, we do not start now to put an end to this insult to the race, expect to see more shocking pictures with the Negro as subject in the near future.”19 Walton seems, in general, to be suspicious of moving pictures, and not inclined to regard them as art. As we will see, by the time The Birth of a Nation was released he would be more than aware that calls to recognize the art of cinema could provide cover for white people’s basest motives. Phrases such as “film art” become a lot more common after 1910, so much so that a new company launching itself in 1912 with an ad in Motion Picture Story offered a perhaps overly eager description of its activities:

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ART Just born in the Moving Picture World, THE ART FILM COMPANY. Exhibitors: Are you for ARTistic pictures, ARTistically conceived, ARTistically executed? If you are, book the first releases of THE ART FILM COMPANY and fill your houses with most ARTistic audience you have yet known. Every reel a masterpiece. Don’t forget, the password is ART.

Despite this attempt to tap into the film zeitgeist, the launch seems to have met with little success, as references to the company are few and far between after this, and its president, D. B. Gally, ended up associated with the Pan-American Film Company later in the teens. While the ART Film Company may not have had much success, its marketing is representative of the era. Most of the first descriptions

Figure 1.2. Advertisement for the Art Film Company, Motion Picture Story, 1912.

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of Griffith’s accomplishments in the realm of “art” filmmaking are similarly promotional, and often self-promotional. In December 1913, as he was leaving the Biograph company, Griffith took out a full-page ad in the New York Dramatic Mirror labeling himself the “Producer of all great Biograph successes, revolutionizing Motion Picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.” This was a necessary career move, as he had been uncredited in the Biograph films, and so needed to announce that a long list of films had been his work. Crucially, though, the ad also includes a long list of techniques, such as the close-up and the fade out, that Griffith claimed to have invented.20 Similarly, once he joined the Mutual corporation, his work was described in advertisements as art before this had become common in critical assessments of his films. Thus the recognition of Griffith as an artist of filmmaking began as hype, and this marketing started at least a year before the release of The Birth of a Nation. Ads in Reel Life, a magazine produced by the Mutual Film Company in order to promote its own films and those of the related Reliance and Majestic companies, had been steadily upping the artistic hyperbole around Griffith since he had joined the company in 1913.21 In the course of a few months in the summer of 1914, one can trace a shift in rhetoric that sets up the bold claims that will accompany the release of The Birth of a Nation. A general ad for the Reliance Motion Picture Company (to whom Griffith was directly signed) in April 1914 includes a section at the bottom about Griffith, even though the films listed (an episode of Our Mutual Girl and a film called The Return of Cal Clawson) are not ones he directed. The ad reads, “Constant Reiteration will impress a golden truth on anyone just as constant dripping will wear away a stone. So let it be said once more that D. W. Griffith is the head producer of Reliance pictures and has surrounded himself with the world’s greatest acting and producing forces.”22 It then lists “G. W. Bitzer, photographic expert” and many of the actors who appeared in Griffith’s films of the period. In the next issue (May 1914), the same ad for the month’s releases has a similar note, but one that ratchets up the rhetoric considerably: D. W. GRIFFITH is the most prominent figure among the motion picture producers of the world. For years he made the Biography successes. He made “The Battle of Elderbrush Gulch,” “The Massacre,” “Judith of Bethulia” and the rest of the big Biographs. He originated the present technique of photoplay production. To him are credited

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the “close-up,” the most effective way of “registering” a point; the “flash-back,” by which contemporaneous events happening in different places are clearly shown[,] and the “fade-out,” a wonderful bit of artistry. Those who follow in his train are legion but none successfully rival him. He IS THE HEAD PRODUCER OF RELIANCE MUTUAL MOVIES.23

Here we can see one of the most direct examples of Griffith claiming credit for inventing much of the vocabulary of filmmaking, claims that have been repeatedly undermined in recent decades by a fuller understanding of the development of motion picture techniques. As much as these claims are grandiose, they only make passing mention of “artistry.” This is remedied by a second advertisement in the same issue announcing that Griffith is now supervising the production of Majestic releases as well as those of Reliance. This ad repeats the claims about Griffith having “originated the principal rules of technique now being followed by all producers,” but goes on to describe the ways in which Griffith is trying to move motion pictures forward, beginning with a frank assessment that is rare in its relative humility: Majestic pictures are not “the best in the world,” but we expect to make them as good as any. With this end in view . . . Mr. Griffith has associated himself with some of the very best talent and brains that the motion picture art and industry afford. The players in the new Majestic films are not necessarily actors and actresses with inflated stage reputations, who, no longer able to impose upon the public before the footlights, are now attempting to bring their worn out ideas and obsolete, stilted unnatural “stagecraft” into the rich field of motion pictures.24

The ad goes on to cite the “assistance of people who for years have labored along with him . . . to develop this great art—the greatest in educational and amusement value the world has ever known,” before laying out a grand plan for the future: “It is the hope of Mr. Griffith and his staff to continue on in further endeavor to reach a higher level in the photodrama art, with the aid of those actors and directors in other companies, as well as the motion picture press, with its criticisms and encouragement, who have, from the beginning, joined in the long, hard battle for higher ideals.”25

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The ad copy functions as a sort of manifesto, positioning Griffith as the leader of an industry who can move the entire collective toward artistic achievement. It is remarkable how much this ad focuses on the idea of film art, which is a relatively new phenomenon (even though previous ads had no shortage of hyperbole). The call to collective action in the last paragraph is a crucial development, since it directly entreats others to join Griffith in thinking of film as an art form, which does not simply mean focusing on artistic subjects, nor hiring established stage actors and borrowing their prestige. Griffith is trying to put forth the notion that film could be its own independent art form. This implied that film could be an American art as much as a European one, and that it might enjoy the markers of middle-class and high-class status that other arts enjoy. To that end, an article on Griffith’s Home, Sweet Home in the same Reel Life issue (May 16, 1914) points out that the film “had its first public performance last week in [Clune’s] Auditorium, Los Angeles,” which had a capacity of several thousand people. The story claims that this was “the first picture ever shown in The Auditorium, which is the Los Angeles home of grand opera and the big dramatic plays.”26 Apparent in all this self-promotion and hyperbole is that while Griffith had high hopes for film, he knew that it was not there yet, and that it must make the case for its status as an art form on its own terms, even as it associated itself with more established arts. This dualpronged approach meant that film should try to mimic the experience of other performing arts—going to a respectable theater with a relatively high ticket price—while not depending on those arts for its content. The goal was to make film not a recording of art but something that might be art by itself. To that end, a third ad in Reel Life, published in July 1914, takes the manifesto of creation one step further. The ad claims to be “Extracts from a Letter addressed to the Continental Feature Film Corporation by D. W. GRIFFITH” and contains the following commandments of artistic filmmaking: Inartistic picturization of plays written primarily for the speaking stage DO NOT MAKE GOOD FEATURES! Even “stars” of the speaking stage, when hedged about with aged and out-lawed traditions of the spoken drama—DO NOT MAKE GOOD FEATURES! FAMOUS NAMES ALONE, unbolstered by artistry, in however big type they may be advertised—DO NOT MAKE GOOD FEATURES!

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Only films played by real artists OF THE SCREEN, the subject matter big, gripping theme—dramas, written especially for the Screen, presented in an ARTISTIC MANNER—DO MAKE GOOD FEATURES!27

In this case, the emphasis is clearly on cinema’s independence, presented in terms that depict the new medium as the youthful upstart contrasted with the “aged” traditions of theater. What was becoming clear to Griffith and some of his contemporaries was that film had developed enough of a vocabulary that it could now tell more complicated stories and deal with substantial themes. There was no shortage of genius among the earliest creators of cinema, but audiences also had to be trained in the grammar of the medium, and this had to be accomplished without formal instruction. All filmmakers could do was try things and then see if audiences could comprehend them. Much of this comprehension was by its nature additive, so to claim that filmmakers and film audiences had reached a point by 1914 in which film could suitably advance is not to claim that either group was smarter or more sophisticated than those who had come before. Instead, the development of filmic communication had to arise like a natural language, with new grammatical elements being created when needed, and depending always on appropriate links to prior “speech” to ensure understanding. Audiences could not “talk back” in film, but could only react to films with praise and attendance. The varieties of exhibition and the vagaries of censorship in this period also meant that it was difficult for filmmakers to know why a film did or did not succeed in reaching its audience. Despite all this, it was apparent that the medium and its audience had developed sufficiently for film to take another step. Robert Grau’s The Theatre of Science, published in 1914, was one of the first comprehensive histories of the motion picture business, written at a time of rapid development in the cinema. In the preface to his book, Grau writes that he had initially “intended to represent every phase of public entertaining of a scientific order, such as the phonograph, the player piano, the organ orchestra, and kindred productions of a mechanical age; but, while the work was in the process of making, there came the two- and three-hour photoplay to the nation’s first-grade playhouses.”28 Citing Quo Vadis, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cabiria, Grau claims that “the spectacle of the ‘dollar’ photoplay was now on view, with eleven of New York’s high-grade playhouses . . . in the camera man’s possession.” Thus he decided to devote his entire book to the history of photoplays. The book is dedicated “To David Wark Griffith,

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Figure 1.3. Griffith advertisement in Reel Life, July 1914.

Whose genius in the perfection of the Motion Picture Art contributes significance to this Volume,” and Griffith is often referred to in the book as a leading example of film’s potential. For the most part, the book is a history of the technology of cinema and the various individuals whose inventions enabled it to make progress. What is most valuable about Grau’s book is that despite its scientific orientation, it offers a prescient understanding of the state of film art in 1914 and a smart reading of film’s future. In short, Grau saw that cinema would not need to depend much longer on other arts for either its source material or its participants. It would soon cease to be art by association and begin to earn the title itself. He writes of the “truism” that good film directors need “stage experience and plenty of it,”29 claiming that his current research “cast such theories to the wind.”30 Recognizing that growing numbers of screenwriters and directors were coming from fields other than theater, he asserts, “I believe that given a man of a high order of intellect who has an intimate knowledge of photography and who is gifted with an ability to ‘think in pictures’ he

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will prove a greater asset to the film producer a year from now (if not much sooner) than the stage manager who comes to the studio with no other qualification than his stage experience.”31 As part of his research, Grau wrote directly to Griffith to ask him what he saw as the relationship between film and theater. Griffith’s responses are insightful and revealing: You ask me: “Do you think the stage and its craft are the best means of productivity for the camera man?” No, I do not. The stage is a development of centuries, based on certain fixed conditions and within prescribed limits. . . . The motion picture, although a growth of only a few years, is boundless in its scope, and endless in its possibilities. The whole world is its stage, and time without end its limitations. In the use of speech alone it is at a disadvantage, but other advantages of the motion picture over the stage are so numerous and powerful that we can well afford to grant the stage this one point of superiority.

Griffith had begun his career in the theater and knew enough of it to understand what one form could do that the other could not.32 Given that his theatrical career was unexceptional, it is not surprising that he would side with film. He was correct, though, in seeing that the potential of film had only begun to be explored. Not only would it no longer need to be tied to theater, but it would in fact benefit from the separation. He wrote to Grau: To your second question, “After the plays of other days are exhausted, who will supply the needs of thirty thousand theatres?” . . . The plays of other days are not essential to the motion picture, and I am not sure that they are not proving a positive harm. If motion-picture producers had no access to stage plays, they would be obliged to depend upon their own authors for their material, and, since the picture dramas that would thus result would be composed entirely for picture production, they could not fail to much more nearly reach a perfection of art than could ever be hoped for while writers and directors are trying in vain to twist stage dramas into condition for picture use. When the plays of other days, and of these days are exhausted, as they will be, motion pictures will come into their own.33

While writing this, Griffith was of course deep into his work on The Clansman (which would become The Birth of a Nation), itself an adaptation of a novel and stage play. He was not quite clear of theatrical

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influence yet. In his letter to Grau, he asserts that “when a stage play is reproduced in pictures with any success, it is inevitably found that often the plot and always the manner of treatment have been entirely departed from.”34 The letter reveals a filmmaker chafing at the limits that theater imposed, and clearly seeing himself as the man to break through those limits. Within a year, he would be working on Intolerance, which was a clear attempt to move away from the strictures of theater and expand the palette of filmic art, drawing primarily on well-known historical episodes rather than preexisting summaries and trying to develop a new narrative style for cinema. The mixed reactions to Intolerance would reveal that some of the limits on filmic narrative are easier to discard than others. For now, Griffith’s elevation of the cinema—at least as far as The Clansman was concerned—lay in demonstrating film’s technical potential, best illustrated by the great lengths to which filmmakers would go to create a sense of verisimilitude in their films. Griffith suggests to Grau that “stage craft and stage people are out of place in the intense realism of motion-picture expression, but it may well be that a little motionpicture realism would be of immense advantage to the stage.”35 Some of the early previews of The Clansman in magazines like Motography connect realism directly to artistic achievement: Realism, atmosphere, and a broad grasp of big ideas. These are the keynotes of the artistry of D.W. Griffith. The infinite care paid to seemingly minor details, the efforts to make each trifling incident stand out as an artistic situation in itself, and the commanding comprehension of large subjects are among the principal reasons why Mr. Griffith has earned the sobriquet of the world’s foremost motion picture producer. “We must have realism no matter what the expense” is one of his mottoes.36

The article goes on to cite many of the excesses of historicity that were part of the production of what would become The Birth of a Nation, from consultations with Civil War veterans to the construction of period-authentic trenches. Extensive attention to historical detail in the mise-en-scène of films would become, in the longer term, both a synonym for artistry and a way for filmmakers to paper over the necessary inventions of narrative filmmaking. The excesses of historicity in feature filmmaking are directly tied to the notion of film as an art form. By “excesses of historicity” I mean two related practices. Holly-

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wood historical films, since the era of Griffith, have usually spent considerable time and money on the historical details of the mise-enscène. They have also continually advertised the fact that they are expending those resources as part of the marketing of historical films, to emphasize to audiences that the films are based in historical truth. Both of these industrial practices run alongside a creative method that is directly opposed to them—the tendency to conflate, edit, reimagine, and invent historical events in the service of a good story. To choose a famous and reasonably typical example, James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) was marketed as having been created with incredible attention to detail. Cameron visited the ship on the ocean floor twelve times, created careful models for filming, and tried as much as possible to have the sinking on-screen match the details of what happened to the real ship.37 At the same time, the core story of lovers separated by social class and by disaster is pure invention. Even in films that hew more closely to the lives of historical figures, conversations must be invented, timelines rearranged, and conflicts intensified. These two apparently contradictory practices are in fact symbiotic. The drama of the narrative draws attention to details that would otherwise concern no one but historical specialists. At the same time, the careful attention to military uniforms, china patterns, and room decorations is intended to compensate for the historical inventions in the rest of the text. If it were not, it would not be so heavily advertised. The excesses of historicity in Hollywood fiction films provide cover for the fact that, in practice, historical accuracy is almost always subverted to the needs of dramatic storytelling. In Griffith’s case, this was already true. The same article in Motography about The Clansman declares that “six old Civil War veterans, who fought in the original battle, went over the battlefield with Mr. Griffith and assisted in laying out the trenches. Two of these veterans were commissioned officers and they remained with Mr. Griffith during all battle scenes, advising him of numerous incidents in connection with the original battles.”38 At the same time, the primary story of The Birth of a Nation is an allegorical invention. While some of the characters have a basis in reality—Austin Stoneman is clearly the Pennsylvania abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens—most of the characters are inventions from Thomas Dixon’s novels and play. In at least one case, Griffith mixes careful attention to detail and invention within the same scene. In the recounting of Lincoln’s assassination, title cards mark the exact time and follow the sequence of events carefully, while the fictional characters of Elsie

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Figure 1.4. The Birth of a Nation: Elsie seems to spot John Wilkes Booth just before Lincoln is shot.

and Phil Stoneman are present in the theater, and Elsie is suspicious of John Wilkes Booth before he kills Lincoln. Why do Hollywood films need to emphasize their historical details in order to cover for their narrative inventions? Why should it matter at all to audiences if a story is invented or not, and to what degree? Why would filmmakers care about being taken seriously by audiences and critics? Sometimes, the answer is that the filmmaker wants to convince others of a particular viewpoint about a historical event; the film is making a truth claim that might be controversial. Some of Oliver Stone’s works fall into this category, particularly JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995), both of which were accompanied by the publication of heavily footnoted screenplays, making them an interesting parallel to The Birth of a Nation, which includes (often misleading) footnotes in its intertitles. In general, the rhetoric of historical exactitude provides two much more general benefits. The first benefit is that the rhetoric of research and careful attention to detail provides Hollywood films with a general veneer of seriousness. “Seriousness” is not a synonym for art, of course, as many things that require significant research and expertise are not necessarily art forms. At the same time, seriousness is in most cases a prerequisite for a work to be considered art. In a culture in which art forms can be offered in high and low versions—literature versus dime novels, oil painting versus commercial illustration, opera versus pop songs—what often distinguishes the high from the low is the sense that the high-culture version is worthy of sustained analysis, that it has been designed to

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be pondered, and that it provides an intellectual reward for continued scrutiny. Griffith’s interviews before Birth show the beginnings of a method by which Hollywood films, hitherto considered quick and cheap entertainment to be discarded after use, could come to be considered works that invited audiences to view them multiple times, to learn from them, and to scrutinize them with intellectual curiosity. Ideas about what constitutes art changed over the century after The Birth of a Nation, but what did not change was the idea that works of art are still thought to reward continued attention. In the 1910s it was not self-evident that films rewarded this kind of careful consideration, but filmmakers and critics were trying to create the virtuous cycle in which this could become true. There is another related idea of art that is an undercurrent in the interviews in which Griffith talks of his attention to detail in making The Birth of a Nation, and this is the idea that the creation of art requires the work of trained practitioners who have honed their skills through extensive practice. This definition of artistic practice no longer holds the same sway it once did, but it is still very much the foundation for the ways in which we view classical pianists as “real” musicians in contrast to pop stars, whose music is less likely to involve decades of practice and study. Even within popular music, there are hierarchies of artistry based on who writes songs or plays instruments, and how well they can play those instruments. The public’s continuing skepticism about some kinds of abstract painting reflects this same hierarchy. The solid color paintings of Yves Klein, the striped canvases of Barnett Newman, and even the splatter paintings of Jackson Pollock have long been subject to a suspicion that they are not real art because their technical skill is either not immediately visible or simply not the point of the work. The tension of conceptual art is often that we expect art to be technically hard in some way, to earn its social status through sustained effort. Thus the emphasis that Griffith and later filmmakers put on how much effort filmmaking requires can be seen as an attempt to invoke a cultural ideal of the artist who slowly masters scales or visual perspective before they create work that can be presented to the public. Fortunately for cinema, making movies is extraordinarily difficult, requiring many people doing specialized labor. In addition, the immediate popularity of cinema in its earliest days meant that producers very quickly had the money to spend on elaborate productions, so that some of the commercial successes of the Hollywood industry could be directed toward excessive spending

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on sets, costumes, and consultants. By spending some of their wealth this way, filmmakers could redefine commercial excess as artistic labor. Big-budget filmmaking, which had been made possible by a mass audience, could become craft filmmaking, the slow work of artisans making something to be scrutinized. High production values became, and still are, a near synonym for artistic film, rewarding the studios and the filmmakers who could afford to produce such works. The virtuous cycle of artistic film production thus becomes intertwined with commercially successful film production, in which high production values create the sense of artistic value among audiences (even if the subject matter is not specifically highbrow), and that sense of artistic value translates into box office success, which creates further opportunities to keep or raise production values. In the last few decades, the phrase “art film” has had a much broader meaning, often used in opposition to the descriptor “Hollywood film.” We might instead describe Hollywood films with high production values as “prestige pictures” or associate them with the fall and winter Oscar season. It is worth remembering, though, that even “low-budget” art films might cost something like $2 million to make. Film is undoubtedly the most expensive art form to create. A century of Hollywood filmmaking standards has successfully set the bar for the production values of popular cinema very high, so that most people are effectively removed from the pool of potential filmmakers. It was precisely this elevation that Griffith had in mind when The Birth of a Nation was released in early 1915. Ads for The Clansman—as it was still then known—in the Los Angeles Evening Herald in February 1915 simply called the film “A Combination of Motion Pictures and Spoken Drama”39 as a way of trying to mark that this was a new era in filmmaking. The small ad that appeared in the New York Times a couple of weeks later, on March 3, 1915, was much less subtle. “THE DAWN OF A NEW ART WHICH MARKS AN EPOCH IN THE THEATRES OF THE WORLD” was the triumphant claim; “18,000 people in the mightiest spectacle ever produced.”40 Already we see the quantification of quality, which would become typical in Hollywood film marketing. Appropriately, it is with an entirely made-up number, as there are nowhere near eighteen thousand people in The Birth of a Nation. There are not even crowds that could be reasonably interpreted to contain that many people, and most accounts describe extras playing multiple roles depending on what the scene required. The actual number is probably something like a few hundred.

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Figure 1.5. Advertisement for The Clansman, Los Angeles Evening Herald, February 15, 1915.

The March New York Times ad also noted that the film would be accompanied by a “Symphony Orchestra of 40,” a relatively rare occurrence for the time, as The Birth of a Nation was one of only a few films in this period to have a set score, which had been composed by Joseph Breil from familiar tunes, classical repertoire, and his own creations. According to Martin Marks, Breil had previously written scores for Queen Elizabeth and Cabiria and was commissioned by Griffith to score The Birth of a Nation. Breil’s score for the film did not debut until the New York engagement, so the earlier run of The Clansman at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles had a different score, one that stayed with it for the months of its run in LA.41 (Incidentally, the film kept running in Los Angeles under the title The Clansman even as it was already playing in New York as The Birth of a Nation.) Much of what we know about the Clune’s score comes from a program dated May 24, 1915, that lists much of the source music, which is generally different from Breil’s. Even this score is billed as one that required extensive artistic labor. The ad points out that the music was selected after a “diligent search of the music libraries of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York,” and that while developing the score the twelve

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reels of the film had been run “eighty-four times.” There were also “six complete full orchestra rehearsals.”42 Marks notes Griffith’s close involvement with both the Clune’s and New York scores, and cites an article in the Los Angeles Times from February 8 that both recounts Griffith’s complaints about typical film music and describes the new scores in terms of high-art conventions: “A tremendous idea that of Mr. Griffith, no less than the adapting of grand-opera methods to motion pictures! Each character playing has a distinct type of music, a distinct theme as in opera. A more difficult matter in pictures than opera, however, inasmuch as any one character seldom holds the screen long at a time. In cases where there are many characters, the music is adapted to the dominant note or character in the scene.”43 Thus we have a production staged in a legitimate theater and not in a movie house, with an orchestra and a properly composed score, and the invocation of the “dawn of a new art.” This was all part of a move among distributors to make films respectable by removing them as much as possible from their associations with gritty nickelodeons and working-class immigrant audiences. In the rarified world of “legitimate” theaters, filmmakers and producers could charge premium prices and attract middle-class audiences who could eventually perceive films as art. As much as possible, the marketing of The Birth of a Nation worked to distinguish it from normal films and to place it in a category that had until then included only a handful of features. For readers who have never seen all of The Birth of a Nation, or who saw it once in a classroom decades ago and reasonably decided that once was enough, I will provide a brief synopsis. The plot is divided into two sections. In the first half, we meet two families, the Stonemans and the Camerons, who are related to each other but live in the North and South, respectively. The Stonemans, led by their patriarch Austin Stoneman (played by Ralph Lewis), a politician, decide to visit their southern relatives, and are shown around a plantation in which enslaved people happily pick cotton. Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) catches the attention of Ben Cameron (Henry Walthall), while Elsie’s brother Phil (Elmer Clifton) becomes enamored with Ben’s sister Margaret (Miriam Cooper). There are younger boys in each family who bond, and the youngest sister, Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), is introduced. The two families are divided by the Civil War, and the film features long battle scenes in which Confederate Ben Cameron (now nicknamed the Little Colonel) makes a brave rush on the Union army. The two younger brothers meet on the battlefield on opposite sides and die in each other’s arms. The first half of the film

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ends with a painstaking reproduction of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, with the fictional addition of Phil and Elsie Stoneman in the audience to witness the historic event. In the second half, the film takes a much more sinister turn. Opening titles quote Woodrow Wilson’s claim that Reconstruction was an attempt to “put the white south under the heal of the black south” and that the Ku Klux Klan stood up to “protect the southern country.” Austin Stoneman is shown plotting, and “carpetbaggers” are soon taking over the South, led by Stoneman’s “mulatto” protégé, Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), who is eventually elected lieutenant governor. There are numerous scenes of Black field-workers being urged to quit their labors and enjoy themselves, and of general chaos in the streets. The youngest Cameron sister, Flora, is pursued by Gus, a “renegade negro,” and chooses to jump off a cliff to her death rather than submit to his marriage proposal, which is coded as an attempted rape. Gus is pursued by the Klan and lynched. White people are attacked by Blacks all over the South, and the film culminates in a scene of the Cameron family taking refuge in a cabin with some “Union veterans,” with whom they unite “in common defense of their Aryan birthright.” At the same moment, Silas Lynch has taken Elsie Stoneman hostage and is preparing a forced marriage. The climax of the film is a ride to the rescue by a group of hooded Klansmen, who save Elsie and then the family in the cabin. After the Black soldiers are vanquished, there are scenes of “the next election,” in which Black people are blocked from the polls by the KKK, and scenes of the two couples on a double honeymoon. The last shots are introduced by a card that asks, “Dare we dream of a golden day when bestial War shall rule no more. But instead—the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace,” followed by scenes of Jesus waving his hands over an all-white heaven. The final title card calls for “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!”44 The Birth of a Nation debuted around the country to generally very enthusiastic reviews from the white critics who staffed major newspapers and magazines. Their complaints, when they had them, were much more likely to be about the racist subject matter than the form of the film. Griffith would have been pleased with the praise, but not all who lauded the film referred to it as art. It was just as likely to be described as a “spectacle” or a “stupendous achievement” as a work of art. The change, although under way, was not immediate. Within a year, reviewers of Intolerance would be more likely to wax rhapsodic about film art, but there was a long way to go yet. The Birth of a Nation

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Figure 1.6. The Birth of a Nation: Gus pursuing Flora Cameron to her death.

rolled out slowly across the country, taking months to appear in Chicago (June) and Atlanta (December). Many smaller cities did not see the film until 1916, as there was a continuing requirement that it be booked into appropriate theaters. The slow rollout meant the controversy that engulfed the film had time to build in some cities long before the film appeared. It also meant that Griffith and his producers could generally fight their legal battles one by one, and they succeeded in almost all of these disputes. In arguments in newspaper letter sections and in courtrooms around the country, Griffith was able to immediately use his claim to the artistic status of film as a weapon to silence his critics and ensure unimpeded screenings. While the reviews were laudatory (though “art” seldom appeared among the words of praise), there was little critical consensus that the film marked a turning point during the first months of 1915, even though Griffith was determined to portray it as one. The contrast between his ambitions and the immediate results are exemplified by a pair of articles that appeared side by side in The Moving Picture World in the issue of March 13, 1915. A long review is full of praise for the film, calling it “impressive” and “remarkable” and referring to the “splendor and magnificence of its spectacles.” There is also a mention of the “artistic quality” that is offered in contrast to the ugliness of what it provokes. The author writes: The audience which saw the play at the private exhibition at the Liberty Theater was a most friendly one. It was significant that on

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more than one occasion during the showing of the films there were hisses mingled with the applause. These hisses were not, of course, directed against the artistic quality of the film. They were evoked by the undisguised appeal to race prejudices. The tendency of the second part is to inflame race hatred. The negroes are shown as horrible brutes, given over to beastly excesses, defiant and criminal in their attitude toward the whites and lusting after white women. Some of the details are plainly morbid and repulsive. The film having roused the disgust and hatred of the white against the black to the highest pitch, suggests as a remedy of the racial question the transportation of the negroes to Liberia, which Mr. Griffith assures us was Lincoln’s idea.45

The review concludes, “There can be no question that the appeal to the imagination will carry the picture a good way toward popular success.” The central tensions of much Birth of a Nation criticism are already apparent here, as the author is clearly weighing the “artistic” achievements of the film against its ugliness. He does not seem to dismiss the film’s racism, as many later critics do, nor does he make any claim that the film’s artistry outweighs or makes up for its message. The ending about its appeal being likely to carry it to popular success seems somewhat resigned rather than promotional. In contrast, a news story following this review makes no mention of controversy, only of the enthusiastic reception the film received on its opening night from an audience “including many listed in the Who’s Who of filmdom and a large number of men and women prominent in literary and society circles.”46 What is most interesting about the short article is its description of the speeches given by Thomas Dixon and Griffith between acts of the film on opening night: “Mr. Dixon . . . said that he considered the picture superior to his book and likewise to his play” and “declared that no one save the son of a soldier and a Southerner could have made such a picture, and introduced Mr. Griffith as the greatest director in the world.” For his part, Griffith said “that his aim was to place pictures on a par with the spoken word as a medium for artistic expression appealing to thinking people. He voiced the conviction that important advances are being made in that direction.” Thus the strongest statement about the art of film in these two articles is the one that comes directly from Griffith’s mouth. His reception, while as good as he might have hoped, was still lagging behind his ambitions. Griffith’s repeatedly stated aspirations did at least set the tone of critical reception in the spring of 1915. An April article on the theater

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page of the New York Times offers an honest and blunt assessment of the progress of cinema, pointing out that The Birth of a Nation demonstrates “how far motion pictures have gone, but it might be quite as aptly used to suggest how far they have still to go.”47 The reviewer notes that “for all its impressive pageantry . . . it is, we may hope, not the last word in motion pictures. It is simply the latest word. The photoplay, if not in its infancy, gives evidence of being still in its callow youth.” Since this is the theater page, film is being assessed largely by comparison to theatrical conventions, while the future of film conventions and style is still very much open to debate. The reviewer is confident that film “will surely outgrow, for instance, that trick technically known as the ‘cut back’ which shifts the scenes back and forth in the irresponsible and mischievous manner of the dancing spot of light reflected from the mirror in a small boy’s hand.” Noting that films are not confined by the limits of the stage, the review complains that such cuts between action are “playing havoc with that precious element called tension,” an ironic complaint given that cross-cutting as pioneered in the early years of film by Griffith and others was designed to create tension by, for example, cutting between a person in distress and the attempt at rescue.48 The reviewer suggests that such techniques be “used only on special occasions to follow, say, such converging lines as Dickens traced so effectively when the three men gathered in Jasper’s rooms on the night of Edwin Drood’s disappearance,” a reference to Dickens’s unfinished novel of 1870. So while film had potential, it would do well to heed the rules of more established art forms, a warning that would be repeated many times in the discussion of Griffith’s much more ambitious Intolerance of 1916. In this case, whatever the possibilities of filmic editing and structure, a much simpler problem limited the artistic potential of film: the intertitles. Abandoning the “lofty comparisons” to Dickens, the reviewer observes that the written text of The Birth of a Nation is more reminiscent of “literature of another plane.” Mocking the titles “that tell of the ‘poor bruised heart of the south’ [or] ‘the opal gates of death,’” the reviewer compares them to something “written by Harold Bell Wright in an off moment and . . . revised by Florence Barclay.” Wright and Barclay were among the most popular authors of the period, although both are largely forgotten now. Both had written bestsellers in the years leading up to 1915, but the comparison of the intertitles to their work is clearly not a compliment. While the 1915 New York Times critic is looking down his or her nose at Griffith, it is clear that film’s potential as an art form is very much an open question

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in a way it would not have been in earlier years. The review ends by encouraging filmmakers not to hew too closely to the play when adapting theatrical works for the screen, and to emphasize things that theater cannot do, such as present “vistas of Rome” or the “glimpses of great armies on the march and in the field as reward a visit to ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”49 There can be little doubt, though, that as 1915 wore on, more and more critics and commentators started to see Griffith’s films his way. In May, an article in Motion Picture Magazine mentioned in passing that “nothing so elaborate, so thrilling, and so stupendous has ever before been made by an American director. As spectacle, as an historical document and as art it is unequaled.”50 Articles about the film in African American newspapers at the time were no less nuanced, but obviously much more likely to be concerned with basic questions of justice. The Chicago Defender covered The Birth of a Nation and its controversies extensively in the first six months of 1915, especially to cheer on the initial bans of the film in that city. Articles about the film are often next to reports about the plague of lynching. An editorial published on May 1 points out, “Whenever it becomes necessary to appeal to the baser instincts of men in order to extract from their purse a pittance, it is high time the law step in and say so far shall you go and no farther.” This assessment of film was not so different from the Supreme Court’s, and it is argued with the knowledge that The Birth of a Nation was drawn from Thomas Dixon’s “partisan and misleading” play. An article in the same issue reported that newly elected Chicago mayor William Thompson had announced he would ban the film, but the ban would eventually be overturned. The Defender often attacked the film’s morality and saw it merely as the newest incarnation of Dixon’s long racist campaign. In an editorial titled “The Dirt of a Nation,” the editors wrote: “But just a word about ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ which is big only in size and paradoxically small in morality, since it exploits the colored man of reconstruction days in the character of a profligate. After the carnage and bloodshed of disease the country suffered through the Civil War, who has made the new South and without suitable reward?”51 New York Age arts columnist Lester A. Walton also covered the controversies in Chicago, pointing out that newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, which had lamented the banning of The Birth of a Nation and presented themselves as patrons of the arts, had a strong financial incentive to support the film because of the advertising revenue it would

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generate. Whether or not this was actually a factor in the Tribune’s choice to support the film, Walton is correct in identifying the complex and lucrative benefits of a newspaper posing as a defender of art. Walton understood that art could do a lot of damage: “Some stiletto [knives] are artistically carved and very pretty, as are some revolvers, but notwithstanding their artistic value they are dangerous and objectionable, and so is ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”52 While white critics, filmmakers, and newspapers assumed that art equals goodness and nobleness, Black critics saw from experience that there was no such direct link. The irony of this division is that white writers also assumed Black people had a limited understanding of the nature of art, when in fact it was the white writers who did not see the full picture. A complicated and contradictory notion of art is much more sophisticated than one that sees it as simply a site of beauty and virtue and truth. At the same time, it was not in Griffith’s or other white filmmakers’ interests to try to reconcile the interrelations of racism and art. Their definition of art suited them, and advanced their narrow interests, even as it posed as a high-minded virtue floating above the everyday. There is no evidence that, during the period in which he was making it, Griffith anticipated the controversy his film would create. As a southerner, this was simply his version of history, and for years afterward he seemed genuinely perplexed that anyone would have a problem with it. Even though Dixon was a controversial figure and his play had been critiqued as the racist screed that it was, Griffith seemingly did not make The Birth of a Nation to cause trouble. I write this not to minimize his offense or paint him as an innocent, but only to make clear that he apparently did not set out to make a “controversial” film to further his career or to make money. Importantly, in the hundreds of ads for the film that ran in newspapers across the country in the fifteen years after its initial release, very few mention controversy or legal issues; as a general rule, they extol the film as a “stirring masterpiece” and avoid capitalizing on the attempts to ban the film, with very little “see it while you can” advertising. In a later interview, Dixon did claim that he foresaw the controversy and organized the White House and Supreme Court screenings as a preventive measure that would help with inevitable bans of the film.53 This distinction about intentions is important only insofar as it reveals that Griffith did not think he would have to defend his work in this particular way, but set out to make a film that would solidify him

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as an artist of the movies. Very quickly, though, these two issues were completely intertwined. There was no better way to defend a film as ugly as The Birth of a Nation than to defend it as art, and to claim ideals as high as possible. That is why the “Plea for the Art of the Motion Picture” title card that compares films to the Bible and Shakespeare is so important.54 By giving him something to fight, the film’s opponents allowed him to defend himself as an artist in a way that would have been much more difficult if he had merely made a bad film. The reasonable calls to ban The Birth of a Nation based on the damage it was likely to cause allowed Griffith to speak on behalf of film art itself, rather than speaking merely in his own self-interest. If he were merely defending his film, he would have been limited by his own ego and the decorum of the time. While the ads that he and Mutual had run in the New York Dramatic Mirror and Reel Life in 1913 and 1914 had made grandiose claims on Griffith’s part, even those were framed as the words of others applied to him, which allowed him to play the tempered artist in interviews. He received many negative reviews of his films in later years, and he never had the fire that he had when he was defending The Birth of a Nation, because Birth was wrapped up in larger issues that allowed Griffith to make it seem as though he was not merely defending his own work. While he would be the primary beneficiary of film’s status as a respectable art object, it would also be a benefit for the medium and the industry as a whole. He clearly felt as though this was something he had to make happen, both by making films that were worthy of the term “art,” and by defending his work publicly. It is hard to imagine an alternate history in which Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster was some other film, one that truly was a call to brotherly love and peace. Griffith was a leader in the industry but far from its only talented filmmaker, and it seems likely that film history would have progressed along similar lines even if this film did not end up being the singular event that it was. The other film might have still been very popular, or even a different racist film that was full of stereotypes of African Americans, but not as actively vicious about the possibilities of Black political life. Nevertheless, it is important that this film’s racism was in part what led to its being defined as art, because for its defenders that was the best way to protect it. The notion of film as art, in 1915, comes in part from the need for terms that would allow this particular film to continue being shown, and for middle-class audiences to feel as though they were seeing something worthwhile and not simply a call to racial hatred. The film ended up being regarded as art, in part,

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specifically because of the necessity of defending it as such, and that defense is necessary only because of the film’s racism. A less-racist or nonracist film might have won plaudits and been influential, and it may even have been something that people showed in film history retrospectives and in film courses, but it would never have been a film that needed a “Plea for the Art of the Motion Picture” and so would not have been able to define itself in the way that this one did, nor would it necessarily have been received as an artistic work were it not necessary to defend it as such. And while this was true in 1915, it also needed to be repeatedly solidified over the next century. From the first months of its creation, the film’s racism and its artistic status were inexorably intertwined. Ironically, these threads have mostly been considered as separate and contradictory elements for most of the film’s history, as its technical proficiency is endlessly contrasted with the ugliness of its themes, as if these were two things that only happened to be side by side in the same film. But from 1915 on, these two ideas were tightly woven together. The best way to defend the film was to wrap it in the mantle of artistic creation, so that to protest against The Birth of a Nation was to protest against art itself. The art-versus-racism binary of The Birth of a Nation does not hold up to scrutiny. Griffith’s film was so effective as racist propaganda because it was so well made, because Griffith had so mastered the art of editing that he could direct his audience’s emotions as he wished, because he was elevating film from cheap entertainment to art form at exactly the moment when he was debasing an entire community of people who had responded to the most grievous harms with decency and hard work. From the beginning, its racism and its accomplishments have been bound together, and it is counterproductive to try to fully separate them in order to consider one element purely on its own. If it were not well made, it would not have been so popular and would not have received so much attention or been so influential. If it were not so racist, it would not have needed to be defended as art. All of the threads are intertwined and, most importantly, mutually reinforcing. While Griffith invoked art as a defense against charges of racism, there was plenty of criticism of the film in 1915 that simply took the story at face value and discussed it as though the film were about something else entirely. That is to say, for many white critics and spectators in 1915, the content of The Birth of a Nation was completely uncontroversial, even as they undertook spirited defenses of the film on other grounds. A June 6 article in the New York Times laments the “lack of

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adequate interpretation and criticism” of the movies, something that the critic Henry MacMahon claims would astonish the Martian or other visitors coming to these shores and noting the predominant position rapidly being taken in the amusement world by the motion pictures. The cinema is a Topsy “dat jes’ growed.” There are no canons of the art, no rules of criticism, no intelligent body of opinion, and no agreement on anything except that D. W. Griffith as a producer is the “best ever” and his film “The Birth of a Nation” is by far the greatest motion picture work yet put forward.55

The use of a stereotype like Topsy here and the intended comedy of a phrase in parodied Black speech is a clear clue that this was not a critic finely attuned to negative images of African Americans. This only makes him more representative of an important shift of critical opinion: the small but growing consensus that film was worthy of consideration as an art form, and that Griffith was the key driver of this improved status for cinema. There were plenty of filmmakers making interesting and intriguing films at the time, films which—in retrospect—one can see as key artistic developments, even if they were less publicly influential in the period. The films of Lois Weber are a key example here, which have needed a century to get the critical respect they deserve.56 My argument is that Griffith was the driver of the critical perception that film is an art form, even if that critical opinion was not completely informed. The perception that Griffith was the “best ever” is an important moment in the development of film culture. That is not the same as arguing that Griffith is, in fact, the best filmmaker ever, nor even that he deserved that title in 1915. What is most interesting about MacMahon’s essay is that his analysis of the state of filmmaking holds up much better than his superlatives about Griffith. Frustrated that no one “offers any constructive suggestion as to the future” of film, he singles out Walter Prichard Eaton of the Boston Transcript as being “singularly obtuse to the possibilities of the new art.” Eaton had been critical of film in the Transcript, writing that “the assumption that we can go back to what amounts to sign language at this stage of civilization is one of the most touchingly naive examples of motion-picture makers’ credulity.” It is clear that Eaton is comparing film unfavorably to the stage, but as MacMahon points out, it might be better to compare film to other art forms. “How about the

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‘sign language’ of pure music? The ‘sign language’ of sculpture? The ‘sign language’ of painting? . . . The function of all art is to touch the emotions ideally, and it matters not whether the ‘signs’ or media be words or tones or carvings or pigments or mere facial and bodily attitudes and expressions. No one seems to have sensed the fact that the new art is symbolistic.”57 MacMahon is correct in realizing that film is being evaluated by the standards of theater, and that these are inappropriate models. He writes, “The technique of the motion picture is closer kin to music; the frequent recurrence of parallel themes is both agreeable and necessary.” In theater, a constant shifting back and forth between locations is disruptive and confusing. In film, “each successive series, similar yet different, carries the emotion to the next higher power, till at last, when both of the parallel emotions have attained the nth power, so to speak, they meet in the final swift shock of victory and defeat.” It is clear that MacMahon’s conception of what film is and can do has much in common with Griffith’s. For both, the power of film is its emotional impact, its ability to create feelings rather than intellectual ideas. As MacMahon explains, “The picturemaker HAS to use the rapier of suggestion rather than the bludgeon of logic.” “Suggestion” is a complicated word here, because it implies a subtlety that one would not associate with Griffith. But MacMahon is talking about the ways in which film can set up an associative chain of ideas that are not necessarily linear but can still lead to an overwhelming conclusion. In that sense, this is very much a movie that uses the rapier of suggestion rather than the bludgeon of logic. All of the Black and mulatto characters in the film are nefarious stereotypes unworthy of the audience’s trust. The only “worthy” Black characters are those who demonstrate their subservient loyalty by turning on those who dare to argue for equality. No matter what side of Griffith’s moral line they are on, every moment that a Black or mulatto character is on screen, he or she is conveying to white audiences that Black people are not like “us.” MacMahon ends his piece with a long quotation from E. E. Slosson, who reviewed the film for the New York Independent. MacMahon notes that Slosson was a “bitter opponent of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ on social grounds,” the only time MacMahon mentions its content. Slosson had listed all the ways in which films are superior to stage plays, including the fact that a filmmaker can “use all outdoors for his background instead of a painted and rumpled back drop” and can “dip into the future or the past as though he were in Wells’ time-machine.” More importantly, “he can reveal the mind of his characters in two

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Figure 1.7. Advertisement for The Birth of a Nation, New York Times, July 11, 1915.

ways, neither of them possible on the stage, first by bringing the actor so close that the spectator can read his facial expression, and second, by visualizing his memories or imaginings.” It is fascinating to read the criticism of this period and watch filmmakers and critics and audiences figure out the possibilities and the vocabulary of film together. There were no textbooks for this language—only experimentation, and then either confusion or comprehension. At the same time that Griffith was enjoying the plaudits of critics, the marketing campaign run by Epoch, the film’s production company, was turning analytical nuance into a marketing bullhorn. An ad for the film in the July 11 New York Times contained all the usual exaggerated claims about numbers of horses and extras as well as a list of exciting scenes in the film, including “cities built up only to be destroyed by fire.” This ad is different from others before and after in that it contains an additional claim in large capital letters: “GREATEST ART CONQUEST SINCE THE BEGINNING OF CIVILIZATION.” In case that were not superlative enough, the same idea is repeated at the bottom of the ad: “THE MOST STUPENDOUS DRAMATIC SPECTACLE THE BRAIN OF MAN HAS YET VISIONED AND REVEALED.” It is hard to imagine such a claim being made about any film other than this one, or even

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about other artistic productions, precisely because it came along at a moment when the need to claim that film is art was so acute. By July 1915, the film had aroused protest in most of the major cities where it appeared, and its status as an art object was key to its defense. In addition, it seems clear that people went to see The Birth of a Nation in part because it genuinely was not something whose like they had seen on the screen before. It is hard to place ourselves in the mind of a 1915 spectator watching a film like this, but all of us who have watched a movie have had the experience of being overwhelmed by some kind of blockbuster. Depending on our generation, those movies vary, but there can be little doubt that films, particularly epic films, can have an intense emotional impact. For many who grow up watching movies, their first experiences with such films can occur when they are very young, and we become acclimatized to the experience somewhat, forgetting what it was like to see a movie and feel as though our world had been transformed. We may have it again and again as we age, but its effects are more fleeting each time. We can walk out of a theater feeling emotionally transported, but the effects of that feeling are often diminished by their lack of novelty. We often walk into a theater expecting to be deeply moved by a film and are disappointed if we are not. Since we have been experiencing films like this since childhood, we cannot fully process what it would feel like to do so for the first time as an adult, with a strong memory of what the period before the film looked like. We can imagine not seeing a particular film very easily. We cannot imagine never having seen a film like this one. For most of the spectators in 1915, it was likely their first experience seeing a film like this. There had already been large-scale epics (Cabiria, Quo Vadis), emotional turmoil on screen (The Cheat), and a great many rides-to-the-rescue. Griffith was not the inventor of film vocabulary that he claimed to be, but he was the first real master of what would become Hollywood language. So white audiences in 1915 had this completely overwhelming experience, unlike anything they had had before, carrying them away emotionally and stunning them with spectacle—all of it done in the service of a message that African Americans were not worthy of the full rights of citizenship, that mixedrace Americans were a special danger to be guarded against at all costs, and that America was to be properly understood as a nation of white men who needed to work together to safeguard its racial purity. Much of the complexity of audience reactions in this particular historical moment was captured by the poet Vachel Lindsay, who

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published the pioneering Art of the Moving Picture in late 1915. Often credited as the first book to treat film as an art form, it goes one step beyond Grau’s analysis of the progress of cinema to explicitly make the case that cinema is an art distinct from all others, and to attempt to classify films into different types.58 His three primary categories are films of Action, of Intimacy, and of Splendor, and he cannot help but define these in terms of other arts: “Action Pictures are sculpture-inmotion, Intimate Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendor Pictures are architecture-in-motion.”59 He is determined to separate the photoplay as much as possible from its theatrical antecedents, pushing it closer to painting, sculpture, and architecture. He writes, “This work tries to show that whatever the seeming emphasis on dramatic excitement, the tendency of the best motion pictures is to evolve quite a different thing; the mood of the standard art gallery, the spirit of Tintoretto rather than that of Molière. The ripe photoplay is the art exhibition, plus action. The speed limit is soon reached. But the limit of pictorial beauty cannot be reached.”60 Throughout the book, Lindsay presents Griffith’s past films as illustrative examples. He praises Man’s Genesis (1912), a caveman story about the victory of “Weak-Hands” over “Brute Force,” attributing its success not to the brains-over-brawn allegory, but to the spectacle of watching club weapons be invented. He writes, “Action Pictures are falsely advertised as having heart-interest, or abounding in tragedy” but in fact are successful because they “gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.”61 Lindsay does not mean this as an insult. By connecting such films to sculptors’ long interest in capturing a sense of bodies in motion, he is pointing out that presenting motion is a valid goal for an art, and that cinema can do it particularly well. The Birth of a Nation is a “film of Splendor” according to Lindsay’s divisions, and he classifies it as the third of four subtypes, a film of Crowd Splendor. He points out that “the shoddiest silent drama may contain noble views of the sea,”62 but a sea of humanity is much more difficult. “Only Griffith and his close disciples can do these as well as most any manager can reproduce the ocean. . . . While the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion, it is powerful in conveying the passions of masses of men.”63 He argues that characters in Splendor films need to be representative of a group or a wider ideal: “If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect that afterward it was a fight between only two or three men in a room otherwise empty, stop

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to analyze what they stood for. They were probably representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other earlier in the film.”64 It is clear that Lindsay’s conception of the Crowd Splendor film has been heavily influenced by The Birth of a Nation, and it is his key example in this section. To his credit, Lindsay seems completely aware of the tension between the level of Griffith’s skill and the ugliness of the message that he conveys with that skill, while also recognizing that these two things are not separate. He sees that part of the film’s power is that it arouses hatreds in its audience. So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff. Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Siegmann). The lady is brought forward as a typical helpless white maiden. The white leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face until the crisis has passed. The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result this rescue is a real climax, something the photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve. The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense. On the films, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s poisonous hatred of the negro.65

This was perhaps one of the most insightful takes on The Birth of a Nation that would be written for decades. Lindsay is not seduced by the film’s construction nor its appeals to racial hatred. Not only does he see that the film is well made and deeply racist, but he understands in a way that few others do that these are two sides of the same coin. For most of the past century, very few critics have recognized that the film’s formal achievements are not a counterbalance to its racism, but complicit in the spread of that racism. Lindsay seems to understand this, as well as the inverse relationship: that the film is successful as a Crowd Splendor film precisely because it appeals to racial hatred, that part of its success is because the audience is preloaded with racial

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animus that it can project into the film, and that the film itself builds up this animus throughout its three-hour length so that by the time the climactic ride arrives the boundary between art and anger has been obliterated and the scene “turns the crowd into a mob.” Even so, Lindsay is aware that not everyone will read the film in the same way. He acknowledges that the mob can be “either for or against” Dixon’s hatred, and he himself seems eager to rescue Griffith to the extent that he can, attributing the worst of the film to Dixon and the better parts of it to Griffith, going so far as to recommend other southern authors, including Mark Twain, as sources for Griffith works that would provide “a better basis for future Southern scenarios. The Birth of a Nation has been very properly denounced for its Simon Legree qualities by Francis Hackett, Jane Addams, and others. But it is still true that it is a wonder in its Griffith sections.”66 (Legree is the cruel enslaver in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who has Tom flogged to death.) Lindsay writes, “Unconsciously, Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character.”67 Lindsay was one of the few critics writing in 1915 who managed to fully grapple with the concept of this deeply racist work of art. To most of his contemporaries, art was something that was inherently to be admired, something inherently beautiful, and so much of the debate around the film fell into a pattern where art is opposed to racism—either this was a beautiful piece of art or an ugly racist diatribe. Such an opposition allowed Griffith and his defenders to occupy what they saw as the “high ground” in that debate, appointing themselves the defenders of filmic art. It also left the NAACP and other African American critics of the film in the difficult position of arguing for censorship of an artistic work, a generally unpopular position in American culture, in this case compounded by the unapologetic racism of much of the white American public, deeply sympathetic to the hatreds shown on-screen. Lindsay seemed to understand that the film could be beautifully constructed yet also horrible in its intentions, and that the combination of these two elements could make the film worse rather than better. The craft of the film increased its impact and thus the damage it could inflict. Lindsay’s argument that the film “turns the crowd into a mob” is a crucial insight. Lindsay was himself a sympathetic chronicler of America’s racial divide, even if he sometimes fell prey to many of the stereotypes and blind spots that infect white liberals. In fact, his own reputation has largely been defined by a poem from 1914, “The Congo,” that is full of such stereotypes, even as it tries to critique the legacy of

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colonialism.68 He understood, though, that racism can be relative, that Dixon’s racism was an outlier even in the white supremacist America of 1915, and that this film did much to pull the country toward Dixon’s pole of bigotry, even if Griffith toned down some of the excesses of Dixon’s novels. In “toning down” Dixon’s rhetoric while leaving the most fundamental message of the novels intact, Griffith had in fact made that message tolerable and appealing to a wide audience, even those who thought of themselves as progressive by the standards of the time. Although Lindsay was eager to spare Griffith some of the guilt, he was fully aware that the film’s power is cumulative, that it is itself capable of generating racist outrage, that it would solidify racist views in those who had them and help those who saw themselves as “neutral” to understand the racists’ points of view. Lindsay could see the political potential of this film in a way that few white critics could. Unfortunately, while this lesson was lost on many of his contemporaries who focused on the film’s artistry, it was not lost at all on those who shared Thomas Dixon’s wish for an unabashedly white supremacist America. Many of the indignities that this white supremacist America inflicted on its Black citizens were documented in real time by the journalist Ida B. Wells, one of the founders of the NAACP and a longtime anti-lynching crusader. In her autobiography, she writes of witnessing the hearings that took place on The Birth of a Nation in the spring of 1915, when the film was briefly banned in Chicago. Wells was frustrated that the case was so poorly handled: “Not one of the persons present had seen the film or could give testimony as to why it ought to be suppressed. . . . One could not blame Judge Cooper for refusing to grant an injunction against The Birth of a Nation when no case had been made out to show him why he should do so, and especially when so little interest had been shown by the colored people themselves.”69 Of the film itself, Wells writes, D. W. Griffith was a great artist and one of the leading geniuses in presenting photo plays. That he should prostitute his talents in what would otherwise have been the finest picture presented, in an effort to misrepresent a helpless race, has always been a wonder to me. I have often wondered if his failure to establish himself as a moving picture magnate is not because he chose to prostitute his magnificent talents by an unjust and unworthy portrayal of the Negro race.70

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Eventually Griffith’s inability to see beyond a narrow Victorian and southern worldview would limit his career, but for the moment, he still had more accolades to collect. Wells could see Griffith’s abilities and imagine another set of possibilities for film art. She laments the waste of talent on something so destructive, even if she herself had to quickly move on to the more pressing concerns of the moment. She writes that at one point later in 1915 two friends came to her door “to tell me that they had just been to see The Birth of a Nation and agreed with me that it was an outrage which ought never to have been perpetrated, nor allowed to be shown here.” Wells says she told them that she was “not worrying about that anymore.” She was rushing off to try to win a fair trial for a man in Joliet penitentiary who had been accused of arson.71 Her tireless anti-lynching work was recognized more than one hundred years later with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.72

Chapter 2

film art, intolerance, and oscar micheaux, 1915–1925

By the time The Birth of a Nation debuted in Atlanta in December 1915, the film had been collecting accolades for months, and white southern audiences were primed to hear “their” version of events recounted.1 Reviews in major publications were laudatory and specifically compared Griffith and the film to other forms of artistic achievement. As Vachel Lindsay and African American critics foresaw, the film’s full political potential would soon be realized. In late November, as the premiere approached, at least one person was prepared to capitalize on the film in a way that would have a profound effect on American politics for decades. William Joseph Simmons was an unsuccessful itinerant preacher who had the idea to reestablish the Klan in 1915. The organization had fallen apart in the late nineteenth century after the rise of Jim Crow took away its reason for existence. Simmons timed the launch of his new Klan to take advantage of the release of The Birth of a Nation, and in later interviews he claimed it would not have been so successful without the film. Simmons launched the Klan by burning a cross on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta on Thanksgiving 1915, about ten days before the film’s release, and then bought ads in local newspapers to run alongside those for the film. He recounted much of this history to an interviewer from Collier’s in 1928, and the interviewer then sought out Griffith for his response. The director’s reply was that this “ends a thirteen-year-old mystery.” He claimed to have had no idea how anyone could blame him for the Klan’s rise after 1915 and offered no apology once the association was clear: I’ve been accused of having made The Birth of a Nation as propaganda for the Klan. What’s more, throughout the years I have been constant-

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ly asked to explain the relationship between that picture and the Klan. That accusation seemed foolish to me; so did the question. . . . I had no more idea that The Birth of a Nation might be used to revive the old Klan than I might have had that “Intolerance” would revive the ancient persecution of the Huguenots.2

The historian Katherine Lennard has documented how the second version of the Klan was inspired by Dixon’s play and Griffith’s film, particularly on the symbolic choice of white robes, which had not been a feature of the Reconstruction-era Klan. “The strange shape of the long robes and spiked helmets Dixon described [in his novel and play] resembled garments worn by some Reconstruction Era Klansmen,” Lennard writes, “but their ritual uniformity was Dixon’s primary innovation.”3 As Lennard notes, The Birth of a Nation does not feature uniformly white robes in all scenes, which seems a compromise between historical fidelity and the spectacle that Dixon had created in his fictions.4 While scenes like the final parade of the Klansmen show a range of clothing styles, the predominant costume for the KKK in the film is the white robe, which the film offers as part of an origin story for the Klan, when Ben Cameron watches Black children run from white children who have hidden themselves under a white sheet. Whether Griffith could have foreseen it or not, his film would inspire the real Klan in numerous ways. In Griffith’s surviving papers there is a letter from December 1925, three years before the 1928 Collier’s exchange. It is from the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Ohio of the Ku Klux Klan and is addressed to Harry Aitken, the president of Epoch Productions, which handled the release of The Birth of a Nation. The (unnamed) Grand Dragon writes that he has received a telegram from Aitken, a letter from Griffith’s secretary, and a visit from “an attorney, presumably representing Mr. Griffith’s interests.” All have apparently requested the Klan’s help in overturning a ban on The Birth of a Nation in Ohio that was still in effect in 1925. The Klansman writes that he cannot be of much assistance lobbying the Ohio Censor Board but offers to apply for a special dispensation to show the film in Klan halls around the state. There is no available evidence of this happening, and it would have been unlikely that anyone would have received a dispensation to break the statewide ban on the film.5 The letter is important, though, because it shows a direct link between Epoch and the Klan, and most likely between the Klan and Griffith himself, in 1925, dramatically undermining his claim in 1928

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that associations between the Klan and his film were a “mystery.” It is easily conceivable that Griffith did not foresee, in 1914 and 1915, that his film would be used to revitalize the long-dead KKK. It is impossible that he did not see the connection by the late 1920s, especially when his own production company and his staff were seeking to work with the organization. He would have known as well that the revitalized Klan, at its peak in the 1920s, was broader in its hatreds than it had been during Reconstruction, and that it had widened its range of targets to include Jews, Catholics, and all immigrants.6 In the nativist 1920s, when Ellis Island was closed and the United States was gripped by anti-immigrant hysteria, the Klan would not have been perceived as outside the realm of polite opinion. Griffith was instead maintaining his lifelong refusal to admit any fault, or even bias, on the part of his most famous film. In the meantime, its power was not at all lost on southern viewers. A group of ministers appealed to the mayor of Atlanta to ban The Birth of a Nation in the fall of 1915, before the film had been released there.7 In early December, the local censor board made a trip to Macon to attend a screening and assess the film for themselves. A newspaper account says that “immediately at the close of the performance the censors hurried out among the audience and asked for expressions from hundreds. . . . At the end of this time . . . they decided unanimously that the picture should be shown in Atlanta.”8 Unmentioned here is the assumption that the censor board and all of the people they spoke to were white. The process would have been pro forma anyway. There was little chance that such a hyped film was going to be banned in the South. By the time the censors made this visit to Macon, the Atlanta Constitution had already run full-page illustrated stories praising the film, with banner headlines like “Great Outdoors is D. W. Griffith’s Stage,”9 on the same day that they ran ads for the film and a full-page excerpt from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People, which is referenced in the film. It was no wonder that a few weeks later the same paper ran an editorial praising a matinee performance that was a fund-raiser for the Daughters of the Confederacy: “It is particularly appropriate that this historic organization should profit by an exhibit which tends to teach and preserve the truth of history regarding the civil war, so that generations tracing back to confederate lineage shall go forward in the building of the united nation, proud of the south’s bearing in the tragic events which gave a whole country a new birth.”10 This somber and serious tone was in stark contrast to the effusiveness of their critic a few weeks before, on the night after the debut.

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Ned McIntosh begins his encomium by claiming that “Ancient Greece had her Homer, Modern America has her David W. Griffith.” He ends by adding, “The world has long waited for the American Hugo who could write the ‘Les Miserables’ of the war between the states. Many writers have tried and failed. But the great novel of the civil war has at last arrived––and when it got here it was a moving picture and not a book!” Like so many others, McIntosh immediately connects the film not just to artworks, but to masterpieces of art. In between, though, there is not much that might pass for in-depth analysis. The bulk of the review is an excited recounting of the wonders of the film that summarizes much of the story in detail. After detailing the first half of the film that culminates in the assassination of Lincoln, he writes that Griffith “has just begun!” You are ushered into an ante-chamber in Washington where a misguided man is plotting a black regime among white people–-where a mulatto woman dreams of empire. You live through a period of ruin and destruction in the country where you were born. You see the plot executed and that same country humiliated and crushed under the black heel. Former happiness is shattered by the arrogance of ignorance. You sicken at the sight of an attempt to enforce marital racial equality.

It is interesting to note the use of the word “country” here to mean the South, but there was no doubt that the audience was pleased with this glorification of the Confederacy. He recounts the climax of the film: “A troop of white figures upon spirited horses dashes at breakneck speed into the picture and wheels into position. There is a cheer from the audience. Comes another blood-curling trumpet call and another troop. . . . Men grimly determined upon a last desperate chance to rescue women and homes and civilization from an unspeakable curse are gathering for the work at hand.” And then, “The Little Colonel” rises in his stirrups and holds aloft a cross of fire. The host moves forward. The awful restraint of the audience is thrown to the winds. Many rise from their seats. With the roar of thunder a shout goes up. Freedom is here. Justice is at hand! Retribution has arrived! The scene is indescribable.

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Despite this excitement of a white southern audience overcome with emotion watching the rise of the Klan, McIntosh goes on to claim that the film “is not designed to arouse your prejudices, and if you are fairminded and not predisposed, it will not do so.” Answering calls for the film to be banned, he writes that “the picture is vindicated by historical facts and does not attempt to misinterpret or warp these facts for the purpose of dragging from their graves prejudices that have been dead long since.”11 What should be made of a review that claims that we will sicken at the call for marital racial equality, and then vows that the film will do nothing to arouse prejudices that have been “dead long since?” This is not a case in which the author believes in racial equality but thinks intermarriage is a bridge too far. This is a reviewer writing in the South at the height of Jim Crow, praising a film that glorifies the Klan and demonizes Black people, who still feels the need to deny that he is racist, or that any racist feelings could come from this film. Given the time period, why would he not just proclaim his racist beliefs proudly? Many white Americans did. And yet many more, perhaps the majority, would not, at least in print. It is remarkable how much of the history of racism in America is marked by continual denial of that racism, even in periods where—it seems to us as modern viewers—the racism was so severe as to be undeniable. But at least since Reconstruction and the passage of the constitutional amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) that codified racial equality, a key element of the maintenance of white supremacy has been its simultaneous denial, a claim that the people enforcing racist laws are only acting neutrally based on facts and motivated by the broader social good. McIntosh’s 1915 argument that these prejudices are long dead makes a neat and unfortunate pair with the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which claimed that the civil rights–era restrictions on voting law changes in some southern states were based on data that was fifty years old and therefore invalid. The removal of this supposedly unnecessary restriction immediately led to hundreds of new voting restrictions and the closure of polling places in African American neighborhoods across the region. At each of these moments, and in hundreds of others over the past 150 years, the imaginary relegation of prejudice to the past is an essential part of its maintenance in the present. That line between past and present need not even be strictly maintained. Birth of a Nation reviewers were able to encourage white audiences to relive the glory of the Confederacy without shame or guilt,

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even while claiming that the white supremacy the Confederates were giving their lives to defend was safely in the past. At one screening in Atlanta, Confederate veterans appeared in uniform, a publicity event that has been repeated for war films ever since. A write-up in the Constitution advertised that “the old rebel cry will be heard once again in Atlanta.”12 The Constitution also featured a story about a former Klansman, interviewed after a screening, nostalgically remembering his rides with the group. The unnamed man “addressed his remarks to no one in particular, but several heard him,” and he recounted his fear at his first Klan ride: “I shed my youthfulness right there and I never had that feeling since. It was a case of helpless woman and Black brute, and 200 strong we rode to do our mission . . . which finally had its reward in a peacefulness of mind to our men folks and a sense of security to our women. And I had lost all sense of fear.” The lack of attribution and romantic details make this a highly dubious story, although it is possible that the man did take part in a lynching that he had justified to himself. The connection to the Confederate past was made explicit in ads for the film as well. A December 12 advertisement is particularly notable as one of the earliest appearances of the phrase “writing history with lightning” in connection with the film, but it is not attributed to Woodrow Wilson nor anyone else. It simply reads that “19,759 Persons saw history written with lightning at the Atlanta theatre last week.” The ad includes typical-for-the-period descriptions of key scenes that “YOU WILL SEE . . .” and “YOU WILL HEAR . . . ,” but these are followed by “YOU WILL FEEL . . . ,” and the list is specific to the place: —The spirit of ’61. —The hot surging patriotism that drove your grandfather to don a suit of gray. —The pang of sweethearts parted and the anguish of wives and mothers bereaved. —And above it all a glow of undying pride that they’re your stars and your bars.13

Both the ads and the Constitution’s coverage were completely caught up in the romance of the Lost Cause, but an article published six months later fit more closely with the broader film culture of the times. It recounts the visit of star Henry Walthall to the Atlanta Screen Club. It is difficult to assess how long this organization had existed, but it may have been new, since the article mentions that Walthall’s

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visit “christened” it. He made a speech in which he claimed, “Moving pictures are creating a distinct American art. . . . They are virile, poetic, aesthetic—they are the true democracy of art. There is a greater future for moving pictures than any branch of art the modern stage has known.” Already, the repetition of film’s claim to the status of art was having an effect. Atlanta was not New York, nor was it a center of art or high culture in any way, but the idea that film was an art already seemed ordinary in a daily paper. Even if Walthall had a selfish interest in presenting such an idea, it seems to have been read by his audience as reasonable and not simply as an act of self-promotion.14 By early 1916, Griffith appeared to have won his battle to have his films regarded as art forms by white critics and reviewers. He had spent much of 1915 working on Intolerance, a film that was even more ambitious in its scope than The Birth of a Nation. Intolerance was released in September 1916 in New York, and the critical response shows a near complete acceptance of the idea that film is an art form and that Griffith’s films at least should be treated as artworks. That did not mean they would all be masterpieces. While Intolerance received many glowing reviews, the artistic standards that Griffith had demanded were now earnestly applied to his films, and many critics found Intolerance at least a partial failure by this new standard.

“a story in this manner”: reception of intolerance in 1916 If I may predict: he will never again tell a story in this manner. Nor will anyone else. The blue sea is pretty much where it was when the sails of the Argonauts bellied tight in the winds of a morning world, and so are the people who live in the world. Still we wish to follow, undisturbed, the adventures of a single set of characters, or to thrill with a single pair of lovers. Verily, when the game is hearts[,] two’s company, and the lovers of four ages an awful crowd.15

Julian Johnson’s December 1916 review of Intolerance in Photoplay began with this acknowledgment: “The metropolitan critics who preceded me in learned discourse upon Mr. Griffith’s sun-play, ‘Intolerance,’ shot away all the superlatives which were our common property.”16 Recognizing that the film’s epic battles and scope made it “the biggest art-work of any description in a decade,” he nevertheless could discern the problems inherent in the film’s unusual structure:

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It is much like listening to a quartette of excellent elocutionists simultaneously reading novels by Arnold Bennett, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elinor Glyn. Any of these carnivorous legends would fang you emotionally if you were left long enough in its cage. But just as it is about to bite, out you come, slam goes the door, and you are thrust among the raveners of another century.17

From the outset, Johnson gets at Intolerance’s strengths and its flaws in terms that ring true a century later, and with a prediction that has largely held up. What seemed to Griffith as perhaps the next logical step in the development of filmic narrative and style instead became an evolutionary dead end. Intolerance stands as something of an admirable folly, a film that inspires awe but that does not offer a template for filmic structure in the way that The Birth of a Nation had. While Intolerance’s thematic message has become a Hollywood staple in the way that The Birth of a Nation’s thankfully has not, it is Griffith’s more conventional historical epic that has laid the groundwork for Hollywood’s narrative style. The review of Intolerance in the December issue of Photoplay followed a long series on Griffith that the magazine had been running all year. The series had concluded in November with an article on “The Real Story of ‘Intolerance’” that had covered its construction and motivation. The November article provides crucial evidence in clarifying Griffith’s intentions in making the film. One of the most commonly cited “facts” about Intolerance is that it was a “response” or an “answer” to the criticism Griffith had received over The Birth of a Nation.18 Such an ambiguous phrase might lead modern viewers to see it as an apology or recompense for the racism of Griffith’s blockbuster, and indeed one can easily read the theme of Intolerance as a direct contrast to that of The Birth of a Nation. This contemporary perspective should not convince us that Griffith saw Intolerance in such a light. Griffith designed the film in part as an answer and a response to the criticism he had received, but he offered it as a rebuke, not an apology. As becomes clear from the Photoplay interviews, and indeed from the body of Griffith’s responses to The Birth of a Nation’s many controversies, he saw himself as the persecuted victim of intolerance in the Birth of a Nation debates, not the one being intolerant. His position is recounted in the Photoplay story: “Is this truly to be your last picture?” Griffith was asked. “‘It is,’ he

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Figure 2.1. The spectacle of Intolerance.

replied; ‘intolerance that I have met with and fought with in my other picture makes it impossible to ask investment of the tremendous sums of money required for a real feature film with the result dependent on the whim or lack of brains of a captain of police.’”19 While this seems extraordinary now, we should remember that Griffith saw The Birth of a Nation as a paean to peace, love, and brotherly understanding, complete with Jesus smiling beatifically over (an all-white) heaven. The director seemed genuinely perplexed by the reaction his Civil War film had engendered, and defended it again and again on historical grounds, challenging his critics to find any errors and safeguarding the film with appeals to freedom of speech. Despite his complaints about censorship, these were more of a hassle than a real penalty. When the film was briefly banned in numerous jurisdictions, Griffith fought most of these injunctions in court successfully, also adding a clause to booking contracts for The Birth of a Nation that required theaters to pay the guaranteed minimum fee even if the film was banned in their town or region.20 Overall, the controversy that surrounded the film indubitably made Griffith richer rather than poorer by attracting audiences eager to see what all the fuss was about. Nevertheless, Griffith clearly understood himself as a persecuted artist, and said so publicly. In an earlier segment of Photoplay’s series, published before the release of Intolerance, he had claimed, “If I approach success in what I am trying to do in my coming picture . . . I expect a persecution even greater than that which met ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”21 It is impossible to imagine a scenario in which this might have been true. Instead, Griffith is simply posing as a beleaguered artist.

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Despite Johnson’s claim in Photoplay that his colleagues had used up all superlatives on Intolerance, the mainstream reviews, like his, were often thoughtful and balanced, and many seem to hold up as analyses of the film a century later. For example, the New York Dramatic Mirror’s critic, Frederick James Smith, wrote: “Intolerance, of course, instantly challenges comparison, by reason of its creator, with The Birth of a Nation. One is the dramatization of a novel, a gripping, even thrilling visualization of a story dealing with a theme of national interest—our own Civil War. On the other hand, Intolerance is the screening of an idea. That alone places it as an advance.”22 Throughout the review, Smith offers strong praise for Griffith’s obvious advances in filmmaking style while still holding to the opinion that the film falls short of total success. At the moment of its release, the praise seemed to win out, but there are clues within the reviews about the reassessment that will soon come. Smith ends his review thus: Intolerance, let us sum up once more, stands at the outpost of the cinema’s advance. It has an idea. It has a purpose. From a structural standpoint, the handling and weaving of four plots are revolutionary. There is never a moment’s lack of clarity. Each story sweeps to its climax. Since the interest is divided, it would be reasonable to assume that the dramatic interest might, too, be divided. But the grip of Intolerance, to our way of thinking, surpasses The Birth of a Nation. Power, punch, and real thrills are there—thrills to equal the preceding Griffith spectacle. Its themes are overtopped by spectacular trappings, dwarfing them in a measure. The modern story, in its melodramatic present dayedness [sic], seems a bit below the key of the historical divisions. It is lurid, even conventional, in its final working out. But, in its early moments, it points a caustic finger upon certain phases of modern charity, particularly upon the salaried uplifter. And it is the one vigorous story of the spectacle. Griffith makes his point in Intolerance. There are obvious moments, moments a bit overdone, lapses to banality, but, on the whole, Intolerance is a mighty thing. Its spectacular appeal is certain.23

Only a few months later, once the initial amazement had worn off, and perhaps once critics began to perceive that Intolerance would not copy The Birth of a Nation in its popular success, the reception of Intolerance began to shift. In March 1917, a Photoplay article by Harry C. Carr used Intolerance to demonstrate the ills of contemporary cinema. The article laments an apparent decline in storytelling ability

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in Hollywood, blaming directors and predicting that writers would be getting their due in Hollywood soon. Carr claims that “the author is about to rise and tell the director where he belongs”24 since “the old time punch play is to give way to more subtle plays written by men practiced in writing.”25 Much of his article is based on an interview with Cecil B. DeMille, and Carr repeatedly blurs the lines between DeMille’s contributions and his own, making it difficult to determine attribution. He loosely quotes DeMille as follows: The experience of Mr. Griffith with “Intolerance” has driven most movie magnets [sic] into a panic over big spectacles. Nevertheless the spectacle will survive. The trouble with Intolerance was its departure from the laws of drama. A spectacle is only permissible if it is subsidiary to character development. In other words, the San Francisco earthquake has no right to be shown on the screen as a mere spectacle. As an event that brought about a crisis in the affairs of a certain character, it is dramatically correct. The story must dominate events; the events have no dramatic right to dominate the characters. The fatal error of Intolerance was that, in the great Babylonian scene, you didn’t care which side won. It was just a great show.26

Griffith continued to enjoy considerable critical and box office respect until the early 1920s, when he experienced a period of decline that continued until his career ended, in the early 1930s. Even the highly successful films that he produced in the teens did not have the impact of either The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance, and these are the two that have defined his career ever since. Still, by 1919 he was respected enough to be invited to be one of the founders of United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, an initially ill-fated attempt to create a studio in which artists would have full creative control. It also attempted to entice exhibitors by offering freedom from the block booking practices of the larger studios, boasting in a late 1919 ad that if theater owners wanted to book “‘Broken Blossoms’ and ‘Broken Blossoms’ only, [they] can do so without being obliged to rent any other pictures whatsoever. This is our only method of doing business.”27 For our purposes, Broken Blossoms is the most important Griffith film in this period, as it is about an abused girl in London (Lillian Gish) who is befriended by a Chinese immigrant, played by Richard Barthelmess in yellowface. It is most intriguing now because although

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Figure 2.2. Promotional photo of the founding of United Artists, 1919. Foreground: D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin (seated), and Douglas Fairbanks. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

it is full of the racial stereotypes of the period, it is clearly an attempt to argue against racism itself. It received enthusiastic reviews, not only for its subject matter but for the sensitivity of the camera work. Writing in Motion Picture Classic, critic Frederick James Smith called it an “epoch in the march of the photoplay,” adding, “‘Broken Blossoms’ reveals a lyric quality we have long dreamed for the photoplay, but never discovered. There are other splendid qualities to ‘Broken Blossoms,’ but it is because of this alone that we place the production as a milestone of the screen. Indeed, at moments Mr. Griffith makes the camera fairly sing.”28 Similarly, Picture-Play Magazine called it “a real advancement in the motion picture art” and noted that Griffith “brings a new style of photography which creates a more artistic effect than plain flat blackand-white work.”29 While this was far from the first use of color in film, and Griffith himself had used coloring extensively in his earlier films, he had come up with a new device that cast colored light on the screen, giving him control he had not had earlier, although the film could only be shown with this extra equipment in some theaters.30 The innovation seemed to suit the subject matter, perhaps because the film itself was quieter than some of his earlier efforts. In Motion Picture Classic, Smith explained, “Mr. Griffith is using living colors—palpitating blues, pale bronzes, hot golds and a vivid rose—to aid the dramatic moods of his photoplay. And how singularly effective it is! Who knows by what mood colors may ultimately fill the void left by the human voice?”31 An interview with Griffith in the June 21, 1919, issue of Moving Picture World summarized some of the recent reviews of Broken Blossoms

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Figure 2.3. Richard Barthelmess and Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms (1919).

and claimed it was the film that had finally won some theater critics over to recognizing film as an art form. Griffith shows the interviewer a press clipping from the Boston Evening Transcript and says that it was the critic’s “first notice of a photoplay, a form of art that he has always refused to accept.”32 The review notes that Griffith “has attained a new softness of outline, a new play of light and shadow, a new subtlety and fineness of suggestion that are to photography as an artistry, whether on film or plate.” A second review, also supplied by Griffith, from the Chicago Evening Post, says that Mr. Griffith’s “Broken Blossoms,” now at the Illinois Theatre, is the motion picture that converts dramatic critics to whom the cinema is anathema into film fanatics. Mr. Darnton, of the New York World, for example, was seduced by it into total abandonment of a stern vow of silence on the subject of the photoplay, and Mr. Parker, of the Boston Transcript, went to the exhibition to scoff and remained to write three columns of praise. Decidedly there must be something potent in “Broken Blossoms” if it causes such strong men as these to change their journalistic religion. . . . The thing is top-notch in movie-making; it deserves to be called a classic example of the art of narrative through cinematography.33

While this is an example of expert public relations as much as anything else—Griffith is taking praise from one quarter and feeding it to a journalist from another—it still demonstrates the ongoing nature

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of the “conversion” of critics to seeing cinema as an art. Like any monumental shift, it does not come all at once, and it does not all come from watching Griffith’s work, as much as he would have liked to promote (and perhaps earnestly believed) that it did. The sense that cinema was an art form developed as cinema itself was developing—in small stages fueled by innovation and by trial and error. His films were successful enough and he had amassed enough cultural capital to push this process forward in multiple ways. He was obviously interested in innovating with the camera for the sake of film itself, but he was also shrewd enough when it came to marketing to make sure that supportive voices were amplified as much as possible, in both interviews and his own advertisements. As much praise as Griffith received, there was a healthy amount of argument about what kind of art film should be. In the same issue of Motion Picture Classic in which Smith extolled the virtues of Broken Blossoms, the critic (and eventual successful producer) Kenneth Macgowan pointed out the ways in which Griffith, and filmmaking, had gone wrong since the success of The Birth of a Nation. Macgowan writes of “the evil effect of that great photoplay on its director and the whole motion picture art,” which was not its racism but that “it gave producers the idea that spending a great deal of money, hiring a great many people and trying to tell a three-hour story should result in satisfactory screen entertainments.” He argues that because “the obvious melodrama of ‘The Birth’ made money—and fame—Griffith turned from the hard and dangerous business of character study and psychological action to the sure-fire recipe of a riot, a race and a rescue.”34 Macgowan is pleased that Griffith has returned to the intimacy that marks films like Broken Blossoms, and laments that he could have made more films like this in the place of spectacles like Intolerance and Hearts of the World. While Griffith’s efforts in this era were occasionally hit-and-miss, and  artistic respect and commercial success would eventually elude him, his earlier films would carry him a while longer, especially since they continued to be popular with audiences for many years into their runs.

oscar micheaux and african american artistic responses to the birth of a nation The aesthetic arguments about The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance discussed so far have been primarily debates among white people, for

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multiple reasons. Many newspapers and film magazines had no Black contributors by design, and African Americans had few outlets for public speech outside of their own communities for most of the twentieth century. The selective attention paid to Black struggles by white journalists and writers, usually during times of crisis, contributed to the sense among white Americans that race relations were “fine” or “peaceful” most of the time and allowed civil rights activists to be portrayed as troublemakers.35 In addition, almost all the century-long debates about the aesthetics and artistic value of The Birth of a Nation have been written from a place of white privilege. Being able to have a “reasonable” discussion about race relations has most often meant that one must act and speak dispassionately and calmly, which is much easier to do when you are not the one being threatened. African Americans have been asked for 150 years to have “reasonable” debates about the terms of their own humanity, and there is nothing at all rational about such a request. While there is a wealth of Black writing on The Birth of a Nation, most of it is in support of bans of the film, which the NAACP led for many decades.36 Such calls for censorship played into the terms that Griffith had already attempted to create, given that there has long been little support among left-leaning intellectuals for the suppression of artworks. Black citizens were caught in the middle of a debate between white people, in which conservatives were fine with film censorship but would never ban this film, and liberals and progressives opposed censorship on principle. As we will see, as The Birth of a Nation became a work of “film history” in later decades, this progressive opposition to censorship became much easier to justify. But in the teens and 1920s, with the Klan on the rise and the nation in the grips of nativist racism on multiple fronts, there was no time for Black writers or activists to have nuanced discussions about the film’s editing or cinematography. That is not to imply that they did not understand the workings of the film. For them to fear the film’s influence, they had to comprehend the sources of its power over audiences. If the film had been poorly constructed, they would have understood that it was likely to lose audiences’ attention quickly. Instead, they were fighting something that was, for its white audiences, a stunning emotional experience, with narrative and image and orchestral score coming together to overwhelm the senses. One attempt to counteract this emotional experience had been the addition of The New Era, which became known as the “Hampton Epilogue.” This documentary footage of Black students learning trades at

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the Hampton Institute was intended to show the progress that Black people had made since Reconstruction. While the footage was part of a larger project of “uplift cinema” made by Black filmmakers and activists, it also provided cover for the racism of The Birth of a Nation, adding to the film’s veneer of historical accuracy and providing ammunition for Griffith’s defense that he had shown the good as well as the bad. The footage, seen only in select cities, drew significant condemnation from some Black critics as well as some members of Hampton’s faculty. It seemed clear to many viewers that it was not so simple to counteract the message of a powerful and affecting film with just a short epilogue.37 A similar effort to respond to The Birth of a Nation with positive images evolved into the film The Birth of a Race, which was eventually released in 1918 and ended up as a mix of biblical stories connected to American history. It was unfortunately a critical and commercial failure.38 As Jane Gaines has noted, it was The Birth of a Nation’s “achieved ‘orchestration of affect’ that was so difficult for the NAACP and other liberal groups to combat in their long opposition to the film. Of all the critical responses to The Birth of a Nation, [Oscar] Micheaux’s is the only one that answers affect with affect.”39 That is not to suggest that it was the only filmic response. As Allyson Nadia Field has explained at length, African American filmmakers had been using cinema as a way to encourage “uplift” and counter demeaning stereotypes for quite some time.40 Micheaux was one of the more successful, and one whose surviving films reveal a sophisticated understanding and critique of Griffith, not only for his racism, but for his misunderstandings about cinema. Micheaux himself has been the subject of a considerable amount of critical attention in recent years. He had worked as a Pullman porter and a farmer in South Dakota before he turned to writing novels, which he self-published and sold door-to-door.41 He turned his novel The Homesteader into his debut film, but the film does not survive. To understand this period, we have only Within Our Gates (1920), The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), and Body and Soul (1925), the surviving copies of which show heavy evidence of censorship that can make it hard to decipher what the original films looked like.42 For our purposes, it is most important to recount the ways in which one of his surviving films, Within Our Gates, answers The Birth of a Nation in terms of both content and form. Likely because of the censorship, the plot can be hard to follow at times. The protagonist, Sylvia Landry, is involved in both a thwarted engagement and the search for funding for a rural school for Black

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children. The most important elements in relation to The Birth of a Nation are all in the long flashback scene near the end that recounts the lynching deaths of Sylvia’s adoptive family. As an educated woman, Sylvia Landry is able to help her farmer parents keep track of their accounts with the white landowner Philip Gridlestone, the son of an enslaver who routinely cheats his tenant farmers. When Sylvia’s father, Mr. Landry, goes to settle his accounts fairly, Gridlestone threatens him. At the same moment, a white tenant farmer appears outside the window with a shotgun, looking for revenge because Gridlestone had called him “poor white trash—no better than a negro.” The white man shoots Gridlestone through the window and kills him. Unbeknownst to any of them, Gridlestone’s duplicitous Black servant Efrem has been watching all of this from another window, but believes that Landry has killed Gridlestone, and he runs off to alert other white people, who immediately form a lynch mob. When it takes them a few days to find Landry and his wife, they lynch Efrem too, even as he boasts of how he is on the side of the white people now. Efrem has helped the whites, but they turn on him easily because they need to punish a Black person “while we’s waitin’.” At this point, a title card announces “What the Newspapers said” with the headline “The Murderer Landry Escapes Capture.” We see the words of a newspaper article on screen, and the story of the crime attributed to “Efrem, Gridlestone’s faithful servant—and himself the recent victim of an accidental death at unknown hands,” directly contradicting what we have just seen, that Efrem was lynched by impatient whites. It is crucial that he is still called a “faithful servant,” echoing Griffith’s references to the faithful souls who remain loyal to the Cameron family. The newspaper story goes on to recount that Landry had arrived drunk and been greeted by Gridlestone in his “accustomed kindly manner.” The murderer Landry chased Gridlestone around the room while Gridlestone begged for mercy and the “savage negro continued his attack.” What is crucial about this sequence is that it clearly conveys that newspaper accounts of Black crimes are not to be trusted. Not only is this story a lie, but it is also an unnecessary exaggeration. The story that the white community already had from Efrem, that Landry had killed Gridlestone in a dispute, would be enough for mob justice. But it is not enough for the newspapers, who must continue to create narratives of depraved Blacks committing wanton violence. A financial dispute might actually create questions about how Gridlestone billed

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his tenants, which would elevate Landry to the status of a reasonable man who might have had a case. Micheaux understands that even this is too much for white society, and that white fears of Black people must be continually stoked, as Griffith did with the sequence of Gus chasing Flora in The Birth of a Nation. In this case, it is also crucial that we see the supposedly neutral language of the newspaper, which presents inflammatory lies as calm and distanced reporting. Micheaux is reminding audiences of the ways in which media representations of Black life construct a veil of objectivity behind which racism can hide and flourish. For all the sophistication of this critique of newspaper reporting, it is not the most remarkable facet of the scene. The title cards of this account of Landry the murderer are interspersed with scenes of the events unfolding according to the newspaper’s version of events. We see Landry sneak up on a calm and friendly Mr. Gridlestone and brutally attack him, and the film cuts back and forth between the racist invention of events and scenes that depict exactly those events. Micheaux is constructing a scene full of racist inventions to show how easy it is, and to make it clear to his audience that they cannot trust filmic images. Black viewers cannot trust newspapers to represent them, and they cannot trust film either. It is impossible to overstate how direct a critique this is of Griffith and his ideas of cinema. Micheaux is not simply criticizing Griffith’s filmmaking as racist, although it is. Griffith had repeatedly claimed that films might replace history books and that his film was simple fact, and dared anyone to find a single historical error in it (never mind that it is a fictional story). Griffith believed in the ability of film to act as a transparent view of the past or the present, to be an objective representation of events that would then be beyond dispute. He claimed in a 1915 interview that “the time will come in less than ten years . . . when the children in the public schools will be taught everything by moving pictures.” This was not a self-promotional claim made offhand, as he seems to have thought it through. He claims that instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of what exactly did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.

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There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history. All the work of writing revising, collating and reproducing will have been carefully attended to by a corps of recognized experts, and you will have received a vivid and complete expression.43

The intellectual naïveté of this claim is stunning. Since these films would be created in consultations with “experts,” they would have exactly the same biases as written histories. Griffith offers these supposedly clear images as an alternative to the “bewilderment” of reading multiple conflicting histories, but all these films would do is hide the honest debate that happens among historians. The films obviously would not be “objective,” but they would have the appearance of objectivity, playing on our mind’s bias toward things we have “seen” over things we have read. Griffith genuinely seems to not understand this distinction, and Micheaux clearly does. For the broader society, it was Griffith’s view that carried the day. Included in the official program of The Birth of a Nation was the claim referenced in this book’s introduction by journalist and columnist Dorothy Dix that “you see, as the angels looking down from heaven must have seen, exactly what took place fifty years ago.” Griffith’s key defense for many years was that his film was objective history. Some of this naïveté can be attributed to the newness of film, to the overwhelming sensation of immersion produced by a medium that was only beginning to develop its potential. We are less likely now to imagine films as an angel’s view of history, but we still value historical films with immersive experiences that feel like eyewitness accounts, such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) and 1917 (2019). In 1920, Micheaux was working with minimal funding, no formal training, and aggressive censors. His film was never going to compete with Griffith’s in terms of spectacle or polish. But intellectually he understood the medium in ways that Griffith did not. He knew that filmic images, especially in a fiction film, were not some kind of truth, and they could never be. He also understood that viewers might accept those images as truth and was trying to do his part to educate his audiences. Given that Micheaux’s films played primarily in Black theaters, he was perhaps preaching to the choir. It was white audiences who needed to hear his critique, and few of them were paying attention.

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the birth of a nation and intolerance in the 1920s A 1920 ad for The Birth of a Nation placed by the Elliott Film Corporation of Minnesota in The Greater Amusements, a trade paper, makes the case that the film still has some life in it for exhibitors. The ad repeats many of the false claims from release ads—5,000 scenes, 1,800 people, etc.—and claims the film is “BIG AS EVER” and touring “WITH ORIGINAL BIG ORCHESTRA.”44 There still seemed to be an audience in both smaller centers and large cities. As late as 1924, an ad for a revival of the film in Chicago contained a long appeal signed by Harry Aitken claiming that “4,000 Persons Saw It Last Night at the Auditorium.” The ad makes appeals to the cinema of attractions, encouraging patrons to “SEE These Stirring Scenes Again” and listing “Sherman’s March Through Georgia” and “The Assassination of Lincoln,” among others. The ad acknowledges that most viewers had seen it already many times: Who wouldn’t see the picture again? So long as the American heart leaps to the names of Lincoln, Grant and Lee so it will leap to the name, “The Birth of a Nation.” For this is more than a motion picture. It is stirring history being lived again. . . . No American can fully appreciate what it is to be American until he has seen this picture. By the same token no American of any color or creed can say that the picture does him offense. There is no reflection on any race or creed that lives beneath our flag. There can be none! For the very lesson of love and understanding is what the picture brings home.

For all of this hyperbole, the ad ends by noting that the era of this film is coming to a close: A Chance You May Never Have Again Remember how this picture held you rapt? Remember the music that set you aquiver? Once again that experience may be yours. Once again you may see “The Birth of a Nation.” And it may be your last chance. So seize it.45

Aitken seemed well aware that the era in which general audiences would be interested in this film was ending, and he was trying to wring every last dollar out of it.

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Similarly, an advertisement for a two-day run at the Academy Theatre in Selma, Alabama, in December 1925 announced a “FAREWELL TOUR of the Greatest of All American Spectacles,” adding that The Birth of a Nation was “The Picture That Every Real American Should See At Least Once A Year.” The dictum was apparently to be taken literally, as the film had been given a similar two-day run a year earlier. The same page featured a “story” about the revival that repeats some of the ad’s claims, with a banner headline claiming that the film “Arouses Patriotic Approval.”46 Obviously, the definition of patriotic appeal in Selma in 1925 was a deeply racist, white supremacist one, and it is no surprise that the film would continue to have appeal there, at least for a limited run. This is not to suggest that the film’s allure as straightforward entertainment was limited to the South. An ad in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in December 1926 also claimed it to be the picture that real Americans

Figure 2.4. Advertisement in The Greater Amusements, May 29, 1920.

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Figure 2.5. Chicago advertisement for The Birth of a Nation, 1924.

should see every year, but added an explanation from the theater manager about the reasons for the film’s revival: “Why am I bringing back to this Theatre ‘The Birth of a Nation’? You have a right to my answer to that. I think it is a GOOD ANSWER.” The manager then lists the various accolades and successes the film has enjoyed, mentioning its international reception and describing it as a “picture that a President of the United States wept with.” The key is that this is a nostalgia exercise: the first line is “DO YOU REMEMBER, when you first saw . . .”47 While showings of the film occurred sporadically after 1925, the number dropped off significantly. There were still hundreds of references to The Birth of a Nation in American newspapers in the 1920s, but these often used it merely as a historical touchstone, claiming this or that film as the greatest thing since The Birth of a Nation or that some type of storyline or style had not been seen since The Birth of a

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Nation. Similar claims came up frequently in mentions of any of the film’s actors. Even those who had long and successful careers, like Lillian Gish, never outgrew their connection to it. Both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were frequently referenced in film criticism in the 1920s, and as filmmaking matured over the decade, some important shifts can be seen in how the two films were perceived. As Intolerance made the transition from current release to cinema history milestone, the reviews and discussion became less forgiving. In a number of 1920s commentaries, critics characterized the film as a failed experiment, especially once it became clear that the film’s narrative structure had not caught on. While DeMille and others had further demonstrated the possibilities of the epic, their efforts generally relied on one story at a time. A revealing example of Intolerance criticism appeared in the March 1922 issue of the Educational Screen, a journal founded that same year “with the sole purpose of publishing a magazine in the field of visual education which should be at once impartial and authoritative, scholarly and tolerant, critical and optimistic.”48 Its editors imagined the journal as more highbrow than fan magazines and emphatically independent of business interests, claiming, This magazine intends to get at the truth about visual education—in all its phases and in its broadest aspects—and serve it up in a form palatable to thinking Americans. We shall endeavor to supply for you the best in theory, opinion and experience that the country affords—in the form of articles by contributors qualified to speak interestingly and authoritatively.49

In a March article by Marion Lanphier, “Epic Possibilities of the Film,” she echoes many of the criticisms in the Carr piece from 1917, arguing that Griffith had broken fundamental rules of storytelling. She is sharp in her critique of the attempt to link the four stories: As to the bad points of Intolerance, the unity of the whole film was hopelessly broken in the use of the four narratives. They were linked by an idea symbolized. Miss Lillian Gish rocked the cradle until we rocked in protest. Symbolism—precious treasure of the silver sheet— was maudlinized to cover incoherent arrangement. . . . It was a glaring proof to me that we cannot straddle the centuries with an analogous

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tale of love strung on a rocking cradle. Long practice in the ways of the silent drama and a respect for the old underlying principles of dramatic narration before we make a habit of departing from them! For, though our medium be visual, the essential elements of dramatic climax in which unity of time and action count tremendously, are the same. Therefore, before we say “Good-bye Mr. Aristotle!” let Intolerance in its Babylonian reels be an indication of the matchless epic quality of the screen in—to quote Mrs. Gerould—“its great spaces, with horsemen riding, men lying in ambush; the specks in the distance growing; flight and pursuit; the crowd, and contrast”—these matters properly used. But let Intolerance, in its whole effect, be a warning against an utter disregard for the unity of time.50

From our present-day perspective, a dramatic world in which unity of time and action are sacrosanct possesses little currency. One can cite hundreds of films, novels, and stage plays produced in the last few decades that disrupt the unity of time and space to draw connections among related stories. The failure of Intolerance to do this well does not translate into a prohibition against all temporal experimentation in cinema from that point onward. At the same time, Intolerance’s particular style, the blending of four complex stories linked by a common theme, has never become commonplace, and imagining an alternate history of cinema in which it might have become the standard seems impossible. The film is simply too difficult to follow, even for sophisticated film viewers. The complexity of the Babylonian and French sequences in particular makes it easy to lose track of characters and plot lines. The soft consensus that these reviews reach about the strengths and weaknesses of Intolerance came at a crucial moment in cinema’s development. At this early stage in Hollywood’s formation, industry figures, critics, and educators were in the process of figuring out what makes films work and what does not. For the most part, film would come to be limited by notions of narrative and temporality borrowed from other arts. Ample narrative experimentation would ensue in the years to come, but even so, Intolerance remains at the outer edges of comprehensibility. In the decade after the release of Intolerance, the critical consensus on the film seemed to hit a low ebb, as Griffith’s career waned before he became the subject of historical research or canon-building. In 1925, one Photoplay writer openly mocked Griffith’s pretensions and accomplishments, in sharp contrast to the hagiographic treatment he had received in that magazine’s multi-part history of his career just prior to

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the release of Intolerance.51 The 1925 article is a profile of Monte Blue, who had been an extra in The Birth of a Nation and played the strike leader in Intolerance, and who went on to play Danton in Orphans of the Storm, eventually appearing in hundreds of films up to the 1950s. The article contrasts the careers of Blue and Griffith up to that point and calls Griffith “a tank town actor—grown weary in the ways of the stage and a failure in middle life—who was later to produce an epic of the South and be the indirect cause of many a negro’s death—who would die unknowing for the so-called cause of cinema art.”52 As we have seen, even early articles that are critical of The Birth of a Nation only rarely accuse Griffith of having blood on his hands. The film’s politics are often cast as “controversial” when referred to at all. For a fan magazine like Photoplay to accuse Griffith of being “the indirect cause of many a negro’s death” is certainly significant, and there is heavy sarcasm in the acknowledged trade-off between the deaths of Black people at the hands of whites and the “so-called cause of cinema art.” It represents a fundamental shift in the treatment of Griffith and his work in the public sphere, a shift that foreshadows a century of changing views and impassioned arguments about The Birth of a Nation. In this article, at least, Intolerance does not fare much better. Keeping with the generally disparaging tone of the piece, its author labels the film “that hodge-podge of history by one unfitted both in balance and mental outlook to make it.”53 A more nuanced response from the same period is found in Terry Ramsaye’s early history of cinema, A Million and One Nights, first published in 1926 but begun as an extended series of articles in Photoplay in April 1922. Ramsaye’s book returns repeatedly to the idea that films must communicate properly, by which he means that certain films fail to convey their ideas to the audience because they are improperly constructed. Ramsaye emphasizes that films should not outstrip their audience’s capacity for comprehension through an overly complicated narrative structure or excessive symbolism. Not surprisingly, Intolerance serves as a key example of a film that fails to communicate effectively to its audience because it aims too high. He writes that the “concept denoted by the word Intolerance is an abstraction of thought. A motion picture which has to be thought about is in the same status as a joke which has to be explained.”54 With something approaching a dry sarcasm, Ramsaye points out that if human beings were smart enough to appreciate a film like Intolerance, Griffith would not have had so much raw historical material for his film in the first place:

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“Griffith sought by concrete emotional illustrations from history to create a dramatic appreciation of an abstract principle in the minds of the screen masses. If they had ever had the deductive capacity for digesting historical experience, the conditions of intolerance which gave him his inspiration would not have continued for two thousand four hundred and fifty-four years between the fall of Babylon and The Birth of a Nation.”55 Continuing in this vein, he claims that “the public never goes anywhere to intellectualize. It went to Intolerance in just sufficient numbers to find out that it did not know what it was about. The consumers of the great common denominator of the emotional arts found themselves confronted by a specimen of screen algebra, ornate but confusing.”56 In particular, he points to Gish’s scenes, intended to link the stories: To Griffith the scenes of Lillian Gish rocking the cradle did mean “a golden thread,” denoting the continuity of the human race and binding his fugue of period pictures. But to the movies audience a picture of a cradle is a hieroglyph meaning: “There is going to be a baby,” “there is a baby” or “there was a baby.” It does not mean the continuity of the race, and it does not suggest intolerance—rather the opposite. The introduction of a cradle in a motion picture is more likely to set the audience to counting back nine months on its fingers than it is to set it to reflecting on man’s inhumanity to man.57

Collectively, these critiques from Ramsaye and the others represent an effort to figure out the rules of cinema, the codes and configurations that allow it to successfully communicate with an audience. This is not simply market research, although some authors include a sense of the commercial achievements of individual films. Rather, these writings constitute an early stage in the development of film theory in America. While feature film production had existed for scarcely a decade, observers were already drawing conclusions concerning the ideal structure of motion pictures—an attempt to turn whatever critical consensus existed into a usable method of understanding cinema. There was not yet a canon of films—that would properly begin with the “Little Theatres” and the addition of films to the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s—but one can detect the beginning of a popular critical sense of what films were, and what they could and could not be. Given the dwindling commercial interest in The Birth of a Nation by the middle of the decade, it is somewhat odd that Epoch still put

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Figure 2.6. Lillian Gish rocking the cradle in Intolerance.

considerable resources into fighting occasional bans of the film. In 1926, the company sued Chicago police chief Morgan Collins and other city officials for preventing a 1924 showing,58 and they seem to have put a lot of effort into trying to get a ban of the film overturned in Ohio in 1925. The film had been banned in that state in 1915 and then reconsidered and approved in February 1917, after an election that transferred control of the state from Republicans to Democrats.59 Its approval was revoked and it was banned again in 1921 after state control returned to Republicans. After trying and failing to get the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio and the Ohio Supreme Court to intervene, Epoch appealed again in 1925 and created documents for the case that do not appear elsewhere in the available historical record. The first was a collection of supportive letters from various prominent citizens, which was a tactic they had used before in successful court challenges. The second was an annotated bibliography for the film, with long excerpts from historians of the Dunning School and Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People. The booklets are attributed to Charles Sumner Druggan and Charles J. Trainor, attorneys for applicant. This appeal failed, too, and the film remained banned in Ohio until the US Supreme Court’s Burstyn decision of 1952 removed the legal foundation for state censorship of film. Aitken must have felt that the commercial potential of The Birth of a Nation in this one state was still worth whatever he spent on fighting the ban. It is also possible, of course, that this felt like an argument on principle for Griffith and Aitken, or that they were motivated by fears that ignoring any standing ban risked

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providing justification for censorship in other states. In any event, the long commercial window for The Birth of a Nation was closing, but it would move almost immediately into a new phase that, while not as financially lucrative, would create for Griffith a significant period of artistic respect of the kind he had long craved. This “artistic respect” was in itself a mixed blessing in that it would apply to Griffith’s older films and not his newer releases. As Richard Schickel recounts in his biography of Griffith, the New Yorker was in its first year of publication in 1925 and “trying hard to establish its reputation for sophistication.” In a review of That Royle Girl (1925), a Griffith comedy that starred W. C. Fields, the magazine opined that “Mr. David Wark Griffith, saintly showman . . . is indisputably the grand master of moralistic-melodramatic balderdash. He has the corner on treacle, mush and trash and automatically is out of our set.”60 Some of his late 1920s films received mixed reviews, and when viewed in the present day do not seem out of step with other offerings of the period. As film came to be accepted as an art form, Griffith would be a part of it, but not in the way he had hoped. He would be viewed as a pioneer and accorded the respect that comes with such a title, even though as a still-working filmmaker he was eager to be seen as a relevant and bankable director. In Griffith’s case, there was a contradiction between these two positions. The Victorian sentimentality that had allowed him to tap into audience emotions in the teens became a handicap in the more modern and cynical 1920s.

reception in other countries In many European countries, the First World War delayed the releases of both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. This happenstance helps us to imagine an alternate timeline of influence in which the films are not cinematic milestones, but simply additional works in Griffith’s oeuvre. In France, the subject matter of The Birth of a Nation created additional obstacles to its release. Georges Sadoul has documented the concern that The Birth of a Nation was “an opportunity to fuel the hatred of color and racial prejudices, in an era where numerous colonial troops were fighting on all fronts.”61 He mentions that the film was banned throughout the war before it was eventually shown in Paris in 1921 in a “mutilated version.” Additionally, it “stayed banned in the French occupation zones in Germany, where the nationalists led an active campaign against the presence of Senegalese troops in the Rhineland.”

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Sadoul writes that in contrast to the colossal success of the film in the United States, “in the rest of the world, absorbed in the hostilities, the event passed practically unnoticed, and had on filmmakers no direct influence. If the message of Griffith could have influenced them, it did so through the channel of his imitators.”62 The Birth of a Nation did not get a full release in Paris until 1923,63 which meant that many French critics saw Intolerance first. Louis Delluc, generally regarded as the most influential critic of the era, published a brief reaction to the recent release of The Birth of a Nation in Bonsoir on August 14, 1923. For Delluc, the film was somewhat underwhelming. He writes: “I think that, aside from [Griffith’s] admirable folly, Intolerance, all of his ambitious epics of recent years are inferior to his series of ‘intimate sentimentals,’ for example The Lily and the Rose, True Heart Susie, Way Down East. . . . Griffith, brilliant or ingenious, had more profound and sharper insights in the expression of little sentiments than he did for the agitation of large crowds.”64 For Delluc, Intolerance emerges as superior to The Birth of a Nation, but only as an “admirable folly.” Sadoul, writing in the 1960s, seems to be in agreement, suggesting that Griffith lets his sense of spectacle get away from him: “With Intolerance, Griffith had done everything himself. . . . The advantages of having an all-powerful director—very rare in cinema—are evident; but this does not come without problems. The nebulous ideology of the great man, his total absence of a sense of the absurd, his autodidactic pedantry, his confidence in his own genius—all are given free rein.” Sadoul also points out that Intolerance “was mutilated by British censors. Its pacifism led to it being banned in continental Europe, particularly in France, where during the war the projection of the Saint-Barthelemy [massacre] was not permitted.”65

griffith and soviet filmmakers The influence of Intolerance in the Soviet Union, though storied, proves difficult to document. Many historical accounts of Intolerance’s reception in the country argue for the film’s centrality to the development of 1920s Soviet cinema, and to the development of montage editing in particular, with few references to original sources. For example, Lillian Gish’s autobiography claims: Its influence has since been felt in every country. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian director, acknowledged that Intolerance had become

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the one basic textbook for the entire Soviet film industry. The film ran continuously in Russia for ten years; it made millions, though not a cent reached Mr. Griffith. In 1922 a delegation from Moscow called on Mr. Griffith and extended to him an invitation from Lenin himself to come to Russia and take charge of all the country’s film production. From the theme of Intolerance, Lenin had inferred that Mr. Griffith must be a Communist, particularly in view of the modern story, with its battle between capital and labor. Mr. Griffith declined the invitation. Although the film depicted the merciless treatment labor suffered at the hands of capitalists, Mr. Griffith himself was an aristocrat who never forgot his father’s reminder that the Griffiths were descended from kings. Sects, parties, politics meant little to him. He cut through the surface to the inner core of humanity—the brotherhood of man.66

Much of this oft-repeated story is impossible to verify. In his history of Soviet film, Kino, Jay Leyda allows that Intolerance was “the new-born Soviet film industry’s first great success—artistically, at the box-office, and even politically,” but points out that “there are so many legends of the subsequent history of Intolerance’s significant Soviet career that it is very difficult to extract the true part from them at this late date.”67 Leyda was well positioned to know, having spent time in the Soviet Union working in film with both Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. He leaves the story of Lenin contacting Griffith as legend and tries to restrict his description of the film’s influence in the Soviet Union to what can reasonably be known to be true: “We know for certain of the popular success of Intolerance, and we know as certainly of the tremendous aesthetic and technical impetus given to all young Soviet film-makers by this and subsequently-shown Griffith films. No Soviet film of importance made within the following ten years was to be completely outside Intolerance’s sphere of influence.”68 In providing an overall sense of the film’s significance, Leyda echoes the critiques of many others, as well as Lillian Gish’s observation that the modern story would have best resonated with Soviet audiences: The thematic flaws and illogicality of Intolerance’s four stories show up more clearly thirty years after the event, rather than when American audiences in 1916 and Soviet audiences in 1919 were dazzled and excited, either by the “hail of images,” or by Griffith’s passionate portrayal of the four conflicts. Some may have been moved by the dimensions of the Babylonian story, but it must certainly have been the

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intense “modern story” that moved the alert, embattled Soviet audience. Russian audiences had never seen such a believable tragedy of American working-class life—it must have given life to every slogan they had heard about the sympathies of foreign workers with the revolution in Russia. It was this core of sincerity in the film, rather than its philosophy (which would not have stood up under any objective Marxist inspection) that gave Intolerance its popular Soviet appeal.69

In an in-depth study of the reception of Intolerance in the Soviet Union, Vance Kepley argues that we should not overestimate the film’s importance—particularly as a stylistic inspiration. It would be incorrect to assume that the idea of film montage for the Soviets originated with Intolerance. Rather, it seems that when the film was shown in the Soviet Union in 1919, it merely popularised a style already evolving in the hands of Soviet artists. Kuleshov claims he began to forge his seminal theories well before Intolerance appeared in the Soviet Union. His experiments which defined the “Kuleshov effect” apparently began as early as 1917–18. . . . Vertov writes that he worked out the rapid montage style in his early film The Battle of Tsaritsyn [Boi pod Tsaritsynom, 1919–1920]. Intolerance played in Russia while he was still at work on the film, and the American picture helped acquaint audiences with the mode he sought to perfect: “After a short time there came Griffith’s film Intolerance. After that it was easier to speak.” Intolerance may have been less a source than a vindication for these innovators.70

Claims about Griffith’s influence in Soviet cinema have been circulating for a long time. In a widely cited article from 1972 about The Birth of a Nation’s impact on the Ku Klux Klan, Maxim Simcovitch added a postscript, noting that in 1940 he had been frustrated by the efforts of Seymour Stern and other Griffith defenders to claim that The Birth of a Nation had been hailed by Eisenstein as a major influence on his own work. Since Stern could produce no evidence of this, Simcovitch wrote to Eisenstein, and received a reply denouncing the claim: In connection with the revival on American screens of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, certain shrewd businessmen, seeking to advertise the film, made assertions to the effect that I have praised it and have stated that in its time Birth of a Nation had greatly influenced my

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creative work. I emphatically protest against these assertions. True, I have always given Griffith his due as an outstanding master of the bourgeois film. But this can in no way be applied to Birth of a Nation, a film which is intrinsically alien and inimical to the ideals for which we are struggling. This film has never been shown here, and I saw it abroad, already after Potemkin had appeared, and therefore could have been in no way influenced by Birth of a Nation. The disgraceful propaganda of racial hatred toward the colored people which permeates this film cannot be redeemed by the purely cinematographic effects of this production.71

At the end of this letter, Eisenstein explains that he will be writing more about Griffith’s actual influence on Soviet filmmaking, the article that would eventually appear with the English title “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in which he clearly links Griffith to the Soviet idea of montage, but also notes that Griffith’s montage was parallel action, which he got from novelists like Dickens.72 Eisenstein’s analysis in this article firmly places Griffith into a longer artistic tradition that, while it diminishes the sense of Griffith as the great inventor, also elevates him by association with the novelist. At the same time, Eisenstein is eager to separate the techniques he admired in Griffith from the “propaganda of racial hatred,” of which he wanted no part.

Chapter 3

little theatres, moma, and the birth of art cinema, 1925–1945

The Birth of a Nation had an extraordinarily long run, playing in reprisal showings until the early 1920s, with audiences still seemingly entranced by the spectacle. By the late 1920s, cinema perhaps had changed enough that such viewings were no longer viable, despite the attempts to re-edit and release the film with sound in 1930. This shift paralleled the decline in Griffith’s career, as he remained relatively successful into the early 1920s but then lost his place in the industry as the decade continued. At that time his films became part of a new circuit of historical film revivals, and there was almost no gap between audiences watching The Birth of a Nation to be entertained and those watching it to revisit old films. The film moved from popular entertainment to “history” without any significant pause. By the mid-1920s, cinema was already thirty years old, enough time for there to be an artistic and historical interest in its past, as well as a simpler nostalgia among adults for the films they had seen as children. The postwar European film industry had also produced a thriving art cinema, and those films started appearing on American shores. While only some of these European films enjoyed widespread popularity across the United States, enough of them found an audience in major centers such as New York to create a new culture of art cinema focused on these innovative works, a culture that would eventually expand to include the historical milestones of American cinema. This was a key step in the acceptance of film as an art form.

the beginnings of the little theatre movement and the idea of art cinema For film to become part of high culture, it required some of the trappings of other art forms. Chief among these requirements was an emerging

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Figure 3.1. Dorothy Gish, D. W. Griffith, and Lillian Gish visit the White House, March 1922 (courtesy of the Library of Congress).

canon of masterpiece films organized around a critical consensus of quality. While plenty of films in the first three decades of cinema were lauded as masterpieces upon their release, film needed to develop a narrative of its own past so that its partisans could point to a series of key works contributing to the development of filmic art, as critics could with other art forms. The beginnings of this historically minded film culture were apparent by the late 1920s, as custodians of film’s past started to organize previous works into something that would eventually become a new field of study. As soon as there were revivals of historic movies, Griffith’s films were prominently featured and sometimes formed a significant part of a very short list of historical films to be reexamined. That is not to suggest that historical films were at the center of anyone’s ideas of art film, which was, in the 1920s, primarily associated with the Little Theatre Movement, a loosely connected network of generally independent theaters that began to appear in major American cities in the second half of the decade. As Tony Guzman has written, the burgeoning art cinema movement of the 1920s was primarily focused on European film, considered to be artistically superior to the massproduction-oriented output of the Hollywood studios. He notes, “From almost the beginning of its existence, various groups had opposed the commercial American film industry on moral or social grounds; however, the little theatre movement was the first organized opposition to Hollywood on the basis of aesthetic principles.”1 As Guzman explains, European film came to be defined, in some circles, as art cinema: “At the onset of the movement, only a few imports seemed to warrant the

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term ‘art film,’ but by the end of the decade the hunger for product saw virtually any European import being screened in little theatres, as if simply being outside the Hollywood system constituted ‘art.’”2 Two crucial developments were ensconced in this contrast between Hollywood and Europe. The first was that the opposition between competing ideas of artistry is in itself the sign of a mature medium. If you are having debates about what properly constitutes filmic art, then you are agreeing that filmic art can and does exist. As we have seen, there was very little discussion of film being art before 1915, but by the mid-1920s the idea was commonplace enough that film partisans could have appropriately intense discussions about various styles and what they might mean. Guzman writes that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the quintessential art film of the period, precisely because it differed so substantially from the ostensible realism of most Hollywood output. This was of course a debate that had followed film from its earliest moments, and had surrounded photography before that: could a medium that depended so heavily on realistic reproduction ever be art? Was there enough room for interpretation in a recording of reality? Caligari’s unreal sets, stylized acting, and obsession with the psychological placed it far from the realist mode and into the context of German expressionism in theater and visual art.3 Regardless of whether one supports or opposes this definition of art cinema, the crucial point is that there were multiple competing definitions, and enough films in divergent styles to have a proper argument. The second idea that the little theatres carried forward was the continuing association of “European” with “high art,” contrasted against the supposedly base instincts of Hollywood production. This hierarchy was hardly unique to cinema. In literature, visual art, and classical music, it was long taken for granted that real art came from Europe, and that North American practitioners could only learn from the masters and follow in their wakes. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that this began to shift in any substantial way. It is not surprising that film culture would adopt this broad cultural bias as its own, especially when it had a kernel of truth to it. The dominance of the Hollywood industry in the period meant that there was little of the independent art-focused cinema that exists today. European nations had their own unique histories, many of them as industrial as America’s, but for a variety of reasons particular to each film-producing nation, there seemed to be a greater range of artistic possibilities, however slight. Watching a cross-section of films from the 1920s today, no one could argue that the European ones are on the whole more “artistic” than

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the Hollywood ones. The perception at the time was likely rooted, in part, in the ability of European filmmakers to show Americans a world that was unfamiliar to them. In other words, European films seemed less rooted in a quotidian reality because they were less rooted in an American reality—a shot of people walking on the streets of Paris would be exotic to American audiences in a way that the same scene shot in Los Angeles could never be. This in itself contained another presupposition about art: that it should offer us something that departs from our daily experience of reality. Thus, a couple of preconceived ideas about art—that it should not be a direct recording of reality, and that it should come from Europe—were at the root of the art film movement. This pro-Europe orientation would affect the reception of Griffith’s work for decades. Since film culture had such a pro-European bias, national pride often made it necessary to offer at least some American films that might compete. Most of the time, those films were Griffith’s. If film culture had been more American in its focus, it might have had a place for other American filmmakers, and for a broader conception of the development of American film, but as it was, there were limited slots, and Griffith always ended up occupying at least one of them. Anne Morey has argued that the little cinema movement’s embrace of Griffith and selected older films was part of its critique of Hollywood, that it “used some of Hollywood’s own products against it (older films were opposed to newer ones).” This seems to be an act motivated not by critical nostalgia but rather by an interest in “the promotion of distribution and exhibition structures that explicitly rejected Hollywood’s business methods.”4 There is little in the criticism of the period to suggest that anyone thought Hollywood’s best days were behind it, or that a golden age had already passed. If anything, the opposite was true. Reviewing a program of historical films in the New York Times in June 1926, critic Mordaunt Hall allows that “the old films were illuminating” because they “demonstrated the remarkable progress of photoplays.” He goes on to contradict those who claim that “the work of the old-timers is just as worthy as that of a few producers of today, forgetting perhaps that what creates laughter now was taken seriously twenty or more years ago, when the intelligence of screen patrons was far below that of the present audiences.”5 If the viewing of older films was not motivated by critical nostalgia, then it seems instead to have been rooted in a historian’s sense that the past can illuminate the present, and that to understand the nature of an art form, one must have a sense of its development—the same impulse that has motivated art history courses for a long time. Notably, these early revivals were not

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reverent undergraduate lectures. Hall makes clear in his review that he finds the early films amusing, and he is not the only one in the audience so inclined. Writing about The Great Train Robbery, he notes that it “elicited more laughter than the Chaplin comedy” that was also on the program. Most tellingly, he writes, “It was retitled so as to point out in a humorous fashion some of its delinquencies.” That someone interested in showing older films would go to the effort of adding titles to mock the film speaks volumes about the contradictory impulses of these early revivals. The truth was that film style had developed extraordinarily quickly over the course of thirty years, and there were stark differences in the construction of films made only five years apart, so much so that a knowledgeable viewer can now reasonably date one in a few minutes of viewing. From a present-day perspective, The Birth of a Nation was part of a major shift in film style in the teens that was firmly ensconced by the 1920s. Griffith and DeMille and others had invented what would become Hollywood style, and thus Griffith’s feature films do not seem as dated to modern viewers as ones made just a few years before. In general, films from the 1920s seem much closer in style to modern films than they do to films from 1905,6 even though they are inevitably classified with these earlier works as silent films despite the fact that the descriptor “silent” tells us almost nothing about what kind of films they were and has come to function as a type of genre despite having no connection to genre at all. The gaps between early cinema and the mature features of the 1920s would have been extremely obvious to viewers at the time, who already had a strong sense of the medium’s artistic and narrative potential, and of its rapid development. Later in the same essay, Hall writes that a film from 1922 (Driven, directed by Charles Brabin)7 contains strong performances, but “although this picture was produced only four years ago it shows its age, occasionally in the expressions of the players and sometimes in the direction. It was at that time conceded to be one of the outstanding features of the year.”8 The rapid shifts in cinema style over the period make it difficult for older films to find an audience that will react in the same way as viewers had on first release. The rapidity of film’s transformation was echoed by Ernst Lubitsch when Symon Gould’s International Film Arts Guild presented some of his films in early 1926: I feel that I am not overstating the facts when I say that the work of the guild is destined to be a turning point in the development of films.

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So far we have been going on making pictures without stopping to look back upon what has been done in the past fifteen or twenty years. We had no means of obtaining a historical perspective of the development of the screen. I have always deplored the lack of something like a central library of photoplays, affiliated, perhaps, with circulating libraries in larger cities. . . . This industry is developing with such leaps and bounds that screen history is made very fast.9

Lubitsch would eventually get his wish for a central library (at the Museum of Modern Art), but he would have to wait another decade. The program that the guild offered at the Cameo Theatre in March 1926 was a mix of his German and American films, making him an ideal subject for the guild, as he was perceived as having brought European sophistication to Hollywood. The program included The Loves of Pharaoh, a German production released in 1922 starring Emil Jannings, and Rosita, made a year later in the United States with Mary Pickford.10 Griffith was the subject of his own retrospective at the Cameo in October and November 1926 while he was also preparing for the release of his newest film, The Sorrows of Satan. The new film would be a commercial failure despite some positive reviews, and his second major setback in a couple of months. In September, a court had ruled in his suit against Al Jolson over a film they had started together in

Figure 3.2. Advertisement for a Griffith retrospective presented by the Film Arts Guild at the Cameo Theatre, New York Times, October 31, 1926.

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1923, which Jolson had abandoned by fleeing to Europe after seeing a screen test and deciding that he would never be involved in motion pictures. The film was to have featured Jolson in blackface, but obviously without his famous singing voice. Jolson abandoned the film after sets had been built, costing Griffith and his backers a small fortune.11 They sued for more than $570,000 but received only $2,627.12 It would not have aided Griffith’s legacy any to have been involved in a blackface film, even if it might have been financially rewarding. His willingness to make such a film is one more demonstration that he never took any of the criticism he received over The Birth of a Nation to heart. In fact, his screenwriter for the Jolson film, Anthony P. Kelly, testified in court that when the scenario for the film, to be called “Mammy’s Boy,” was shown to Griffith, “the latter threw up his hands, saying it touched on the two things he had always avoided in his productions—race and religion.”13 If Kelly’s account is to be believed, it would reflect a fairly stunning lack of self-reflection on Griffith’s part, but one that is not contradicted by any of his other statements about the racist legacy of his most famous film. On October 23, 1926, the New York Times ran two adjacent ads for Griffith movies playing practically next door to each other. The larger ad is for The Sorrows of Satan at the George M. Cohen Theatre. Above it is a smaller ad for the weekly program of the Film Arts Guild at the Cameo. The biggest text in this small listing announces Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh, but squeezed below is text reading: “Sunday—Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation.’” As Russell Merritt has noted, these two screenings were related in that Griffith was spending much of his time at the Cohen Theatre recutting Intolerance for the revival at the Cameo, which was part of “the first comprehensive Griffith retrospective.”14 This was Griffith’s last major revision of Intolerance, and the end of a process of re-editing that he had undertaken many times since the original release in 1916. Acknowledging that “what Griffith changed in the mid-1920s cannot always be differentiated from what he altered in 1918–19,” Merritt allows that “all subsequent changes were matters of deletion and rearrangement of shots and titles. Nothing was reshot or retitled in 1926. Changes at this point become nuanced to the point of imperceptibility. .  .  . In one or two cases, a sequence is dropped. But otherwise, the new changes involve transposing, shortening, and lengthening shots. The net effect, however, is remarkable: In single strokes, Griffith’s film becomes more tautly constructed, darker in tone, and less sentimental.”15 In this case the screening of Intolerance

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was both retrospective and current, in the sense that Griffith continued to actively adapt the film. This duality fits the moment of 1926, when he was both trying to have an active career and happy to see his older work celebrated as foundational. These early retrospectives might have been complicated for him, though, because they were in part about the progress of cinema, and inherent in the idea of progress is that an earlier stage was inferior to the current one. This is evident in one of Mordaunt Hall’s summaries of a Cameo program from early October 1926. In the listings at the head of the review, which usually include just the title and a two- or three-word description, The Avenging Conscience is called “an old David W. Griffith film, with Henry B. Walthall.” It only gets a few sentences in the body of the review, which is otherwise dedicated to a German film called The Treasure and a Chinese production called The Legend of the Willow Pattern Plate. Hall again dismisses it as “David W. Griffith’s old picture, ‘The Avenging Conscience.’”16 The Avenging Conscience was only twelve years old at this point, but Hall is pointedly putting it outside the bounds of current critical reception. Thus, by the late 1920s, Griffith was trying to be seen as both a pioneer of cinema and one of the leading current practitioners of it. He was failing at the latter even as his leading place among the pioneers became more and more secure. At the same time that his films were being shown in the retrospective at the Cameo, Griffith made a speech to the Advertising Club of New York in which he called for “an endowment for the making of artistic and really worth-while pictures,” which “would prove a greater educational force than all the libraries in the world.” These films, he claimed, “would also serve to discourage the ‘bunk and nonsense’ now prevalent in the films.”17 It is hard not to hear, in such a pitch, Griffith’s frustration with the economics of film financing, as well as his sense of grievance that he was not being taken as seriously as he deserved. His films had not been commercially successful, and in the case of The Sorrows of Satan, he had dealt with an invasive amount of studio meddling and rewriting. This had even included, somewhat ironically, consultations with Julian Johnson, the critic whose review of Intolerance I discussed in chapter 2 and who had declared that Griffith would “never again tell a story in this manner.” As an employee of Famous Players, he now had a say in how Griffith was allowed to tell stories.18 Griffith was understandably fed up with this process and thought he could do better if left to his own devices. He dreamed of a return to his days of independence. In his address to the Advertising Club, he mused, “Think what Gary, Ford, Schwab or

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Rockefeller could do if they were to put up a million for an endowment! The motion picture can be understood by all. It needs no translation.”19

the sound-era version of the birth of a nation Griffith’s struggle to be both an elder statesman and a bankable director in the film world continued into the next decade. By 1930, his career as a filmmaker was nearing its end, but there were continuous attempts to recapitalize on his older films, which should be seen as a distinct process from the revivals in which he was happy to take part. He was busy making Abraham Lincoln, but there was also a much-hyped soundera version of The Birth of a Nation that was clearly intended to be a commercial success, a way to make money from old work even as he was trying to make money from new, and not connected to the nascent retrospectives conducted by cinephiles. Beginning in the late 1920s, Griffith’s business managers suggested re-releasing The Birth of a Nation with sound effects, score, and dialogue. It was not until 1930, however, that work on the film began. Here, the status of the film is less than clear. Griffith’s papers include a flyer that seeks investors for the new version of the film, promising them that this was a rare opportunity, since it would cost millions to make a film of this magnitude and quality, but that they could own a piece of a reinvented classic produced on a budget of only $150,000. The flyer makes it clear that this was to be Griffith’s project. This request demonstrates the state of Griffith’s finances in the early 1930s. Despite all his success, and the millions that he would have made from Birth and other films, neither he nor his partners had this money themselves.20 Griffith biographer Richard Schickel writes that the re-release was completed in the summer of 1930 by Harry and Roy Aitken, and that Griffith had little to do with it since he was working on Abraham Lincoln. The re-release came out that fall. Whatever financial hopes Griffith may have had for the re-release of the film were not realized. Its release drew only minimal attention. For example, the New York Times gave it a small but positive notice of about one hundred words before moving on to the rest of that week’s films. What is more remarkable is that there is almost no mention of it in Griffith’s papers during a period when the papers seem to be fairly complete. Griffith was headed toward the disappointing end of his filmmaking career, and this re-release garnered him neither the critical respect nor the financial windfall he hoped for. The re-release might

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Figure 3.3. Sound-era ad for the reissued The Birth of a Nation.

have been a minor footnote in the history of the reception of the film, except that the sound version became a commonly shown edit of the film for many years, as there were few good copies of the silent release in circulation. Restorers working in the 1990s pieced together the version that most of us see now, which is the basis for more recent public releases of the film.21 The sound-era version of The Birth of a Nation is a different film than its silent counterpart, one in which editing has lightened its historical burdens in favor of creating an action film of sorts that is long on battles and short on consequences. The 1930s edition of The Birth of a Nation was re-edited throughout and carries rewritten intertitles that dampen some of the film’s racism. Close attention to these differences allows us to speculate about some of the ways in which Griffith or his production partners might have been influenced by the vehement criticism he had received upon the film’s first release. Given what we know about this edition’s creation and Griffith’s steadfast refusal to admit any error, it seems more likely that it was his producers who made the changes. For most of the middle part of the twentieth century, the sound version of the film was the “standard” despite having been a commercial failure, which is not that surprising since it would have been the only

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version of the film with a soundtrack, something audiences from the 1930s onward would have expected. It also has the practical advantage of being much shorter, about 1 hour and 40 minutes rather than three hours, and thus more watchable, except for the fact that it is also sped up to sync speed. For about fifty years, this was the version that many viewers of the film saw. The sound-era version is indeed a different film, more of a historical adventure and less of a historical treatise. It has considerably different intertitles and is missing whole sections of the original. This includes the entire ending of the film after the “Parade of the Clansman” through the village, with Elsie riding victoriously beside her paramour. Ending the film there shifts its implications considerably. There are no shots of honeymoons, and no images of heaven and hell or calls for peace among men at the end of the film. This takes away a lot of the deeper meaning, reducing the weight of what the characters have been fighting for. In the original, Griffith cannot help but make the battle one between good and evil, Jesus and the Devil. In this version, it is back to being a battle between humans. While the film is still one that shows Klansmen victorious over those who call for racial equality, it now has a hint of ambiguity to it, which seems to be reflected in the awkward filmed introduction Griffith made for the re-release with Walter Huston.22 In it, Griffith accepts a Confederate sword as a gift from Huston and reminisces about his father’s battle stories and his mother sitting up at night to sew Klan robes. When asked if his film is “true,” he first says that it is as “true as that blade.” A moment later, he adds, “but as Pontius Pilate said, ‘Truth . . . what is the truth?’” This was the most ambiguous response to the film he ever allowed himself in public. Since the sound version of the film cuts off after the “Parade of the Clansman” (rebranded in the titles as a “Parade of the Liberators”), it is also missing the scenes of “The Next Election,” where Black citizens are shown leaving their houses and facing a line of mounted Klansmen, only to return sheepishly to their homes. By cutting this, the film disavows its historical connection to the resurgent KKK in the teens and 1920s, and the continuing harassment and disenfranchising of Black voters. We see this distinction in the clip with Huston where Griffith says that the Klan was necessary “at that time.” But he would not talk about the direct relationship between his film and the resurgent Klan that now targeted Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in addition to Blacks. Another major omission is the transition in the middle of the film after Lincoln’s assassination. The quotes from Woodrow Wilson

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are missing, which removes the historical justification from the film as well as its claim to be actual history. It also removes the disclaimer about not representing any race or people of today. This double omission, of both the racism and its softening, is indicative of the new tone. It is not really trying to be progressive, or at least not trying very hard. It is instead trying to sidestep the difficult and divisive issues entirely. Some of the changes do seem to be direct attempts to tone down the racism. An early title in the silent version reads: “Piedmont scarred by the war. An irregular force of guerrillas raids the town. The first negro regiments of the war were raised in South Carolina.” The last sentence is printed in smaller type below the first two, to imply that it is a scholarly reference rather than a narrative claim. It is clearly there to draw a direct line between allowing African Americans to serve in uniform and abuses of white civilians. It is important that they are called “irregular” and “guerrillas,” and later a “militia,” to deny them any of the honor of serving as US soldiers. In the sound-era version, this card is rewritten to simply read: “Piedmont suffers a guerrilla raid. Viciousness, brought forth by war, is common to all races.” Another card near the end of the film that refers to the North and South coming together to defend their “Aryan birthright” is also rewritten to claim they are simply uniting “to resist the mad results of the Carpetbaggers’ political folly.” Lest this give too kind an impression of the tone of the rewrites, there are still plenty of cards that maintain the racial hierarchies of the film, as when formerly enslaved people are said to “ape the manners of their late masters.” Furthermore, most of the racism of The Birth of a Nation is in the images themselves, and all that new titles can do is try to make it palatable to an audience that is perhaps more sensitive to the excesses of the original. While it is hard to chart any softening in white Americans’ attitudes about race between 1915 and 1930—after all, these were the years in which Ellis Island was shuttered and the KKK became a mainstream organization—what is more important for our purposes is that this slightly toned-down version became the standard for much of the next few decades. The sound-era cut of The Birth of a Nation is thus a film that bears the marks of its own reception.

the museum of modern art and the birth of the film library As we have seen, the idea of a film library had been circulating among film partisans for a long time.23 Griffith himself had offered his own

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Figure 3.4. A rewritten intertitle from the sound version of The Birth of a Nation.

vision of a film library at the time of Birth of a Nation’s release, but his idea was for a historical library in which films had replaced the books. He suggested that rather than reading biased versions of historical events, future library patrons would be able to press a button and watch highquality reproductions of what actually happened. This of course made little sense, because these film versions would be subject to the same biases as the books he was eager to cast aside. By the 1920s, the idea of a library of released films in which the films represent cultural history rather than verbatim representations of the past was a relatively common idea, coming up again and again in ways that make it impossible to figure out who was the first to suggest the idea. As just one example, there is a 1924 interview in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle with B. P. Schulberg of Preferred Pictures, who would help launch Clara Bow’s career and bring her to Paramount after the collapse of Preferred in 1925 (and whose then ten-year-old son Seymour, to be known as Budd, would go on to write On The Waterfront). Schulberg claimed that “while the percentage of good pictures is still lamentably low, still it is ever on the increase,” and that “film classics will soon be in sufficient number to warrant the establishing of a library where the best in screen literature can be preserved.” He offered that his selections for such a library if he were “appointed as a committee of one” would include The Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms among others. He noted, In this list, the so-called “spectacle” which has been the center of a producing orgy for two or three years is conspicuous by its absence. “The Birth of a Nation,” to be sure, falls under the classifications but

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my reason for including it is not because Mr. Griffith used 10,000 extras and 2,000,000 yards of material to dress up the Ku-Klux-Klan but because he made one of the most stirring dramas in any medium at any time. The proportions that it reached were only incidental to the story it told.24

In the 1920s there were already institutional film libraries at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the American Museum of Natural History, but these were films that supported the missions of those institutions—they were about art or the natural world.25 In contrast, the film library at the Museum of Modern Art grew out of the little theatres and the burgeoning film society movement and was dedicated to film itself.26 This not only was the beginning of a long history of film finding its way into cultural institutions but also paved the way for the eventual inclusion of film in academia. MOMA was, by its nature, committed to cutting-edge works of the day, so the jump into film curation was less of a leap than it would have been for more traditional art institutions; it came relatively soon in the life of MOMA, which opened in 1929. Nonetheless, in a cultural environment that maintained a strong division between high and low culture, the transition of film from low status to high was neither assured nor simple. The founding of the MOMA Film Library in 1935 thus marked an important change in the reception of American film. Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation were among the first films that the Film Library offered as examples of cinematic art. Griffith was an obvious choice to represent the history of cinema: he was an American whose works the museum could cite as examples of cinematic accomplishment. MOMA promoted and distributed the films widely and seems to have succeeded in placing articles about them in papers around the country, many of which feature suspiciously similar PR language about Intolerance. For example, the Columbus (GA) Ledger of March 24, 1936, featured an article titled “Museum of Modern Art Selects ‘Intolerance’ For Distribution.” It reads in part: New York critics have been loud in the praise of the picture since its showing March 3. They have unfailingly pronounced it one of the great pictures of all time. Some have gone so far as to say that it is an indictment against the modern picture, or rather that it proves that the industry has not developed as it should, else a picture made twenty years ago would not be able to stand comparison with the best

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of today. Certainly its showing has been the high point in the cinemaworld of the past two weeks.27

Such marketing rhetoric overstates the general reception of the film. Intolerance was indeed a popular part of the repertoire in the library’s first years, even if print and screening conditions were sometimes less than ideal. A handful of letters in the MOMA archives complain about cuts in the print, inappropriate projection speeds, and audiences laughing at the film. In July 1939 the New York Times published an exchange of letters between Barnet G. Braver-Mann, later an editor of the journal Experimental Cinema, and several MOMA staffers. BraverMann complained that even classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “had drawn two hours of wisecracks and horse laughs from a typically rowdy mob of sophisticates,” echoing the way that filmgoers at the Cameo had viewed films from the early teens in 1926. As for Griffith, he writes that the running time of “Intolerance,” which even in the museum’s present incomplete print, if projected at normal silent-film speed, should last three hours . . . is cut down to two hours and forty minutes. The result of this accelerated projection of course is that the images assume a pace so rapid that they frequently become ridiculous. In this instance and in this alone, the audience cannot be blamed for jeering. Subtly misled by the program texts and with this added provocation, it is no wonder they enjoy themselves in riotous outbursts of ridicule. Possibly, however, the Film Library officials in their ineffable wisdom consider this all part of the audience’s right to amusement.28

The museum’s response, printed in the New York Times on July 16, reveals much by what it concedes and what it does not. The library’s director, John Abbott, explained that the film was being projected not at sound speed but at eighty feet per minute, “at which rate it exactly matched the original musical accompaniment.”29 The arguments about the condition of the print are difficult to adjudicate at this point, since, as Russell Merritt has demonstrated, it is impossible to mark any one version of Intolerance as the “real” one.30 Perhaps most revealing for our purposes is the fact that audiences laughed at the film, a reaction that Abbott does not dispute in his reply: This question of derisive or nervous laughter is one that concerns us as a museum even more than it concerns Mr. Braver-Mann. The Film

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Library maintains the position that no public reaction to a work of art invades its sanctity, for such sanctity does not exist. Works of art are made by people and are presented at the museum to be enjoyed by people: the fact that paintings by Whistler, Van Gogh and Picasso were formerly derided, that Dali’s work and the Sarah Bernhardt film still provoke rage or titters, certainly does not justify withdrawing them from exhibition. Naturally we regret that thoughtless laughter which interrupts the appreciative examination of a film. But experience has already proved to us that, once the seeing of films from a past era has become customary, the spectator who at first finds the experience embarrassing and even a shock finally responds to the intrinsic interest of the material presented. He then no longer needs to make audible comments or to laugh.31

Audiences in the late 1930s clearly did not quite know what to make of Intolerance, a reaction in keeping with that accorded other silent films. Abbott’s response, that audiences have to be trained to understand and appreciate silent films, seems no less true now than at the time. Haidee Wasson points out that at early MOMA screenings, disruptions “occurred frequently enough that the Film Library’s first curator, Iris Barry, had a slide projector permanently installed in the museum’s auditorium, equipped with a slide that read: ‘If the disturbance in the auditorium does not cease, the showing of this film will be discontinued.’ If, after the film had been stopped and the warning slide displayed, the audience still did not compose itself, the house lights would come up, and the show would be declared over.”32 Even at MOMA screenings, only some of the patrons were able to accept the films on their own terms, and the demands that Intolerance placed on viewer comprehension did not help matters. At this point in cinema history, audiences were only beginning to see old films as having any value beyond curiosity or amusement, so viewers would scarcely embrace the idea that a twenty-year-old film should be approached seriously, much less reverentially. The program guides that MOMA produced for its exhibitions also occasionally reveal a difficulty in figuring out what to do with The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. A program from 1939 for “A Cycle of Seventy Films 1895–1935,” offered as part of the museum’s exhibit “Art in Our Time,” lists, in part: 3. The Basis of Modern Technique: 1915 The Birth of a Nation 4. The Sociological Film: 1916 Intolerance

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The other film listed as “sociological,” shown toward the end of the cycle, was Mervyn Leroy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang from 1932.33 These two films seem linked only by their stories of criminal justice. Why should The Birth of a Nation be considered the basis of modern technique but Intolerance merely “sociological”? Whatever the reason, MOMA changed this classification in a later program that ran from 1944 to 1945. In a description of the library’s lending series from that year called “A Short Survey of the Film in America,” Intolerance is listed as “The Basis of Modern Technique” and The Birth of a Nation does not appear. The Birth of a Nation was still part of separate lending series dedicated to Griffith’s films, so it had not been deleted, but in its role as a central exemplar of stylistic innovation it had been usurped by the later film. In the early years of the film library, programming consisted only of traveling shows. The opening of the current building on West Fifty-third Street in New York City allowed the library to offer in-house screenings and exhibits beginning in 1939.34 In 1940, one of the screening programs was called “D. W. Griffith: The Art of the Moving Picture.” As Peter Decherney has noted, it “was the only Film Library program until after the war to use ‘art’ in its title.”35 When the newly opened MOMA Film Library presented its retrospective of the career of D. W. Griffith in December 1940, the show was titled “D. W. Griffith: American Film Master.” The title seems generic, but close attention to documents in the MOMA archive reveals that the title of the exhibit was likely carefully chosen to emphasize that Griffith was an American film master and that the museum was paying attention and tribute to American filmmakers. There are numerous reasons why the museum might have been so emphatic about promoting American artists at this point in its history. The lead-up to World War II seems like an obvious answer, and this appears to have been an undercurrent to deliberations. Much more significant, however, was the fact that the film library had been under attack on many fronts over the previous year for paying too much attention to foreign films and not enough to American films. This was, at first glance, an unfair accusation, as MOMA had included many American films in its programming since 1935. But the criticism was not simply the grumbling of a few film critics. There were several episodes of public criticism of the film library and MOMA in 1940 that the museum saw as significant enough to call for official responses. In the political world of 1940, it was obviously not good to be too foreign, and the library was concerned that a perception of the institution as un-American would

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hamper its mission and its fund-raising. MOMA obviously could not afford to ignore these accusations. Throughout 1940 they answered their critics with public replies and private letters, but by the end of the year the exhibit was the best answer possible, since it was a high-profile action rather than a defensive claim. There are in particular three revealing moments in the lead-up to the exhibit in December: accusations of the film library being too “foreign,” specific charges that staffer Jay Leyda had been a propagandist in the Soviet Union, and a letter from Griffith himself requesting that film library director Iris Barry be replaced as the exhibit organizer by Griffith’s own brother. In March 1940, Iris Barry wrote a letter to a newspaper responding to an accusation that the museum had “pack[ed] the staff” of the film library with English assistants. The letter listed the nineteen members of the film library staff and their hometowns. Barry pointed out that fifteen of them were “native Americans” (her phrase), one was an Austrian refugee, one a naturalized American born in Australia, and only two staffers, including her, were English. There was a slight irony in this defense, since, as Peter Decherney has carefully documented, Iris Barry’s relationship to film when she still lived in England in the 1920s could be described as “anti-American” in the context of a time and place where concerns about growing American influence upset the cultural relationship many British people thought they had with their former colony. Decherney notes that her position changed relatively quickly after she arrived in the United States, “a reversal that isn’t easily explained.”36 Whatever Barry’s personal feelings were, this kind of criticism of the film library seemed endemic in the period, and there are numerous examples of the library responding to it, obviously concerned that a false perception could spread and harm their public image. Pleasing such critics was difficult given the inherently international outlook of the film library and of MOMA, a necessity for a world-class art museum, albeit one that would play a part in coming to define what Decherney calls “the idea of America.”37 The MOMA film library had begun its 1940 calendar with an exhibition of Soviet cinema. In the New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote that “in the possible event that any one should suspect political implication in this fact, let it be quickly explained that the library disavows any such imputation whatsoever, reasonably justifies its selection on the grounds that it aims only to trace the artistic ancestry of the cinema and offers as proof the evidence that it has been intending and collecting this series since 1936.”38 Indeed, as if the American focus of

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the film library needed to be reinforced, Crowther went on to do just that for his readers, providing a short summary of the museum’s programs since 1935. Their first two programs were surveys of American films, the next two on European films, and the fifth a series on Griffith. This seemed like a reasonable balance to Crowther, and no doubt to the library’s directors. By March, though, the Soviet film exhibition was causing problems for the library. In the liberal anti-Communist magazine The New Leader, Seymour Stern wrote a detailed critique of Jay Leyda’s notes for the 1929 Aleksandr Dovzhenko film Arsenal. He accused Leyda of significant errors in his historical account of the rise of communism in Ukraine and of “outright political propaganda” in his account of the film.39 Stern’s critique of Leyda is relatively reasonable, which is somewhat surprising given that he also happened to be one of the most voracious Griffith defenders of his era. Stern wrote numerous books and essays praising The Birth of a Nation and answering Griffith’s critics on that film. Prone to endless hyperbole, he is generally not a trustworthy source. A May 1940 letter from Barry’s eventual assistant, Richard Griffith (no direct relation to the filmmaker), refers to him as “our good friend Seymour Stern, who could spend a lifetime investigating [D. W. Griffith] and still not convince me that his conclusions were correct.”40 To bolster his case, Stern sent a copy of his article to Nelson Rockefeller, the director of MOMA at the time, with a note assuring Rockefeller that he was not “in any sense a professional red-baiter. As it happens I am very much opposed to that sort of thing, believing as I do that free and open discussion of all viewpoints is the high road to cultural enlightenment in a democracy.”41 We know from later correspondence that Rockefeller replied, but whatever his response, The New Leader was not finished with Jay Leyda. A “Heard on the Left” column by Victor Riesel, published on May 11, upped the ante by claiming that Leyda “was formerly an important propaganda commissar in Moscow, where he worked on documentary films under the aegis of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature. One of his functions was to spread international propaganda boosting Soviet movies.”42 Seymour Stern also sent this article to Rockefeller to call his attention to it. All of this controversy prompted Leyda to write a memo in reply to his boss Iris Barry, explaining what he had spent his time in Moscow doing and complaining that the article in The New Leader “does not contain one true fact.” He described an apprenticeship program for young filmmakers that he was invited to join in 1933 and explained that

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he had spent a year in a directors’ course taught by Sergei Eisenstein and then had been an apprentice for both Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. While he had written articles about Soviet theater, film, and dance, he was “never connected with any International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature.”43 It seems reasonable to assume that Barry supported Leyda, since she had hired him away from the Eisenstein group in Moscow in 1936 and they later remained close enough that he dedicated his history of Soviet and Russian cinema to her, but it was not enough. Leyda was fired from the film library soon after. He went on to a distinguished career in criticism, writing numerous well-received books on film and literature. He ended up teaching film at York University in Toronto and finished his career at New York University, where he taught some of the earliest credentialed film historians. All of this fuss would have been enough to make the film library staff proceed cautiously, although they could not avoid further red-baiting in subsequent years.44 But the exhibit on Griffith was already scheduled for the end of 1940, and it was hoped that the high-profile celebration of an American filmmaker would take some of the pressure off of the museum. The entire project was nearly derailed, however, by D. W. Griffith himself, who wrote a letter to the museum director Nelson Rockefeller in August. The letter begins: Dear Mr. Rockefeller: I have been very much troubled concerning the special exhibit of my films that the Museum of Modern Arts [sic] is giving next October. I do not imagine that you worry much about the museum or my pictures either and I don’t blame you. Oh, boy, if I had your dough I wouldn’t worry about anything.45

He goes on to explain that he is deeply concerned about Iris Barry running his exhibit at the museum, offering exactly the same reasons for which the museum had been criticized all year: “Personally I believe Miss Barry to be a brilliant and most capable woman and as for her enthusiasm for the foreign films, this is easily understood as she, herself, is a foreigner.” He says it is “regrettable that Miss Barry did not possess the same enthusiasm for the American films.” He continues: Now I don’t pretend to be damn brilliant or dipped deeply in the wine of sophistication but I, as an American, made pictures mostly for the

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Americans and I believe that on the whole the American people have liked my pictures very well. The receipts at the box office should be proof enough of this. No picture yet produced has earned as much as the “Birth of a Nation.” “Way Down East” and “Broken Blossoms” didn’t do so badly either and the American press as a whole have given all these works great praise.46

He has a suggestion to overcome his fears about Iris Barry’s lack of sympathy for his work. He proposes that his brother, Albert Griffith Grey, be put in charge of the exhibit, and that the notes be written by Seymour Stern. Even Griffith seems to acknowledge that Stern was more of a booster of his career than a historian, writing that Stern “is a brilliant writer and also has entree to the press and magazines and, right or wrong, he has a great enthusiasm for my work” (my emphasis). The letter ends: If something after this manner is not done, I personally would very much prefer not to have the films shown at all. Sorry to make all this trouble for you but you are young, good looking and have all that dough and on the other hand, I am an old and fading weed and don’t want to work no more. So on the whole, I think it is only right that I should give you at least a little trouble. With best regards, believe me, I am, as ever, Most insincerely yours, D. W. Griffith.

This is a wonderful and sad look at Griffith in his later years, but it would not have been funny at all for the museum. The letter of response, carrying Rockefeller’s name, was crafted very carefully— there are multiple drafts in the archives. The museum did its best to convince Griffith that he should continue to offer his blessing to the project. The letter says that even though MOMA’s staff had been working on the exhibit for two years, they would abandon it if Griffith did not approve. That said, the staff substitutions Griffith proposed were impossible. The letter then makes the case for the American focus of the film library, pointing out that “the Film Library is international in its scope,” but nevertheless “the Museum programs have shown 124 American films while the work of eleven foreign countries was covered in 81 films.” It then defends Iris Barry specifically in the following terms:

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Miss Barry believes you to be the greatest creative spirit in the entire history of the film, and she has repeatedly pointed out that the admired Russian “montage” was something that you had invented and that the best Russian films were the product of the close study of your own work. I can safely assure you that the only desire of Miss Barry and the entire Museum staff is to see that your great work is fully appreciated by the millions of young people who attend films today but do not realize how great a role you played in their development.47

There was a lot at stake here, both because of the amount of effort already expended and because the museum needed this particular exhibit to quiet its critics. Griffith acquiesced to the exhibit, and it went ahead. He need not have worried so much about it, since the official notes were very flattering to him. Just in case they were not flattering enough, however, there was one more volley in the war of words, and it came again from Seymour Stern. On November 10, just before the exhibit was to open, Stern managed to place an article on Griffith in the New York Times Magazine. The article, “Pioneer of the Film Art,” is full of breathless praise for Griffith. A typical example: “Thirty-two years after his entry into motion pictures the legend, the achievements, the complex and far-reaching influence of the king of directors, like the remembered glory of an ancient world have crystallized into what is now known in film circles as the Griffith Tradition.”48 Iris Barry’s notes in the official program drop the promotional tone but give Griffith no less credit for his innovations. Given the context of this exhibition, Barry’s notes on the film’s subject matter are a masterpiece of subtlety and evasion: The film, however, aroused much opposition and censure. Its subject matter is of a controversial and—to many people—inflammatory nature, though Griffith himself certainly believed he had honestly and impartially told the truth about the South after the Civil War. But he also realized how rich a means of expression he had at his command in this new medium which he himself had so conspicuously helped to develop, and he very naturally insisted on the right of the motion picture to share with literature the privilege of free speech. The protests against the birth of a nation, the moves to censor and muzzle the film threw him into a fighting mood. By his mastery he had unwittingly proved the film to be a most powerful instrument of expression and as a showman he now determined to use it as such.49

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Twice in this short paragraph Barry pulls off the same rhetorical maneuver. She shifts from a discussion of the film’s “controversial” subject matter to a general statement about the power of cinema and uses some comment about Griffith’s ability to get there. At the same time, she does not explicitly endorse his position either. She writes that “Griffith himself certainly believed he had honestly and impartially told the truth about the South after the Civil War,” which makes it clear that she does not necessarily agree. In this case, Iris Barry had two constraints on her critique of the film. On one hand, there was the controversy over the library’s position and the desire to keep Griffith reasonably happy. On the other, there was a liberal art lover’s belief in free speech and the need for films to be considered speech, a right they did not have in 1940. These constraints were far more powerful than her feelings about race in America, but it would be a mistake to read her comments as indifferent to racism or the politics of The Birth of a Nation. We might fault her for not being more forceful in her discussion of the film’s racism, but in any event, it seems like a clear reflection of the events that surrounded it. A similar wrestling with stylistic innovation and sociological content can be seen in a key film history of the period, Lewis Jacobs’s The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History, which appeared in 1939. Without Barry’s institutional constraints, Jacobs was much freer to explore the tensions of Griffith’s work. Jacobs was already a filmmaker and also a cofounder of Experimental Cinema, and he went on to have a long career in Hollywood and academia. His book traces the history of cinema from its origins to 1939 and includes a whole chapter on The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Later, though, there is also a chapter on Griffith’s decline during the 1920s. What is most remarkable is that when tracing the history of the development of film style, Jacobs attributes almost all innovations to Griffith, and, when recounting the achievements of others, repeatedly mentions they were adapting something that Griffith had pioneered. Covering Griffith’s Biograph years, Jacobs claims that Griffith invented the idea of “changing the position of the camera in the middle of the scene”50 as well as the close-up, and often recounts stories of producers claiming that one of Griffith’s innovations “will never work” when in fact it revolutionizes cinema.51 Claims that Griffith had invented nearly all of film style were common at the time, in part because he and his producers had helped to spread them. Jacobs includes the ad from the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1913, placed by Griffith himself, that calls him “Producer of

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all great Biograph successes, revolutionizing motion picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.”52 Jacobs goes further than this ad, which is primarily about technical innovations, by claiming that Griffith was the one who “realized that pictures could become significant only if their content was significant.”53 He also credits Griffith with revolutions in screen acting, and for seeing that “acting must be more natural.”54 Despite his excessive praise and admiration for Griffith, Jacobs is aware of the director’s limitations. He writes that Griffith’s work was to “culminate in that powerful film of secessionist bigotry The Birth of a Nation.” He also sees, even in Griffith’s earlier films, the excesses that would undermine his later career: “Original and profound as a craftsman, Griffith however was never to outgrow his Southern sentiments and Victorian idealism. When his creative genius was most vigorous, it could lift him from sentimentality to dignity and art; when he surrendered to his emotional impulsiveness, his films became orgies of feeling. This accounts for the incongruity between the discipline of his structure and the lack of restraint in his sentiment that mars even the best of his works.”55 Jacobs also clearly understands the destructive racist messages of the film and deals with them bluntly, if quickly. He writes that Griffith “must have realized, however, the wanton injury he had done to a race” and adds that the scene of a white soldier kissing a wounded Black comrade in Hearts of the World was clearly an inadequate attempt to atone for this sin. “The raging controversy awakened the nation to the social import of moving pictures. But this realization was overshadowed by the great acclaim for the picture’s artistry. . . . So advanced was the film structurally that even today it stands as an accomplishment of great stature.”56 Jacob’s book is notable for two other apparent additions to the Griffith legend. He writes, “The reception given to [The Birth of a Nation] influenced Griffith’s choice of theme of his next work, Intolerance. This was in part an apology, more or less intentional, for his prejudiced stand in The Birth of a Nation. The extraordinary success of The Birth of a Nation, however, wrought great harm upon tolerance, and other antinegro films soon appeared.”57 As I discussed in chapter 2, Intolerance was in no way an apology for The Birth of a Nation. Griffith intended the film to be in part an angry response to those who had been intolerant of him by criticizing his earlier epic. The story is appealing because to later viewers it seems reasonable that Griffith would have wanted to apologize for The Birth of a Nation, and the contrast in the messages

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of the two films seems clear. But to Griffith, both films were calls for fraternity and tolerance among peoples. He simply never saw African Americans as fully “people” to be included in that call. Jacobs is one of the earliest writers to refer to Intolerance as an apology, but that does not mean he was solely responsible for the idea—it would seem to be inherent and obvious in modern readings of the two films, and likely would have reappeared over and over whether he wrote it or not. Jacobs’s second notable addition was his claim that The Birth of a Nation “was the first film to be honored by a showing at the White House: President Woodrow Wilson is said to have remarked, ‘It is like writing history with lightning.’”58 This quotation, sometimes followed by the line “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” has been following the film for many years, but it does not appear in that form in any contemporary accounts of the film. In his biography of Wilson, A.  Scott Berg notes that the only mention of the film he could find from Wilson was from a 1918 letter, where he called it an “unfortunate production.”59 After the 1915 Atlanta ad in which the phrase was not attributed to Wilson (see chapter 2), there are few mentions of it until a 1937 article in Scribner’s magazine, which does attribute it to Wilson,60 and thus Jacobs’s 1939 book is perhaps the first to transfer the phrase, without footnotes or references, into a written history. It is a compelling description, and one can understand how it might become part of the myth of the film, but there is no evidence at all that Wilson actually said it. It is also not true that The Birth of a Nation was the first film shown at the White House. Cabiria had been screened there the year before, and both appear to have been beaten by a screening of nature films that Theodore Roosevelt hosted at the White House in 1908.61 Jacobs finishes his chapter on Griffith’s 1930s decline and irrelevance by harshly critiquing his sound-era films Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931). His summation of Griffith’s career is a crucial snapshot of what film culture, and Griffith’s place in it, looked like on the cusp of the 1940s: So fast has the motion picture world moved in thirty years that Griffith is in the peculiar circumstance of being regarded as an “old master” although he is still alive. Notwithstanding all his great contributions and early talent, he has unquestionably declined since the war. As soon as he was no longer moving forward he disintegrated as an artist. The profound film form of which he achieved mastery could not sustain or compensate for the superficiality of content and

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the commercial motives revealed in his post-war work. His romantic leanings, inbred prejudices, and moral inflexibility, while serving him well in their day and age, at last became millstones around his neck. Of this misfortune he apparently was unaware, since he became absorbed in high finance and the personal glories of success. The name of Griffith, nevertheless, has come to signify American motion picture art: his contributions to it enriched its traditions and gave it vital momentum.62

Griffith was no doubt aware that he had long been considered out of date and that the industry had moved on without him. As harsh as Jacobs’s assessment is, Griffith would have also known that he had a place in the history books, and was eager to guard that place as much as he could. Film culture in the United States needed Griffith much more than Hollywood or contemporary audiences did. In the early 1940s, the need to rally Americans of all races to the war effort would change the way in which racist films like The Birth of a Nation were seen, even if the civil rights movement would not find its most successful form until after the war was over. Just as the film would begin to be less socially acceptable, new contexts and critical considerations would align to keep it in circulation.

Chapter 4

from american history to film history, 1945–1960

In midcentury, The Birth of a Nation ended up at the intersection of two long-term social changes. The first was the gradual decline in overt racism over the course of the twentieth century, a change that was slow and sometimes merely a tactical shift rather than actual progress. The second movement was the rise in the status of film over roughly the same period. Film began as a popular medium and was famously decreed to not be an art form by the US Supreme Court in early 1915, just as The Birth of a Nation was being released. Over the past century, film has remained widely popular while simultaneously coming to be regarded as an art form, with the attendant cultural prestige and academic study such standing brings. This shift in itself is obviously less important than changing attitudes about race, but it is part of broader artistic and cultural patterns that have profound effects and influences. This chapter traces the ways in which The Birth of a Nation’s reputation fell along with the decreasing acceptability of racism, only to be rescued by the rising status of film. In the mid-twentieth century, The Birth of a Nation stood at the nexus of changing notions of race, art, and film. This period included some episodes of political controversy, as well as the rise of cinema clubs, which formed a key link between the institutional structures of filmmaking and the later rise of academic film studies. It is also crucial to consider the state of film criticism in the 1940s and 1950s. In his book The Rhapsodes, David Bordwell recounts the developing careers of four prominent critics of the 1940s: James Agee, Parker Tyler, Manny Farber, and Otis Ferguson.1 For the most part, their reviews did not become a crucial part of film culture until much later. Bordwell dates the beginning of their rise to the death of Agee in 1955. Agee won

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a posthumous Pulitzer for his novel A Death in the Family in 1958, the same year a collection of his criticism, Agee on Film, was released. It is hard to gauge the impact that these writers had as they were writing; all had outlets, but as with most criticism, the impact is amorphous and difficult to map onto specific events or cultural changes. What is crucial is that they seemed to be working from a set of cultural referents in which Griffith figured heavily. As Bordwell writes: All were cinephiles. They knew the standard story of film history, handily traced in Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (1930) and Lewis Jacobs’s Rise of the American Film (1939). Their canon was, by today’s standards, very cramped. It consisted mostly of Museum of Modern Art touchstones and Manhattan revival staples: D. W. Griffith (for some shorts and The Birth of a Nation), the silent clowns (Chaplin above all), Caligari, The Battleship Potemkin (sometimes Earth), and René Clair’s The Italian Straw Hat and his early sound pictures. Yet the critics agreed that however great the classics remained, and however terrible contemporary Hollywood could be, there were extraordinary things to be found in new releases.2

In Bordwell’s deep reading of these critics’ work, he sees a constant dilemma for intellectuals faced with the industrial output of Hollywood. The assembly-line nature of Hollywood production was inherently at odds with a notion of filmic art. In this telling, despite Griffith’s role in the invention of Hollywood style, he sometimes becomes a nostalgic touchstone for the days before Hollywood “ruined movies.” It is not that critics see a distinct stylistic difference as much as a contrast in the mode of production. Griffith and DeMille become symbols of an era in which a single filmmaker could impose his artistic vision on the entirety of a production, whereas Hollywood in the studio era was an assembly line in which each cog in the process was expected to do his or her job and no other, with the overarching goal of maximizing profits. Despite Parker Tyler’s assertion that “Hollywood is a vital, interesting phenomenon, at least as important to the spiritual climate as daily weather to the physical climate,” he also held, by Bordwell’s summary, that “high art in any medium . . . requires that a single person’s vision deliberately control the shape and implications of the work.”3 This was not an uncommon view of the era, and indeed is one that carries plenty of weight in the present day. Since film is inherently a collaborative

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medium, the tension between film production and the romantic notion of art coming from an artist who reveals some particular part of his or her soul or worldview will never be fully untangled, at least outside of avant-garde or small-scale filmmakers who are able to control all aspects of their work.4 This tension is, in part, critically resolved by the French Cahiers du Cinéma critics of the 1950s, who work around it by asserting that directors, even in the Hollywood system, can often be properly seen as the creators of films. This position was of course heavily debated at the time, and the outlines of the argument and its critique are well known to anyone who has studied film in an academic setting since that period. It is in part an unresolvable argument because the two ideas it attempts to resolve—romantic artist and collaborative industrial product—are inherently opposed to one another. In the intervening years, auteurism has become an idea that continues to circulate because it is useful as a way of organizing film study and maintaining film’s relationship to other art forms, despite the obvious difficulty in attributing the details of most films’ content and style to any one person. There is also the obvious counterexample of television, in which creator credit goes to showrunners and writer/producers, and in which directors are often an afterthought. Auteurism is the quantum physics of film study, in which the mechanics of the underlying process have to be set aside because the product helps us do things. Writing in the pre-auteurism era, critics of the 1940s had a much harder time squaring the circle of “artistic” film production. The foreign films that played in New York often had the names of known directors on them, while the mass production of many European countries was ignored because those films never appeared in the United States, leading to a selection bias that furthered the image of Europe as the home of artistic film. This perception was strongly supported by preconceptions borrowed from other art forms. In our modern era in which music and opera and painting and theater frequently move in both directions, it is easy to forget that this influence ran one way for a fairly long time. For cinephiles, it was thus important that French critics, among them writers who would go on to make some of the most exciting movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s, would be the ones to validate Hollywood production as a site of artistic filmmaking. Before that happened, however, it was harder to take seriously the idea that Hawks or Ford or Hitchcock was an artist in his own right. Griffith was far enough removed that he could be a representative of what American filmmaking might have been, rather than what it was.

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The only other “American” filmmaker who might have been seen to be in Griffith’s league was Charlie Chaplin, who, unlike Griffith, was still an active filmmaker in the 1940s. As beloved as Chaplin was, the fact that he worked in comedy, a genre not usually considered to be art, meant that his position was complicated. He also, of course, had his own political problems.5 Like Griffith, he ended up being regarded as someone who was a historically great artist, even though the style for which he was known would not generally be considered art in the 1940s or in the present day. For Chaplin, that incongruity has never gone away. His reputation is as strong as ever, and there is no doubt that he is regarded as an auteur now, even though modern comedies are almost never received as art films, no matter the art or craft of their production. This is reflective of a larger bias in which contemporary film studies is interested in almost any artistic or historical film, which excludes a significant portion of contemporary films that are not considered artistic and are not yet historical.6

griffith’s death and late 1940s film culture When D. W. Griffith died on July 23, 1948, in Los Angeles, the obituary in the New York Times treated him gently, emphasizing the breadth of his career and his accomplishments as a filmmaker, while playing down the controversies his most famous film had engendered. The paper described The Birth of a Nation as a film “directed by a man whose family had been ruined by the fall of the Confederacy, . . . most biased but .  .  . filled with great sweep and movement.”7 An editorial appreciation published the same day allowed that “stylistically speaking, Griffith outlived his times. His mind and his manner were Victorian—and so, of course, were his films.”8 Lest this gentleness be attributed to an unwillingness to speak ill of the dead, there is the convenient contrast of Thomas Dixon’s obituary from two years earlier. While it also emphasized the cultural impact of The Birth of a Nation, it clearly labels Dixon as the white supremacist and Klan supporter that he was. The subheadings on Dixon’s obituary were “Book Was Basis for ‘Birth of a Nation,’ Provocative Film—Supported Ku Klux Klan,” “He Had Held Pulpit Here,” and “Also Was Lawyer, Lecturer—‘White Supremacy’ Was Subject of His Novels.”9 In these accounts, Griffith was a filmmaker who had made a controversial film, while Dixon was a controversial figure who had helped make a film. In retrospect, such characterizations still seem reasonable. Dixon had devoted his life to

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the cause of white supremacy and racial segregation. He had preached and advocated endlessly for the return of Blacks to Africa, and he wrote The Clansman as an antidote to the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When a review of The Clansman in the New York Evening Post called his play “a means of sowing the seed of revulsion for the black man,” he cited it proudly in his own writing as proof that he had “found the hearts of my hearers.”10 In contrast, Griffith did not seem primarily motivated by racism, even though he demonstrated plenty of it. While it is important to acknowledge that he never apologized or backed down from his film’s message, he generally did not use the rhetoric of Black threat to defend it, preferring to portray his work as the true representation of an unfortunate history, and his detractors as enemies of artistic freedom. (There were of course exceptions, as when he condemned his critics in a letter to the New York Globe, and his climactic damnation of the NAACP was that “they successfully opposed bills which were framed to prohibit the marriage of Negroes to whites.”)11 The point of any of these comparisons is not to make Griffith seem progressive by contrast to Dixon and thus less guilty, but only to mark the different motivations of the two men. Griffith was motivated primarily by the possibilities of cinema, and this, somewhat ironically, is what allowed him to do much more damage to racial relations than Dixon had ever done. A version of The Birth of a Nation that was closer to Dixon’s original stories and ideas would have been a much more pedantic and less successful film, one that would not have found the audiences that this film did. By toning down Dixon’s racism and marrying it to his own fixation with narrative, Griffith made bigotry palatable and allowed it to travel much further. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the racism of The Birth of a Nation was much more widely acknowledged than it had once been, even as the film was well on its way to being recognized as a key point in the development of filmic art. The film’s status as an art object rose just as its politics were becoming less acceptable, although neither the artistic claims nor the politics were completely new. The film was always controversial, and Griffith himself made numerous claims about the artistic status of The Birth of a Nation and about film in general at the time it was released. What was different by the late 1940s was that the debate was now largely between liberals who agreed on the film’s politics. At the very moment when shifting attitudes about race might have consigned The Birth of a Nation to simply becoming a historical curiosity, shifting attitudes about film were elevating it to the status

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of art object. At the same time, just as the film was less likely to be regarded as American history, it became film history, a category that did not previously exist. This is the central irony of the place of The Birth of a Nation in midcentury: that the elevation of film to the level of art gave new life to one of cinema’s ugliest debates. If film had never achieved the status of art form, then The Birth of a Nation would have become a nearly forgotten historical curiosity, something a society would be willing and eager to forget. It might have been the subject of study in histories of race in the United States, the way that other vestiges of racist popular culture are, but there would have been much less need to grapple with it thoughtfully. That challenge was eventually good for our understanding of film, given that it is generally art objects at the fringes that are most illustrative of our assumptions about what art is and should be. The nearly innumerable rounds of “But is it art?” that Western cultures have played in the twentieth century have both freed artists to explore the boundaries of creativity and helped scholars better understand what art is and might be.12 Even as notions of what art is were changing in midcentury, film’s partisans were not in much of a position to shift the overall boundaries, beyond the already considerable challenge of having film admitted to the club as a “seventh art.” The idea that film was worthy of study and contemplation as an art form was already a profound change, and like anyone trying to join an exclusive club who tries to put his or her best foot forward, the works that helped make the case for film’s status as an art form tended to be masterpieces by directors who could be considered “auteurs.” The Birth of a Nation, although based on Dixon’s successful novel and stage play, could be said to have been “written” by Griffith himself. By all accounts, there was no written screenplay for the film. In Griffith’s surviving papers, there is a two-page list of scenes that would have functioned to keep the scenario in order, but even this might have been created afterward to help in the editing process. In any event, it was not The Birth of a Nation’s authorship that made it a difficult object for a nascent art, but the contrast between its form and its content. For all the controversy the film’s content has engendered in the past century, and despite the necessary corrections about how much Griffith actually invented, there has never been a serious argument that he did not use the form well. That fact in itself is worthy of note, and an important marker of Griffith’s accomplishment. There has never been a moment

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in the past century when anyone has mounted a serious critique of the film’s editing or cinematography in and of itself. It does not seem dated even now, something that cannot be said of every film of the period. Such a contrast between the content and the form is a useful indicator of what those who were opposed to the film were up against. In the late 1940s, The Birth of a Nation also became embroiled, like much of the film world, in arguments about communism. Tarring opponents of the film as Communists became the simplest way to defend it, and this happened repeatedly. Political arguments about the film were also intertwined with arguments about free speech as film moved toward the moment, in 1952, when it would finally be awarded First Amendment protection in the United States. The second focus of this chapter is cinema clubs, organizations that were formed in a number of countries and peaked between 1950 and the 1970s, rising with the status of film until the advent of the home video era made them less essential for some participants. Some of these clubs date back to the 1920s, including the London Film Society (1925) and a club in Glasgow founded in 1929. The clubs in Britain seem to predate their North American counterparts somewhat—there were more clubs in the United States after MOMA began distributing film prints in 1935. The free speech cases and the cinema clubs provide a complex portrait of the ways in which cinema was perceived and used in the middle of the century. Cinema clubs differed dramatically in size and formality. Some were primarily focused on avant-garde films, while others doubled as creative groups for amateur filmmakers. Most offered regular screenings of foreign, historical, or artistic films, and as such were a crucial precursor to the academic study of film, which was not especially well developed until the late 1960s and 1970s. It is difficult to trace their extent or reach, since records are scattered and ephemeral. What remains is largely determined by luck and circumstance. But these clubs seem to have been very common in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, Latin America,13 and presumably other countries with developed film cultures. In North America and Britain, there seem to have been clubs in most mid-sized and large towns, and on most college or university campuses. Some of the clubs in this last group have survived as student film clubs to the present day. Given the difficulty of finding cinema club records, one of the best surviving collections of cinema club material comes from the collection of John Griggs in New Jersey.14 Griggs was an actor who had limited

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Figure 4.1. Essex Film Club program for The Birth of a Nation, September 1957 (courtesy of Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College).

success in film but appeared on numerous radio programs. He found his calling as a film collector and distributor. He made copies of some of the early films in his collection and distributed them under the name Griggs-Moviedrome.15 He was also friends with Robert E. “Bob” Lee, founder of the Essex Film Club in Nutley, New Jersey, which was one of the longest-functioning film clubs in the United States, running until Lee’s death in 1992. Many of the films shown by the club in the 1950s seem to have been from Griggs’s collection. The papers were compiled roughly between 1946 and 1960. There are numerous programs from bookings of the sound version of The Birth of a Nation around New York and New Jersey, and information on Griggs’s own copy of the film, which he booked for school and community groups in the late 1950s. He had apparently even composed his own original score for the film. The papers in this collection, which amount to perhaps one hundred pages, are by no means an exhaustive document of the film or the time period, but clusters of documents reveal key moments in the film’s reception. In addition to records of the cinema clubs, Griggs collected clippings and letters from some of the controversies that followed the

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film in the northeastern United States. One episode from New York state is particularly enlightening because Griggs managed to collect a range of letters from it, and because it connects to an important free speech case in the United States, Feiner v. New York (1951).

free speech and the specter of communism In early July 1949 the mayor of Syracuse, Frank J. Costello, reacted to public pressure initiated by the NAACP and denied a local theater permission to screen The Birth of a Nation. There are two letters in the Griggs papers from Elmer Rice, chairman of the National Council for Freedom from Censorship, which was a subcommittee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The letter addressed to the mayor begins by assuming that the mayor has “undoubtedly . . . the best of intentions to prevent the growth of racial prejudice.” Rice goes on to make an impassioned defense of free speech rights, but also makes specific claims about the film that are revealing. He writes, “If there are traces of race prejudice in the film, they are put in the proper perspective of today by a statement in the prologue flashed on screen in the following words.” He then cites one of the title cards that was commonly added to the film in the 1940s: “Today the American Negro and all races of man living under the protection of the Constitution of these glorious United States, fight and work side by side to preserve our cherished freedom.” Rice also cites in his letter an epilogue card that appeared at the end of the film: “And so we learn from this great historical document that only by equality, justice and liberty for all, that ‘this Nation shall not perish from the earth.’”16 Rice assumes that the “traces of race prejudice” in the film can be reversed with simple prologue and epilogue cards. In this way, the cards echo the “Hampton epilogue” that was added to some prints in 1915, and which also attempted to contradict the film’s message with a simple add-on, but was generally regarded as a failure.17 Such a claim seems to us quite naïve, especially since these title cards survive, and they are not nearly as unambiguous about racial equality as he seems to assert. One card claims, “This historical document, reviving one of the most crucial moments in American history, forcefully depicts the exploitation of the slave-dazed negroes of that period by the northern carpetbaggers.” Such is the historical balance of the period, where the notion that the people recently freed from enslavement simply did not know any better constitutes an improvement over the idea that they had acted with conscious and violent intent. In both cases, the idea that African Americans ran wild during Reconstruction is not questioned, as it would

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have been supported by many of the history books then available. Until midcentury, the historical understanding of the post–Civil War period was dominated by the Dunning School, named for William Archibald Dunning, an influential Columbia University historian whose work provided support for Griffith’s view of Reconstruction.18 The more important assumption in the title card is based on the meaning of the phrase “historical document.” In 1915 Griffith treated The Birth of a Nation as a historical document of Reconstruction and defended it as such. Today we still think of it as a historical document, but of 1915, not of Reconstruction, since its version of post–Civil War history has been so thoroughly debunked. By the late 1940s, we begin to see this transition from one sense of “historical document” to the other. In the title card, the phrase can be read either way, although it still seems to mean primarily “history of Reconstruction,” since it implies that there is a valuable historical lesson to be learned from the film and takes the film’s treatment of Reconstruction at face value. In the period around 1950, some began to refer to the film as a “museum piece” and the like, as is evident in a letter from the Griggs collection dated March 1950, apparently from a theater manager in Kentucky to Frank Markey, who seems to have been a distributor of the film in this period. The letter says that the Screen Directors Guild was planning to install a memorial to Griffith in the “little church yard near Crestwood, Ky.” where Griffith is buried. The theater manager, A. N. Miles, writes, “As to exploiting this old picture ‘Birth of a Nation’ it seems to me that it would best be presented in the art and small ‘class’ houses for exactly what it is, you might say a museum piece. As you probably know it was screened last year at the Museum of Modern Arts & Science [sic].”19 In commercial terms, the appeal of The Birth of a Nation was now limited, although it does seem to have been screened regularly in those art houses for a very long time. As Miles notes, however, Griffith was now useful as a symbol of Hollywood’s history and stature. The Screen Directors Guild paid for the stone cover on Griffith’s grave, which also includes the seal of the guild. The first award the guild ever handed out was an “Honorary Life Member” award for Griffith in 1938, and in 1953 they honored him again by creating the D. W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award, which first went to Cecil B. DeMille and has been given out to most major postwar directors in the decades since. The guild merged with the Radio and Television Directors’ Guild in 1960 to form the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and in 1999 Griffith’s name was dropped from the Lifetime Achievement Award despite his

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“innovations as a visionary film artist” because he “helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes” according to DGA president Jack Shea.20 In 1949 there were still plenty of people who accepted The Birth of a Nation as a document that told the truth about American history, as one letter in the Griggs collection makes clear. Written in August 1949 to Frank Feocco at the Horseheads Theatre in Horseheads, New York, it thanks him for allowing the letter writer, Mrs. Charles W. Swift, president of the Elmira Community Motion Picture Council,21 to see a preview of the film. She is effusive in her praise: I recommend that everyone, from History students on up, see it. It is invaluable to help understand the chaos in the country after the Civil War. That picture was never meant to hurt anyone, either black or white but to help them to understand the conditions. The colored people should stop and think, if it had not been for Lincoln & the Civil War, they might still be slaves . . . and, too, they should appreciate all that has been done for them in education, housing, a place in the community (of course many of them do) now it is up to them to do their part.22

This is a remarkable misreading of the film and of the civil rights movement. It assumes both that African Americans do not understand Lincoln’s accomplishments and that a misunderstanding of Lincoln is the primary problem with The Birth of a Nation. Mrs. Swift explains her broader concerns, however: “I am not going to sit calmly by and see communists and other pressure groups, poisoning the minds of people who do not understand that they are being used as tools for their cause. We have all got to work together to keep this country free!” While Swift’s perspective seems easy to dismiss in the present day, such common concerns were an important part of the cultural context. At a time when liberals were defending The Birth of a Nation on artistic grounds or recognizing it as film history, it still also had its conservative defenders who saw it as an accurate portrayal of American history and had little problem with its racist content. Those opposed to the film now had a nearly impossible case to make, as the film had supporters from across the political spectrum who would defend it for, at times, completely opposite reasons. Conservatives saw it as a true history of racial equality run amok, while liberals saw it as an important reflector of early film art despite its racist content. Both groups would have been likely to defend the film on free speech grounds, a particularly American

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response. Absolute defenses of free speech are ingrained in American culture in a way that they rarely are in other nations. Many developed democracies have laws against hate speech that provide criminal penalties for words considered dangerous to particular groups. There have been times when dangerous speech has been banned in America, but such bans have rarely held up in a culture that tends to see all such limits as a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. As it happens, one of the key free speech cases in American history was unfolding in Syracuse at exactly the same moment that the mayor was grappling with The Birth of a Nation. As mayor Frank J. Costello was reading the letter from the ACLU about The Birth of a Nation, he could also have been thinking about a much more significant free speech case in which he had become embroiled only a couple of months previously. He had denied a permit at the last minute for a public appearance by a lawyer who was defending six Black men accused of murder in Trenton, New Jersey. After Mayor Costello pulled the permit, student organizers took to the streets to protest the action and to announce a new location. One of them, Irving Feiner, stood up on a soapbox to denounce the mayor. Feiner was arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced to thirty days in jail. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1951 the court upheld his conviction on the grounds that his speech was likely to cause a riot. This case came to be associated with others that grappled with what was known as the “heckler’s veto” since it meant that anyone could stop a controversial speaker by threatening violence. It has since been overturned in a number of cases.23 Costello did not know that Feiner’s case would become a Supreme Court precedent, and it is unclear whether he banned The Birth of a Nation for the same reasons he tried to stop the speech (the threat of public disorder) or whether it was an appeasement aimed at the Black community, since the original event Feiner was protesting had been about race, and the “mob” he was accused of inciting was a mixture of Blacks and whites. There are two other key arguments in the letter from the ACLU’s Elmer Rice to the mayor. The first is practical—that if The Birth of a Nation could be banned in the North, then films sympathetic to Blacks could be banned in the South. Such a position reveals what I have always seen as the inherently practical, as opposed to philosophical, position of the ACLU on free speech. Rice’s last argument is based on a faith in the audience that, given the

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particular history of this film, also seems naïve. He writes: “If there is unfortunate propaganda in ‘Birth of a Nation’ the people of Syracuse will be adept in spotting and discounting it for what it is. Faith in freedom of speech is nothing except faith in the people. We have such faith.”24 It is tempting to see Rice himself as foolish or naïve, but we need to remember that this letter was written with a particular purpose: to convince someone he does not know to accept his philosophical and political position. Given that, we have to keep in mind the rhetorical construction of this letter; Rice was using arguments he thought most likely to convince the mayor and perhaps would have made his point differently to a different audience. Rice also wrote to Jack Zurich, the owner of the Midtown Theatre, and this message is simpler: that he understands Zurich withdrew the picture under duress, and that he offers the ACLU’s legal help if Zurich should decide to defy the ban.25 Zurich seems to have decided to simply wait the mayor out, since the film appeared at the Midtown Theatre in June 1950, not long after Mayor Costello had left office.26

Figure 4.2. Letter from Joseph Breen to Harry Aitken, October 1948 (courtesy of Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College).

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All of this discussion of censorship takes place in an environment in which films were still subject to the Mutual decision of 1915 and thus could not claim an exemption from censorship on First Amendment grounds. At the same time, the Production Code of 1934 provided stricter limitations on films than almost any local or state law. A 1948 letter from Production Code director Joseph Breen to Griffith’s producer Harry Aitken (who was still administering the film in the late 1940s) assured him that The Birth of a Nation was exempt from the Production Code and that “extremely few film masterpieces are in this special category and then only in the original versions.” In the same letter, Breen also said the film was “an important part of the documentary history of the motion picture industry, and as such should be preserved intact.”27 It is important that he refers to the film as a “part of the documentary history of the motion picture industry” and not a document of American history. Breen is making it clear that the film is now an artifact of film history and outside of midcentury concerns about morals and censorship. This placement of the film as part of “film history” would begin to have important ramifications for the reception of the film in the 1950s.

the rise of foreign films in america In this same period, the range of films available to Americans was changing in important ways. The success of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1946 helped to create a market for other Italian neorealist films, and in their wake came a great expansion in the market for foreign films in America, or at least the foreign films that could be conceived of as art films. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, films arrived in waves from Britain, Japan, France, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe.28 Often not submitted for Production Code approval because the theaters that showed them were not bound by the code, they could offer access not only to more complicated ideas and ideologies, but also to sexual images not found in Hollywood releases. Even after the controversy around Rossellini’s The Miracle destroyed the legal foundation of the Production Code, the studios continued to use it for the next decade and a half, although its strictest rules were gradually weakened. After the code was abandoned completely in 1968 and Hollywood liberalized its standards, foreign films would lose this competitive advantage, but in the 1950s it still helped them to draw audiences. It would be a mistake of course to ascribe the popularity of foreign films simply to sex appeal, since the majority of them contained no sex or nudity whatsoever. It

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was clear that tastes were changing for various reasons that are hard to quantify in and of themselves. The postwar GI Bill provided four years of college education for returning soldiers, and nearly eight million took advantage, so that the number of degree holders in the United States doubled between 1940 and 1950. At the same time, these veterans were the foundation of the postwar baby boom and the migration to suburbia, so it seems unlikely that they were also the core of the urban art-cinema market. Film academics tend to search for sociological answers to film audience questions, but it seems more likely that the response had more to do with markets. Hollywood studios had thrived for many years in a closed ecosystem in which they controlled nearly all access to American moviegoers, because either they owned the theaters outright or block booking allowed them to keep independents out. The 1948 Paramount decision had loosened the studios’ hold on theaters, but it was also clear that, for all of Hollywood’s success at making movies, its studios offered a limited product line compared to the full potential of what film could be. For there to be increased audiences for art films, it is not necessary that there be a lot of new filmgoers, even though there were surely some people who were drawn into cinephilia by what the art cinemas had to offer. Instead, it is only necessary for some portion of the people who love cinema to be excited by the greater range of films now on offer and make them part of their viewing habits. While film reception was changing in response to social mores, there were equally important shifts in technology and distribution that also had a considerable impact on film culture and allowed The Birth of a Nation and other films to circulate in places where they might not previously have been accessible. The wide availability of 16mm film projectors, with libraries and distribution networks of films to fuel them, allowed amateur film societies to spring up all over the United States. This expansion predated, for the most part, the creation of academic film programs, which is notable given that many of these new film societies were on college and university campuses. While this was part of a wider conception of film as art, it was also connected to the idea that film could be education. As Charles Acland has noted, we have tended to see education about film and education through film as distinct threads, but this was a period when the two were intimately interrelated by the technology of 16mm. Purchases of projectors by educational institutions might be driven by a desire to show educational films as well as by an inclination to provide access to non-Hollywood films. In addition, film

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societies and film education organizations often had overlapping memberships.29 In a history of the Film Council of America, “the most visible national and influential US film education organization of the 1940s and 1950s,”30 Acland points out that “the expanding availability and mobility of media—that is, sounds and images from elsewhere becoming ubiquitously evident—destabilized the hold of traditional educational institutions, authorities, and ideals, thus engendering a certain crisis of modernity and calling forth efforts to navigate and guide a potentially chaotic realm. The FCA . . . legitimized a particular configuration of modern education and cultural authority.”31 While Acland is writing about the activities of a particular organization, he identifies much of the broader tension that existed in 1950s film culture. While film societies were flourishing on college campuses, there was still very little film in most curricula. Students and other members of academic communities were ahead of the faculties of their own institutions, even though some of those professors were surely at the same screenings. These screenings were not just a way for members of the campus community to pass time; they helped to create an intelligent and insightful film culture. In many cases, the writing that came out of these groups was as sophisticated as the academic writing that would follow it in later decades. During this period, even laudatory accounts of film societies often revealed tensions about high and low culture. In a September 1949 article in the New York Times, Thomas Pryor approvingly notes the explosion of film societies around the country, pointing out that although New York had one of the largest film societies (Cinema 16, organized by Amos Vogel), other smaller cities had film-lending departments in public libraries, something that New York City did not have. He writes, though, that “film society audiences run the gamut from pseudo-intellectuals and sophisticates, professing a marked disdain for Hollywood’s fictional creations[,] to more reasonable and intellectually sound admirers of motion pictures. Among the last are many ‘occasional’ patrons of the commercial movie theatre who have a healthy respect for Hollywood’s best creative efforts, but also recognize the film as a potent form in modern society and a medium of expression which has yet to be fully developed.”32 It is noteworthy here that Pryor is warning against a generalized notion of the superiority of non-Hollywood film, guarding a place for the best Hollywood productions in the same way that the French Cahiers du Cinéma critics would a few years later. This position reads differently coming from an American, of course, but it is also interesting that Pryor was defending contemporary films rather than

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classic films. For him, it goes without saying that Hollywood is making important films. He is critiquing as pseudo-intellectual the position that Hollywood is unworthy and claiming a space for contemporary American popular film alongside its historical and foreign counterparts. Thus, the wide availability of projectors and prints made it possible for films to circulate in new and decentralized ways. A considerable part of the Griggs collection consists of documents related to Griggs’s own showings of films, including The Birth of a Nation, in the late 1950s. In promotional materials, he claims that his print is the original uncut version. It was extremely unlikely that he had any 1915 version, given the history of the prints of this film. Although common versions of the film now include material, like references to the printed program, that clearly date from the original run of the film, no copy can be definitively traced further back than 1921.33 He means that he at least had a silent-era version, which would have distinguished his copy from nearly every other copy in circulation in the 1950s. As we saw in chapter 3, for much of the period between the 1930s and the 1990s, most people who saw The Birth of a Nation would have seen the greatly truncated sound-era version. The sound version of the film is nearly a different film than the one in current circulation, since so much is cut or changed. The net result of these changes is that the sound version of the film is more of a war adventure story and less of a social history lesson, although of course the bulk of the racism remains, inscribed as it is in the very bodies and performances of the actors. Griggs produced a program for a special showing of his print by the Essex Film Club in Nutley, New Jersey, in 1957. The Essex Film Club was one of the longest continuously operating amateur film clubs in the United States, holding at least monthly screenings between 1939 and the early 1990s. The showing of The Birth of a Nation, scheduled in the auditorium of a local public school on the evening of Sunday, September 15, was a special event for the club. The program includes a summary of the film largely copied from program notes written by T. K. Peters, a film teacher and collector from Georgia. The summary repeats most of the key claims of the film at face value—that Lincoln, had he lived, would never had imposed Reconstruction on the South, and that the rise of the Klan was a reasonable reaction of disenfranchised whites to the enfranchisement of African Americans. The program also goes out of its way to distinguish the Reconstruction-era Klan from later counterparts.

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Following this description, though, the program makes explicit the now-dual historical nature of presentations of The Birth of a Nation. Griggs writes: The showing of “The Birth of a Nation” today is for a two fold purpose. First it is recognized as the museum film of the motion picture industry, and shows clearly the progress made in the motion picture art during the last 42 years. Secondly, but still more important, it is now shown to portray very clearly the progress that has been made by our Negro Race during the last 97 years; progress made since tolerance and education in human relationships have assumed proper perspective.34

So the film was still considered to be a history of Reconstruction, but it also had become film history and could be justified as such. As a collector, Griggs was obviously interested in film for film’s sake, but his justification is crucial here because of the nature of the film. If The Birth of a Nation was now film history, then those who objected to showing the film were not just antiracists, but people who object to the notion that film itself constitutes an important part of America’s cultural history. Those who sought to suppress this film were now potential enemies of art, and of art history. This new binary used to defend the film came under sophisticated attack in a letter also preserved in the Griggs collection. Addressed to Robert “Bob” Lee, the head of the Essex Film Club, it is written by Grace Golat, who is trying to convince Lee to voluntarily withdraw the film, at least from the advertised public showing. Refusing to be painted as an enemy of film art, Golat makes her case on exactly those grounds: she argues that a showing of The Birth of a Nation is “a distortion and perversion of the purposes of film groups, which [she understands] to be the study and exhibition of the film art, the advancement of the film as an art form, and the encouragement thru this art of the growth of all human cultural values, deepening and strengthening individual sensitivity, insight and awareness.” Drawing an analogy, she asks, “Could one be considered genuinely fostering the film arts who would exhibit films that are primarily pornographic, despite the fine photography thereto? Or one who would foster showing of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films for all their excellent photographic or sound techniques?”35 She also notes, “In the eyes of the community, I’m afraid the substance will

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Figure 4.3. Protest flyer distributed by the NAACP of New York, 1950s (courtesy of Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College).

take precedence over the art form.” With this line, she anticipated a large part of the justification of the film in the following thirty years, that one should simply divorce the form from the content, although in almost all subsequent cases the argument would be that the form should take precedence over the content, or even that one should simply “ignore” the content and learn from the form. We now tend to see the form as inseparable from the content. At the same time, the context of the film’s viewership and changing social values continually decreases (but does not eliminate) the likelihood that it will contribute to the racism of its viewers. In the collection of the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal are numerous film club programs from Canada, Britain, and Australia.36 There is a great deal of overlap in the programs that these clubs produced for films such as The Birth of a Nation and, later, Intolerance, and in many cases the club organizers copied film descriptions and details from one

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another, sometimes with attribution and sometimes without. One group of programs from the Ottawa and Montreal area in the early 1950s all seem to be based on a program from the Oxford University Film Society written in 1949. This means that many errors are repeated, particularly the claim that “because of [the film’s] anti-negro tone . . . in Boston a riot broke out with continuous fighting for twenty-four hours.” While the programs in the collection vary in their approach to dealing with the film’s racism, few seem to argue it away. This is important because well into the 1970s, one can find articles in newspapers and magazines on Griffith that still attempt to do just that, dismissing the controversies over the film’s content as some kind of attack by philistines on a great artist, much as Griffith had defended himself in the teens. In contrast, most of these programs are among the earliest attempts to put the film’s racism in context. While emphasizing that they are showing the film because of its importance in the formal development of film style, the film clubs include statements that acknowledge the harmful stereotypes the film contains. The program from the Oxford University Film Society for a showing in May 1949 is an early attempt to strike this balance. Its author writes of the film: “It was an immediate success, partly perhaps because of its anti-negro tone which gained it some notoriety. . . . When it was shown in London quite recently, it was preceded by a notice asking the audience to disregard the sociological implications and to treat it as a work of art. Griffith does in fact represent the negroes in a very bad light, and he makes a mock of the Radical politician, Stoneman, who takes their part.”37 While it may sound as though this is just another attempt to diminish attention to the film’s racism, it is different from the dismissals one finds in the popular press and in film history books prior to the 1980s. The film club programs make repeated attempts to emphasize the film’s historical context, recognizing how much attitudes have changed in the forty years since 1915 and trying to position the club members as distanced art historians who are presenting these films as an opportunity to learn about cinema and history, rather than just “appreciating” the films as works of art. The Oxford University Film Society was founded in 1944 by theater and film director Peter Brook, who went on to have one of the longest and most remarkable careers of the twentieth century. The Oxford society’s level of activity increased in the late 1940s, earlier than many such similar groups. The organization’s lofty reputation was bolstered

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by the relative critical acuity of the notes that it issued. The group’s notes on Intolerance, written in 1949, begin thus: Some critics consider Intolerance the greatest film ever made: none considers it the most perfect. No one denies its importance as an influence: there is some debate about its value as a work of art. In Intolerance Griffith did four things which were at that time remarkable. He used many new technical devices which later influenced the early Russian and German cinemas; he evolved an elaborate and efficient organisation for production; did everything on an enormous scale at very great expense in both setting an example for the American cinema, and he tried to make a film about a subject that really mattered, and in this he is, from time to time, followed by most directors who take themselves seriously.38

The summary contained in these notes, written more than seventy years ago, still resonates strikingly with current critical consensus on Intolerance. The last line even offers a nicely balanced dose of cynicism, in the claim that making films about subjects that “really matter” is a habit of directors who “take themselves seriously.” The author demonstrates an awareness of the risks inherent for directors who take themselves seriously, as well as for those who do not. There can be little doubt, of course, that Griffith belonged to the category of directors who take themselves seriously. No one would undertake films called The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance if he did not. And Griffith’s writings on the meaning of film, and on his films, reveal a strong belief in the transformative nature of cinema. Yet while the past one hundred years have witnessed a near-complete transformation in reactions to The Birth of a Nation, surprisingly little change has marked the reception of Intolerance. Griffith’s sense in the 1910s that he was making foundational cinematic works has turned out to be correct, even if they are not now remembered exactly as he would have wished. The cut-and-paste nature of the programs in the Cinémathèque québécoise collection means that much is repeated from film society to film society. One frequently copied page features a range of quotations about The Birth of a Nation that illustrate the complexity of its midcentury reception. The generally debunked Wilson remark is included, but the quotations that follow alternate between praise and condemnation. The next two are arguments similar to those made in the teens about the film’s historical accuracy, with notorious Griffith

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defender Seymour Stern making a strong case for Griffith’s “objectivity and scholarship.” From there, they largely deal with the film’s status as an art object, whether it is a work of genius or a piece of “old-fashioned theatricality.” It gives the last word to British critic (and later filmmaker) Lindsay Anderson, who remarks on the “generally Fascist tone of its final sequences” and the “corresponding assumption of White ‘supremacy.’” Even while listing the formal techniques that Griffith either devised or mastered, these film programs try to find some scholarly distance. A good extended example is the program from the Ciné-Club of SaintLaurent, Québec, probably from 1953. The program begins by describing the film as being about “the fight to the death between white and black, the will of the former to guarantee forever their complete domination. This theme, which has never ceased to be exploited (for or against the racist ideal) by the American cinema, maintains a troubling relevance today.”39 Under the section “L’Apport de Griffith” (The Contribution of Griffith), it begins, “One cannot exaggerate the importance and the historic role of Griffith who took on, between 1908 and 1918, the carefully thought out establishment of the syntax of cinema.” The summary explains in detail the nature of his contributions to film language and style as well as his role in the development of the star system. It adds: “For the first time, the camera, forgetting its origins in still photography with its firmly rooted feet on the ground, became aware of its possibilities of mobility; shooting, which had always been objective, could become subjective; the mechanical eye substituting itself for the human eye.”40 This is reasonably poetic prose, but despite the high praise, which is extensive, there is no attempt here to justify Griffith’s version of history, and the tone is scholarly rather than celebratory. In fact, it is notable that much of the praise in this section is about Griffith’s work in general, while the first section, titled The Birth of a Nation, is the part that condemns the history. Another program in the collection from around the same time makes a division between form and content, but not to argue that the two are unrelated. This program survives only in part, so it cannot be dated, but the notes are largely drawn from the English-language examples referred to earlier, so it is in some way a descendent of the Oxford program from 1949. It contains the same summary and some details about the stylistic innovations, but then concludes that “the faults of Birth of a Nation are obvious . . . The film’s passionate and persuasive avowal of the inferiority of the Negro seems even more narrowly prejudiced and

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insidious than it did to its contemporaries. In 1915 the social implications of the film aroused a storm of protest. Negroes and whites united in attacking it. In Boston and other ‘abolitionist’ cities race riots broke out. The President of Harvard charged the film with ‘a tendency to pervert white ideals.’ Viewed today this criticism seems over mild.”41 It is interesting that these related programs all seem to build on one another, since they offer us a chance to trace the spread of a particular way of reading the film. Of course, there is no linear progression here from more racism to less, and in cases where few details are given it can be hard to discern the intended meaning. A program from the AGE Film Society in Toronto in 1961 simply states, “The storm of protest that broke after this picture’s release is now well known. Though he tried to be fair, it was still the work of a fiercely loyal but embittered southerner.” It goes on to credit Griffith with rebutting much of the criticism when he made Intolerance.42 This collection of Canadian programs seems to reflect a cultural moment in the development of film clubs. For other places, the record is spottier, and it is impossible to tell if available examples are representative at all. A program from the Tyneside Film Society in northeast England, written in 1955, is a clear example of the “triumphant Griffith” genre. It covers the film’s controversy thus: “From the very beginning, The Birth of a Nation became the subject of bitter controversy and Griffith was frequently accused of inciting racial hatred. The film made front page headlines when political organisations, seeking the Negro vote, attacked it viciously. Disturbances broke out in several places where the film was being shown and in some communities where the Negro vote meant money and power, it was banned altogether.” After summarizing the film’s successes in “nearly all the capitals and key cities of Europe and Asia,” the author concludes, “the world record of The Birth of a Nation is little short of fabulous. The attacks against it have been echoed and re-echoed down the years but none of the attacks has finally prevailed either against the film or against Griffith.” It ends: “To sum up, Griffith revealed in this film, first to America and later to the world, the hitherto undreamed of possibilities of the motion picture as a medium of expression. It came as overwhelming proof that the screen could re-create history, stir emotion and feeling, provoke controversy, and even direct thought.”43 A more balanced program from Melbourne, Australia, for a presentation by the Continental Film Group of both Intolerance and The Birth of Nation sometime in the 1950s includes extensive notes on the form of the films.

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When it comes to the discussion of The Birth of a Nation, this program also has one of the clearest statements about the film’s content: The Committee of the Continental Film Group screens films for their artistic and historical importance and, it should hardly be necessary to add, not because of ideological content. We do not justify any of the historical inaccuracy, racial bias and the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan which are particularly displayed in the second half of the film. The attitude of Griffith can be explained, not excused, by his background. He was a Southerner by birth steeped in an atmosphere of racial prejudice, he was brought up with the conventional Southern States attitude to the negro.44

This perspective on the film is not really different from ours now. This is not to suggest, of course, that there was anything like a consensus on the film by this point in the 1950s. As we have seen, responses ranged from thoughtful ones like this to outright defenses of the film. What is most important in this example is the idea that the film could be of “artistic and historical importance” even as its content is disavowed. The key words here are “it should hardly be necessary to add,” since they capture a turning point in the reception of the film. The programmers think it is obvious that films can be appreciated even as they are critiqued, but they are aware that their audience may not make such a distinction. The program introduces Intolerance thus: “Intolerance, the world’s largest film, ranks with The Birth of a Nation as one of the two historic cornerstones of film art. Intolerance advanced the revolution of the medium, initiated by Griffith through the former and primary work, in a dimension, and to a degree, such as may be regarded as constituting, both artistically and technically, as well as in creative influence, the second cinematic revolution.”45 The description of Intolerance as “the world’s largest film” is an odd construction that manages to seem remarkably apt given the magnitude of the film’s means and ambitions. It captures the film’s scale and scope while sounding oddly neutral on whether this largeness is laudable. The program goes on to note the independent nature of the film’s production and the lack of a written script. The bulk of the notes, though, are detailed summaries of the various formal devices in the film, from the moving camera and parallel editing to soft focus and natural lighting. The section entitled “Stylized Shots” remarks, “In the Modern Story, the scaffold and other instruments of Death, stark and simple, [are shown] against an empty black background

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(the hangman’s cell). The omission here of all surrounding realistic detail raises these objects from the status of natural ‘props’ to the category of image-symbols.”46 The program goes on to credit Intolerance with the invention of “Inanimate Objects as Symbols,” describing the use of the technique in this way: “The origin of this peculiarly cinematic form, which has psychological as well as pictorial capacity, may be traced to Intolerance: for example, in the Babylonian story, when Griffith introduces Cyrus by showing first his sword (the “sword of war”); or in the Modern Story, when he introduces the Musketeer of the Slums.”47 On this last point the praise seems a bit overblown: one can scarcely claim that the use of inanimate objects as symbols is particular to cinema. Despite these occasional oversteps, the notes on Intolerance are smart and clear, summing up the film in the following fashion: As a spectacle, Intolerance made a deep and lasting impression on the American film industry. Hollywood rejected its artistic integrity, its content and approach, but it envied, and later tried to rival, its physical magnitude, pageantry and use of crowds. The principal effect of Intolerance along this line may be seen in the ambitiously imitative spectacles of Cecil B. De Mille, who never forgot Intolerance.48

There are three main intellectual threads here. The first is that in midcentury, The Birth of a Nation is at the intersection of two currents in American society: the gradual decrease in the acceptability of racism and the rise in the status of film as an art form. As we have seen, just when The Birth of a Nation’s racism became less socially acceptable, and just as it was becoming clearer that the film did not accurately reflect US history, The Birth of a Nation emerged as a key example of film history, a category that did not previously exist. Museums, cinema clubs, and Hollywood itself were all interested in seeing film regarded as an important part of cultural history. The fact that they all saw The Birth of a Nation as a key text is useful to us now, because the arguments and defensiveness the film engendered meant that we have been left evidence of how people approached film in general and what they thought it meant. My second argument in this chapter has been about the importance of the cinema clubs themselves, which are an understudied yet crucial element in the development of film culture. The reason they have been understudied is in part perfectly sensible—it is by its nature a piecemeal

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history that must be patched together from documents that are widely dispersed if they exist at all. The depth and nuance of some clubs’ understanding of film are crucial to the history of film reception in the years before academic film study became well established. Cinema clubs often give us a perspective that is in between critics and fans, indeed closer to that of the academic film critics who would come later. The last part of my argument concerns those academic film critics themselves. It is clear from a reading of the period that the scholars involved in the early days of film studies in the academy did, in general, a far worse job of dealing with the complexities of The Birth of a Nation than the cinema clubs had done a decade or two earlier. While there were exceptions, the tendency in academia in the 1960s and 1970s was to downplay or ignore the film’s racism in favor of regarding it as a masterwork of cinematography and editing. As film studies tried to make its case within the academy for why its object was worthy of study, it needed artistic and historical masterpieces in order to better match the structure of art history or English literature. In a rush to demonstrate that it had such history, film studies often stripped away the sociological and cultural context in favor of aesthetics. While this is somewhat understandable in the historical context, it also sometimes reflected a step backward for the understanding of The Birth of a Nation and other films like it. Generations of film students were shown The Birth of a Nation as a historical masterpiece and told to ignore its racist content. As we will see in the following chapters, this had a range of negative implications for the nascent discipline of film studies.

Chapter 5

in search of legitimacy and masterpieces: film studies in the academy, 1960–2000

In the second half of the twentieth century, the discussions of The Birth of a Nation in media and academia reflect the enormous breadth of political beliefs about race and art. The rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s focused many white people’s attention on the horrific injustices they had long tolerated. At the same time, many more white people clung ever more fiercely to their belief in white supremacy, and the culture would be extremely slow to give up those beliefs. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the range of publicly expressed opinions was wider than it had been a decade earlier, so that much of the political fighting occurred within the left or the right. The failed 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater is often seen as the starting point for a harsher conservatism that came to dominate American politics,1 while the late 1960s divisions in the left often pitted younger radicals against older liberals. In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement itself was already divided between the assimilationism preached by Martin Luther King and the more confrontational rhetoric of Malcolm X, although their philosophies harmonized somewhat before their deaths.2 In moments like these, political arguments are often sharpened by disagreements about the terms of the debate, or about which arguments are even fit to be voiced. The left-right divide can seem so vast that even those who are on the same side of the overall ledger can seem incredibly far away, and there are not enough shared assumptions for measured debate to take place. It can be tempting in these moments to blame this lack of measured debate on a decline in overall civility or civilization, but it is in fact a necessary discomfort in order for societies to move forward.3 For our purposes, it means that there was not a debate about The Birth of a Nation during this period, but multiple debates, each with differ-

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ent ideals and assumptions. In the popular press, the debate was often still one about freedom of expression over censorship. In academia, the debate was about form versus content. In between, there were debates about what it meant to show this film “in context,” about what film history is and what it should be trying to accomplish. There is not a clear historical timeline to these debates, with perspectives becoming more or less liberal over time. There are thoughtful and nuanced critiques of the film, like those in the 1950s cine-clubs, as well as relatively ignorant defenses of it in mainstream newspapers forty years later. Many of these defenses pretended that racism was a thing of the past, much as the Atlanta reviewer did in 1915,4 without actually dealing with any of the difficult questions that the civil rights era raised. Overt racism became much less socially acceptable, which means that white people had to become more creative and coded in expressing it or else do what they could to “set the question aside” in a way that allowed them to ignore it. As film studies moved more fully into academic environments in the 1960s and 1970s, the question of what to do about The Birth of a Nation was not an easy one to ignore. The film was obviously central to the history of cinema and had to be faced in one way or another. The reactions it engendered were complicated and contradictory, and not always progressive in terms of racial equality. Dana Polan dates the earliest film courses in America to 1915, the same year as the release of The Birth of a Nation. As he notes, academic film study in the United States had numerous starts and stops over the next forty years, and efforts tended to be scattershot and short lived, so much so that “many of the early professors of film declared themselves to be the first in the field often in blithe or deliberate ignorance of earlier attempts.”5 He cautions that we should avoid “imagining that the scattered array of initiatives around film pedagogy formed any sort of discipline of film made up of common methods, common objects, and common purposes.”6 Most of these forays into a new field of study were remarkably uncontroversial, which is surprising given that film was an upstart in the world of high culture. Instead, film was often a useful object for university study, as it connected art and industry. Citing a Harvard course in film from 1927 that blended film as art with film as industry, Polan notes that both the institution and the industry stood to gain from a kind of mutual exchange of prestige. Film would be legitimized by Ivy League study, and Harvard would gain as well. As Polan explains, “If it could be shown that the film industry differed

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from other American businesses to the extent that its individual products stood out by virtue of aesthetic value (rather than, say, utilitarian ones) then the [Harvard School of Business] would be demonstrating its civic ability to cultivate business practice as something worthy in higher, cultural terms.”7 Writing of the relationship between academia and the film industry in the first half of the twentieth century, Polan identifies tensions that have lasted to the present day: How to maintain moral and aesthetic value in the machine age was a central intellectual dilemma of the American university as it entered the twentieth century, and while some traditional humanists tried to confront that dilemma by a fervent fetishizing of the past, others moved more directly into modernity and tried to find a bearable path within it. Film might be attacked by the traditional intellectual, but it might also be welcomed by a new sort of academic cultural custodian who would see that its status as an art of mechanical reproducibility posed an interesting challenge: if a product of the machine age could be found to offer something more than crass standardization—if from within mass production aesthetic value could be born—then there would be every possibility of humanism and aestheticism showing that they had their necessary, inevitable place within modernity.8

So while film study did not have a natural place in the tradition-bound world of academia, there were two impulses that drew it there. The exchange of prestige between industry and academia is based on the exchange of two different kinds of cultural capital. For industry creators, academic attention legitimizes their work as artistic in the sense of having a depth that makes it worthy of study. Given that not all films are perceived as art, there is a powerful incentive for individual artists to seek and welcome attention from professors and students concerned with the art of filmmaking. For academics, who are often concerned about the perception that they are too separate from the mainstream of American life, film grants relevance as well as peripheral association with an industry regarded as sexy and glamorous. For American universities, there is the additional benefit, as there was for MOMA in the 1930s and 1940s, that film study allows them to focus on US culture as a source of art. Though American literature now has a long and accomplished history of its own, film is one medium in which the United States truly dominates the world. As such, it is impossible to understand American culture without studying film. Film studies

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eventually became intertwined with other strands of American cultural history and sociology, but those strands would not be fully developed for several more decades. The early twentieth-century history of film studies was interrupted by World War II and a postwar concern with media effects and research.9 There was a resurgence in the late 1950s, marked by the launch of the first PhD program in cinema at the University of Southern California in 1959—the same year as the founding of the Society of Cinematologists, which later became the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, now the largest film and media study organization in the world. Robert Gessner, the first president of the Society of Cinematologists, used his first address to the group in 1960 to talk about the challenges of making cinema into a proper object of academic study: “‘Movies’ and ‘scholarship’ are words which sound strange when heard in juxtaposition. The two were not considered marriageable in the traditional halls of academe, and hence not even accorded the respectable status of a sad but legal mesalliance. Upgrading to the British word ‘film’ indicates the recent respectability of a first-generation nouveau riche. It is hoped by some, frowned on by others, that a wider acceptance of ‘cinema’ will eventually signal admittance at a high church ceremony.”10 Gessner goes on to list the challenges that cinema study faced: the relatively short history of filmmaking, the low quality of many written sources, and the general tendency to accept “folklore” as history rather than holding to more traditional standards of historical evidence.11 Film did not begin to take on the trappings of disciplinarity until the late 1960s and 1970s, and took root in a range of more established disciplines, often English and communication, but also modern languages and art history. As cinema study tried to find a place in the academy, there was inherently a tremendous pressure to emphasize its similarities to art forms that were already worthy of study, which meant that the model of art history or literary study was the one most often adopted, in which scholars and students used a series of influential “masterpieces” to chart the development of a medium. (As Gessner noted in his address, it was often a challenge to even have access to historical films, and he admonished those who tried to write about films they did not have in front of them.) The “masterpiece” approach had the benefit of emphasizing film’s artistic aspirations and achievements rather than its populist appeal, which was essential for competing with the study of art and literature. While modern scholars in those fields might regularly study graffiti or detective novels, such scholarly attention

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to popular culture was virtually unheard of fifty or sixty years ago. To have a field of study, masterpieces and a history were needed, and this was a challenge for a medium that was only sixty to eighty years old. As if this were not enough pressure, literary scholarship in this period was at the height of New Criticism, which emphasized the internal components of a piece of art, with the goal of figuring out how it worked as a self-contained object, eschewing attention to the social context of production or reception. In this intellectual and social context, it is not surprising that The Birth of a Nation’s content and social message were sometimes downplayed in favor of close attention to its editing, cinematography, and narrative structure. But there was a third intellectual thread that, somewhat oddly, pushed film scholarship even further away from the sociological and political: auteurism. The Cahiers du Cinéma group had developed the auteur theory and made it possible to think about Hollywood studio directors as individual artists who included some part of themselves in their work. While the Cahiers du Cinéma writers were not excessively formalist in their approach to criticism, and much of their writing hinges on political critique, it was their emphasis on a romantic notion of individual artistry that was most useful in an era that tried to separate the artist from his or her social milieu. François Truffaut would later write, The New Wave had no aesthetic program, it was simply an attempt to retrieve a certain independence lost around 1924, when films became too expensive, a bit before the talkies. In 1960, making cinema, for us, was to imitate D. W. Griffith directing his films under the California sun, before even the birth of Hollywood. At that time, the directors were all very young. It’s stunning to see that Hitchcock, Chaplin, King Vidor, Walsh, Ford, Capra had all made their first film before the age of 25. It was a youngster’s field more than a cinéaste’s, and that’s how it must be.12

So Griffith is, for Truffaut at least, a representative of a romantic notion of independent artistic filmmaking, one in which filmmakers were relatively free of the encumbrances of studios or of political interference. As a critic, Truffaut is most famous for his scathing indictment of the French cinema industry of his day,13 but in this case, he looks even further back, toward an Edenic early cinema in which young people could make the films they wanted. Like all Edenic images of

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the past, this is not an entirely accurate one, but that was not the point of invoking it. At other moments, Truffaut was emphatic in his admiration for Lillian and Dorothy Gish, dedicating his film about filmmaking, Day for Night, to them. In a later tribute to Lillian Gish, he wrote, “I detest war films except for the moment where the soldier pulls from his pocket a photo of a woman to look at. Griffith was the first to understand that cinema was an art of the woman, the art of showing women.”14 Truffaut is surely revealing more about himself than about The Birth of a Nation here, even though that is clearly the film to which he is referring. Griffith was indeed lucky to have an artist of Gish’s talents to work with, but within the film the women function as traditional southern images of virginal purity who must be defended with violence. Truffaut’s dismissal of the rest of The Birth of a Nation as a “war film” is telling, especially since the film had much less impact in France than most of Griffith’s other works. As noted in an earlier chapter, the French release was delayed for many years by the First World War, and by then it was interesting but dated, so that it never became the canonical film that it was in the United States. Jean-Luc Godard’s use of Griffith was not far from Truffaut’s. Godard’s most frequent remark about Griffith was that he had pointed out that the most important elements of a movie were “a girl and a gun.” Godard repeated this attribution enough times that most searches of the term link it to him rather than Griffith.15 It does appear in a 1922 interview with Griffith in the magazine Shadowland but is presented as an aside in an article that is otherwise full of direct quotes: “We once heard an interesting tale of Mr. Griffith’s formula for screen success, a rather striking sidelight upon his view of what the public wants. ‘A gun and a girl,’ ran his recipe for film popularity.”16 Even if this were a real quotation from Griffith (it does not appear elsewhere), it was clearly not meant to be prescriptive. The rest of the article is full of Griffith’s complaints about how in the 1920s he could no longer advance the art of film and how the moviegoing public had the “mind of a nine-year-old.” Nowhere in Griffith’s extensive interviews on filmmaking does he ever claim that film art is just sex and violence; instead he consistently makes lofty claims for the form. It is not hard to see why this phrase would have appealed to Godard, nor to see the ways in which it influenced his own filmmaking, even though he is completely misreading Griffith. What is important here, though, is that for the French New Wave filmmakers, Griffith is something of a free-form signifier, someone who can

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connect them to cinema’s origins and who represents the filmmaker as individual and independent artist. The American debates about racism are more distant for them, even though France had and still has plenty of racism of its own. But the particularities of Reconstruction and the legacy of slavery are not their battles, and it is not a history they know or are directly affected by, in the same way that French historical stories do not have the same effect on American viewers. In addition, their consumption of Griffith’s work, either directly or through critical summaries, is not dominated by The Birth of a Nation in the way that it might be in other places. They are likely to have seen Broken Blossoms or other films more frequently. The nouvelle vague filmmakers are grabbing whatever they can from the past to inspire themselves, while insisting only upon the individual director’s right to make whatever he or she wishes. Film periodicals in the United States around the same period were also often marked by a sense of nostalgia for the silent era. Haden Guest has noted that many of the critics and scholars writing in Films in Review, a periodical launched in 1950 by the National Board of Review, were fascinated with tragically fallen figures from the silent era such as Erich Von Stroheim, D. W. Griffith and, to a certain extent, Charlie Chaplin—hugely ambitious directors of the silent screen who had reached a peak of creativity and artistic confidence only to stumble precipitously once they had been banished into the world of sound. For this group of film historians the embattled figures of the silent era embodied a lost art that remained tragically misunderstood and underappreciated.17

In the case of the American critics, Griffith and his contemporaries were not just artists who transcended their time, but also symbols of a lost era which some writers in the 1950s and 1960s were old enough to remember as a time of personal discovery and astonishment, having seen many of the silent classics in their original runs, and in some cases having had personal interactions with key figures. This sometimes led to a lot of “folklore” being mixed with history, exactly what Robert Gessner warned his colleagues about in 1960. When auteurism as an idea came to the United States, it blossomed in the art cinema movement and the cine-clubs and inspired a generation of filmmakers who became the New Hollywood of the 1970s. At

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the same time, one of the side effects of auteurism was that it sometimes elevated the filmmaker to “great artist,” a position that made criticism of racism more difficult. In the imagination of the period, great artists were supposed to be expressing the “human condition,” without reference to the specific variations of that experience. Without comparing Griffith to Shakespeare (a comparison he clearly craved), one might note that there had long been a tradition in artistic criticism of excusing or leaving aside the racism or anti-Semitism of Shakespeare’s plays, and this was still an era when white actors could play Othello in blackface, with Laurence Olivier nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for just such a performance in 1965, two years after Sidney Poitier had been the first African American actor to win in that category. The reaction to his Othello in the United States provides a good example of transatlantic differences in sensitivity to racism. The film, which had been a National Theatre production in Britain, featured Olivier wearing not only blackface, but also an Afro-style wig and red lipstick. Writing in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther described his stunned reaction to the image, comparing Olivier to “the end man in an American minstrel show” with a voice reminiscent of the Amos and Andy radio serials.18 Crowther’s reaction is important because it makes clear that awareness of the history of racial stereotypes was part of regular critical discourse in the mid- to late 1960s, even if sensitivity to those stereotypes in the general filmic community was much more muted. Obviously, blatant stereotyping was not enough to prevent Olivier from being nominated for an Oscar.19 This is a good example of the ways in which the terms of a debate about racism that seemed obvious to Crowther writing in New York do not seem to have been obvious at all to Academy voters working in the industry, who were likely to put Olivier’s performance into the completely different context of Shakespearean theatricality rather than American minstrelsy. Their industry was much more closely related to the latter even though it feigned a desire to be on par with the former. Thus there are multiple and contradictory debates surrounding the introduction of film studies in the US academy. The end result of all these crossed intellectual threads was a sometimes self-reinforcing pattern where early film scholars downplayed or even ignored The Birth of a Nation’s racism while emphasizing its artistic genius. What is notable is how much knowledge was lost and abandoned in this moment, as some of the analysis of the film that had been circulating for decades was set aside in favor of a focus on form. Up until this point

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(i.e., before the 1960s), discussions of racism in the film had roughly tracked the broader social transitions of American culture. As society became less overtly racist, so did readings of the film. Oddly, though, just at the moment when the civil rights movement was helping American society make a substantial leap toward greater awareness and tolerance, the reception of The Birth of a Nation was jumbled and contradictory. While  few readings supported the film’s message, the tendency was to mention that it was “controversial” while moving quickly to discussions of formal elements. Much of the subtlety and nuance in critiques and film club notes from earlier decades was now gone, sometimes replaced with cheerleading for film as a medium and for Griffith himself. It is not that the racism of the film was defended, but more that it was set aside. Early film studies was caught between two intense pressures: the need to impress its university colleagues and the appeal of New Criticism, based in close formal reading. These two impulses were related, since one of the key goals of New Criticism and of formalist analysis was to demonstrate that good works of art were actually good by some internal criterion and not just by vague general consent. This emphasis on the internal construction of artworks could be to film studies’ advantage, assuming there was a sufficient collection of critical formal tools, which the nascent discipline set about building. Researching this period involves some distinct methodological challenges. In a moment when the discipline had no clear center, it is hard to say with certainty which voices were prevailing, or even which ones were firmly inside the academy and which ones outside. I am dependent here in large part on anecdotal recollections from colleagues who were there. This is a challenge because it is a touchy subject, to put it mildly, and the point of the research is not to lay blame on individual actors but to chart a moment in the discipline. In the fifteen years that I have been researching The Birth of a Nation, I have had dozens of conversations with people who either taught the film or studied it in this period, and while the places and contexts vary, the range of responses to it was very narrow. Either students were advised to simply set aside the racism, or the racism was not mentioned at all. This seems to have been the default position until the 1980s and is not uncommon even into the twenty-first century, depending on the scholarly orientation of the person teaching the film. Almost without exception, Griffith and his film were there to be praised and emulated.20 This often-unquestioning praise of Griffith had a particularly dev-

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astating impact on African American students who found themselves in barely integrated college classrooms in the 1970s. Not only was a film full of horrific stereotypes being hailed as a masterpiece, but there was little place for discussion of its message, and students often found themselves at odds with their professors if they challenged the film. The most famous of these cases was that of Spike Lee, who was shown the film at NYU’s film school in the 1970s. Lee’s first student film, The Answer, was a response to The Birth of a Nation, and it nearly led to him being kicked out of the school at the end of the year. In Lee’s telling, the masterpiece mentality was so ingrained at this point that a rejection of The Birth of a Nation felt like a rejection of the larger film school project of learning by studying the greats. Director Larry Clark also recounts an incident at UCLA in the same period where students interrupted a professor who was lecturing on The Birth of a Nation and physically removed him from the classroom before going back and teaching the class themselves.21 Dozens of thematic and historical books about film were published between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, with a notable increase after 1970. Most of these were general introductions or overviews, aimed at explaining film to undergraduates, other scholars, and the general public. Although some were written by professors and some by filmmakers and other experts, there is no sharp distinction between academic and nonacademic work, given the discipline’s newness. What they have in common, though, is an overwhelming emphasis on form over content or context. Typical is Lewis Jacobs’s The Movies as Medium (1970), which lays out elements of film that are all internal. The sections of the book are “Image,” “Movement,” “Time and Space,” “Color,” and “Sound.”22 Jacobs makes a particularly compelling example of the zeitgeist of the period because, as we saw in chapter 3, he had published a history of film in 1939 that examined Griffith’s racism with nuance and care. He had not reversed himself by 1970; it is simply that other questions had moved to the forefront. Robert Gessner’s own The Moving Image: A Guide to Cinematic Literacy, from 1970, is less strictly formalist and has chapters entitled “Intercharacter Relations” and “Structuring Conflict,” but still includes essentially no information on the social context of films like The Birth of a Nation, while using Griffith as a praiseworthy example throughout.23 In many of these books, the film’s historical controversies are often mentioned in passing, as a necessary note before we get

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to the real content of the film and the analysis. Typical is this passage from Peter Cowie’s Seventy Years of Cinema, published in 1969: Griffith’s style is mellifluous and assured. In the previous five years he had initiated and perfected one technical advance after another: closeup, the fast overhead travelling shot, the split screen, the masked screen, wide panoramas. Now they are blended unostentatiously into the narrative, taking third place to historical accuracy and emotional emphasis. In the second half of the film, his review of race relations borders on the hysterical, with the Radical, Stoneman, emerging as villain of the piece.

There is criticism here, but it is mild: the “review of race relations borders on the hysterical,” and we still have the assertion that “historical accuracy” is one of the major accomplishments of the film.24 Other contributions are more nuanced. William Kuhn’s Movies in America from 1972 describes some of the controversy over the film and claims, “It cannot be said, finally, that The Birth of a Nation is an unflawed film. Even excepting the passionate Southern and segregationist viewpoint, the film exposes Griffith’s key weaknesses: his sentimentality, his Victorian simplification of moral problems, his eagerness to cast villains as demons and heroes as gods.”25 There were of course other academic voices that critiqued the film much more strongly, but they were the minority view, and it is clear in their writing that they knew it, since they often aim some of their frustration at their colleagues as well as at Griffith. Thomas Cripps used a book review of Lillian Griffith’s The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me in Cinema Journal in 1969 to forcefully refute the apologies for racism that Gish offered, even while maintaining that he had plenty of affection for Gish herself. Cripps had won a graduate student essay prize in 1962 for an essay titled “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation” that was printed in The Historian; it was one of the first essays by a white historian to center Black reactions to The Birth of a Nation.26 Cripps writes of Gish’s memoir, “How can one be critical of Miss Lillian Gish? It would be like attacking mother, God, and country all in one breath; like desecrating a monument; like whistling through an empty jujube box at the Sunday adult matinee instead of confining the racket to Charlie Chan on Saturday.”27 Cripps is evenhanded in his review of the book, pointing out the many ways it reveals interesting information about Griffith’s working methods, even

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as he criticizes Gish for attempting to justify Griffith’s worldview. He points out, correctly, that her claim that Griffith believed the “history books falsified actual happenings” makes no sense given Griffith’s long dependence on history books that supported his view. Cripps points out that the alternate view Gish also raises—that only those who lived through Reconstruction could comment on it—would exclude Griffith himself. In addition, he asks, “Was any black man ever asked his version of Reconstruction?” He ends, “As to Griffith’s alleged meticulous attention to detail, it consisted in large measure of gathering white men’s anecdotes to justify their terrorizing of a then helpless race. One can only ask, why mar a fascinating, useful memoir by wasting pages defending the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Griffith’s worst side? It only subtracted from what we might have learned of Griffith the creator.”28 Russell Merritt’s article entitled “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” also published in Cinema Journal, in 1972, is one of the earliest attempts to make a case for a more complete film history. He writes: No one who writes on film history fails to pay homage to Griffith’s brilliant talents as a craftsman and inventor. That praise is well-deserved, but it tends to place the unimportant things at the center and the important at the outer edges. Griffith’s craftsmanship alone no more explains The Birth of a Nation’s peculiar appeal than Homer’s metrical skill explains the magic of the Iliad.29

At the same time that many film histories were still overly focused on form, the early 1970s saw an explosion of books that were about the representations of African Americans in Hollywood films. At least eight books on African Americans in film were published between 1970 and 1977 alone. Writing in the late 1980s, James Snead noted, These studies all, in various ways, stressed the need for more positive roles, types, and portrayals, while pointing out the intractable presence of “negative stereotypes” in the film industry’s depiction of blacks. While the thoroughness of such books was welcome, their clustered appearance contributed to an unfortunate homogeneity. For the mid-seventies were also the period of a most productive ferment in film theory, one which the above-mentioned books on blacks in film either uniformly ignored, or of which they were unaware. Invaluable semiotic, poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic tools were neglected, and still have not been adequately applied to the large

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body of Hollywood films in which blacks appear. The “black Hollywood” books of the seventies took a binary approach, sociological in its position, hunting down either “negative” or “positive” images. Such a method could not grasp what closer rhetorical and discursive analysis of racial imagery can. Few of these books investigate the filmic text or its implied audience.30

We will return to Snead’s work in a moment, but by the late 1970s, one can start to see the hints of an approach that would blend the formalist and socio-historical threads of film study. James Monaco’s textbook How to Read a Film, first published in 1977 and issued in a new edition as recently as 2009, took this argument to introductory film students. Monaco repeatedly makes a strong case for the importance of social context to the understanding of film. He writes that “one of the most telling social criticisms provided by the Black Power movement of the 1960s was its historical analysis of the inherently racist characterizations to which Blacks had been subjected as a matter of course throughout the history of film and television.”31 Using this to lead into a discussion of The Birth of a Nation, he writes, Racism pervades American film because it is a basic strain in American history. It is one of the ugly facts of film history that the landmark Birth of a Nation (1915) can be generally hailed as a classic despite its essential racism. No amount of technical expertise demonstrated, money invested, or artistic effect should be allowed to outweigh Birth of a Nation’s militantly anti-Black political stance, yet we continue in film history as it is presently written to praise the film for its form, ignoring, or at best paying lip service to, its content.32

This remarkable passage, written in a late 1970s context informed in part by feminist criticism, shows the discipline beginning to realize its error. The 1960s and early 1970s had been marked by film studies’ inferiority complex, by the rise of New Criticism, and by the influence of auteurship, so that the young field ignored the massive cultural shifts happening in the broader culture. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, film studies had the confidence to critique itself and was ready for its historical turn, in which the field finally began to synthesize its attention to form with appraisals of how films have affected the lives of people in the real world.

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Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s, film and media studies went through a period of radical growth that was fueled by two partially related theoretical developments. The first was that the field became much more focused on questions of gender and race. While this shift was common in the academic humanities, it perhaps moved a bit quicker in film studies because of the early influence of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay, published in the mid-1970s, which put feminist critique at the center of our understanding of how film worked.33 The fact that film studies was a younger discipline with less of a theoretical history meant that socially aware scholars did not have as much disciplinary inertia to fight, as they might have had in English literature or in history. For scholars trained after the 1980s, a focus on the representations of gender and race was a key part of the discipline itself, not an incursion into the discipline. The emphasis on gender had come first, and the focus on race and representation would not develop fully until the 1990s. The second major influence of this period is what might be referred to as “French Theory,” the appearance of a range of philosophical and theoretical works that had been published in France beginning in the late 1960s by a wide variety of scholars, some of whom were writing explicitly about cinema, while others barely mentioned it. Many of these scholars had a profound influence on the field in ways that were not foreseeable in the original contexts in which they were writing. Some became more popular in the anglophone world than they had been in the francophone one.34 Of the critics who were writing explicitly about cinema, Christian Metz is one who put his assessment of The Birth of a Nation and Griffith near the center of some of his analysis, seeing Griffith as a key figure in the development of film as a language. His book Film Language appeared in English in 1974, having been first published in France in 1968. He writes, “Between 1911 and 1915, Griffith made a whole series of films having, more or less consciously, the value of experimental probings, and Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, appears as the crowning work, the sum and the public demonstration of investigations that, however naive they may have been, were nonetheless systematic and fundamental. Thus, it was in a single motion that the cinema became narrative and took over some of the attributes of a language.”35 In his reading of Griffith, Metz is simply repeating the most common histories of his time, and this is of course only a single piece of his complex theory of cinematic language. It is worth noting,

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though, that Metz’s reading of Griffith was also quite limited and misguided. He writes, The pioneers of “cinematographic language”—Méliès, Porter, Griffith— couldn’t care less about “formal” research conducted for its own sake; what is more (except for occasional naive and confused attempts), they cared little about the symbolic, philosophical or human “message” of their films. Men of denotation rather than of connotation, they wanted above all to tell a story; they were not content unless they could subject the continuous, analogical material of photographic duplication to the articulations—however rudimentary—of a narrative discourse.36

While I must leave aside the question of whether this argument applies to Méliès or Porter (I doubt it), the idea that Griffith cared little about the “symbolic, philosophical or human ‘message’” of his films is clearly preposterous, even for the films made long before The Birth of a Nation. To pick just one well-known example, his 1909 film A Corner in Wheat features numerous shots and tableaus that reference paintings as well as the symbolic death of the businessman in a pit of the very food he has hoarded. As we have seen, The Birth of a Nation is steeped in the symbolism of the Lost Cause, of white supremacy, and of myths about American history. To be fair to Metz, many of these symbols and codes are specifically American, and it is easy to miss the cultural codes of another country in another time. Metz’s reading of Griffith’s work is based on the limited evidence he would have had in front of him. In his book White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, published posthumously in 1992, James Snead tries to repair the disconnect he notes between the sociological studies of race in film in the 1970s and the wealth of film theory that had appeared in the same period. In a chapter dedicated to The Birth of Nation, Snead begins by approvingly quoting Metz’s description of Griffith as one of the inventors of film language and sets out to explore some of the connections between the denotations and connotations of Griffith’s work. While this structure obviously borrows from Metz, Snead never mistakenly describes Griffith as a denotative filmmaker, as Metz does. His article is primarily concerned with the relations between filmic language and the “extra-cinematic codes,” in this case the assumptions of American racism, that the film both reinforces and creates. He writes,

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In general, throughout the history of coding the color black in mainstream American films, it is precisely the intentional confusion of narrative, cinematic, and extra-cinematic codes that tends to undermine the color black on screen. Roland Barthes calls these “referential codes”—references to a generally accepted notion of “common sense” or the established knowledge of the time: they enable all manner of extra-cinematic ideologies to hide under accustomed codes of narrative closure. Birth of a Nation does not merely represent the beginning of many cinematic codes, found here for the first time in any film, but also represents the culmination, refinement, and further dissemination of certain extra-cinematic codes concerning blacks and whites.37

Snead understands The Birth of a Nation as a node in the development of American racism, one that marks both a natural waypoint and a new creation: “In unprecedented ways, film form and racism coalesce into myth here, seemingly myths of entertainment but ultimately ones political in nature, ones that continue to assert their presence today.”38 Snead’s attempt to reconcile the film theory of his period and a historical understanding of the film are perhaps even more profound when he turns his attention to the question of history itself. He writes that “even if one does not find concrete evidence” that Woodrow Wilson described the film as ‘writing history with lightning,’ it is still a selfconscious aim of The Birth of a Nation to write history with cinema, particularly with its so-called ‘historical facsimiles,’ which are both obtrusive and dilatory to the plot, but which are crucial to ideological, rather than narrative aims.”39 This contrast between narrative aims and historical/ideological ones is crucial to Snead’s reading of the film, and it leads to perhaps his biggest contribution to our understanding of The Birth of a Nation. First, he connects this handful of “historical facsimiles” to the rest of the story: Part of the purpose of Griffith’s film is precisely to reproduce “nostalgia” as “history,” rather than to advance plot. The establishing shots of blacks dancing in the slave quarters, or picking cotton in the fields are more akin to the novelistic statement “here is the way it was” than “here’s what happened next.” They, though not labeled “historical facsimiles,” are similarly designed to give a “documentary” view of “the way things were” in a time and place that most of the audience could not have known first-hand.40

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Snead is not merely interested in correcting the historical record here, nor in simply considering the condescending and racist portrayals of African Americans. Although both of those questions are clearly important, he wants to use these particular scenes in Griffith’s film to get at bigger questions about how cinema works: “Siegfried Kracauer’s opposition of the two basic ‘tendencies’ of cinema—the ‘realistic’ tendency (Lumière), and the ‘fantastic’ tendency (Méliès)—is relevant here. Simplistic as it may sound, one must never forget the apparently phenomenological ‘truth-value’ of a medium that is in fact custom-made (to a greater extent than still photography) to produce true-seeming lies.”41 Snead’s insistence that we must not “forget the cinema’s falsifying potential” gets at the heart of what he seems to see as a naive false binary in Kracauer’s widely adopted description of cinema: “Kracauer presupposes a constitutive delineation: some films use the medium to truthfully record what the camera sees; others deliberately use camera tricks to create an imaginary scene that never existed. Even those which combine the two tendencies must have a ‘balance between the realistic tendency and the formative tendency.’”42 So whereas the contrast between the Lumieres and Méliès seems to many film theorists and historians as a sort of continuum of choice, in which filmmakers can blend the reality and the fantasy, Snead wants to remind us that this blend can also be used to construct lies that serve the filmmaker’s interests. For all the trompe-l’oeil moments upon which Méliès and his filmic progeny depend, there is nearly always an element of innocent play. As with magic on stage, the audience is supposed to know that this is impossible, and the gap between that knowledge and what they see is the mark of the performer or director’s craft. Understanding the fantastic in this way does not account for those, like Griffith, who make supposedly verifiable truth claims about the past while employing tricks and codes descended from both documentary and fantasy films. As Snead demonstrates, Griffith is employing all these codes to serve a disingenuous ideological and political end rather than a simply narrative or spectacular one. In this moment, Snead is most closely echoing Oscar Micheaux and the critique of cinematic form that Micheaux offered in Within Our Gates (see chapter 2). Snead understands what Micheaux did, that cinema’s potential to lie to its audience had been undertheorized, even as that lying sat within the poles that much film theory had drawn for itself. It is no coincidence that African American filmmakers and critics drew attention to this central element of Griffith’s work and of

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filmmaking in general. Having been on the receiving end of so many of Hollywood’s lies, it would make sense for them to see that lying as fundamental to the very form itself. Snead’s intervention reveals that a large part of film theory had been built around questions of fantasy and reality without fully considering the question of dishonesty. Even though many of those same critics recognized that The Birth of a Nation was “not true,” that is not the same thing as theorizing, at a foundational level, the ways in which film can create an effective lie. This is a crucial contribution, and it is a shame that Snead was not able to expand it. White Screens/Black Images was compiled from notes after his untimely death from HIV at age thirty-five in 1989, yet another reminder of what was lost when an unchecked disease was allowed to rampage through a community. Writing around the same time as Snead, Clyde Taylor published an article in Wide Angle in 1991 that was a milestone in understanding the relationship between form and content in The Birth of a Nation.43 Like Snead, Taylor revealed how some fundamental assumptions about cinema were informed by whiteness. Taylor begins his article by noting, “For obscure reasons, narrative works considered landmarks in American culture for technical innovation and/or popular success have often importantly involved the portrayal of African Americans,” and he cites The Jazz Singer, Gone With the Wind, Song of the South, and Roots.44 He recounts many of the excuses and evasions that scholars have offered for Griffith over the years and responds, In satisfying itself with these pro forma arguments, the discourse of film studies in the United States makes its own compromise with racist ideology. It has become conventional to repeat these critical positions without interrogating their relation to each other or to the film as a whole. It is as though the film’s many celebrated rhetorical achievements and its substantial defamation of Blacks were isolated issues, discussible as if they belonged to two separate films. Demonstrations of Griffith’s artistic mastery in particular scenes are never connected to their role in denigrating Blacks. More importantly, the reflex interpretation avoids connection between the film’s racist import and racism as a fact in American life. The passive racism of film studies has led it to neglect the meaning of Griffith’s national allegory and the role of racism in it, in striking contrast to the subtle social analysis given other national allegories like the Western or the gangster movie. Nor has film studies crossed its self-constructed

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boundaries and examined the links between Griffith’s racial characterization, certainly the most negative in U.S. film history, and the wider theme of Hollywood negrophobia, arguably the most massive racist assault in the history of mass communications.45

The bulk of Taylor’s essay is an application of the previous twenty years of film theory to better understand the psychosocial basis of The Birth of a Nation. He refuses to separate the aesthetic from the political and points out that if Griffith gave a new birth to the aesthetic in cinema, it was necessarily as the apotheosis of Caucasian perfection. This aspect of the aesthetic, its celebration of the collective self, might not be in itself alarming or objectionable. It must be clear that most if not all cultures cling to a hierarchy of values that confer identity, and perhaps also distinction. Where this celebratory commitment becomes problematic is in the constitution of the aesthetic as a supra-ethnic cognitive grid, as a universal configuration. So canonized, it becomes a mythic construct, assuredly of great force and power, but of the sort that requires massive repressions along with its massive assertions. In this, the aesthetic operates simultaneously and harmoniously with a kindred ideology, that of western racial superiority.46

In addition to grappling with the politics of racial aesthetics, Taylor also digs into much of the Reconstruction history in the film. Thus his paper links numerous disparate threads that had often been treated separately, and is a major contribution to our understanding of whiteness in The Birth of a Nation and in film studies.47 These questions of history and filmic truth would circle each other in film studies for much of the next twenty years. In the late twentieth century, film studies was thought to have gone through a “historical turn” that moved the field away from the theoretical and philosophical pole it had circled since the 1960s and toward an emphasis on archival and primary-source research. The impact and implications of this turn were and are much debated. As Sumiko Higashi points out in a 2004 overview, it never really became the case that historical work dominated the field.48 But there clearly was enough of an emphasis on history in a wide range of works to de-center purely philosophical or theoretical writing on the nature of cinema. Influential books and essays by Linda Williams, Jane Gaines, Tom Gunning, Donald Crafton, and many others

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were certainly not abandoning theory in favor of a dry recounting of historical facts. The best work in film studies used history to justify and understand readings of films, and situated films as carefully as possible in their social, artistic, and philosophical contexts. But a lot of historical research remained to be done. The pioneering film histories of the 1960s and 1970s did much to provide an overview of cinema’s past, and the field should be grateful that so many early film scholars gathered remembrances from historical figures before they died. It also meant, though, that a lot of myths and legends were reprinted, and there was not a lot of archival research to correct those legends. In this sense, the historical turn in film studies was crucial, because there was so much that was simply not known. One collection of essays from the early 1980s seems to capture this transition well. Edited by John F. Fell, it is called Film Before Griffith, and the title itself reveals the correction that the book attempts to undertake, to make it clear that film had a rich history before Griffith and Hollywood came along. In his introduction, Fell laments that much film study “streaks past the ‘primitive’ period,” with “token nods” to early pioneers, before, “with a kind of relieved sigh, the authors get onto the real stuff, which is D. W. Griffith and the Hollywood business. The Promethean Griffith rises like a slumbering giant, striding the American continent and dispensing gifts like the functional closeup, the flashback, and offscreen space.”49 Fell points out that this mode of historiography is changing because of several developments, including “the academicization of film study itself. For the first time, people now writing ‘film history’ have undergone basic training in techniques of historical research.”50 He also points out that some of this research is taking place on the East Coast of the United States, where one could find many film archives as well as court and business records. He proposes his book as a modest attempt to start to fill in pieces of a puzzle in which only the vaguest sense of the picture is known. Within that collection, an essay by Barry Salt, “The Early Development of Film Form,” offers a summary of some of the techniques that Griffith did and did not invent, trying to correct the image of “Promethean Griffith” that Fell had outlined. Salt recounts in a great deal of detail some of the lighting and editing techniques that existed before Griffith, but for which he is often given credit.51 While for the most part the historical and philosophical strands of film studies have nurtured and illuminated each other, there are inherent tensions in the two approaches that come from their different roots. As we have seen, the philosophical strain of film studies comes out of

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a particular moment in the history of American academics, influenced by French theory, New Criticism, and 1970s feminism. Film history has more in common with the discipline of history itself and adopted nearly wholesale the standards and practices of academic history. This adoption occurred while the field of history was itself undergoing a tremendous disruption under the influence of some of the same theories and politics that film studies was absorbing. In the period after the 1960s, historians became more and more interested in “histories from below,” telling the stories of groups of people who had previously been ignored or dismissed: the poor, minority populations, women. This in turn led to methodological shifts. Since many of these people do not leave the same official written documentation of their lives, historians had to expand their notion of what counted as historical evidence. For film historians dealing with a popular entertainment medium, it was essential to build historical research out of a patchwork of incomplete financial and censorship records, reviews, fan magazines, and battered prints. While historical work in film studies mirrored shifts in historical methodology, it also retained academic history’s fundamentally modern and enlightenment vision of history—that one could construct a reasonable portrait of the past from the available evidence, if one were careful enough with that evidence. This modern perspective was at odds with the postmodern orientation of much film theory, in which traditional notions of fact, evidence, and knowledge were constantly being called into question. The postmodern position emphasized the “social construction” of much supposedly objective knowledge and the ways in which social power structures could be reflected in our views of nature and of history. The tension between these two approaches is well demonstrated by our understanding of The Birth of a Nation.

social constructionism in film and media study The social constructionist moment peaked in the academic humanities around the turn of the millennium, and then seemed to fade away without ever being properly resolved. Social constructionism had been building for many years, drawing on diverse sources like post-1968 French theory, the “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge, theorists of science such as Donna Haraway, and critics of historical research such as Hayden White. It was a moment rather than a movement, as it never really had a center or even an agreed-upon meaning. It ranged from a healthy skepticism about the truth claims of scien-

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tific and historical research to more radical claims that scientific and historical knowledge were in and of themselves impossible. Because it shifted from moment to moment, it was difficult to argue with, since many scholars adopted radical positions when it seemed useful and then retreated to safer ground when challenged. Social constructionism also functioned more as a set of background assumptions than as a published program, so there is not as much of a paper record as there otherwise might have been. If this moment had a defining event, though, it was the publication of the infamous Sokal hoax paper in 1996. Alan Sokal was a New York University physicist who submitted an article on quantum physics to the cultural studies journal Social Text. The essay had, in his words, no “logical sequence of thought; . . . only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.”52 While it might not be remarkable that a physicist could fool nonphysicists with scientific jargon and a serious tone, his essay was included in a special issue of Social Text dedicated to the “Science Wars.” The articles dealt with the political implications of contemporary scientific research, and thus the editors were implicitly claiming expertise by publishing the issue. A story about the hoax appeared on the front page of the New York Times on May 18, 1996,53 and led to widespread mockery of the editors involved. This did not exactly create an atmosphere for reasoned academic debate, and if anything, the tendency in the academic humanities was for heels to be dug in and Sokal’s criticisms to be dismissed. Social constructionism had a strong appeal to film scholars, especially since so many fiction films tell historical stories. In some ways, film is an ideal medium for telling history: it allows us to feel something of what people in the past might have felt in a way that is hard for nonfiction historical texts to replicate, and the immersive nature of the cinema experience can give us some sense of historical places. Film is terrible, however, at representing the details of history. The dialogue is almost always invented, as are private meetings and internal motivations. Even if some elements are drawn from well-documented historical records, film has no way of distinguishing, within the frame, which elements are based on evidence and which are inventions of the screenwriter or director. There is a long tradition of extratextual claims about historical films’ accuracy, where marketing campaigns emphasize the amount of historical research that went into a production, or that consultations were held with actual participants. As a general rule, Hollywood productions have overemphasized the historical accuracy

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of the mise-en-scène—costumes, props, and set design—to compensate for the fictional core of the narrative; The Birth of a Nation fits this pattern well, as it was one of the first films to deploy this sleight-ofhand so successfully. Academic historians have sometimes responded to historical fiction films by critiquing their inaccuracies and inventions (although that tendency seems to have faded in the past twenty years). This tendency was strong enough, though, to make ideas about the social construction of history appealing to film scholars, who could use it to set aside arguments about historical accuracy in films that were otherwise aesthetically or thematically interesting. It was not that film scholars wanted to defend a particular version of a history presented on film, but that social constructionism allowed them to sidestep the question. At the same time, the “historical turn” in film studies meant that more and more historical research was being written, and all of it followed the realist traditions of academic history. Scholars consulted archival sources and carefully pieced together the story they were trying to tell. They were tentative when evidence was scarce and built conclusions and arguments carefully. Thus the two sides of academic film studies were in direct tension with each other, even if this was little remarked upon at the time. Social constructionism had a lot of unresolved tensions, primarily because its tensions were in fact unresolvable. It was a position of convenience that was untenable in academic environments, where claims in all fields must be supported by the evidentiary standards of that field.54 The paradox seems to have faded away rather than being properly resolved, in part because the desire to save face after the Sokal hoax meant that humanities scholars could not bear to be seen backing down. It was also undone in part by the lies and manipulations of Bush-era politics, when even leading constructionists like Bruno Latour came to the realization that the attacks on science and reason he had so exuberantly led could easily be used by people with whom he disagreed.55 The Birth of a Nation was the ideal film with which to understand these contradictions, and it still seems a perfect case study in the complex interrelationship between film and history. Within the context of historiography, how do we account for The Birth of a Nation as a “historical” film? Since Griffith had no shortage of written and academic sources on which to draw, he could reasonably maintain that his film was the truth as he saw it. The widespread acceptance of the film suggests that, despite protests, it was in agreement with the commonly accepted view of Reconstruction in 1915, and Woodrow Wilson’s stature alone as both a source and rumored endorser

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of the film gave it establishment credentials. Griffith was able to claim that those who criticized his film were politically motivated and did not have the facts behind them. He at times criticized the actions of white politicians who condemned his film as being simply motivated by a desire to get the “colored vote.”56 Both the implied divisions between “white” and “black” history and the changing view of Birth’s history since 1915 seem, at first glance, like strong support for the idea that history is socially constructed. The relationship in 1915 between white power, Jim Crow laws, and a view of Reconstruction as a disastrous experiment is not coincidental. All of these elements are part of a societal structure based on racism, in which the past must play a role in supporting the present. History, in this case, has been written by the dominant group in society, and Griffith’s film played a key role in justifying that domination. At the time, African Americans and their supporters had an alternate view of history based on their experience, which was also a view that had significant political ramifications. The history of the exploitation and slavery that Black Americans had endured for centuries was as central to the nascent struggle for equality in 1915 as it was during the 1960s. Thus, the political struggle of the time period virtually defines the history of that time. These social tensions seem to offer strong support for social constructionism. That assessment runs into difficulty, however, for it precludes any resolution of the competing views of Reconstruction in 1915 or our own conflicting perceptions a hundred years later. If we recognize that both Griffith’s view of Reconstruction and our own present-day view are social constructions of their time of production, then how can we have any confidence in our version of events? Are both versions equally true? It is extremely difficult to endorse this type of equivalence, not least because of its political implications. Social constructionism here seems to slip into a type of relativism, in which one version of history is as good as another. We need to have a way to declare one version of history incorrect, to support counterclaims with facts and evidence. Few social constructionists really were relativists who would support  the notion that Griffith’s version of history is different but epistemologically equal. In other words, I am not arguing that social constructionists consciously supported a glib relativism in which racist revisions of history could not be condemned. Rather, the failure to consider such troublesome examples was a serious omission in theories of social constructionism that had been offered up to this point. Some theorists of social constructionism, like Donna Haraway, hinted at an

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awareness of this problem, and had difficulty reconciling social constructionism with the need to answer racists or, in her example, the Christian right.57 Nearly all accounts of Griffith’s film written in recent decades are predicated on the idea that his version of history is wrong, not simply that it is a version of history with which the writer disagrees. This condemnation or correction relies on a realist and modernist version of history that depends on traditional notions of facts and evidence. This simple argument for realism fails to account for the status of history in 1915, relying as it does on our own distance from the making of the film. Any epistemological theory must be able to account for the ways in which history has been told in the past as well as provide verdicts in the present. Realist historians would view Griffith’s version of history as “bad” history, one that includes obvious distortions. In one sense, this response would not be very different from academic historians’ reaction to many fiction films, pointing out all the places where the film has it wrong. But since some of the written histories of the time support Griffith, the issue is more complicated. How does realism account for the change of perspectives over time? It does so in two ways. The first is by assuming that change occurs because new evidence has accrued. This optimism is inherently modern in its belief in an arc of human progress from ignorance to knowledge. In the case of Griffith, though, the version of history in The Birth of a Nation does not seem attributable to lack of evidence. Even if Griffith himself had had only racist sources from which to draw, we would still have to account for those sources. The bias here is political and cultural, and cannot be conceived as a simple lack of evidence. So the second way that realism accounts for such histories is by writing those efforts off as bad history: in other words, history that does not conform to the evidentiary standards of realism. Thus, part of any realist historiography is the march toward greater realism. Realism presumes that historians (if not societies) learn from their mistakes. In this sense, realism itself is a closed system that accounts for its own success by rules it has devised. Since it holds the concept of logic to be central to the project, there is no way to logically destroy the system and little opportunity for logic outside of realism. It seems to be a paradox, since realism clearly is in some way self-justifying. What is crucial about this paradox is the link to logic. Social constructionism contains inconsistencies that are essentially illogical. Realism and logic are inherently linked, and though it easy to imagine the former as an epistemological “option,” it is harder to do so with the latter.

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Without descending too far into epistemological paradoxes, we might shift the discussion to the question of the political usefulness of realism and social constructionism. It is here that the debate has the most relevance for film and media scholars. While realism might seem overly optimistic from a postmodern perspective, it is what allows us to view Griffith’s history as something that can be corrected or revised on a basis other than a difference of political opinion. A social constructionist might hold that one can differ from Griffith on the basis of politics, and that those politics are enough without recourse to realism. This is essentially a pragmatic view, and one that can be satisfying in some cases. In real-world political battles, though, there is no foundation on which to base a perspective. We might feel confident in our view of Reconstruction or African American history while recognizing that our view is based on a political desire for equality, but how can we force that view on others who do not share that aim? From an epistemological perspective, we cannot have a history dependent on politics without allowing others the same luxury. The stakes in these debates are not academic. The Birth of a Nation represents an extreme example of the implications of a theory, but as we have seen, it is also a film that has been central to film studies for many years. Our evolving responses to the film have been social and political, but to consider those responses as a whole, to weigh and evaluate them, we are inevitably realists. Our impulse to claim that “this did not happen” is entirely a realist one. Both our contemporary position and our sense of that position’s relation to history are realist. Some histories might be “socially constructed,” but only realism allows us to properly account for those histories and divide them from attempts to figure out the actual past as best as we are able. I noted that one of the key figures in debates about social constructionism, Bruno Latour, eventually had second thoughts about his position in the Bush era, when Bush’s administration and the Republican Party began to fully realize that they did not have to abide by any external reality and could make political gains by constructing their own reality. An academic left that had spent much of the previous decade undermining the possibility of truth claims would soon end up on the defensive, with a diminished ability to fight these alternate political realities.

Chapter 6

race, reception, and remix in the new millennium

Given the limited reception history of most films made before 1920, it seems extraordinary that The Birth of a Nation would have any cultural relevance whatsoever more than one hundred years after its release. Indeed, it is hard to see its relevance as a positive—it would be much better if it were truly a museum piece. The legacy, as always, is complicated. While there have been dramatic changes in the stereotyped portrayals of African Americans on screen and, as we begin the third decade of the twenty-first century, a newfound awareness of the subtleties of on-screen racism, white men still dominate the Hollywood industry, with relatively few opportunities for creative control offered to people of color. It is essential to note as well that, regardless of race, Hollywood is still extraordinarily male dominated, with women directing around 4 percent of the top-grossing films between 2007 and 2018. This is not because of a lack of interest or skill. In the same period, about a quarter of the directors in competition at the Sundance Film Festival were women, and in 2018 and 2019 the percentage of female directors at the Toronto International Film Festival was around 35 percent, rising to 46 percent in 2020 because of a concerted effort on the part of festival programmers, who were aiming for gender parity.1 A 2020 study of 1300 popular films concluded that about 6 percent were directed by African Americans, about 4 percent by Hispanic or Latino directors, and another 3 percent by Asian or Asian American directors.2 At the same time, US politics in the twenty-first century has been marked by extreme contrasts and political divisions that are similar to those of the late 1960s. The first eight years of the century comprised the presidency of George W. Bush, who often delivered eloquent speeches about the legacy of civil rights but whose Office for Civil Rights slowed

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down enforcement of antidiscrimination laws.3 The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was of course a major milestone in the history of race in America, a victory that was deeply symbolic but not transformative in terms of the country’s deeply rooted racism. It was tempting in the Obama years to see his election as representing a new floor for racial progress, upon which further progress could be made.4 This turned out to be a false assessment. There were important signs of a brewing backlash during Obama’s administration. He did not talk about his own experiences of racism very often, and did so only in the gentlest of terms. Each time it came up, though, it aroused extreme anger on the part of the American right. In addition, Obama was subject throughout his entire term to degrading and deeply racist claims about his birth in Hawaii in 1961. The “birther” movement claimed that somehow Obama’s birth certificate had been forged and that he had actually been born in Kenya. As with all conspiracy theories, it was an idea immune to counterpoint or reason, and was often extended to suspicion about Obama’s degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, with birthers demanding transcripts and proof of grades. One of the leaders of this campaign was of course Donald Trump, whose own campaign for president in 2015 and 2016 offered numerous appeals to racists and nativists who were furious about the imagined slights of the Obama years. Obama’s election was in fact a marker of America’s shift to becoming a less white and more racially heterogeneous country, and the election of Trump was a direct reflection of the fear of that shift among many white Americans. Elected by a minority of votes, Trump felt compelled to invent illegal voters in order to claim that he in fact did have majority support. That so many Americans were willing to overlook his obvious deceits and lack of a single personal or professional qualification for the position provided ample evidence of Americans’ lack of progress on racism or sexism, as it was inconceivable that any woman or person of color could have been taken seriously, let alone elected, with similar abilities. Trump repeatedly appealed to racism and xenophobia in his campaign, and never in his first term of office made a single conciliatory gesture to any of the Americans who did not vote for him. To make matters worse, a 2013 Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder, struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had required election administrators in some states and counties to receive preclearance for changes in voting rules. The Supreme

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Court ruled that such restrictions, while justified in 1965, were now unconstitutional because “things have changed dramatically.”5 Since this ruling, dozens of restrictive new voting rules have been passed across states previously subject to preclearance.6 For example, in 2012 Texas had passed a voter ID law that did not pass preclearance because it would have had a disproportionate effect on minority voters. Within hours of the Shelby decision, the attorney general announced that the law would go into effect immediately.7 These changes are sadly ironic given the plot of The Birth of a Nation, in which Republicans are the villains for trying to allow African Americans to vote and hold public office. The reversal of positions on civil rights that took place after the 1960s is one of the most frustrating markers of the ingrained racism in the United States. At exactly the moment when the Democratic Party attempted to fix its century-old opposition to civil rights, the Republican Party began to transform into a party of white grievance dedicated to restricting the accessibility of the franchise. It had taken one hundred years to convince the party of segregation to abandon its position, only to see the Republicans under Richard Nixon appeal to segregationists almost immediately. This switch in party positions on voting, and a broader switch on questions of civil rights for African Americans, is one of the most commonly ignored historical facts on the American right. In 2020, The Birth of a Nation is still mentioned in American newspapers nearly every day. A significant portion of these remarks are from conservatives and Trump supporters pointing out, in political editorials and articles, that it was a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who showed The Birth of a Nation in the White House in 1915. This is offered as proof that it is really the modern Democrats who are the racist party, and not the Trump Republicans. This deeply ignorant position has been repeated in American newspapers dozens of times over the past several years. It was also the basis for a ridiculous “documentary” by the right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, who released a film called Death of a Nation in 2018 that argued Democrats had attacked Donald Trump in the same way they had attacked Abraham Lincoln, and that liberals were actually Nazis. The film, which featured a promotional poster with a melded image of Trump and Lincoln, seems to have earned about $6 million at the box office, despite reviews that pointed out, correctly, that D’Souza “is no longer preaching to the choir; he’s preaching to the mentally unsound.”8 The rise of Donald Trump and his acceptance by the mainstream

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of the Republican Party has polarized American politics more than at any point in recent history. His flagrant lies and complete disregard for anyone who is not part of his political base make it difficult for Americans to even have a conversation about politics, let alone come to any kind of agreement. This is not to suggest any kind of empirical or moral equivalence between the two sides in this argument. To see Trump as a good and honest president is a complete moral and intellectual failure. If there are failures on the left, and there are, key among them has been an overreliance on symbolic victories fought on the terrain of entertainment and public life at the expense of a focus on political rights and issues that affect the lived experience of Americans. The near erasure of verbally expressed explicit racism from public life has allowed us to be complacent about the ways in which it can be manifested in areas like voting law. In fact, the low tolerance for racist discussions in public life has provided cover for infringements of voting rights since it is possible for such laws to be proposed and debated for months without anyone speaking their racist intentions aloud. Despite this plus ça change phenomenon of American politics, in which the same battles must be endlessly refought, scholarly understandings of race, racism, and cinema have not been similarly encumbered. The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen a significant shift in the way that we understand representations of Black people and other people of color in American cinema. There has been a recognition that representation on screen, while important, only goes so far. Over the past twenty years, the range of images of African American people in American media has expanded considerably, so that it is now commonplace to see Black families represented as simply American families, whereas not that long ago, almost all “generic” families in advertising were white. This has generally not been matched by seismic changes in the real world, which are much more difficult to bring into being. It is one thing to feature a middle-aged Black couple in an advertisement for retirement planning, something that would not have happened two decades ago, but another thing altogether to close the wealth gap between Black families and white ones. In film and television production, there are fewer Black actors in stereotypical roles and a greater fluidity in the roles that are available to some successful Black actors, but we obviously have much further to go. As much as these debates play out in public forums between critics and fans, there is a more significant shift in academic critical awareness of how limited our understanding of Black films and characters

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and audiences has been. Several critical books have attempted to shift our focus in profound ways by moving beyond the relatively simple binary of “positive or negative” images of Black people. Building on the pioneering work of James Snead (which I considered in chapter 5) and others, a number of scholars have pointed out the ways in which our century-long approach to understanding race and cinema has constrained our understanding of both ideas. In chapter 1 I referenced Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (2005) for its careful attention to the ways in which images of Blackness circulated in film and other media at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on essays by Snead and others, Stewart points out, “A closer look at the distinctive and diverse qualities of Black representation in preclassical cinema can complicate the ‘stereotypes’ approach in Black film criticism in a number of ways. Preclassical cinema features numerous Black representations that seem to problematize racial hierarchies.”9 This is not to claim that these images were not stereotypical or harmful, as Stewart makes clear. What she is interested in is the complexities that get lost in our justifiable attention to the harm these images caused. She writes, “The prevalence of white supremacist ideals in early cinema’s narrational and representational strategies leads me to argue that the Black images they contain are, in fact, racist because they reinforce and reproduce a social formation in which nonwhites are systematically disempowered. What we must consider, then, are the many layers and historical contexts of the racial discourses in play, as well as the other terms of the dialogue in which these films and images participate.”10 Given that Stewart’s book is dedicated to the nuances and contradictions of these images, it is impossible to summarize the project without doing it a disservice. It is best perhaps to give a sense of the complicated context in which she reads images of Blackness in early film: Early Black film images should be read as being polyphonic, “speaking of” and “speaking to” constructions of Blackness produced by both whites and African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. As whites produced and consumed images of Black subservience, ignorance, and inferiority, Black people responded by refuting limiting stereotypes and by constructing new images for themselves and their white observers. In addition, the Black photographic images that constitute these films are influenced by other kinds of images, both visual (e.g., postcards, illustrations, artifacts, live performance) and non-visual (e.g., literature, journalism, and other print media; politi-

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cal, legal, religious, and scientific discourses). In the various media and discourses in which “Black images” circulated during this period, Blackness is structured by notions of the progress of the Race, on the one hand, and the stasis, or even regression, of Black people, on the other. These competing discourses . . . produced numerous representational challenges and contradictions when long-standing and contested Black images were adapted and recontextualized by the cinema, revealing the complex and political/politicized nature of the very notion of the “Black image.”11

While Stewart is complicating the “Black image,” others are doing the same thing for Black film. A second critical milestone for me has been Michael Gillespie’s Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, published in 2016. As the title suggests, Gillespie is interested in interrogating the fundamental definitions of Black film and freeing works, at least in part, from the burdens of representing a group of people. He is trying to examine “the way that black film, and black art more broadly, navigates the idea of race as constitutive, cultural fiction, yet this art is nevertheless often determined exclusively by the social category of race or veracity claims about black existential life in very debilitating ways.”12 He continues, This book is about black film, or more precisely, the idea of black film. I argue that, as art and discourse, black film operates as a visual negotiation, if not tension, between film as art and race as a constitutive, cultural fiction. I deliberately engender a shift to distinguish between the rendering of race in the arts from the social categories of race and thus forestall the collapsing of the distance between referent and representation. This shift disputes the fidelity considerations of black film: the presumption that the primary function of this brand of American cinema entails an extradiegetic responsibility or capacity to embody the black lifeworld or provide answers in the sense of social problem solving. Furthermore the idea of black film cannot be tantamount to an ethics of positive and negative representation that insists on black film in the terms of cultural policy, immanent category, genre, or mimetic corroboration of the black experience. Black film must be understood as art, not prescription.13

There is a lot to unpack here. Like Stewart, Gillespie obviously is not arguing that representation is not important, nor that the sociopolitical implications of that representation can be set aside. He is clear that

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“this book does not insist on an aesthete’s vision of a pure cinema, an art unsoiled by incidental or extraneous concerns for the cultural, social, and political. I am not arguing for a deracialized or postracial notion of black film.”14 Instead, he is calling attention to the ways in which commercial Black filmmakers are burdened with representing a community. White people get to be just filmmakers, but Black filmmakers, especially those whose work deals with Black characters and stories, are always Black filmmakers, and their films are read not simply in terms of whether they represent Black people well, but also whether they represent them accurately. The burden of representation is one of verisimilitude as well as one of uplift. This burden fundamentally limits what Black filmmakers can do with cinema and how Black films are read. I have been arguing throughout that our ideas about what film is and what it can be are intrinsically linked to race and racism, and the fact that Gillespie’s argument seems like a necessary corrective is just one more way in which two concepts—race and film—have become inexorably entwined. As I have shown, from 1915 on, Griffith and his defenders linked racism and art, so that those who protested his racism could be portrayed as enemies of art itself. Film needed to be elevated to the status of art because that was one way to protect it from claims that it was only appealing to our baser nature. Early responders to Griffith, including Oscar Micheaux, demonstrated the ways in which film could be both artistic and antiracist, but Hollywood mostly ignored that lesson and associated whiteness with beauty and higher ideals for most of the next century. Black filmmakers have done much to try to undo those racist ideals, but they have not been able to escape the discussion itself. Because filmmaking has been so embedded with racism, there is no way to step outside it. You can either make racism worse or try to counter it, but in either case you are constrained by a series of expectations, a yes-or-no binary that limits artistic expression. White filmmakers can sometimes have whole careers in which they act as though they are outside of this binary and are often treated by critics and fans as though they actually are. Thus the broader film culture is always intimately connected to the ways in which the burden of representation falls disproportionately onto those who have already been harmed by it. There are white filmmakers for whom the question of race and representation never comes up, and who spend their careers exploring other facets of the human experience. But Black filmmakers never have this luxury, because even if they try

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to set aside their own experiences of racism and center their films on other questions, the burdens of representation never go away, and their work will be interpreted by scholars, critics, and fans through the lens of representation. This can weigh on them even when those viewers, Black or not, have the absolute best of intentions and are motivated only by a noble desire to see Black people succeed and be treated fairly. The challenges of racism in the current era are still so severe that they take priority over other kinds of artistic questions. In this way, the freedom to make movies that explore ideas other than race and racism becomes another kind of white privilege and, crucially, the full potential of film art is reserved only for white filmmakers. It is no surprise, then, that artistic reinterpretations of The Birth of a Nation would continue to be unfortunately relevant in this political context, where we are supposed to be postracial, but at the same time the disenfranchisement of African American voters continues a struggle begun during Reconstruction. Those reinterpretations have taken a variety of forms, with the earliest of them assuming a form not available for much of the twentieth century: the remix. Remix culture is itself a relatively recent phenomenon that has taken on new life in the past twenty years with the intertwining of three threads that developed mostly in parallel for the previous several decades. The first thread was of course a musical one, with remix developing as part of hip-hop culture performed by DJs who chose the best breaks or samples from vinyl recordings. The relative availability of sampling machines and other technology beginning in the 1980s meant that remix tools were more widely available, and there was a brief explosion of musical sampling in rap music before restrictive readings of copyright law began to make it more difficult and expensive to use previously existing songs. This had the effect of pushing sampling and some forms of remix out of the commercial realm and into a legal gray area where boundaries of legality were not always clear. Even as remix became part of musical culture, it still required relatively specialized tools, as the home computers of the era did not handle musical files very well. The wide adoption of the mp3 format in the late 1990s meant that fans and consumers now had access to musical remix tools at home, and this kicked off an era of mashups, where sometimes discordant tracks were mixed together for novelty effect or critical commentary. Musical recording and remixing tools are now accessible to anyone who has a laptop, even as the legality of remix is complicated. On one hand,

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recording artists have no legal right to use samples of previously released music without permission. On the other hand, some artists have built careers doing exactly that with few repercussions or lawsuits.15 The second thread was the development of fan subcultures beginning in the 1960s. Francesca Coppa has charted the ways in which fan fiction and other fan-created objects soon led to video remixes with the availability of VCRs in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories and videos, primarily underground and with limited distribution, survived for years before the Internet made it dramatically easier to share them. Coppa points out that this culture was female driven for most of its existence, and even now a lot of the most interesting work involves gender-based critiques and reworkings of popular culture.16 It is from this thread that remix culture gets much of its political focus. The appearance of YouTube in 2005 has given many of these videos a much wider audience, so much so that the line between official versions of objects and remix versions is likely to break down over time. The last thread is the much-longer history of avant-garde and political art that dates from at least the Dadaists of the early twentieth century, in which objects and images are removed from their context and refigured or reformed with the aim of either critiquing their original meaning or redirecting that meaning. This thread has been part of film culture since at least the 1950s. The work of Bruce Connor in particular is well known in film circles for challenging the notion of what constitutes a film or filmmaking, and for using preexisting images in ways that convey critique or commentary. It is from all of these threads that DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation project is woven. Spooky (his real name is Paul Miller) has released about a dozen albums’ worth of music, and is deeply versed in critical theory, postmodernism, and the history of art. In addition to making music, he has written extensively for art publications and teaches courses for the European Graduate School. The Rebirth of a Nation was a live remix performance by Miller that toured museums and performance spaces around the world beginning in 2004 and was still touring intermittently fifteen years later. The Birth of a Nation’s frames were combined with music, contemporary media images, and voice-over to critique its racism and to underscore the continuities between the film’s views and contemporary politics. The project was later released on DVD, but that version is fundamentally a different experience from the original live show. Where the original show involved multiple images being contrasted with each other, the DVD version has only a single image at a

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time. As such, it can feel more like a rescored version of the film than a true remix. Miller has sometimes toured with this later simplified version, making fewer in-person adjustments or choices as the film plays. The audience for this project consisted of those interested in art or film or DJ culture who most likely had very little experience with the film, so for many people it would have functioned as an introduction to The Birth of a Nation and the images it contains. This is crucial for any assessment of the performance, because the makeup of the audience largely determines what the performance is able to accomplish. Part of the audience is watching relatively familiar images be remixed and reinvented. The effect of the work depends on the novelty and strangeness of these images in new contexts, in being encouraged to reimagine their meanings. The performance functions much like an essay on a film, taking it apart and putting it back together, calling attention to things that are hidden or downplayed in the original. There are of course also those who have never seen the film before, and even those have never seen a silent film. It is easy for film scholars and cinephiles to forget how common this viewing position is. Many film scholars and cinephiles themselves have never seen more than a handful of silent films, and it is likely that those might have disproportionately been Chaplin and Keaton comedies. For this part of the audience, perhaps the majority, the images in Miller’s performance are read not necessarily as “the scene where Gus chases Flora,” with its associated connotations of racialized aggression and feminine “purity,” but simply as “an actor in blackface in a silent film,” or even less specifically as “a villain in an old movie.” Miller shows enough of these scenes for first-time viewers to get at least part of the context, but it is still a very different viewing experience. All art functions this way, of course; a reading of a painting or play can differ significantly as a function of the viewer’s previous knowledge. But this is especially true for remix, because remix by definition refers to an earlier object. This is not to say that one cannot read a remix “correctly” without previous knowledge. Those with deep knowledge of popular music might be able to recognize the source of a sample in a modern hip-hop track, but that knowledge is not a requirement to dance to it. This divergence is important only in order to acknowledge what, in this case, might be dramatically different readings of the same experience, a crucial distinction given the aims of the project. In an interview with Miller in 2004, as the project was getting under way, he referred to it as a “digital exorcism” in which he was trying to

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confront the images and “make them absurd.”17 This is a telling point, because it is in some ways an easier reach for audiences less accustomed to silent film, for whom images of filmic performance from 1915 are very nearly absurd already. The project was situated in the politics of the moment of its creation. Miller said that he “wanted to think about race issues after the American election of 2000,” a conversation that was more important after the scandals of the Abu Ghraib prison. He was interested in “a deep structural analysis about how American culture is structured around a series of clichés structured around race. What roles can we play? Abu Ghraib is about playing roles.” By this he clearly did not mean that Abu Ghraib was “play,” or not real, but that American soldiers had cast their Iraqi prisoners into a series of stereotypical Arab roles in which they could be tormented as prisoners rather than seen as human. There was a direct connection between the soldiers who were able to see themselves as heroic even as they tortured others and the world of the film in which white Americans are racist in the name of brotherhood. The Birth of a Nation was in some ways an ideal case for Miller’s remix, and this had as much to do with the film’s legacy as its internal construction. The legacy mattered because the status of The Birth of a Nation in film history means that it brings a certain kind of historical prestige to the project. DJ remix projects are rarely featured in museums or as part of the academic programming of universities, but this one has now played in prestigious institutions all over the world. As we have seen, The Birth of a Nation has been part of museum film programming for as long as such programming has existed, at least in the United States. For remix, a new art form, to be taken seriously, it needs to tackle something serious, and The Birth of a Nation is about as serious a film as we can get. In artistic terms, Miller’s project could succeed because the images in The Birth of a Nation are so egregious that they work out of context. The racism in many later films is, by comparison, more subtle, but nearly every shot of an African American or mixed-race person in the film is easily readable as racist. Griffith of course saw his film as presenting a balanced portrait of African Americans, but his idea of “good” portrayals were the loyal servants, Mammy and Jake, both played, like all other primary black characters, by white actors in blackface. It sometimes takes modern viewers some time to recognize the blackface in this film, as they are not expecting it. As the images pile up, though, it becomes

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clearer what they are, and their connections to America’s history of racism become disturbing. Indeed, blackface performance has become synonymous with egregious racism in the modern day. The fact that Miller’s performance separates many of these images from their narrative context is helpful in calling attention to them. Short scenes are repeated, and racist images can be dwelled upon in a way that they might not be within the forward motion of the narrative. This readability for modern audiences makes the film ideal for Miller’s project, but in his case it also raises questions about the usefulness of remix. What can you learn about racism watching this remix version that you cannot learn watching The Birth of a Nation? Few modern viewers of the film are unable to see the stereotypes in it for anything other than what they are. The handful of people who might be unable or unwilling to see the film as racist are also unlikely to be the audience for a DJ Spooky remix version shown at their local contemporary art museum. Where political remix excels is in cutting films or other objects so that relationships and tendencies that were previously hidden can be revealed. But The Birth of a Nation does not have much to hide. Its own lack of subtlety is what undermines it as a remix object. It may be that a remixed version denies Griffith much of his narrative power, and thus allows additional space for critique of his imagery, although there is no guarantee that a free-floating signifier will do less damage than one bound to a narrative. As we are all aware by now, even the most didactic films can be read against the grain by viewers, as The Birth of a Nation is now by almost everyone, and there is no way to ensure a particular reading from an audience. So while there is no guarantee that Miller’s audience will read the film in the way he intended, it is also a relatively low-risk activity, as he is often, in some sense, preaching to the choir. It is difficult to assess what the effects of the performance might be on the many people who have seen it outside of the United States, and who come to see it with very different histories and assumptions. In the 2004 interview, Miller said the performance involved “thinking about how people move between media like moving between different languages,” a movement that represented a process of “creolization.” Thus we might understand the work as an act of translation and think about what is gained or lost along the way. The filmmaker Christopher Harris, too, repurposed footage from The Birth of a Nation for his 2004 avant-garde work Reckless Eyeballing, named for a phrase once used to accuse Black men of looking at white

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women. Although Harris’s work reads in part like a contemporary remix, it also harks back to a longer tradition of avant-garde repurposing of filmic images in ways that recall Bruce Connor, Martin Arnold, and others. Harris’s work is hand-processed and optically printed and draws from multiple prints of The Birth of a Nation, providing echoes of Birth’s own long history of revision. In this fourteen-minute work, he primarily uses images from the scene where Gus chases Flora Cameron, although the images are of Gus alone, wandering in the woods—the emphasis is on his gaze and the threat it implies. These shots are juxtaposed with images of Pam Grier as Foxy Brown and Angela Davis, calling attention to the complexities of who gets to look and how we perceive those looks. The heavy processing of the images, which includes negative versions of the shots, undermines the dichotomy of Black and white gazes, while simultaneously calling attention to those dichotomies. The repetition of images and words also both drains the images of their meaning and forces the viewer to meditate on those meanings in profound ways. This film and Harris’s other work have been widely shown both in American galleries and museums and around the world. There was also a lesser-known Birth of a Nation remix project from the same year. In 2004, Ellen Strain and Gregory VanHoosier-Carey released an educational CD-ROM called Griffith in Context: A Multimedia Exploration of The Birth of a Nation, which was published by Norton. Part of the content on the CD-ROM is clips of the film with commentary by a number of prominent scholars, but one of the more innovative sections of the disc allows users to re-edit sections of the film. There are four exercises in all, and they encourage students to consider the effects of editing, music, and intertitles on the meaning of the film. The first offers footage of enslaved people working in the fields, which can be contrasted with the masters enjoying themselves inside. Newly created intertitles allow the editor to create a very different version of the film, with intertitles such as “In the South, slaves spent their days picking cotton for their wealthy masters.” This section also offers meta-titles about the production such as “The black actors found this a strange way to earn a day’s pay.” While this might seem like a fairly crude revision of the film, it potentially creates an intriguing and significant lesson about the intrinsic meanings of words and images for students. Just how much can the racist messages in The Birth of a Nation be undermined by rewriting titles? To what extent were those messages ingrained in the images by the director, so that no amount of context can erase them?

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contemporary cinematic responses to the birth of a nation Despite the one-hundred-year legacy of critiques of The Birth of Nation, relatively few of the direct challenges have been in the form of another film, at least since the work of Oscar Micheaux. Spike Lee made one of his early films at NYU, The Answer, in response to The Birth of a Nation, and so it is fitting that in the twenty-first century he was one of the filmmakers doing it again. Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation from 2016 both were critically lauded art films, and BlacKkKlansman has also been one of Lee’s more commercially successful projects, grossing about $91 million worldwide through March 2019.18 The reception of Parker’s The Birth of Nation has been much more complicated, but both films use Griffith’s techniques to try to undermine him. We might say that they are both trying, to borrow the famous phrase from Audre Lorde, to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Nate Parker’s 2016 film is a more complicated response to Griffith’s racist epic than Lee’s, and not only because of the controversies of its reception. Released at Sundance in 2016 in the middle of the #oscarssowhite campaign, which critiqued the lack of diversity in the Academy Award nominees, it seemed like an answer for the industry’s sins. Seeing significant commercial potential, Fox Searchlight quickly paid $17.5 million for the rights, a Sundance record at the time. The film’s path toward the next year’s Oscars seemed relatively assured, but this was derailed by the rediscovery that Parker, along with his screenwriter and longtime collaborator Jean Celestin, had been charged with sexual assault in 1999. Parker had been acquitted and Celestin’s conviction had been vacated on appeal, while the woman had committed suicide in 2012. In a period of rapidly shifting sensitivity to both racism and violence against women, the film found itself caught between these two movements. The film’s reception became loaded and complicated, especially since much of the plot, like Griffith’s original, is motivated by fear of rape and responses to rape. When the film appeared at the London Film Festival in the fall of 2016, Parker went onstage only to wave and retreat, unable to risk taking questions at a public event. The controversy was enough to make the film, according to A. O. Scott in the New York Times, “simultaneously the must-see and the won’t-see movie of the year.”19 The choice of the title The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing one,

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given that Parker’s film is not a remake of Griffith’s, nor does it deal with the same events. His film is set thirty or forty years before the Civil War and is the story of the unsuccessful slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. In interviews, Parker claimed that he wanted to reclaim the title, to take some of its power, pointing out that now when someone googles The Birth of a Nation, they end up reading about Nat Turner and not just Griffith.20 The film’s promotional materials also included a modified poster from Griffith’s film with “Nat Turner Lives” spray-painted across it, to emphasize the rewriting of cinematic history. More substantially, the title contains an argument, that the slave rebellions were in some ways the birth of a particular kind of nation, and the film itself makes this argument clear in its final scene, when a shot of a young boy watching Nat Turner being executed morphs into a shot of that same boy, now a man, leading a charge of Union soldiers into battle thirty years later. The transition mirrors the ending in Griffith’s film, in which numerous “future” events are pasted onto the climax, to show the repercussions of the film’s story. This is not the only filmic connection between the two versions of The Birth of a Nation. They mirror each other in myriad ways, both general and specific. The pairings begin in the first scene. Griffith’s film opens with a title card that reads, “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” and a scene of a slave market. In this telling, the enslavement of Africans is a problem only insofar as it creates disunion for the white people; the enslaved people matter not at all in themselves. This is the fundamental structure of Griffith’s film, in which white people will eventually overcome this disunion and reunite “in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” Parker’s film also pointedly starts with references to Africa, but with an African religious ceremony being performed by enslaved people in the forest. The language is Twi, spoken in Ghana, where Nat Turner’s parents had come from, and it is a ceremony to celebrate Nat as a particularly blessed child, one marked by the gods. It is a way to emphasize the specificity of the African slave experience, that these are people with a distinct culture who survived the horrors of the middle passage. In this scene, Africans are embodied humans with their own concerns, not merely the source of disunion for whites. This ceremony takes place completely away from white eyes, which would recognize neither its value nor its meaning (as a film audience, we are given subtitles to allow us an observer’s pass to this world). So while Griffith’s film begins from the presumption that stories begin with Africans in America,

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Figure 6.1. The Birth of a Nation (2016): Nat Turner as a blessed child.

Parker’s emphatically makes clear that the stories begin in Africa, and given his choice of title, this creates a reimagining of the American story. In Parker’s view, the roots of America are in Africa and not just in Western Europe, and the American nation comes from African roots as much as European ones. We are used to thinking of the influence of slave culture as something that comes later, in the way that immigrant cultures shaped American society. Thinking of it as a root rather than a branch is a profound shift, and a direct rebuttal to Griffith, who argues that the nation is reborn when it fully embraces white supremacy. The ending of the film makes a similar reference to Griffith, when a dying Nat Turner rolls his eyes to the heavens and sees the face of an angel. This is a move Griffith uses in The Birth of a Nation at the death of Wade Cameron on the battlefield. It has precisely the same effect in both cases, to argue that these protagonists are divinely inspired. Parker borrows Griffith’s techniques, but reverses the meaning. It is a different kind of rebuke than his use of the slave scene, less subtle and more direct. This scene is followed by the sequence mentioned earlier, in which a young boy watching the hanging, a boy who had fought with Turner and then betrayed him, watches with a tear rolling down his cheek and then morphs into a soldier at the front of an African American Union brigade rushing toward the camera, as we have seen Nat and his followers do earlier in the film. This shot makes a pair with Griffith’s “The Next Election” sequence, in which we are supposed to cheer hooded Klansmen intimidating Black voters into staying away from the polls. In both cases, we are supposed to feel elation that the history we would have wanted has already come to pass.

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Figures 6.2 and 6.3. The Birth of a Nation (2016): A young boy watching Nat’s execution morphs into a young soldier at the head of a Union brigade.

None of this is anything we might call subtle; to point out the similarities between Parker’s film and Griffith’s is to point out that both are melodramas, more interested in swelling sentiment than in subtle realities. Parker’s film is by far the more nuanced of the two, but many of the reviews that noted its flaws seemed to imply that it lacked the nuance and craft of 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013). Some reviews compared it to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), since both are bloody revenge stories, but others made the more apt comparison to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995): both are gory tales of powerless warriors avenging assaults on their wives, filled with euphoric violence and tragic outcomes. Parker apparently received advice from Gibson, and Braveheart and The Birth of a Nation had the same editor, Steven Rosenblum, who also drew on his experience cutting Glory, Ed Zwick’s 1989 film about the first Black unit of Union soldiers in the Civil War.21

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The fact that Parker’s film uses so many of the tropes of Hollywood melodrama can perhaps explain why the reviews were so mixed. Many critics cited the importance of the topic, but even the positive reviews tended to refer to the film as flawed or weak at points,22 some pointing to the fact that even the violence inflicted on women is primarily framed in terms of Nat’s reactions.23 The story had also been transformed and censored to ensure our sympathies. Turner’s rebels killed a large number of women and children, including babies, but this is never seen on screen.24 One of the few murders of a white person we see in detail is the man who has previously been shown abusing enslaved people and who is coded as white trash. His murder and beheading are supposed to feel righteous and satisfactory, much as the murder of Gus was intended to feel in Griffith’s original. This is a very different choice than the one made by Charles Burnett in his 2003 docudrama Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, which does much less to sanitize the violence of Turner’s revenge. In this case, the heightened emotions and righteous anger that fuel Griffith’s film are inverted by Parker. He is obviously not the only maker of historical fiction films to choose emotional impact over historical truth, but the choice has a particular resonance in this case because of the subject matter. Parker is indeed trying to undo Griffith with Griffith. I am mindful here of Vivian Sobchack’s useful description of the difference between academic and filmic histories. In “Surge and Splendor: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Sobchack writes, “Whereas the reticent and opaque work of academic histories is the objectification and projection of ourselves-now as others-then, the expansive and transparent work of Hollywood’s epic histories seems to be the subjectification and projection of ourselves-now as we-then.”25 If Hollywood histories make us feel like a “we-then,” they do this so that we can experience the thrills of being historical actors without the actual pain of historical loss or death. Films obviously vary in how deeply they immerse us in “we-then,” both by their construction and by what we bring to the film ourselves in terms of history and identity. The intricacies of this connection between past events and present viewers have been central to the filmmaking of Spike Lee for his entire career. Lee has been interested in speaking back to the racist history of Hollywood filmmaking since he was a student at New York University in the 1980s. His first film at NYU, The Answer, was “a twenty-minute, black-and-white film about a young African-American screenwriter who’s hired to direct a big, multimillion-dollar Hollywood remake of

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The Birth of a Nation.”26 The filmmaker, Miles, signs a Faustian deal with a producer dressed in Klan robes. In numerous interviews, Lee has recounted that the faculty took this as an attack on the father of cinema and tried to kick him out of the program. The only thing that kept him in was that he had already been awarded a teaching assistantship for the next year to work in the equipment room.27 Lee is currently the artistic director of that same program and a tenured professor at NYU, a position he has more than earned over the past thirty-five years with a multifaceted and innovative body of films. While he has returned to his interest in The Birth of a Nation at least twice since graduate school in ways that are “answers” to Griffith, the bulk of his work is much more sophisticated than the films that Griffith made. Lee’s masterpiece, Do the Right Thing (1989), has been held up as relevant to our current situation in the 2020s, but this is an indictment of American society and thirty years of limited progress on racism rather than praise for Lee. There are many reasons to praise Do the Right Thing, but the most important for our present purposes is that he refuses to simply invert the stereotypes that Griffith and so many Hollywood directors created. Every character in Do the Right Thing is multifaceted and complex. Every character has strengths and flaws, even the ones who are the ostensible villains of the piece. Lee’s accomplishment is that the film is a compelling tirade against institutional and economic racism without ever resorting to melodrama. It advocates for justice without reducing its protagonists to a stereotype of innocence or childishness. In the middle of his career, Lee returned to a story much like the one in The Answer. In Bamboozled (2000), a frustrated African American television producer named Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) pitches a racist television show to his network, in protest of the ways in which his attempts to diversify representations have been thwarted. Lee spends much of the first act of his film setting up the contradictions of assimilation and resistance for Black people who work in the film and television industry. At the same time, this film is a satire and so moves back and forth between earnest discussions and a more pointed skewering of racist personalities Lee has no doubt met in his time in the industry. Delacroix has a nice life working in television and obviously believes he can do some good to change representations, even though he eventually makes them much worse. His boss, Thomas Dunwitty, played by Michael Rappaport, is a buffoon who uses the n-word in front of Delacroix and, when he is told to stop, says that he

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has a Black wife and doesn’t “give a goddamn what that prick Spike Lee says.” While Dunwitty is an idiot with the name to prove it, his criticism of Delacroix’s pitches for new shows about characters who are like Delacroix—educated African Americans making inroads into white domains—has an element of validity. Most of the pitches he discards are similar to films and television shows from as far back as the 1960s, such as Julia or To Sir with Love. As with Do the Right Thing, even as Lee pulls no punches with white supremacy in America, he fills his film with complicated and flawed characters, refusing easy answers or anything resembling simplicity. At the end, as Delacroix dies, there is a montage of blackface images from Hollywood history, including several from The Birth of a Nation, which is the only film whose title is presented on screen. The references to Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in BlacKkKlansman (2018) are fairly explicit. The film appears three times in BlacKkKlansman: during the opening rant by Alec Baldwin, as a poster on the wall of the local Klan office, and in a scene near the climax when the Klan gather to watch the film. Baldwin’s character is peripheral to  the  primary action of the movie, and functions merely to set the tone for what is to come. The film opens with a scene from Gone with the Wind in which a wide shot of injured Confederate soldiers pulls back to reveal a tattered Confederate flag that dominates the screen. Lee cuts to Baldwin’s character, “Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard,” delivering a filmed rant on the evils of integration, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. Railing against integration and the “Jewish-controlled puppets on the Supreme Court,” Beauregard is the epitome of the angry white 1960s segregationist, repeatedly clearing his throat and forgetting which piece of racist rhetoric he is supposed to be spouting. He delivers much of his speech in front of a screen where 16mm images are projected, so for most of the rant he has scenes from The Birth of a Nation projected onto his face. There are numerous careful syncs between Beauregard’s rhetoric and Griffith’s images. As Beauregard repeats “we had a great way of life,” we see the celebratory parade of the Klan from the end of the film. When he talks about protecting “our holy white Protestant values” from the “rapists, murderers, craving the virgin pure flesh of white women,” we see Gus chasing Flora off a cliff, with the sound of a scream overlaid as Flora falls. There are also numerous shots from one of the most bizarre scenes in The Birth of a Nation, the ceremony in which the gathered Klansmen dip a flag and a burning cross into what is apparently Flora Cameron’s blood. Ben Cameron holds up the cross and

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Figure 6.4. BlacKkKlansman (2018): Alec Baldwin as Kennebrew Beauregard, with The Birth of a Nation (1915) projected on his face.

announces that he will “quench its flames in the sweetest blood that ever stained the sands of time!” The Klan’s ritual of purity is directly connected by Lee to Beauregard’s rhetoric about rapists and virginity. Later in the film, Lee makes sure we hear plenty of racist vitriol coming from the white women who are the partners of the Klansmen, in order to sever this association of white femininity and moral purity. He also has Beauregard anachronistically refer to Black people as “superpredators,” a phrase that dates from the crime debates of the 1990s,28 to remind us of the ways in which the rhetoric of racism returns to the same tropes of threat again and again. For Lee, whose early career was defined by his opposition to being taught that The Birth of a Nation was a masterpiece from which he was to learn, Griffith’s film still has the power to define how Black Americans are seen, even if only through its influence on the representations of African Americans that followed in its wake. He makes his argument about the film explicit in BlacKkKlansman by having a civil rights leader, played by Harry Belafonte, connect a 1916 lynching to the release of the film. Belafonte’s character is presented as a witness to the killing of Jesse Washington, which actually did take place in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916. Belafonte recounts the story in appropriately horrific detail, and then tells the student activists he is speaking to that one of the reasons for the attack was “a movie, called The Birth

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of a Nation, that had come out the year before, and it was so powerful that it gave the Ku Klux Klan a rebirth.” Lee then cuts to a group of newly initiated Klansmen and their wives happily watching the film, cheering on the Klan, and mocking the African American characters. Here the scene functions as a sort of film history lesson as the shots of Belafonte, now filmed face-on as though he were addressing the audience, are intercut with scenes from The Birth of a Nation. The Klan group end up on their feet chanting “white power” and saluting the screen. Lee cuts to Belafonte telling the students that they are there today to celebrate Black power. It is important that this entire scene is presented in cross-cut, the technique that Griffith made famous and the one that structures the climax of The Birth of a Nation. Like Parker, Lee is critiquing Griffith with his own tools. In Ron Stallworth’s memoir upon which the film is based, he mentions that a screening of The Birth of a Nation did in fact take place after the Klan initiation ceremony, but offers no details.29 For all the complexity of its reception in the present day, The Birth of a Nation is still capable of functioning as a straight piece of white supremacist propaganda if the audience is receptive to that message. When reading about the film on websites for popular cinema or on pages selling artifacts connected to the film, a scattering of the comments are still something about how The Birth of a Nation is the film to watch if you want to see the truth about Reconstruction. The fact that the film is now relatively obscure for mainstream audiences sometimes adds to its allure, because it can seem like a forgotten truth—the film itself now is the equivalent of a dusty book found on a shelf whose insights have

Figure 6.5. Klansmen and their wives cheering The Birth of a Nation.

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been long neglected. The sense of having “discovered” the film can be appealing to the conspiracy-minded racists of the American right. As noted, both versions of The Birth of Nation end with flash-forwards that imply that positive change followed the events of the film, events that we are supposed to cheer and be grateful for. On these grounds, Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is the far more radical film, because it refuses to make a distinction between then and now. Instead, Lee’s film makes the opposite move, cutting from a cross-burning on the hill opposite Ron Stallworth’s apartment in 1972 to footage of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally in August 2017, followed by Donald Trump’s equivocation about the “very fine people” on both sides and footage of the present-day David Duke (who is a major character in BlacKkKlansman) explicitly connecting Charlottesville to Trump and to the goals of white supremacy. The connection is devastating, and the film then includes footage of the car attack on antiracist protesters in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer on August 12, 2017. While the climax of the 1972 narrative in BlacKkKlansmen includes several upbeat notes— David Duke is foiled, a racist cop is exposed and arrested—there is no comfort at all in the present-day events. Lee’s film is less of a “we-then” emotional experience than Parker’s Birth of a Nation, but he saves the immersive experience for the present. The feeling is intended to be “we-now” rather than “we-then,” to avoid the comforts of pretending that the concerns raised in the film—of white supremacy, and of police violence—are safely in the past. This is a technique Lee has used at other points in his career for similar reasons. Both Malcolm X (1992) and Da 5 Bloods (2020) cut between past and present to prevent audiences from feeling safely distant from the problems these films raise. Audre Lorde’s famous claim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” has been adopted and adapted over the years in many arguments about the radical possibilities of working with traditional forms of art. Her call was for more radical styles and for us to think about the ways in which languages and media shape the content of messages and limit their radical potential. It has always seemed an intriguing metaphor because it is not literally true. With no one to stop you, you absolutely can dismantle the master’s house using his tools. In both of these cases, Lee and Parker are explicitly trying to do exactly that: take Griffith’s tools, which have become Hollywood’s tools, and use them to invert the narrative and the politics. Lee’s film is the more formally innovative, but not so much that an average moviegoer would be confused or unable to read his intentions.

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Figure 6.6. Lee’s tribute to Heather Heyer at the end of BlacKkKlansman.

In the end, Lee’s sophistication and experience as a filmmaker allow his film to have a much greater political impact. It is not his use of Griffith’s cross-cutting techniques, since most people watching will not pick up on that particular reference. It is his ending, with its explicit ties to Trump, that prevents the audience from consigning the events of the film to the past. One of the risks of any historical film about racism is that it allows viewers to see that racism as something far away. Writing about the cultural discussion around 12 Years a Slave in 2013, conservative columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times pointed out that movies about the horrors of slavery are unlikely to get conservatives to examine their genuine biases about the extent of racism in the United States. He writes: “If you want to convince someone who believes that American society is increasingly colorblind, and that if anything white people are getting a raw deal these days, to reconsider both of those premises, asking him to recognize his own cultural kinship to slavedrivers is quite possibly the most counterproductive way imaginable to go about it.”30 In other words, the extremity of these cases convinces viewers that even if everything is not fine now, it is not as bad as all that. Lee’s ending seems specifically designed to remind us that it is as bad as all that. In the Trump era, debates around The Birth of a Nation continued to arise. One of the most complicated was the controversy surrounding the renaming of a theater at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The Gish Film Theater, dating from the 1970s, had long been named for Dorothy and Lillian Gish, and Lillian had helped to inaugurate it in June 1976. Later it had hosted some artifacts from her career and was remodeled in a fundraising campaign in her honor in the early 1990s.

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In February 2019 the theater hosted a screening of Ava Duvernay’s documentary 13th, which includes footage of The Birth of a Nation as part of its history of discrimination from the end of the Civil War to the present day. Some students from the Black Students Union leaving the theater noticed that a display dedicated to Gish included images from The Birth of a Nation. After complaints to the university, a task force was created to consider renaming the theater, and later that spring the task force recommended dropping the Gish name.31 This announcement occurred in the middle of media debates about “cancel culture,” the supposed tendency of progressives to seek to erase people they disagree with from popular discourse and public platforms. It was a challenging example because it was, on its surface, about a role in a film that Lillian Gish had taken a century before, at the start of a career in which she acted in over one hundred films and played a wide variety of roles. She was undoubtedly one of the finest actors of her generation, and in particular mastered silent film acting like few others, as her performance in the 1926 version of The Scarlet Letter and other late silent-era works makes clear. Well after that era, she turned in exceptional performances in films such as 1955’s The Night of the Hunter. Her sister Dorothy also appeared in over one hundred films, including several of Griffith’s, but she was not in The Birth of a Nation. The Gish sisters had long represented an apparently innocent version of silent film nostalgia, particularly because they had been so young in that era. For example, François Truffaut had dedicated his film about filmmaking, Day for Night (La nuit américaine), to them. This situation seemed very different from the removal of Griffith’s name from the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. Gish did not make The Birth of a Nation and was only one part of an ensemble cast. While there had been many public debates about historical figures and their records on race, this was a new adaptation, because it was about an appearance in a single film. At the same time, it would have perhaps made a difference if Gish had publicly repudiated The Birth of a Nation in her lifetime. She never did so, and often defended it in racist terms. In her autobiography, published in 1969, she wrote at length about the controversies surrounding the film, steadfastly refusing to admit that it was racist at all. She used Griffith’s own brand of paternalistic racism in his defense, approvingly citing his claims that Black people who behaved badly during Reconstruction did so only because they were misled by evil whites and explaining how much the accusations of racism hurt his feelings:

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Of all the criticisms, the one from which Mr. Griffith suffered the most was the accusation that he was against Negroes. “To say that is like saying that I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all our lives.” Mr. Griffith had grown up with Negroes on the farm, and as a baby he had had a Negro mammy. He always treated Negroes with great affection, and they in turn loved him. Being a Southerner, he could communicate with them, and they liked to be around him because he was amusing. When some of them turned against him after the showing of The Birth, he was deeply wounded.32

Although this kind of racism would hardly have been unusual from a seventy-five-year-old white woman in the late 1960s, Gish also approvingly quotes a letter Thomas Dixon wrote in 1915, in which he extols the benefits of the film, including that “it tends to prevent the lowering of the standard of our citizenship by its mixture with Negro blood.”33 She is insistent that there were no Black actors in lead roles because none were available and does not concede at all, fifty years later, that any of the criticisms of the film from African Americans might have been valid.34 She repeats Griffith’s assertion that he made Intolerance to counter all those who had criticized him and who, “in his view, were the bigots.”35 Given all of this, it is much harder to defend Gish’s involvement in the film as merely one part of a long career. Her autobiography is called The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, and it is clear she sees her work with him as her most important, dedicating an entire chapter to The Birth of a Nation. How then do we weigh this against a long career, and against her sister’s career, which had nothing to do with the film? It is not clear that we can. Her career is multiple things at once, and what we view as the most important depends on where we are sitting. For the administration of Bowling Green State University, the concerns of current students of color outweighed any desire to honor a silent film star. This makes sense when we consider that the theater name was intended as a tribute, and removing such an honor is not the same thing as condemning someone’s entire life. It is only removing that name from a place of honor. Black Americans spend their entire lives surrounded by hagiographic praise of historical leaders who enslaved other humans, including some who raped the people they owned. Pointing out these uncomfortable facts is often met with calls to understand the historical context, but this understanding only goes one way. America’s worship

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of its early leaders is not about historical context, but about a shared national and secular religion. No “great men” theory of history is about complexity or nuance, and the innumerable statues and plaques and monuments to those men are not either. All statues of historical leaders mean the same thing: that this person is a role model and we should honor him or her. In that context, it is always Black Americans who are asked to consider “historical complexity” in a culture that generally refuses to do the same for them, a country that has spent parts of the twentieth century literally mass-producing monuments to white supremacy in the form of Confederate statues that were erected all over the United States.36 Given this history, it is much more understandable that university administrators did not see the need to spend their time and effort defending the principle that Lillian Gish “was not really that bad and anyway you have to think about her work in the context of that time.” Context is the work of the historian, and we should continue to consider the complexities of Gish’s life and achievements. But that is not the same as putting or keeping someone’s name on a theater. While I am not sure what I would have done in the shoes of the BGSU administration or of the committee members who recommended removal, I cannot find it in me to condemn their decision. The only critique I have to offer of the BGSU situation is that it falls into the unfortunate pattern of allowing Black Americans to enjoy only symbolic victories. In this year of protests around the killing of unarmed Black people by police, there has been a new reckoning with the legacies of racism in the United States, and a great number of the statues of Confederate generals have come down, a movement that has spread beyond the United States, as when a statue of a slave trader in Bristol, England, was pulled down and tossed into the harbor. While these moments have been stirring to watch, they are always accompanied by the fear that these will be the only victories, because it is much easier for mayors to order a statue removed than it is for them to confront the legacies of segregation and discrimination in their cities. Symbolic victories like pulling down a statue can feel like big moments, as if they were historical transitions. In a way they are, but they can also be pyrrhic when they use up energy that could be better directed into significant social change. These moments can also provide white moderates and liberals with a false sense that something has now been accomplished and they can go back to their regular lives. Since the civil rights movement, the United States has been obsessed with the symbols of racial progress and has usually substituted them for changes that would actually improve

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the lives of Black Americans. The election of Barack Obama was seen by many to be evidence that racism was largely solved, and that now Black people could not claim that there were barriers to their advancement in American society. The racial backlash behind the election of Donald Trump exposed the lie of that claim, and the repeated horrific images of Black Americans being executed by police officers for minor crimes or for nothing at all has revealed a tiny sliver of the daily injustices to which Black people are still subjected. There has long been a stark contrast between mass media images of Black people and their actual situation in the country. Since the 1960s at least, film and television have tried to present more positive images of Black success, and there have been substantial changes in the ways people of color are represented in American advertising and popular culture. At the same time, many Black Americans still live in heavily segregated communities and lag far behind their white counterparts in the accumulation of wealth and property, legacies of discriminatory housing and lending policies that were practiced until recent decades. For an outsider to the United States, this gap between image and reality is profound and disturbing. The United States has repeatedly chosen easy symbolic victories, with disproportionate amounts of self-congratulation, over the difficult work of creating a more just and equitable society. As a fundamentally conservative society with deep suspicions of any effort to lessen inequities, the country is uniquely maladapted to correct for historical injustices. Symbolic victories can make progress more difficult, because even though they are merely symbolic, some white people still put a lot of effort into thwarting them. They show up to defend statues and mount legal defenses. They pass laws to prevent their removal. When they eventually lose, there is a strong sense among conservatives that they have given up something significant, when in fact they have not given up anything material at all. Most white people do not give a second thought to the statues of enslavers and those who fought for enslavement in their communities, but many will rush to defend these symbols as heritage or history when challenged. It is Black people who notice the symbolism of the statue of an enslaver in their town or on their campus, because the statues were put there explicitly to remind Black people to stay in their place. When the statue comes down, white people are not affected at all, and nothing fundamentally changes about their life, their wealth, or their prospects for the future. But in the tortured psyche of American racism, where white people imagine that they have already made too

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many sacrifices, this becomes one more act of “generosity” that they grudgingly offer, wanting praise and the promise that nothing else will be demanded of them. Even this grudging offer is not always available of course. The story of The Birth of a Nation began with revisionist histories of Reconstruction. If newly freed Black people had reacted to their still-dire circumstances— no land, no education, no wealth—with violence, we would probably understand it. That they instead set about bettering themselves and trying to build a better life for their children is a tribute to a people who responded to hundreds of years of cruelty with dignity and hard work. The stories that Dixon and others told of them were especially craven in this regard, because they reversed the perpetrator-victim dynamic and accused Black people of crimes that they had actually suffered. This impulse on the part of white Americans is unfortunately still persistent in the present day. In the final days of the Trump administration, on Martin Luther King Day no less, the government released a document called The 1776 Report, an ugly attempt to reclaim a history of white nobility and to smear the Black activists who have tried to create the more perfect union that Americans were promised. The report was intended as a rejoinder to The 1619 Project, released by the New York Times in August 2019 on the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to Virginia.37 The 1619 Project aimed to point out how slavery has not been peripheral to American history but central to it, and while the project was well received by professional historians, it obviously rankled the Trump administration, which criticized it frequently and organized the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission to try to provide a counterpoint. The obviously political and nonsensical aims of the commission meant that it could not attract a single credentialed historian, so it was made up of Trump administration officials and representatives of Christian colleges. The report, which accuses the majority of American university professors of “historical revisionism” and “deliberately destructive scholarship,” contains no scholarship of its own within its slim twenty pages, and no footnotes or references of any kind. To delve into the report’s continual lies is to give it more credit than it deserves, but among its key sins is trying to steal the legacy of the civil rights movement and to use it as a weapon against those who agitate for civil rights in the present day. It claims that “the Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had

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been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed.”38 This is a rhetorical move in which hard-fought Black progress is grudgingly recognized but stripped from its historical context so that it can be weaponized against the people who achieved it. The report acknowledges that activism took place on either side of the civil rights movement of the 1960s but then extracts only that moment of partial success and uses it to demonstrate that America is benevolent and nonracist while simultaneously attacking the people who made it happen in the first place, as well as those who tried to carry on the legacy after Martin Luther King was murdered. Written by conservative and powerful white people, all of whom would have opposed King when he was alive, this report continues the attempt to erase his social justice crusades while claiming the moral high ground of his supporters. It is an act of breathtaking racial hatred nearly sixty years after King’s attempt to wipe out such hatreds. The report and the commission were short-lived. Only three days after the report was released, Joe Biden was sworn in as president and disbanded the commission on his first day, adding it to an agenda of other high-priority items such as reentering the Paris Climate Agreement and marshaling resources for the fight against Covid-19. The commission was quickly stripped from the White House website. Biden’s administration seemed to recognize how much damage a document like this could do, and it remains to be seen whether it will reappear in state and local curricula in the coming years. In many ways, the battle against whitewashings and racist retellings of America’s history seems to go on and on forever. It is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will be remembered. If future readers’ memories of it are even ambivalent, then it will be because we will have failed them in some way. In the waning days of this disastrous administration, a parody website was set up at djtrumplibrary.com, to imagine what a library for a president like Trump could possibly look like. It features a “Wall of Criminality” and a Covid Memorial, as well as interactive exhibits called “Lie to America.” It also includes an “Alt-Right Auditorium,” in which The Birth of a Nation would play every Wednesday, every week, forever.

epilogue

What are the lessons of The Birth of a Nation for modern film viewers and for modern scholars? The first is that the history of film has always been bound up in questions of racism. Griffith had numerous reasons for wanting his films to be regarded as art, and was working at a moment when this was an open question. The controversy surrounding his film and the stakes raised by the Mutual decision meant that defending The Birth of a Nation as art was both necessary and in his best interests. The success of the film among white audiences who were eager to have their sins transferred onto the Black people they had sinned against meant that Griffith’s ideas about what constituted an artistic film gained currency and outlasted his own career as a successful filmmaker. The Birth of a Nation is often referred to as a milestone or a turning point or a key historical moment, and while perceptions of the film have changed over the years, all of these assessments are true in one way or another. It helped to raise the stature of film as an art form, which in turn helped the industry and opened creative opportunities for other filmmakers. Griffith was undoubtedly Victorian in his ideas about film and storytelling, and he was quickly left behind in an artistic world shifting rapidly toward modernism. As a filmmaker, his influence is still seen mainly in the kinds of historical epics that hew closely to the rules that The Birth of a Nation helped to create: set an individual story against the backdrop of a much bigger historical one, be sure that your protagonists are intimately involved in that history, and provide an excess of historicity and spectacle to play against the intimate emotional lives of the protagonists. Griffith’s key lesson for filmmakers was that audiences care more about emotional lives than

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they do about the historical minutiae, and including enough historical detail in the mise-en-scène helps audiences give themselves permission to get lost in the emotions, and to place those emotions into their own historical understanding. Black critics recognized almost immediately the impossible dilemma Griffith had successfully created: to be an enemy of this film was to be perceived as an enemy of art and of free expression, rather than as a crusader for basic justice. Dressing up racism as film and as art was far more effective for white Americans than just yelling it on a street corner or printing it in a newspaper. Film provided cover for the ugliest and most vicious lies. It invoked hatred in the name of love and made white audiences believe in it. For most white viewers, this was an emotional maneuver they had practiced many times already, and would perfect over the next century. As film culture developed in the 1920s and 1930s, Griffith’s film came to be remembered in ways that simplified what he had done. His contributions to the development of film narrative and technique, which he made over his entire career (and for which he generally took more than his share of credit), were often conflated into this film, his most successful. As we have seen, in countries like France where The Birth of a Nation did not come out until many years later, Griffith still enjoyed a reputation as a pioneer of cinema without The Birth of a Nation being the center of his achievements. In America, though, his career came to be seen primarily in terms of his most successful film, with only Intolerance sometimes providing more context and a sort of “balance.” In describing The Birth of a Nation as “Cinema’s Original Sin,” what do we gain and what do we obscure? There are limits to the metaphor, of course, and those limits can tell us something about the parameters of our own ability to imagine alternate models of cinema history. It is worth contemplating what the story of Original Sin is designed to teach us. This story is an explanation for the evil in the world, a way of reconciling the notion of a just God with the misery and suffering that define many humans’ existence. God gave us a perfect world, the story goes, and it was humans who messed it up by not listening to him, and we have been punished ever since. Griffith was not making his film in anything like an Eden. Neither the United States nor the world was free of biases and hatreds. The Birth of a Nation did not create racial hatred, and it is far from the only thing that has sustained those biases

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until the present day. As much as I have made the case for its influence and importance, I of course know that it is only a single film among hundreds of thousands of films. In the Eden story, the implied alternate ending is clear: if we had not disobeyed God, we would still be living in harmony with him. Such is the clarity of a religious instruction, but we have no such clarity in the real world. What if we could imagine that the first cinematic blockbuster had been something different, a genuine tribute to brotherly (and sisterly) understanding? In the nativist moment of the teens and early twenties, perhaps audiences would not have reacted so enthusiastically, but it is possible they might have if the moral lesson about tolerance was embedded safely in the past, as the moral of The Birth of a Nation was. Everything else that Griffith had on his side—his skill, his fame, a relative lack of competition—might have been put into the service of a very different film, one with the message of Intolerance but the narrative clarity of The Birth of a Nation. We could easily imagine this film being influential enough to become the standard way in which films treated racism against African Americans, pushing the country forward instead of pulling it back. Without getting too caught up in wishful thinking, we can still imagine that Hollywood might have led rather than followed in presenting representations of racism in the United States. It is rare that any single movie has a measurable cultural impact, but the cumulative influence of film images is substantial. The Birth of a Nation normalized the exclusion of African Americans from heroic roles in Hollywood films and helped to carry minstrel images from the vaudeville stage to the motion picture palace. Perhaps all this would have happened anyway, but if portrayals had shifted even a little bit, it might have helped society move in the right direction more quickly. In any event, it is impossible to argue that things could have been worse without The Birth of a Nation. The influence of The Birth of a Nation on Hollywood’s output has not been the subject of this book, however. I have been more interested in the ways in which film viewers, programmers, cinephiles, critics, and academics incorporated this film into their definition of cinema and of art. In this regard, it is even harder to imagine what would have happened if a film like The Birth of a Nation did not exist. Would film culture have argued about racism more, or less? As we have seen, by the 1950s the common understanding of The Birth of a Nation was already that it was film history and not American history, and it was often being discussed as a bad object, at least in cinephile worlds. At

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the same time, the film continued to be shown in countless classrooms for another fifty years, often with little context or sociological critique. It is possible that a less-guilty origin story for film culture might have allowed us to sidestep debates that the ugliness of The Birth of a Nation made unavoidable. White American culture is very good at ignoring and downplaying racism, having had at least 150 years of practice. Perhaps a blatant example was needed to even put the issue on the table. What is clear is that the development of film culture and the reception of The Birth of a Nation have been intertwined since the film was released. In 1915 the need to defend Griffith’s film meant that it had to be called art. To maintain that defense in court systems around the country, it had to be called art. To make middle-class audiences feel better about what they were watching, it had to be called art. By the time the spell wore off, in the 1950s, the cause and effect were inverted. The need for film to be regarded as an art form meant that Griffith had to be defended, (de)contextualized, and rescued from those who would discard him. Only when film became a bit more established as an art, another half-century later, could we begin to fully grapple with the idea that a racist society will produce racist works of art. That racism is not a stone in the bread of American filmmaking. It is part of the flour. The Birth of a Nation is itself part of that long history of denial. Because the Civil War and Reconstruction tried to make explicit racism intolerable, white Americans have had to adapt, rewriting history to make themselves the victims while denying that they have done anything wrong. The history of the Lost Cause is a long one, but in 2022 it seems like it still has some years left in it. This moment feels like the last gasp of a dying ideal, but it has felt like that before. As someone who was born after the major events of the civil rights movement, and who has observed America’s racial struggles first as a foreigner and then with the distance of a privileged resident, I am not unusual for a white person in having grown up thinking that the major struggles of civil rights were in the past, even as I have long been repelled and fascinated by Americans’ ongoing tolerance of racial inequity. In the past few years, my naiveté has been subjected to a rude correction as the extent to which America will go to encode injustice in its legal and government systems has become clearer. In the past two years, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by two white men in Georgia was a major news story. Two white men who suspected him of a crime followed him in their truck and then tried to make a citizen’s arrest at gunpoint. When he resisted, they shot him dead. What

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makes it so reflective of the state of America is the fact that when the police came, the two white men appeared to have the law on their side. Their guns were legal, citizens’ arrests are legal, and Georgia’s so-called stand-your-ground law meant that they could claim they acted in selfdefense. Not charged with a crime until a video of the encounter released months later created a public outcry, they were eventually convicted in November 2021. Their initial treatment was a perfect example of racist laws that are crafted to be neutral on their face. To suggest that two black men could have chased a white jogger, cornered him at gunpoint, shot him when he resisted, and then explained all this to the police and walked away is the height of idiocy. The law in this case was functioning in the racist way in which it was intended. If this tragedy had unfolded as it did and the two men were promptly arrested, it would still be an example of the ways in which racism endangers the lives of Black Americans. As it is, it is an indictment of the American legal system itself, which has long sought neutral-sounding laws that it can use to punish and control African Americans. There is a common frustration among more intellectual American conservatives that they are constantly being accused of racism. Debates about legal issues, about crime and punishment, about social services and taxes—these would all happen anyway in a homogenous society, as indeed they do all over the world. In theory, it need not be the case that every shift in voting rules or self-defense laws has racist intent. In America, though, the evidence is clear that time and again, rules that are presented as neutral or even noble turn out to have not only racist repercussions, but racist intent. This is a crucial part of the story of The Birth of a Nation in American culture. It is not simply that someone made a racist movie and it became extraordinarily popular. The important fact we often ignore is how crucial it was that the racism was denied. If Griffith had written to the newspapers and stated simply that he thought African Americans were evil (as Thomas Dixon preached), his film would have been strictly proscribed in much of America outside of the South. He would not have gotten the accolades, nor been received in artistic circles, nor been one of the founders of United Artists. We would not have spent the last century talking about his film, because we would have set it aside, regardless of how good the cinematography was. Griffith’s plausible deniability of his racism was crucial to the entire enterprise, in exactly the same way that plausible deniability was essential to redlining in the 1950s and is essential to voter ID laws today.

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We spend a lot of time in the current day debating whether proposals like voter ID laws are actually racist, and the politicians who propose them deny furiously that they are, because to admit it would invalidate the law immediately. This has been the pattern of a long list of restrictive voter laws passed after the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, which made explicit that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Poll taxes and grandfather clauses and citizenship tests all had the intention of denying voting rights, and were effective in doing so, while maintaining a supposed neutrality on their face. The long debates about The Birth of a Nation in American culture are a version of the same tendency. Make something explicitly racist. Deny that it is racist and accuse your accusers of defaming you. Create a debate about something that is not actually debatable and use that debate as cover to achieve what you want. When it finally becomes clear that you were in the wrong, attribute that to the past and swear your intentions are not racist in the present. Repeat. The entirety of this book has been an exercise in trying to understand gradations of racism, not to argue that some kinds are acceptable, but to understand the ways in which racism works and persists, particularly among people who are not necessarily trying to be racist. It is impossible to do such work without reflecting on how one’s own words may be read in the future. In particular, I think about the critical shift I wrote about in chapter 4, when The Birth of a Nation stopped being American history and started being film history. This was a move in which the film was neutralized by being located in the past. By acknowledging its ugliness, midcentury cinephiles were also drawing a contrast between the racism of then and the enlightenment of now. I do not mean to condemn those writers, as what other possibility did they have? I myself have been historicizing this film for my entire academic career. I only mean to point out the persistence of the American myth that racism is a crime of the past, and to note that when we talk historically about the “bad old days,” we subtly reinforce the idea that things are pretty much fine now, even if we know better. This makes it more difficult to talk about the problems of the present, a discussion which is always seen as unwelcome and divisive. In my analysis of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, I pointed out the power of Lee’s connection between the Klan of the 1970s and the neo-Nazi rallies in Virginia that led to the death of Heather Heyer. Lee’s move is a difficult one, in that we are used

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to hearing stories of racism in the past, and are in fact comforted by the past-ness of the story. Lee wanted to make clear that the past was not the past, to prevent his audience from leaving the theater feeling contented. Given that his racist characters were often humorously inept, it would be easy to separate ourselves from the entire episode. We might leave the theater less likely to see the racism that still surrounds us. In my own perhaps less elegant way, I have been trying to do that with the end of this book. I do not want to continue the practice of packing racism safely away in the past. As I have argued, it is inherent in the practice of this kind of cultural history. Assuming some progress has been made, the present is always going to look better than the past, and for those of us raised at the end of the twentieth century, it is a particularly tempting form of historical myopia. We have tended to see the arc of history bending toward justice while doing very little to bend it ourselves, but that arc has never bent on its own, and it never will. It us up to each of us to do what we can, in our own time, to create the conditions that will finally fulfill the long-delayed promise of equality.

Notes

introduction 1. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 42–43. 2. The Mutual decision is Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, Appeal from the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of Ohio, no. 456, Argued January 6–7, 1915, Decided February 23, 1915, 1. The Burstyn case was Joseph Burstyn, Incorporated v. Wilson, Commissioner of Education of New York, et al., 343 U.S. 495, Argued April 24, 1952, Decided May 26, 1952. 3. The title appears in most surviving versions of the film that are drawn from 1915 elements, but it does not have the border with Griffith’s name and initials in it that all other title frames have, the border which the second title card has assured us is found in all Griffith films with “no exception.” This suggests that the plea was added quickly after the film was completed. 4. For details of one such later case, see Charles S. Druggan and Charles J. Trainor, In Support of Application of Epoch Producing Corporation in Re: “Birth of a Nation” (1925), collection of the Ohio State Archives, Columbus, Ohio. For a summary, see Paul McEwan, “Lawyers, Bibliographies, and the Klan: Griffith’s Resources in the Censorship Battle over The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Film History 20 (2008): 357–366. The complete list of sources in the bibliography comprises Woodrow Wilson (History of the American People: Division and Reunion); Walter L. Fleming, a history professor at West Virginia University (Documentary History of Reconstruction); Samuel L. McCall (Life of Thaddeus Stevens); John W. Burgess, a professor of political science and constitutional law at Columbia University (Reconstruction and the Constitution); Julian Hawthorne, “son of Nathaniel” (Hawthorne’s United States); James W. Garner, a fellow at Columbia University (Reconstruction in Mississippi); Hillery A. Herbert (Why the Solid South); Prof. Hart, Harvard University (Reconstruction of the South). No publication details are offered for these works in the bibliography. 5. The best single-volume history of Reconstruction is still Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). An updated edition was published by HarperCollins in 2014. 6. Richard Barry, “Five-Dollar Movies Prophesied,” Editor 40 (April 24, 1915): 409. Cited in the introduction to Fred Silva, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 10. 7. Arguments about historical truth in fiction films are obviously too broad to summarize here. Key texts include Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For a counterpoint, see Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (San

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Francisco: Encounter, 1996). See also Paul McEwan, “Knowledge and the Limits of Postmodernism: Social Constructionism in Film and Media Studies” (PhD diss., Northwestern University; Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI, 2003). A good, if perhaps too forgiving, summary of what Hollywood epics do well when it comes to history is Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 24–49. 8. Dorothy Dix quoted in the 1915 program for The Birth of a Nation.

chapter 1: a new art, 1895–1915 1. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, Appeal from the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of Ohio, No. 456, Argued January 6–7, 1915, 2–3. 2. See also Jennifer Petersen, “Can Moving Pictures Speak? Film, Speech, and Social Science in Early Twentieth-Century Law,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 76–99. 3. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62. 4. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 8. 5. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 9. 6. Moving Picture World, February 1908, 1. 7. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 129. 8. The Film Index, June 18, 1910, 15. 9. David S. Hullfish, “Art in Moving Pictures,” The Nickelodeon, May 1909, 139. 10. Hullfish, “Art in Moving Pictures,” 139. 11. “Pictorial Possibilities in Pictures,” The Nickelodeon, May 1909, 121. 12. “Pictorial Possibilities in Pictures,” 122. 13. Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), Kindle edition. 14. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. 15. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 25. 16. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 25. 17. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 18. Lester A. Walton, “The Degeneracy of the Moving Picture Theatre,” New York Age, August 5, 1909, quoted in Everett, Returning the Gaze, 20. 19. Walton, “Degeneracy,” quoted in Everett, Returning the Gaze, 21. 20. Advertisement, New York Dramatic Mirror, December 3, 1913, 36. For further discussion of this ad, see the introduction to The Griffith Project, Volume 7: Films Produced in 1913, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London, British Film Institute 2008) and David Bordwell, “Do Filmmakers Deserve the Last Word?” DavidBordwell.net, October 10, 2007. 21. Ben Brewster, “Home Sweet Home,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 8:

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Films Produced in 1914–15, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London, British Film Institute, 2009), 31. 22. Ad for Reliance Motion Picture Company, Reel Life, April 18, 1914, 34. 23. Ad for Reliance Motion Picture Company, Reel Life, May 16, 1914, 3. 24. Ad for Majestic Motion Picture Company, Reel Life, May 16, 1914, 33. Italics in the original. 25. Ad for Majestic Motion Picture Company, Reel Life, May 16, 1914, 33. 26. “Home, Sweet Home,” Reel Life, May 16, 1914, 8. 27. Ad for Continental Feature Film Corp., Reel Life, July 25, 1914, 32. 28. Robert Grau, The Theater of Science (New York: Broadway, 1914), vi. 29. Grau, The Theater of Science, 83. 30. Grau, The Theater of Science, 84. 31. Grau, The Theater of Science, 85. 32. See David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). 33. Grau, The Theater of Science, 86–87. 34. Grau, The Theater of Science, 87. 35. Grau, The Theater of Science, 86. 36. “How ‘The Clansman’ Was Produced,” Motography, February 6, 1915, 193. 37. There is plenty of online commentary about the historical accuracy of the film. For an overview of the major issues, see Steven Biel, “Review of Titanic,” Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (December 1998): 1177–1179. 38. “How ‘The Clansman’ Was Produced,” 193. 39. Ad for The Clansman, Los Angeles Evening Herald, February 15, 1915, 2. 40. Ad for The Birth of a Nation, New York Times, March 3, 1915. 41. See Martin Miller Marks, “Breil’s Score for The Birth of a Nation,” in Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies 1895–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 42. Program for The Clansman at Clune’s Auditorium, Los Angeles, May 24, 1915, reprinted in Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 134. 43. Grace Kingsley, “At the Stage Door,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1915, pt. 3, p. 4, cited in Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 137. 44. For a much more detailed textual analysis of the film, see Paul McEwan, The Birth of a Nation, BFI Classics (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2015). 45. W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” Moving Picture World, March 15, 1915, 1586–1587. 46. “Griffith Film Scores,” Moving Picture World, March 15, 1915, 1587. 47. “Second Thoughts on First Nights: The Films of the Future,” New York Times, April 18, 1915. 48. For a detailed discussion of the development of cross-cutting and Griffith’s part in that development, see André Gaudreault and Philippe Gauthier, “D. W. Griffith and the Emergence of Crosscutting,” in A Companion to D. W. Griffith, ed. Charlie Keil (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018), 107–136. 49. “Second Thoughts on First Nights: The Films of the Future.” 50. Tarleton Winchester, “What’s What—and Why,” Motion Picture Magazine, May 19, 1915, 123.

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51. “The Dirt of a Nation,” Chicago Defender, June 5, 1915, 8. 52. Lester A. Walton, “Chicago Tribune Laments over Barring of Photo Play,” New York Age, June 3, 1915, quoted in Everett, Returning the Gaze, 79–80. 53. In the author’s possession is a typed and hand-corrected manuscript for an “as told to” interview that Thomas Dixon completed with W. Ward Marsh, the longtime film critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, sometime in the 1930s or 1940s. I cannot find a publication date for the finished article in the Plain Dealer archives, but when Dixon died in 1946, Marsh wrote a kind review of him, mentioning, “During his visits at my house we wrote the whole inside story of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ for one of the top weekly magazines,” so it seems to have been published, or at least submitted, elsewhere. The tribute article is W. Ward Marsh, “Terrific War Pictures for Telenews; of Thomas Dixon, as author of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 8, 1946, 16. The typed manuscript is a detailed description of Dixon’s experience pitching the film to Griffith, his plan to enlist Woodrow Wilson’s support, and his tactics in fighting bans of the film around the country. Thomas Dixon (as told to W. Ward Marsh), “When Our War Time President Approved a Film,” typewritten manuscript, publication unknown, in collection of the author. 54. See the introduction. 55. Henry MacMahon, “The Art of the Movies,” New York Times, June 6, 1915. 56. The most comprehensive work to rewrite women into the early history of film, from which they have often been erased, is the Women Film Pioneers Project, founded by Jane Gaines and supported by Columbia University, https://wfpp .columbia.edu/. 57. MacMahon, “The Art of the Movies.” Italics in the original. 58. As Peter Decherney has explained in depth, Lindsay’s contributions to the idea of film culture go far beyond my description here, which I am limiting to the connections to The Birth of a Nation. See the chapter on “Vachel Lindsay and the  Universal Film Museum” in his Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 59. Vachel Lindsay, Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915), 4. 60. Lindsay, Art, 4. 61. Lindsay, Art, 13. 62. Lindsay, Art, 39. 63. Lindsay, Art, 39–40. 64. Lindsay, Art, 46. 65. Lindsay, Art, 46–47. 66. Lindsay, Art, 48. 67. Lindsay, Art, 48. 68. For a general overview of his career, see the Poetry Foundation entry on Vachel Lindsay, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vachel-lindsay. 69. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), Kindle edition. 70. Wells, Crusade. 71. Wells, Crusade. 72. In 2020, Ida B. Wells was awarded a posthumous Special Citation by the Pulitzer Prize committee “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the hor-

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rific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/ida-b-wells.

chapter 2:film art, intolerance, and oscar micheaux, 1915–1925 1. For a fuller account of the film’s reception in Atlanta, see Matthew Bernstein, “‘At This Time in This City’: Black Atlanta and the Premiere of The Birth of a Nation,” in In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation: Racism, Reception and Resistance, eds. Melvyn Stokes and Paul McEwan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 2. William G. Shepherd, “How I Put Over the Klan,” Collier’s, July 14, 1928, 35. Much of the history of the Klan’s rise and connection to the film is told in Maxim Simcovitch’s “The Impact of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation on the Modern Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Popular Film 1, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 72–82. A much more detailed account is Tom Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). 3. Katherine Lennard, “Old Purpose, ‘New Body’: The Birth of a Nation and the Revival of the Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015): 618. 4. This discussion is elaborated in Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 195. 5. See Paul McEwan, “Lawyers, Bibliographies and the Klan: Griffith’s Resources in the Censorship Battle over The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Film History 20 (2008): 357–366. 6. The full scope of the Klan’s use of The Birth of a Nation and other films is the subject of Tom Rice’s White Robes, Silver Screens. 7. “Mayor Is Asked to Prohibit ‘Birth of a Nation’ in Atlanta,” Atlanta Constitution, October 7, 1915, 9. 8. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Given O.K. By Censors,” Atlanta Constitution, December 2, 1915, 6. 9. “Great Outdoors Is D.  W. Griffith’s Stage,” Atlanta Constitution, November 28, 1915. 10. “A Three Weeks’ Run” (editorial), Atlanta Constitution, December 19, 1915, 4. 11. Ned McIntosh, “‘Birth of a Nation’ Thrills Tremendous Atlanta Audience,” Atlanta Constitution, December 7, 1915, 7. 12. “Veterans to See Picture,” Atlanta Constitution, December 13, 1915, 5. 13. Birth of a Nation ad, Atlanta Constitution, December 12, 1915, 10. 14. “Atlanta Screen Club Entertains Walthall,” Atlanta Constitution, May 27, 1916, 16. 15. Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay, December 1916, 81. 16. Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” 77. 17. Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” 77. 18. See, for example, the description used on the BFI website for the Sight and Sound poll: “Intolerance” http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/film /4ce2b6bbaea80.

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19. Henry Stephen Gordon, “The Real Story of ‘Intolerance,’” Photoplay, November 1916, 34. 20. D.  W. Griffith Papers, 1897–1954, microfilm produced by the Museum of Modern Art, University of Louisville, and Microfilming Corporation of America, 1982. 21. Henry Stephen Gordon, “The Story of David Wark Griffith (Part V),” Photoplay, October 1916, 94. 22. Frederick James Smith, “‘Intolerance’ in Review,” New York Dramatic Mirror, September 16, 1916, 22. 23. Smith, “‘Intolerance’ in Review,” 22. 24. Harry C. Carr, “What Next—?” Photoplay, March 1917, 60. 25. Carr, “What Next—?” 62. 26. Carr, “What Next—?” 62. 27. United Artists ad for When the Clouds Roll By and Broken Blossoms in Motion Picture News, December 13, 1919, 4170–4171. 28. Frederick James Smith, “The Celluloid Critic,” Motion Picture Classic, August 1919, 46. 29. Peter Milne, “The Screen in Review,” Picture-Play Magazine, August 1919, 270. 30. Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 132–133. 31. Smith, “The Celluloid Critic,” 60. 32. Edward Weitzel, “Griffith Converts the Critics,” Moving Picture World, June 21, 1919, 1758. 33. Weitzel, “Griffith Converts the Critics,” 1758. 34. Kenneth Macgowan, “Griffith Renews Old Promises,” Motion Picture Classic, August 1919, 23. 35. I’m writing these words on June 2, 2020. Yesterday the president, Donald Trump, held a photo op in which he posed in front of a Washington church holding a Bible, which he did not open or cite, and promised a violent crackdown on those protesting the death of George Floyd. 36. Stokes’s D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” centers on the history of the NAACP and is the best summation of this work and the overall controversies surrounding the film. 37. Allyson Nadia Field, “‘A Vicious and Hurtful Play’: The Birth of a Nation and The New Era, 1915,” in Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 151–184. 38. R. H. Greene, “‘Birth of a Race’: The Obscure Demise of a Would-Be Rebuttal to Racism,” NPR.org, October 25, 2015. 39. Jane Gaines, “Within Our Gates: From Race Melodrama to Opportunity Narrative,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 70. See also chapter 5 of Gaines’s Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 161–184; and Linda Williams, “Serial Melodramas of Black and White: The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates,” in The Birth of a Nation:

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The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 137–163. 40. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 41. Robert Jackson, “The Secret Life of Oscar Micheaux: Race Films, Contested Histories, and Modern American Culture,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2011), 219. 42. Jackson, “Secret Life of Oscar Micheaux,” 220. 43. Richard Barry, “Five-Dollar Movies Prophesied,” Editor, April 24, 1915, 409, quoted in introduction to Fred Silva, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 10. 44. Full-page ad in The Greater Amusements, May 29, 1920, 13. 45. Birth of a Nation ad from an unknown Chicago newspaper, February 4, 1924, 5, collection of the author. 46. Birth of a Nation ad and advertorial, Selma Times-Journal, December 6, 1925, 14. 47. Birth of a Nation ad, Morning Herald (Uniontown, Pennsylvania), December 31, 1926, 8. 48. House Ad, Educational Screen, January 1922, 4. 49. “Editorial,” Educational Screen, January 1922, 5. 50. Marion Lanphier, “Epic Possibilities of the Film,” Educational Screen, March 1922, 10–13. 51. Photoplay ran “The Story of David Wark Griffith” in six installments between June and November 1916. 52. Jim Tully, “The Man Who Found Himself,” Photoplay, February 1925, 132. 53. Tully, “The Man Who Found Himself,” 132. 54. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights (Abingdon, UK: Franck Cass, 1926), 758. 55. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 759. 56. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 758. 57. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 759. 58. Untitled news item, The Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), February 3, 1926, 2. 59. See McEwan, “Lawyers, Bibliographies and the Klan.” 60. Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 517. 61. Georges Sadoul, Histoire général du cinéma 4: Le cinéma devient un art 1909–1920, vol. 1: La première guerre mondiale (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1952, 1975), 17, translation mine. 62. Sadoul, Histoire général du cinéma, 17. 63. Melvyn Stokes, “Race, Politics and Censorship: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in France, 1916–1923,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 19–38. See also Aurore Spiers, “L’interdiction française de The Birth of a Nation (la Naissance d’une nation) (D. W. Griffith, 1915) vue par la presse africaine-américaine,” 1895 88, no. 2 (2019): 64–80. 64. Louis Delluc, Cinéma et cie (Ecrits Cinématographiques II), édition établie

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et présentée par Pierre Lherminier (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1986), 398. Translation mine. 65. Georges Sadoul, Histoire du cinéma (Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu/Connaissance, 1962), 130. 66. Lillian Gish with A. Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 182–183. 67. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 142. 68. Leyda, Kino, 143. 69. Leyda, Kino, 143. 70. Vance Kepley, “Intolerance and the Soviets: A Historical Investigation,” in Inside The Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, ed. R. Taylor and I. Christie (London: Routledge, 1991), 52. 71. Sergei Eisenstein, Letter to Maxim Simcovitch, 1940, reprinted as a postscript to Simcovitch, “The Impact of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation on the Modern Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Popular Film 1, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 81–82. 72. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1949), 205.

chapter 3: little theatres, moma, and the birth of art cinema, 1925–1945 1. Tony Guzman, “The Little Theatre Movement: The Institutionalization of the European Art Film in America,” Film History 17 (2005): 261. 2. Guzman, “The Little Theatre Movement,” 261. 3. Guzman, “The Little Theatre Movement,” 263–264. 4. Anne Morey, “Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little Cinema Movement of the 1920s,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 236. 5. Mordaunt Hall, “Relics of the Past and German Tragedy Make Interesting Program,” New York Times, June 13, 1926, 2. 6. This is reinforced each year at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, held each October in Italy. Attendees are interested in all eras of silent film, but it is more difficult for films from before 1910 to have the emotional impact on modern viewers that films from the 1920s can have. There is relatively little inappropriate laughter at early films, and they can fascinate the audience, but that fascination is much more likely to be scholarly or historical rather than emotional, even if there are many exceptions. I’m sure many of my fellow attendees will vociferously disagree with this. 7. IMDB.com lists the release date of Driven as February 11, 1923. 8. Hall, “Relics of the Past and German Tragedy Make Interesting Program,” 2. 9. “Lubitsch Praises Guild,” New York Times, March 14, 1926, 5. 10. “Lubitsch Praises Guild,” 5. 11. For details on the film plans with Jolson, see Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 483–485.

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12. “Griffith gets $2,627 in Al Jolson Suit,” New York Times, September 22, 1926, 17. 13. “Says Jolson Asked Stardom in Movies,” New York Times, September 17, 1926, 19. 14. Russell Merritt, “D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Reconstructing an Unobtainable Text,” Film History 4 (1990): 359. 15. Merritt, “D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance,” 361. 16. Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen (A Film Guild Evening),” New York Times, October 1, 1926. 17. “Sees Way to Better Films: Griffith Proposes an Endowment to Elevate Standard of Movies,” New York Times, October 23, 1926. 18. Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life, 522–523. 19. “Sees Way to Better Films,” New York Times, October 23, 1926. 20. Though included with his papers for 1931, this undated document is probably misfiled. 21. See Andy Uhrich, “Great Moments from The Birth of a Nation: Collecting and Privately Screening Small Gauge Versions,” in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 46–75. 22. This footage is included on recent DVDs from Kino Video and is posted online. 23. For a more complete history, see Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 24. “Things Cinematic,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 30, 1924, 4E. 25. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 78–79. 26. Wasson, Museum Movies, 41–43. 27. “Museum of Modern Art Selects ‘Intolerance’ for Distribution,” Columbus Ledger, March 24, 1936, clipping from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 28. B. G. Braver-Mann, “A Letter to Ye Editor: Through This Channel Passes a Beautiful Complaint to the Film Library,” New York Times, July 9, 1939, 4X. 29. John E. Abbott, “In Reply to a Complaint,” New York Times, July 16, 1939. 30. Merritt, “D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance,” 337–338. 31. Abbott, “In Reply to a Complaint.” 32. Wasson, Museum Movies, 2. 33. Program from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 34. For the broader history, please see Wasson, Museum Movies. I am deeply indebted to Wasson for this part of my research. Not only did her book lay a lot of the groundwork, but she went one step further and gave me access to her files. Many parts of what I am recounting here about The Birth of a Nation appear at some point in Wasson’s book, but since The Birth of a Nation is not the focus of her story, the details are scattered throughout the work, and many of the most interesting documents are mentioned only in footnotes. So I want to acknowledge a scholarly debt that is a bit deeper than usual while connecting the MOMA story to

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the larger history of The Birth of a Nation and the development of film culture in the United States. 35. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 159. See also Alison Trope, Stardust Memories: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011) for a discussion of the ways in which the Hollywood studios were skeptical of the new film library and kept their distance from it. 36. Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite, 120. 37. Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite, 124. 38. Bosley Crowther, “The Film Library Looks at Russia,” New York Times, January 7, 1940. 39. Seymour Stern, “Film Library Notes Build ‘CP Liberators’ Myth,” The New Leader, March 23, 1940, Film Library Scrapbooks, Special Collections, Film Study Center, Department of Film and Media, Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 40. Richard Griffith to Iris Barry, May 22, 1940. MOMA records list Griffith as Barry’s assistant beginning in 1940, but this letter is on the letterhead of the Association of Documentary Film Producers, and not an internal memo, so presumably it is from just before his tenure at MOMA. The rest of the letter concerns information received from Richard Griffith’s father about the general Griffith family tree and references to D. W. Griffith, so there was at least a question about whether they were perhaps distantly related. 41. Seymour Stern to Nelson Rockefeller, March 30, 1940, Museum of Modern Art. See also Wasson, Museum Movies, 272n85. 42. Victor Riesel, “Heard on the Left,” The New Leader, May 11, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 43. Memo from Jay Leyda to Iris Barry, Museum of Modern Art, May 29, 1940, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 44. Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite, 141. 45. D. W. Griffith to Nelson Rockefeller, August 27, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 46. D. W. Griffith to Nelson Rockefeller. 47. Draft of a letter to D. W. Griffith from N. A. Rockefeller, September 18, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Haidee Wasson. 48. Seymour Stern, “Pioneer of the Film Art,” New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1940, 16. 49. Iris Barry, D.  W. Griffith: American Film Master (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940), 22. 50. Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 102. 51. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 103. 52. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 117. 53. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 104. 54. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 105. 55. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 98. 56. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 178. 57. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 280.

notes to pages 108–113

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58. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 175. 59. A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: Penguin, 2013), 348–349. 60. Milton MacKaye, “The Birth of a Nation,” Scribner’s, November 1937, 69. 61. Fritzi Kramer, “The First White House Motion Picture Show? Theodore Roosevelt Rides to the Rescue,” MoviesSilently.com, https://moviessilently.com /2019/01/25/the-first-white-house-motion-picture-show-teddy-roosevelt-rides-to -the-rescue/. 62. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 394.

chapter 4: from american history to film history, 1945–1960 1. Two of these critics, Tyler and Farber, are also the subject of an earlier booklength study by Greg Taylor, in which he argues for an even more central role for criticism in the rise of the status of film as an art. Taylor argues that these two writers’ styles of criticism, which he labels Camp and Cult, respectively, positioned the critic as the essential element in making filmmaking an art. In Taylor’s view, it is not so much that these critics decreed what art was, but that their “vanguard criticism” transformed the raw material of mass culture into art. Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cult, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11–12. 3. Bordwell, The Rhapsodes, 118. 4. And even then . . . It is tempting to use filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage as an example here, but even his method often required collaboration with the people who were in his films. For example, Jane Brakhage’s account of the making of Window Water Baby Moving (1959) makes clear the extent of their collaboration. Jane Brakhage, “The Birth Film,” Film Culture 31 (1963–1964): 35–36. 5. Chaplin’s political problems in the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, and his eventual exile from the country, have been well documented. See, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London: Chatto & Windus, 2014), and Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964). 6. Popular music criticism had a similar problem for many years in which older pop music such as Motown was lauded even though contemporary pop was not. In popular music, many (but not all) of the artists excluded by this indifference to contemporary pop were Black or female or both. These artists tended to receive critical attention only decades after their music was made. This tendency was eventually critiqued as “rockism,” because it evaluated all popular music by the “standards” of predominantly white and male rock artists. It would now seem strange for any popular music critic to ignore pop albums. Film’s situation is similar, although very popular films do get some scholarly attention, and the line between popular and artistic films does not break down on racial lines. The fact remains that the majority of mainstream current releases are the only films that contemporary film studies scholars see as inherently outside their purview. For an overview of this phenomemon in music, see Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2004, as well as Chapter 7 of Sanneh’s Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (New York: Penguin, 2021).

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7. “David W. Griffith, Film Pioneer, Dies,” New York Times, July 24, 1948. 8. “David Ward Griffith,” New York Times, July 24, 1948. 9. “Thomas Dixon Dies; Wrote ‘Clansman,’” New York Times, April 4, 1946. 10. Thomas Dixon Jr., “Why I Wrote The Clansman,” The Theatre 6, no. 59 (January 1906): 20–22. 11. D. W. Griffith, “Reply to the New York Globe,” April 10, 1915, reprinted in Robert Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 1994, 168–170. 12. Any of the debates about Marcel Duchamp or Abstract Expressionism or a million other contemporary artists would be illustrative here. For an overview, see Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13. Rielle Navitski has compiled an extensive list of cine-clubs in Latin America dating from 1927 to 1965, https://faculty.franklin.uga.edu/rielle_navitski/latin -american-cineclubs-1927-1965. There was also an overview of film societies, published in 1969, that describes the Latin American cine-clubs, as well as some in Japan, India, and Pakistan that had taken part in print exchanges with counterparts in European countries; see Thorold Dickinson, “Film Societies,” in “Film, New Media, and Aesthetic Education,” special issue, Journal of Aesthetic Education 3, no. 3 (July 1969): 85–95. 14. These papers are now in the Special Collections of the Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College, having been purchased from a private seller in 2005. 15. For a much fuller discussion of the collectors who shared and showed 8mm and 16mm prints of The Birth of a Nation in midcentury, see Andy Uhrich, “Great Moments from The Birth of a Nation: Collecting and Privately Screening Small Gauge Versions,” in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 46–75. 16. Letter from Elmer Rice, Chairman, National Council on Freedom from Censorship, to Mayor Frank Costello, Syracuse, NY, July 18, 1949, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 17. Allyson Nadia Field, “‘A Vicious and Hurtful Play’: The Birth of a Nation and The New Era, 1915,” in Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 151–184. 18. See John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). 19. Letter from A. N. Miles to Frank Markey, (postmarked) March 2, 1950, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 20. Emily Farache, “Directors Guild Renames D.W. Griffith Award,” EOnline, December 15, 1999, http://www.eonline.com/news/39141/directors-guild-renames -d-w-griffith-award. 21. Further references to Mrs. Swift are difficult to find, but an obituary in the June 13, 1915, Elmira Morning Telegram for her father-in-law, Allen W. Swift, mentions that he was a prominent industrialist in the town who had built homes in Elmira for each of his children as they married. So Mrs. Swift would likely have been at least fifty-five years old and part of a relatively well-off family in 1949.

notes to pages 120 –132

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Frank Feocco eventually owned a number of theaters in southern New York and northern Pennsylvania. 22. Letter from Mrs. Charles M. Swift to Frank Feocco, August 8, 1949, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 23. For an overview, see Cheryl A. Leanza, “Heckler’s Veto Case Law as a Resource for Democratic Discourse,” Hofstra Law Review 35 (2007): 1305–1319. 24. Letter from Elmer Rice to Frank Costello, 2. 25. Letter from Elmer Rice to Jack Zurich, Midtown Theatre, July 15, 1949, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 26. “‘Birth of a Nation’ at Midtown Undimmed by Passing Years,” Post-Standard [Syracuse, NY], June 27, 1950, 14. 27. Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Harry E. Aitken, October 14, 1948, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 28. For a comprehensive view of this moment of film history, see Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). 29. Charles R. Acland, “Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the Film Council Movement, 1946–1957,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 150. 30. Acland, “Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits,” 150. 31. Acland, “Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits,” 151. 32. Thomas M. Pryor, “Film Society Movement Catches On,” New York Times, September 18, 1949, X5. 33. For an overview of the difficulties in determining which surviving copy is closest to what would have been seen in 1915, see the introduction to John Cuniberti, “The Birth of a Nation”: A Formal Shot-By-Shot Analysis together with Microfiche (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1979); and J.  B. Kaufman, “Non-Archival Sources,” The Griffith Project, vol. 8: Films Produced in 1914-15 (London: BFI, 2004), 107–112. 34. Essex Film Notes: Program Notes on D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, September 1957, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 35. Letter from Grace N. Golat to Robert E. Lee, Essex Film Club, September 12, 1957, John Griggs Collection, Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College. 36. For an overview of the reception of The Birth of a Nation in these three nations and several others during the teens and twenties, see Melvyn Stokes, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 76–106. 37. Oxford University Film Society, program for “The Birth of a Nation,” May 18 & 19, 1949, collection of the Cinémathèque québécoise. 38. Oxford University Film Society, “Program for Intolerance,” October 19, 1949, Cinémathèque québécoise. 39. Ciné-Club de Saint-Laurent, “Un chef-d’œuvre de David W. Griffith: The Birth of a Nation,” c. 1953, Cinémathèque québécoise. Translation mine. 40. Ciné-Club de Saint-Laurent, “The Birth of a Nation.” 41. Undated midcentury Birth of a Nation program, Cinémathèque québécoise.

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42. Elwood Glover, AGE Film Society Program for The Birth of a Nation, November 2, 1961. AGE Film Society was a creation of Aldo Maggiorotti, Gerald Pratley, and Elwood Glover and existed from 1955 to 1962; see http://torontofilmsociety .com/a-g-e-film-notes/a-g-e-film-society-of-toronto-1955-1962/. 43. Tyneside Film Society, program for The Birth of a Nation, November 7, 1955, Cinémathèque québécoise. 44. Continental Film Group, program for “A Tribute to D.W. Griffith,” 195?, 6, Cinémathèque québécoise. 45. Continental Film Group, 3. 46. Continental Film Group, 5. 47. Continental Film Group, 5. 48. Continental Film Group, 5.

chapter 5: in search of legitimacy and masterpieces 1. See Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 2. See Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 3. This idea is at the core of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter _Birmingham.html. 4. See chapter 2. 5. Dana Polan, “Young Art, Old Colleges: Early Episodes in the American Study of Film,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 95. See also Polan’s Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 6. Polan, “Early Episodes,” 94. 7. Polan, “Early Episodes,” 110. 8. Polan, “Early Episodes,” 95. 9. Polan, “Early Episodes,” 115. 10. Gessner’s presentation was later reprinted in the society’s journal, which would become Cinema Journal. Robert Gessner, “Cinema and Scholarship,” Journal of the Society of Cinematologists 3 (1963): 73, originally presented at the first national meeting of the Society of Cinematologists, New York University, April 11– 12, 1960. 11. Gessner, “Cinema and Scholarship,” 73–74. 12. François Truffaut, “Nouvelle Vague,” Truffaut par Truffaut, offered online as part of a virtual exhibition by the Cinémathèque française, https://www .cinematheque .fr/ expositions -virtuelles/ truffaut -par -truffaut/ index .php ?id = 5. Translation mine.

notes to pages 14 0 –148

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13. François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” Cahiers du Cinéma 31 (January 1954). 14. “Vive Lillian Gish!,” manuscript for an article published in Cinématographe 93 (October 1983), posted as a manuscript for sale on the website Written Traces, https://www.traces-ecrites.com/document/manuscrit-dun-bel-article-de-francois -truffaut-sur-lillian-gish/. Translation mine. 15. The roots of Godard’s attribution of this phrase to Griffith are carefully traced by Roland-François Lack on his Cine-Tourist website, https://www.thecinetourist .net/a-girl-and-a-gun.html. 16. Frederick James Smith, “The Public and the Photoplay,” Shadowland, May 1922, 47, 57, reprinted on the Cine-Tourist website maintained by Roland-François Lack, https://www.thecinetourist.net/griffith-shadowland-may-1922.html. 17. Haden Guest, “Experimentation and Innovation in Three American Film Journals of the 1950s,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 243. 18. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Minstrel Show ‘Othello’: Radical Makeup Marks Olivier’s Interpretation,” New York Times, February 2, 1966. 19. It is likely that Olivier’s Britishness made a difference in how his stereotyping was received. There is a long history of non-American whites being given something of a pass to borrow and interpret Black American culture in ways that would be read much less forgivingly if non-Black Americans did the same thing; one example is the British Invasion of the 1960s. 20. The last forceful academic defense of Griffith that tries to excuse the film’s racism is by Arthur Lennig, in “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, no. 2 (2004): 117–141. 21. Allyson Nadia Field, “Rebellious Unlearning: UCLA Project One Films (1967–1978),” in L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, ed. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 90. 22. Lewis Jacobs, The Movies as Medium (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). 23. Robert Gessner, The Moving Image: A Guide to Cinematic Literacy (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970). 24. Peter Cowie, Seventy Years of Cinema (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1969), 40. 25. William Kuhn, Movies in America (South Brunswick, NJ: A.  S. Barnes, 1972), 32. 26. Thomas Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation,” The Historian 25, no. 3 (May 1963): 344–362. 27. Thomas R. Cripps, review of Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By.  .  . (New York: Knopf, 1968), and Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), Cinema Journal 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 51. 28. Cripps, review of Gish, 52. 29. Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” Cinema Journal 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1972): 27. 30. James Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (London: Routledge, 1992), 1.

214 notes to pages 148–154 Snead’s list of books was Edward Mapp’s Blacks in American Films (1972), Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (1973), James P. Murray’s To Find an Image (1973), Gary Null’s Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures (1975), Daniel Leab’s From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (1975), and Thomas Cripps’s Slow Fade to Black (1977). To this list Jacqueline Stewart has added Lindsay Patterson’s Black Films and Film-Makers (1975) and Jim Pines’s Blacks in Films: A Survey of Racial Themes and Images in the American Film (1975). Stewart also notes that books in this style extend on either side of the 1970s, and include Peter Noble’s The Negro in Film (1948), V.  J Jerome’s The Negro in Hollywood Films (1950), and James R. Nesteby’s Black Images in American Films, 1896–1954: The Interplay between Civil Rights and Film Culture (1982). Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 28, 258 n12. 31. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 221. 32. Monaco, How to Read a Film, 221. 33. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14–26. Originally written in 1973 and published in Screen in 1975. 34. See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). It is revealing that Cusset’s book was originally published in France in 2003, making clear that the influence of these French critics in America was distinct enough that it had to be explained to a French academic audience. 35. Christian Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema (from Film Language),” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 70. 36. Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema,” 70. 37. James Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 38, Kindle edition. 38. Snead, White Screens/Black Images, 38–39. 39. Snead, White Screens/Black Images, 41. 40. Snead, White Screens/Black Images, 43. 41. Snead, White Screens/Black Images, 43–44. 42. Snead, White Screens/Black Images, 44. 43. Clyde Taylor, “The Re-birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 13 (1991): 12–30. Taylor’s essay was reprinted in Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); page numbers cited here reference that version of the essay. 44. Taylor, “The Re-birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” 15. 45. Taylor, “The Re-birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” 17. 46. Taylor, “The Re-birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” 35. 47. Although it does not fit neatly into the narrative of this chapter, I would be remiss if I did not mention Michael Rogin’s often-cited article “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” which first appeared in his book Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and

notes to pages 154–163

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other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 190–235. Like Snead and Taylor, Rogin connects The Birth of a Nation to much of 1970s and 1980s film theory, including work on gender and psychoanalysis. He also excels at connecting Birth and other media to the political environment of the 1980s. 48. Sumiko Higashi, introduction to an “In Focus” section of Cinema Journal: “Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (August 2004): 94–100. 49. John L. Fell, “Introduction,” in Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1. 50. Fell, “Introduction,” 1. 51. Barry Salt, “The Early Development of Film Form,” in Fell, Film Before Griffith, 284–298. 52. Alan Sokal, “Revelation: A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, ed. the editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 51. 53. Janny Scott, “Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly,” New York Times, May 18, 1996, 1. 54. This entire section summarizes and simplifies a complex argument. For more detail, see Paul McEwan, “Knowledge and the Limits of Postmodernism: Social Constructionism in Film and Media Studies” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2003). 55. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–248. 56. D.  W. Griffith, “How I Made The Birth of a Nation,” in Focus on D. W. Griffith, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 41. 57. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 185.

chapter 6: race, reception, and remix in the new millennium 1. See the “Share Her Journey” program, Toronto International Film Festival, https://www.tiff.net/shareherjourney?tab=numbers. 2. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, “Inequality in 1300 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2019,” September 2020, http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inequality_1300 _popular_films_09-08-2020.pdf. 3. Charlie Savage, “Report Examines Civil Rights during Bush Years,” New York Times, December 2, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/us/politics /03rights.html. 4. I ended an earlier book on The Birth of a Nation (London: BFI Classics, 2015) with the rosy image of Barack Obama watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln at a special White House screening, which made a nice contrast to the stories of Woodrow Wilson watching The Birth of a Nation there a century earlier. In an otherwise positive review of my book in Sight & Sound (October 2015), Pamela Hutchinson critiqued the inclusion of this anecdote as overly optimistic. She was right and I was naive.

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n otes to pages 164–179

5. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 13 (2013), https://www.supremecourt.gov /opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf. 6. P.  R. Lockhart, “How Shelby County v. Holder Upended Voting Rights in America,” Vox.com, June 25, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019 / 6/ 25/ 18701277/ shelby -county -v -holder -anniversary -voting -rights -suppression -congress. 7. Statement by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, June 25, 2013, archived at https://perma.cc/SL53-AFSG. 8. Owen Gleiberman, “Film Review: Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Death of a Nation,’” Variety, July 30, 2018. 9. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 29. 10. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 31. 11. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 31–32. 12. Michael Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 1. 13. Gillespie, Film Blackness, 2. 14. Gillespie, Film Blackness, 2. 15. The best-known example is Greg Gillis, who performed for years as Girl Talk. See Robert Levine, “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law,” New York Times, August 6, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/arts/music/07girl .html. 16. Francesca Coppa, ‘A Brief History of Media Fandom,’ in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 41–59. 17. All interview quotations are from an author interview with DJ Spooky on June 13, 2004. 18. Figures from imdbpro.com, March 11, 2019. 19. A. O. Scott, “Review: In Nate Parker’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ Must-See and Won’t-See Collide,” New York Times, October 6, 2016. 20. Jada Yuan, “The Birth of a Nation’s Nate Parker on Directing the Biggest Movie in Sundance History and Its Message,” Vulture, January 28, 2016, https:// www.vulture.com/2016/01/nate-parker-the-birth-of-a-nation-dw-griffith.html. 21. Bill Desowitz, “‘The Birth of a Nation’: How Mel Gibson Helped Nate Parker,” Indiewire, October 6, 2016, https://www.indiewire.com/2016/10/nate -parker-the-birth-of-a-nation-edit-mel-gibson-ed-zwick-1201733480/. 22. For a sample, see Noel Murray, “The Flaws and Fury of The Birth of a Nation,” The Week, October 7, 2016, https://theweek.com/articles/652956/flaws-fury -birth-nation; Peter Bradshaw, “The Birth of a Nation Review—Biblical Passion and Cheesy Emotion,” The Guardian, December 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian .com/film/2016/dec/08/the-birth-of-a-nation-review-nat-turner-nate-parker; Tara Brady, “The Birth of a Nation Review: Decently Entertaining, but Far from Revolutionary,” Irish Times, December 8, 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture / film/ the -birth -of -a -nation -review -decently -entertaining -but -far -from -revolutionary-1.2895176. 23. See, for example, Christopher Orr, “Grappling with The Birth of a Nation,” The Atlantic, October 7, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment

notes to pages 179–191

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/archive/2016/10/grappling-with-the-birth-of-a-nation/503246/; Richard Brody, “The Cinematic Merits and Flaws of Nate Parker’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” New Yorker, October 9, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the -cinematic-merits-and-flaws-of-nate-parkers-the-birth-of-a-nation. 24. Vinson Cunningham, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Isn’t Worth Defending,” New Yorker, October 3, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/the -birth-of-a-nation-isnt-worth-defending. 25. Vivian Sobchack, “Surge and Splendor: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 26. 26. Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas, “Thinking about the Power of Images: An Interview with Spike Lee,” Cineaste 26, no. 2 (January 2001): 4–9; reprinted in Spike Lee Interviews, ed. Cynthia Fuchs (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), 202–203. 27. Marlaine Glicksman, “Lee Way,” Film Comment 22 (September/October 1986): 46–49; reprinted in Fuchs, Spike Lee Interviews, 3–12; “Spike Lee Shows NYU the Answer,” episode of ARTST TLK, Reserve Channel, 2013, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=4q5PX4joOyg. 28. This phrase originated in the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard in 1995 and was widely adopted across the political spectrum during crime debates of this period. For a history, see Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hancock, “How the Media Created the ‘Superpredator’ Myth That Harmed a Generation of Black Youth,” NBC News / The Marshall Project, November 20, 2020, https://www.nbcnews .com/ news/ us -news/ analysis -how -media -created -superpredator -myth -harmed -generation-black-youth-n1248101. 29. Ron Stallworth, Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime (New York: Flatiron Books, 2014), 129. 30. Ross Douthat, “‘12 Years a Slave’ and Our Hopeless Conversation about Race,” New York Times Opinion blog, December 4, 2013, https://douthat.blogs .nytimes.com/2013/12/04/12-years-a-slave-and-our-hopeless-conversation-about -race/. 31. The Task Force on the Gish Film Theater Report, Bowling Green State University, April 2019, https://www.bgsu.edu/president/the-task-force-on-the-gish -film-theater.html. I should note that the Task Force report cited some of my earlier work and statements on The Birth of a Nation as background for its decision. The arguments cited were about the ingrained racism of the film. 32. Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 162–163. 33. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 160. 34. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 134. 35. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 165. 36. Marc Fisher, “Why Those Confederate Soldier Statues Look a Lot Like Their Union Counterparts,” Washington Post, August 18, 2017. 37. “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html. 38. The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, The 1776 Report (January 2021), 15.

Index

Note: BoN is the abbreviation for The Birth of a Nation; numerals in italics indicate figures Abbott, John, 98–99 Abel, Richard, 16 Abraham Lincoln (film), 92, 108–109 Abu Ghraib prison, 172 Academy of Motion Pictures: founding of, 10; #oscarssowhite campaign, 175 Acland, Charles, 124–125 Addams, Jane, 49 African Americans: African origins, 176–177; audiences and, 19–20; critics foresee BoN trouble, 52; exploitation and slavery, 159; film students and BoN, 145; living with unjust memorials, 187–190; military service and, 95; Mrs. Swift’s assumptions, 120; public voice of, 66; and remix culture, 169–174; representative images of, 165–168, 189; response to BoN, 3, 39–40, 66–69; segregation, 19; Senegalese troops in Germany, 79–80; sins transferred to, 192; symbolic victories, 188–190; ugly message of BoN, 46–50; “uplift cinema,” 67. See also racism; slavery Agee, James, Agee on Film, 110–111 AGE Film Society, Toronto, 132 Aitken, Harry, 13, 15; Breen’s letter to, 122, 123; Klan and, 53; 1920s revival ads, 71; Ohio ban and, 78–79; sound release, 92 Aitken, Roy, 13, 15, 92 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 118; Feiner v. New York, 121–123 American Museum of Natural History, 97 Anderson, Lindsay, 131

The Answer (film), 145, 175, 179–180 Arbery, Ahmaud, murder of, 195–196 Arnold, Martin, 174 Arsenal (film), 102 Art Film Company, 20–21, 21 Art of the Moving Picture (Lindsay), 46–50 Atlanta Constitution, 54 audiences: being lied to, 152–153; emotional impact on, 46, 192–193; filmic communication, 25, 76; laughing at MOMA screenings, 98–99; nickelodeon era, 19; racist attitudes within, 6; racist harm to, from BoN, 41–43; “respectable,” 19; Soviet, 81–82 “Austin Stoneman” (acted by Ralph Lewis): based on Thaddeus Stevens, 29; character of, 34–35; film club notes on, 129 The Avenging Conscience (film), 91 Baldwin, Alec, 181 Balio, Tino, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 3 Bamboozled (film), 180–181 banned screenings. See censorship and bans Barclay, Florence, 38 Barry, Iris: on disruptive MOMA audience, 98–99; foreign films and, 101–105; on Griffith and BoN, 102–105; on racism, 105–106 Barthelmess, Richard, 62, 64 Barthes, Roland, 152 The Battle of Elderbrush Gulch (film), 22 The Battle of Tsaritsyn (film), 82 The Battleship Potemkin (film), 111

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Belafonte, Harry, 182–183 “Ben Cameron” (acted by Henry Walthall), 34–35; Klan and, 48; vow of, 181–182 Berg, A. Scott, 108 Biden, Joseph, 191 Biograph Films, 22 The Birth of a Nation (film, 1915), critical responses to: assessments at Griffith’s death, 113–114; Barry’s notes on, 105–106; in BlacKkKlansman, 182, 182–184; changing perceptions of, 12, 114–115; contemporary responses to, 175–191; critical reviews and reactions, 55–56, 74, 107; defenders of, 120–121; film clubs and, 117, 126, 128–133; film studies context, 4–5, 140, 145, 182; first reviews and reception, 35–39; ignoring racism of, 143–145, 195–198; Lindsay’s analysis of, 47–50; MOMA Film Library, 95–102, 104–106; multiple controversies, 136–137; as museum piece, 119, 162, 172; remixed, 170–173; Truffaut on, 141 The Birth of a Nation (film, 1915), film techniques: battle scenes, 39; as entertainment, 5–6; Intolerance and, 59–61; musical score, 33–34; screenplay, lack of, 115–116; synopsis of, 34–35; written texts of, 38 The Birth of a Nation (film, 1915), political and social aspects of: African American response to, 3, 66–69; blackface and, 172–173; as bound up with racism, 192; campaigns against, 6; as cultural history, 1, 127, 134; “evil effects of,” 65; film as art defense, 41–42; as history, 4, 8–10, 28–30, 54, 69–70, 119–120, 129–130, 151–152; history of discrimination and, 186; lessons from, 192–198; New Era/“Hampton Epilogue,” 66–67; as “original sin,” 193–195; power of film’s message, 46–50; racist content of, 5;

Reconstruction ideology of, 190; as reliving the Confederacy, 56–57; resurgence of Klan and, 183; social changes and, 110; social constructionism, 157–161; symbolism of white supremacy in, 150; voting rights and, 164; white critics defense of, 42–45 The Birth of a Nation (film, 1915), release and screenings: advertising campaigns, 45, 71–73, 72, 73; debut in Atlanta, 52; decrease in showings, 73–74, 77–78; “discovery” by later audiences, 183–184; drops in MOMA lending, 100; in France, 79–80; government screenings, 15; long run, 84; 1930s rerelease, 9–10; release and marketing, 32, 33; sound version, 92–95, 93, 126 The Birth of a Nation (film, 2016), 175–179, 177, 178 Bitzer, G. W., 22 BlacKkKlansman (film), 175; BoN references, 181–184; Charlottesville ending, 185–186; then and now, 184–185, 197–198 The Black Klansman (Stallworth), 183 Blue, Monte, 76 Body and Soul (film), 67 Booth, John Wilkes, 30 Bordwell, David, The Rhapsodes, 110–112 Boston Evening Transcript, 64 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2 Bowling Green State University, Gish Film Theater controversy, 185–189 Bowser, Pearl, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (with Gaines and Musser), 3 Brabin, Charles, Driven, 88 Braveheart (film), 178 Braver-Mann, Barnet G., 98–99 Breen, Joseph, 122, 123 Breil, Joseph, score for BoN, 33–34 Broken Blossoms (film): Griffith promotes, 104; reception of, 62–65 Brook, Peter, 129

in d e x Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Schulberg interview, 96–97 Brown, Foxy, 174 Burnett, Charles, Nat Turner, 179 Burstyn v. Wilson, 7, 78 Bush, George W., 162–163 The Butterflies (film), 16, 17 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film), 86, 98, 111 Cabiria (film), 108 Caddoo, Cara, 19 Cahiers du Cinéma: auteur theory and, 140; Europe vs. Hollywood, 125 Cameo Theatre, 89, 89 Cameron, James, Titanic, 29 Carr, Henry C., 74; on Intolerance, 61–62 Catholics and the Klan, 95 Celestin, Jean, Birth of a Nation (2016), 175 censorship and bans: appeal to Atlanta, 54; Burstyn v. Wilson, 78; Chicago, 77–78; freedom of speech defense, 60; Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 13–14, 15; NAACP campaign and, 49, 66, 67; in Ohio, 53, 78; in Syracuse, 118 Chaplin, Charlie: audience enjoyment of, 88; as auteur, 113; as classic, 111; founding of UA, 10, 62, 63; and silent films, 142, 171 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally, 184, 185 Chicago ban on BoN, 39, 50 The Chicago Defender, “The Dirt of a Nation,” 39 Chicago Evening Post, on Broken Blossoms, 64 civil rights movement, 109; The Birth of a Nation and, 144; breadth of political beliefs in, 136; political parties switch on, 164; seen as the past, 195; The 1776 Report, 190–191; and symbols of racial progress, 188–189; talk versus action, 162–163; and voting rights, 163–164, 165 Clair, René, The Italian Straw Hat, 111

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The Clansman (Dixon): BoN ’s release title, 32, 33; historical characters and events, 29–30; as reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 114; stage and film, 27–28 Clark, Larry, 145 Claudy, C. H., 18–19 Clifton, Elmer. See “Phil Stoneman” Clune’s Auditorium, 33 Collier’s magazine, Simmons interview, 52–53 Collins, Morgan, 78 Columbus (GA) Ledger, on MOMA and Intolerance, 97–98 communism as tarring brush, 116 “The Congo” (Lindsay), 49–50 Connor, Bruce, 170, 174 Constitution newspaper, 57 Continental Film Group, Australia, 132–133 Cooper, Judge William F., 50 Cooper, Miriam. See “Margaret Cameron” Coppa, Francesca, 170 A Corner in Wheat (film), 150 Costello, Frank J., 118, 121, 122 Cowie, Peter, Seventy Years of Cinema, 146 Crafton, Donald, 154 Cripps, Thomas, “The Reaction of the Negro to . . . Birth of a Nation,” 146–147 Crowther, Bosley: on blackface Olivier, 143; on Soviet films, 101–102 culture/cultural capital, 2; European high art, 16–17; film clubs and, 125–126; growth of film’s place in, 2–3; low and high, 12 Da 5 Bloods (film), 184 Daughters of the Confederacy, 54 Davis, Angela, 174 Day for Night (film), 141, 186 Death of a Nation (film), 164 Decherney, Peter: Hollywood and the Culture Elite, 2–3; on MOMA films, 100, 101–102

222

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“The Degeneracy of the Moving Picture Theater” (Walton), 20 Delluc, Louis, 80 DeMille, Cecil B., 74; on Griffith, 62; Griffith (D. W.) Lifetime Achievement Award, 119; Hollywood style, 88, 111; spectacles, 134 Dickens, Charles: Eisenstein on, 83; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 38 Directors Guild of America (DGA), 119, 186 Dix, Dorothy, 70 “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend” (Merritt), 147 Dixon, Thomas, Jr.: BoN scenarios and, 115; The Clansman, 27–28, 29; death of, 113; foresaw controversy, 40; government screenings, 15; against intermarriage, 187; Klan costumes, 53; opening night appearances, 37; racism of, 48–50, 113–114, 196; reactions to, 39; reverses the victims, 190 Django Unchained (film), 178 DJ Spooky (Paul Miller), 170–173 Do the Right Thing (film), 180, 181 Douthat, Ross, 185 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, Arsenal, 102 Dramatic Mirror, Intolerance review, 61 Driven (film), 88 Druggan, Charles Sumner, 78 D’Souza, Dinesh, Death of a Nation, 164 Duke, David, 184 Dunning, William A., Reconstruction thesis, 8, 119 Duvernay, Ava, 13th, 186 D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (Stokes), 3 “The Early Development of Film Form” (Salt), 155 Eaton, Walter Prichard, 43 education, 16mm film projection and, 124–125

Educational Screen periodical, on Intolerance, 74 Eisenstein, Sergei: denounces racism, 83; “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Today,” 83; Griffith and, 80–83; MOMA controversy and, 102–103 Elliott Film Corporation of Minnesota, 71 Elmira Community Motion Picture Council, 120 “Elsie Stoneman” (acted by Lillian Gish): character of, 34–35; Lincoln’s assassination and, 29–30, 30; rescued by Klan, 48 Epoch Productions: marketing campaign, 45; sues Chicago, 77–78; tries to overturn ban, 53 Essex Film Club (Nutley, NJ), 117, 117, 126–127 European film industry: as artistic, 84, 85–87, 112, 125; exoticism of, 87; German expressionism, 86; rise in the US, 123–124 European Graduate School, 170 Everett, Anna, Returning the Gaze, 20 Experimental Cinema, 106 Fairbanks, Douglas, 10, 62, 63 Famous Players, 91 Farber, Manny, 110 Feiner, Irving, 121 Feiner v. New York, 121 Fell, John F., Film Before Griffith, 155 feminist criticism: film studies and, 148–149, 156 Feocco, Frank, 120 Ferguson, Otis, 110 Field, Allyson Nadia, Uplift Cinema, 3, 67 Fields, W. C., 79 film as art: birth of, 3; budgets and, 32; collaborative process and, 111–112; compared to theater, 24–28; context and, 137; craftsmanship and, 31–32; defense of BoN, 41; defining art, 115–116; development of idea, 6–8; dilemma for Black critics, 193; di-

in d e x rectors as creators, 112; early ideas of, 13–21; European culture and, 16–17, 85–87, 100–105; freedom of expression and, 7–8; Griffith and, 79; Griffith’s campaign for, 22–28, 36, 37, 52, 58; historical realism and, 28–30; Lindsay’s analysis of, 46–50; low and high culture, 12; MOMA’s emphasis, 101–105; moral contexts of, 135; nostalgic interest, 10–11; rising status of, 110; seriousness, 30–31; Supreme Court ruling on, 13–15; worthy of academic study, 138–139 Film Before Griffith (Fell), 155 Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Gillespie), 167–168 film clubs: and auteurism, 142–143; British, 116, 128–130, 132; Canadian, 128, 130–131; Griggs’s records of, 116–118; high and low culture, 125–126; importance of, 134–135; notes about Griffith films, 128–133; 16mm film and, 124–125; worldwide, 116 film d’art (term), 16 film history and studies: academic development of, 137–139; auteurism, 142–143; BoN as subject of, 115, 127–128; concept of, 84–85; context and racism, 143–145; critical nostalgia, 87; dilemma for Black critics, 193; establishment in culture, 2; feminism, 156; film clubs and, 134–135; French theory, 156; Griffith’s context in, 4, 85; libraries of film, 89, 95–96; masterpiece approach, 139–140; and “the master’s tools,” 184; midcentury French theory, 149–150; moral contexts, 127–128, 135; New Criticism, 144, 148, 156; postmodernism, 156; publications in civil rights era, 145–156; realistic and fantastic, 152–153; realizing social effects, 148–149; on representing Black people, 165–169;

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and rising status of film, 110; silent films and, 171; and social constructionism, 156–161; symbols and codes, 150–151; Taylor on passive racism of, 153–154 film industry: as a collaborative process, 111–112; financing, 91–92; foreign films and, 123–124; Hollywood system, 9–10; moral responsibility of, 11; in nickelodeon era, 19; Production Code, 123; representing African Americans, 165–168; sin of racism in, 193–195; spectacles, 15; technological progress in, 10; “uplift cinema,” 67. See also Hollywood Film Language (Metz), 149–150 film techniques and technology: color film, 63; craftsmanship and, 31–32; emotional impact of, 46; filmic communication, 76; Griffith and, 22–23, 106–107; historical details, 29–30; Micheaux’s interspersions, 69–70; montage, 83; moral context of BoN, 127–128; projection speeds, 98–99; rapid developments in, 88–89; shifting scenes, 38; 16mm and amateur screenings, 124–125; sound, 92, 94; spectacles, 39, 58, 60, 96–97, 134; storytelling time and unity, 74–75; studies of Griffith, 146; symbolic objects, 134; theater and, 26–27, 44–45; then and now together, 184–185 film theaters. See theaters, film Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Gaines), 3 “Flora Cameron” (acted by Mae Marsh): character of, 34–35; chases Gus, 174; Gus chases, 36, 171, 181 Floyd, George, 11 The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Balio), 3 Fox Searchlight, Parker’s Birth of a Nation, 175

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France: BoN in, 79–80; Cahiers du Cinéma, 112, 125; “French theory,” 149; Griffith’s reputation in, 193; Truffaut on New Wave, 140–141 freedom of expression: balancing with racism, 105–106; communism and, 116; dilemma for Black critics, 193; Feiner decision, 118–123; Griffith’s defense, 60; popular press debate, 137; US Supreme Court decisions, 7. See also censorship and bans Gaines, Jane, 154; Fire and Desire, 3; Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (Bowser and Gaines), 3; on response to BoN, 67 Gally, D. B., 20–21, 21 Germany: BoN and, 79–80; German films, 89; Senegalese troops in, 79–80 Gessner, Robert, 142: film studies, 139; The Moving Image, 145 Gibson, Mel, Braveheart, 178 Gillespie, Michael, Film Blackness, 167–168 Gish, Dorothy, 85; career of, 186; Gish Film Theater controversy, 185; Truffaut admires, 141 Gish, Lillian, 85; Broken Blossoms, 62, 64; career of, 186; defends Griffith, 186–187; on Eisenstein, 80–81; Gish Film Theater controversy, 185–189; Intolerance, 74–75, 77, 78; life connection to BoN, 74; The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 146–147, 187; on Soviet audiences, 81–82; Truffaut admires, 141. See also “Elsie Stoneman” Gish Film Theater controversy, 185–189 Glory (film), 178 Godard, Jean-Luc, 141 Golat, Grace, 127–128 Goldwater, Barry, 136 Gone with the Wind (film), 181 Gould, Symon, International Film Arts Guild and, 88–89

Grau, Robert, The Theatre of Science, 25–28 The Greater Amusements (trade paper), 71, 72 The Great Train Robbery (film), 88 Grier, Pam, 174 Griffith, Albert Grey (brother of D. W.), 104 Griffith, David W.: ad in Reel Life, 26; admiration for, 43; Aitkens and, 15; “balanced” portrayal of race, 172; battles and spectacles, 29, 39, 58, 60, 96–97; “blood on his hands,” 76; claims historical truth, 69–70, 119; competing with European films, 87; context in film history, 4, 85, 111, 112, 140–145; context in film studies, 145–156; death of, 113–114; defends film as history, 8–10; Dixon and, 50; film as art campaign, 7–8, 22–28, 36, 37, 52, 58, 79, 129, 168; and founding of UA, 62, 63; Hollywood style, 9–10, 87, 88; intentions of, 1–2; Jacob’s critique of, 106–109; Klan and, 52–54; lack of self-reflection, 90; letter to Rockefeller, 103–104; lying to the audience, 152–153; memorial plan, 119; MOMA retrospective, 100–101, 103–106; notion of film library, 95–96; Ohio ban and, 78–79; oldfashioned storytelling, 192; opening night appearances, 37; photograph of, 85; power of message, 46–50; pretensions of, 75–76; racism of, 114, 143–145, 196; reaction to controversy, 40–41, 59–60, 91–92, 187; realism as artistic, 28–30; reception abroad, 79–83; retrospectives of, 89, 89, 91; social constructionism, 157–161; storytelling time and unity, 74–75; sues Jolson, 89–90; symbols and codes, 150–151; takes self seriously, 130; technique and technical achievements, 83, 155; waning of career, 84, 109. See also The Birth of a Nation (film)

in d e x Griffith, David W., other films by: Abraham Lincoln, 92, 108; The Avenging Conscience, 91; The Battle of Elderbrush Gulch, 22; Broken Blossoms, 62–65, 104; A Corner in Wheat, 150; Home Sweet Home, 22–24; Judith of Bethulia, 22; Man’s Genesis, 47; The Massacre, 22; Orphans of the Storm, 76; The Sorrows of Satan, 89–90, 91; The Struggle, 108; That Royale Girl, 79; Way Down East, 104. See also Intolerance (film) Griffith, Richard, 102 Griffith (D. W.) Lifetime Achievement Award, 119–120 Griffith in Context: A Multimedia Exploration (Strain and VanHoosierCary), 174 Griggs, John: film club records, 116–118; on progress since BoN, 127; shows BoN, 126 Guest, Haden, 142 Gunning, Tom, 154; early film spectacle, 15; on Griffith’s discourse, 4 “Gus” (acted by Walter Long), chases Flora, 36, 171, 174, 181; death of, 179 Guzman, Tony, 85–86 Hackett, Francis, 49 Hall, Mordaunt, on older films, 87–88, 91 “Hampton Epilogue,” 66–67, 118 Hampton Institute, 67 Haraway, Donna, 156, 159–160 Harris, Christopher, Reckless Eyeballing, 173–174 “Heard on the Left” (Reisel), 102–103 Heyer, Heather, 184, 185, 197 Higashi, Sumiko, 154 historical films, 4; as artistic seriousness, 28–30; BoN as, 151–152; context, 188; emotional content, 192–193; feel of eyewitness, 70; Griffith’s defense and, 8–10; Intolerance, 76–77; Nat Turner films,

225

175–179; realism and, 160–161; Sobcheck on now and then, 179; then and now, 197–198 history: “from below,” 156; Lost Cause ideology, 150; relativism and, 159; The 1776 Report versus The 1619 Project, 190; unjust memorials, 187–190. See also slavery; United States History of the American People (Wilson), 54, 78 Hollywood: BoN as “original sin,” 194–195; budgets and, 32; ethnicity of directors, 162; European films and, 85–87, 125; Griffith and DeMille’s style, 111; and historical accuracy, 157–158; hold on theaters by, 124; language of, 46; liberalized Production Code, 123; lying to the audience, 153; male dominated, 162; place in culture, 2–3; rise of studio system, 9–10 Hollywood and the Culture Elite (Decherney), 2–3 The Homesteader (film), 67 Home Sweet Home (film), 24 How to Read a Film (Monaco), 148 Hulfish, David S., “Art in Moving Pictures,” 17–18 Huston, Walter, 94 immigrants: in audiences, 19; as Klan targets, 95 Intolerance (film), 4; as art, 35; critical views of, 74–77, 80, 107–108; DeMille on, 62; film club notes on, 132, 133–134; as history, 76–77; influence in Russia, 80–83; intertitles and, 38; MOMA Film Library, 97–100; moving away from theater, 28; Oxford film club notes on, 129–130; reception of, 58–62; as response to critics, 59–61, 187, 193; revisions of, 90–91, 99; storytelling time and unity, 74–75; symbolic objects, 134 The Italian Straw Hat (film), 111

226

in dex

Jacobs, Lewis: Experimental Cinema, 106; The Movies as Medium, 145; The Rise of American Film, 106–109; The Rise of the American Film, 111 Jannings, Emil, 90 Jews and the Klan, 95 JFK (film), 30 Johnson, Julian, 58–61, 91 Jolson, Al, 90 Judith of Bethulia (film), 22 Keaton, Buster, 171 Kelly, Anthony P., 90 Kepley, Vance, 82 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 136, 191 Kino (Leyda), 81 Klein, Yves, 31 Kracauer, Siegfried, 152–153 Kuhn, William, Movies in America, 146 Ku Klux Klan: array of targets, 95; BlacKkKlansman, 181–184; claims about in BoN, 126; costumes of, 53; effect in film of, 48; film club notes on, 133; nostalgic interview, 57; portrayal in BoN, 35, 53, 94, 177; resurgence of, 52–54, 57, 183, 183 Kuleshov, Lev, 82 Lanphier, Marion, “Epic Possibilities of the Film,” 74–75 The Last Laugh (film), 90 Latour, Bruno: second thoughts, 161; social constructionism, 158 Lee, Robert E. (“Bob”), 117, 127 Lee, Spike: The Answer, 145, 175, 179–180; BlacKkKlansman, 175, 197–198; Da 5 Bloods, 184; Do the Right Thing, 180, 181; Malcolm X, 184; the master’s tools, 184–185; references BoN, 181–184; student objection to BoN, 145, 179–180, 182 Lenin, Vladimir Ilych, 81 Lennard, Katherine, 53 Leroy, Mervyn, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 100

Lewis, Ralph. See “Austin Stoneman” Leyda, Jay: fired from MOMA, 103; Kino, 81; notes for Arsenal, 102–103; Soviet films and MOMA, 101–103 Liberian transportation scheme, 37 Lincoln, Abraham: assassination in BoN, 29–30, 35, 55, 95; claims about in BoN, 126; Liberian idea and, 37; Mrs. Swift’s assumptions, 120; Trump and, 164 Lindsay, Vachel, 52; Art of the Moving Picture, 46–50; on BoN, 46–50; “The Congo,” 49–50 literature, films based on, 14–15 Little Theatre Movement, 6, 77, 97; European “high art,” 86–87; origins of, 85–86 London Film Festival, 2016 Birth of a Nation, 175 London Film Society, 116 Lorde, Audre, 175, 184 Love Ye One Another (film), 17 Lubitsch, Ernst, 88–89 Lumière Brothers, 152 Macgowan, Kenneth, 65 MacMahon, Henry, 43–45 Malcolm X, 136 Malcolm X (film), 184 Man’s Genesis (film), 47 “Margaret Cameron” (acted by Miriam Cooper), 34–35 Markey, Frank, 119 Marks, Martin, 33 Marsh, Mae. See “Flora Cameron” The Massacre (film), 22 McIntosh, Ned, 55–56 McQueen, Steve, 12 Years a Slave (film), 178 Méliès, Georges, 150, 152 Merritt, Russell: “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 147; on revisions of Intolerance, 90–91, 99 Metropolitan Museum, New York, 97 Metz, Christian, Film Language, 149–150

in d e x Micheaux, Oscar, 3, 168; Body and Soul, 67; The Homesteader, 67; response to BoN, 67–70, 175; The Symbol of the Unconquered, 67; techniques and truth, 69–70; Within Our Gates, 67–69, 152 Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Stewart), 3, 19–20, 166–167 Miles, A. N., 119 Miller, Paul (DJ Spooky), BoN remix, 170–173 A Million and One Nights (Ramsaye), 76–77 The Miracle (film), 123 Monaco, James, How to Read a Film, 148 Morey, Anne, 87 Morrison, Toni, 19–20 Motion Picture Classic: on Broken Blossoms, 63, 65; on color film, 63 Motion Picture Magazine, 39 Motion Picture Story, 20–21, 21 The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Gish), 146–147, 187 The Movies as Medium (Jacobs), 145 Movies in America (Kuhn), 146 The Moving Image: A Guide to Cinematic Literacy (Gessner), 145 Moving Picture World: ads for The Butterflies, 16, 17; review of BoN, 36–37; review of Broken Blossoms, 63–64 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 149 Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Wasson), 3 Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 77; criticized as “too foreign,” 101–105; “D. W. Griffith: The Art of the Moving Picture,” 100; establishment of, 2, 89; film critics and, 111; film retrospectives, 6; founding of, 97; Intolerance and, 97–100; laughter at screenings, 98–99; program guides, 99–100; rise of local film

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clubs and, 116; as source for film studies, 138; Soviet films, 101–103 Musser, Charles, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (with Bowser and Gaines), 3 Mutual Film Corporation: ad campaign, 41; Griffith as artist, 22; Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 7, 13–14, 15, 123 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens), 38 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): campaign against BoN, 49, 66, 67, 128; intermarriage policy and, 114 National Board of Review, 142 National Council for Freedom from Censorship, 118 Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (film), 179 The New Era/“Hampton Epilogue,” 66–67, 118 The New Leader, 102 Newman, Barnett, 31 New York Age: reaction to first release, 39–40; Walton on racist propaganda, 20 New York Dramatic Mirror, 41, 107 New York Globe, NAACP and intermarriage, 114 New York Independent, Slosson’s review, 44 New York Times: BoN ads, 45; Crowther on MOMA library, 101–102; Pryor on film societies, 125–126; The 1619 Project, 190; Stern’s “Pioneer of Film Art,” 105 New York University, Spike Lee at, 145, 179–180 The Nickelodeon, Hulfish’s “Art in Moving Pictures,” 17–18; rebuting Claudy, 18–19 1917 (film), 70 Nixon (film), 30 Nixon, Richard, 164

228

in dex

Obama, Barack: racist backlash against, 163; as symbol of progress, 189 Olivier, Laurence, in blackface, 143 Orphans of the Storm (film), 76 Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (Bowser, Gaines, and Musser), 3 #oscarssowhite campaign, 175 A Pair of White Gloves (film), 16 Paramount (United States v. Paramount), 124 Parker, Nate, The Birth of a Nation, 175–179, 177, 178, 184 Pathé Frères, Love Ye One Another ad, 17 Peters, T. K., program notes for BoN, 126 “Phil Stoneman” (acted by Elmer Clifton), 30, 34–35 Photo Era, Claudy on film and art, 18 Photoplay: on Intolerance, 58– 62; mocks Griffith’s pretensions, 75–76 Pickford, Mary, 10, 62, 63 Picture-Play Magazine, review of Broken Blossoms, 63 “Pioneer of Film Art” (Stern), 105 Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White (Williams), 3 Poitier, Sidney, 143 Polan, Dana, 137–138 police violence, 188 Pollock, Jackson, 31 Pryor, Thomas, 125–126 racism: artistic freedom defense of, 40, 41–42, 105–106, 135; blackface as, 90, 143, 172–173; BoN as cultural history, 134; in Broken Blossoms, 62–63; codes and symbols, 150–151; conscious and unconscious, 4; content in BoN, 5, 41–42, 44, 186–187; continuing, 137; dampened in sound BoN, 93–95; decreasing acceptability, 110, 114–115, 134, 165; Dixon and, 48–50; Eisenstein denounces, 83; evolving views of,

11; failure of BoN added texts, 118; film club observations, 128–133; film industry’s sin of, 193–195; first reactions to BoN, 35–39; in France, 142; Hollywood and, 162; ignored or denied, 143–156, 195–198; intermarriage and, 55, 56, 114, 187; Jacob’s critique of BoN, 106–107; Jim Crow laws, 159; Lindsay’s analysis and, 48–50; lynchings and murder, 6, 35, 39, 76, 182–183; Micheaux portrays, 69; against Obama, 163; paternalistic, 186–187; political parties switch, 164; and race within culture, 4; Reconstruction theories and, 8–9; reversing the victims, 190; seeing the extent of, 185; segregated audiences, 19; Shakespeare and, 143; “stand your ground” laws, 195–196; stereotypes in film, 147–148; symbolic victories against, 188–190; then and now, 197–198; Trump and, 163–165; unseen by some, 42–43; voting rights and, 94, 163–164, 165; white privilege and, 66, 168–169. See also slavery; white supremacism Radio and Television Directors’ Guild, 119 Ramsaye, Terry, A Million and One Nights, 76–77 Rappaport, Michael, 180–181 “The Reaction of the Negro to . . . Birth of a Nation” (Cripps), 146–147 Rebirth of a Nation remix, 170–173 Reckless Eyeballing (remix film), 173–174 The Red and the Black (Stendhal), 1, 11 Reel Life: BoN ads in, 41; Griffith’s ad in, 26; on Griffith’s art, 22; on Home Sweet Home, 24 Reliance Motion Picture Company, 22–23 remix culture: and Abu Ghraib prison, 172; BoN remixed, 170–175; music in, 169–170; objects and images, 170; student project of, 174

in d e x Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism (Everett), 20 The Rhapsodes (Bordwell), 110–112 Rice, Elmer: Feiner v. New York, 121; on Syracuse ban, 118 Riesel, Victor, “Heard on the Left,” 102–103 The Rise of American Film (Jacobs), 106–109 Rockefeller, Nelson, Sr., MOMA Film Library and, 102–104 Rome, Open City (film), 123 Rosenblum, Steven, 178 Rossellini, Roberto: The Miracle, 123; Rome, Open City, 123 Rotha, Paul, The Film Till Now, 111 Russia/Soviet Union: Leyda and MOMA library, 101–103; reception of BoN, 80–83 Sadoul, Georges, 79–80 Salt, Barry, “The Early Development of Film Form,” 155 Saving Private Ryan (film), 70 Schickel, Richard: on “sophistication” in the New Yorker, 79; on sound release of BoN, 92 Schulberg, B. P., 96–97 science, social constructionism and, 156–157 Scott, A. O., 175 Screen Directors Guild, 119 Senegal, troops in Germany, 79–80 The 1776 Report, 190 Seventy Years of Cinema (Cowie), 146 sex in foreign films, 123–124 Shea, Jack, 120 Shelby County v. Holder, 56 “Silas Lynch” (acted by George Siegmann): attacked by Klan, 48; character of, 35 Simcovitch, Maxim, 82–83 Simmons, Williams Joseph, 52 The 1619 Project, 190 slavery: as central to US history, 190; Nat Turner’s rebellion, 175–179;

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The 1776 Report versus The 1619 Project, 190; and unjust memorials, 187–190. See also African Americans; racism; United States Slosson, E. E., 44–45 Smith, Frederick James: Broken Blossoms review, 63, 65; Intolerance review, 61 Snead, James: on images of Black people, 166; on racial stereotypes, 147–148; White Screens/Black Images, 150–151 Sobchack, Vivian, “Surge and Splendor,” 179 social constructionism: in film studies, 156–161; history and, 157–161; realism and, 160–161; relativism and, 159; science and, 156–157; Sokal hoax, 157, 158 Social Text, 157 Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL), 16 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 139 Society of Cinematologists, 139 Sokal, Alan, 157, 158 The Sorrows of Satan (film): lack of success, 89–90; studio meddling in, 91–92 Spooky, DJ. See DJ Spooky Stallworth, Ron, 184; Black Klansman, 183 Stardust Memories (Trope), 2–3 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), The Red and the Black, 1, 11 Stern, Seymour: argues for BoN ’s accuracy, 131; claim about Eisenstein, 82; criticism of MOMA, 102–103, 105; “Pioneer of Film Art,” 105; support from Griffith, 104 Stevens, Thaddeus, Stoneman character and, 29 Stewart, Jacqueline, Migrating to the Movies, 3, 19–20, 166–167 Stokes, Melvyn, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 3 Stone, Oliver: JFK, 30; Nixon, 30

230

in dex

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 49, 114 Strain, Ellen, Griffith in Context (with VanHoosier-Cary), 174 Stroheim, Erich von, 142 The Struggle (film), 108 Sundance Film Festival: female directors and, 162; Parker’s Birth of a Nation, 175 “Surge and Splendor: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic” (Sobchack), 179 Swift, Mrs. Charles W., 120 The Symbol of the Unconquered (film), 67 Tarantino, Quentin, Django Unchained, 178 Taylor, Clyde, 153–154 television as collaborative, 112 That Royale Girl (film), 79 theater and drama, film compared to, 24–28, 44–45 theaters, film: Hollywood loses hold on, 124; “respectable” audiences and, 19. See also audiences The Theatre of Science (Grau), 25–28 13th (documentary), 186 Titanic (film), 29 Toronto International Film Festival, 162 Trainor, Charles J., 78 Trope, Alison, Stardust Memories, 2–3 Truffaut, François: Day for Night, 141, 186; on New Wave and auteurs, 140–141 Trump, Donald: aftermath of presidency, 191; appeal to racism/xenophobia by, 163–165; on the Charlottesville rally, 184; Lincoln and, 164; Obama and, 163, 189; and The 1776 Project, 190–191 Turner, Nat: Burnett’s docudrama, 179; in Parker’s Birth of a Nation, 175–179 12 Years a Slave (film), 178 Tyler, Parker, 110, 111

Ukraine, Arsenal and, 102 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 49, 114 United Artists, founding of, 10, 62, 63, 196 United States: anti-immigration hysteria in, 54; BoN as history of, 54, 126; and Dunning theory, 78, 119; freedom of expression in, 7; glorification of Confederacy, 55; image and reality gap, 189; Jim Crow laws, 52, 159; Lost Cause ideology, 57, 150, 195; party switch on civil rights, 164; political unreality, 158, 161; Reconstruction views, 8–9, 35, 119, 154, 158–161, 186–187, 190; The 1776 Report and The 1619 Project, 190; slavery as central to, 190; voting rights, 94, 126, 163–164, 165, 196–197. See also African Americans; freedom of expression; Hollywood; racism; slavery; white supremacism United States Supreme Court: Burstyn v. Wilson, 78; Feiner v. New York, 118, 121; Mutual “film as business” decision (Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio), 7, 13–14, 15, 110, 192; Paramount decision (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.), 124; Shelby County v. Holder, 56, 163–164 University of California, Los Angeles, 145 University of Southern California, 139 Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film (Field), 3 VanHoosier-Cary, Gregory, Griffith in Context (with Strain), 174 vaudeville and film, 14 Vertov, Dziga, 81; The Battle of Tsaritsyn, 82; MOMA controversy and, 103 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey), 149 Vogel, Amos, 125 voting rights, 196–197; Shelby County v. Holder, 56

in d e x “Wade Cameron” (acted by George Berenger), 177 Walthall, Henry B.: in The Avenging Conscience, 91; praises films, 57–58. See also “Ben Cameron” Walton, Lester A., 39–40; “The Degeneracy of the Moving Picture Theater,” 20 Washington, Jesse, 182–183 Wasson, Haidee: disruptive MOMA audience, 99; Museum Movies, 3 Wayans, Damon, 180–181 Way Down East (film), 80, 104 Weber, Lois, 43 Wells, Ida B., 50 White, Hayden, 156 White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (Snead), 150–151 white supremacism: civil rights movement and, 136; Dixon as advocate of, 113–114; receptivity to BoN by

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adherents, 183; Reconstruction ideology, 8–9, 57, 158–159; as reliving the Confederacy, 56–57; reverses the victims, 190, 192; symbols in BoN, 150; then and now, 185. See also Ku Klux Klan; racism Wide Angle, 153–154 Williams, Linda, 154; Playing the Race Card, 3 Wilson, Woodrow, 57; comment on BoN, 108, 130, 151–152; cut from sound version, 95; History of the American People, 54, 78; Reconstruction and, 35, 158–159; shows BoN in White House, 164 Within Our Gates (film), 67–69, 152 Wright, Harold Bell, 38 YouTube, 170 Zurich, Jack, 122 Zwick, Ed, Glory, 178