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It
is nothing short of prodigious that the first of the world's great
films, the first mature achievement with motion photography, should have
had such intense dramatic volume and command of creative techniques as
to render it still considerable as a crowning example of cinema art.
Yet such is The Birth of a Nation, a massive drama of the
American Civil War, which D. W. Griffith produced in the summer of 1914
and released the following year.
The sudden emergence of this picture, with
all its chauvinistic fervor and power of intimate emotional persuasion,
was as though a superb symphony had burst from the muck of primitive
music within two decades after the invention of the horn. It was a
phenomenal occurrence that grandly displayed and dramatized the vast
potentialities of the new medium and the kind of influence it was to
have.
Up to the time of its appearance, the moving
pictures —or "flickers," as they were known—were mostly regarded as
optical freak shows, not far removed from the penny arcades.
Storytelling with this medium had barely gone beyond the basic stage of
exposing simple dramatic actions, such as the holdup of a train and the
attempted escape of the robbers, shown in
The Great
Train Robbery in 1903. Later
pictures, though progressively longer and more involved as to plot, were
still mechanical and impersonal in their portrayals of fictional
happenings. Film-makers were still fumbling for a grammar, a
system of pictorial harmonics, when The
Birth of a Nation came along.
When it did, with its massive construction
of visual rhythms and graphic displays of human feelings counterpointed
to action, it fairly smashed through an age-old dike of natural
confinement of the senses and inundated a new area of sensitivity.
Suddenly the mind was penetrated by optical stimuli that excited
imagination in a fresh and intoxicating way. People were simply bowled
over by its vivid pictorial sweep, its arrangements of personal
involvements, its plunging of the viewer into a sea of boiling
historical associations and its consistently engrossing length.
Where other films ran from forty to sixty minutes, this giant ran for
nigh on three hours!
Of course, Griffith did not come to it like
a genius sprung from a tree. He was a former stage actor and
playwright who had been directing pictures for the Biograph Company
since 1908. In six years of tireless production of several-score
one- and two-reel films, he had studiously found and developed many of
the now-commonplace ways of making moving pictures more flexible,
suggestive and articulate.
With his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, he had
learned to move the camera around, to shoot a scene from more than one
angle. He had worked out the use of the close-up to bring the
audience magnetically near to expressive faces and objects and thus
generate intimate emotional effects. Most important, he had
developed unusual ways of assembling separate shots and scenes to
construct a narrative continuity with cumulative force and clarity.
His Judith of Bethulia (1913), the first American film to run
four reels, presented an elaborate Biblical drama that clearly foretold
his epic taste.
Now a zeal to do something bigger and more
expressive than anything yet done (and this included the monumental
costume dramas Quo Vadis? and Cabiria from Italy)
possessed the aggressive director, and soon he found his story and his
theme in a popular novel, The Clansman, which had to do with the
American Civil War and its aftermath.
As the Kentucky-born son of a Confederate
colonel, Griffith passionately and sincerely felt that the South had
been wronged severely in the waging and the outcome of that war.
He agreed with the Reverend Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman,
that the white people of the southern states had been stricken by
northern carpetbaggers and by free Negroes incited by them after the
war, and that they had bravely rid themselves of this affliction and
reestablished justice by the organization of the Ku Klux Klan.
This was to be the thesis, the epic exposition, of his film.
Griffith began photographing in July 1914,
from a script which he and Frank Woods put together from The Clansman
and another Dixon novel, The Leopard's Spots. His
actors were mostly from a troupe he had trained at Biograph. Very
soon it was evident to the company that he was embarked on a tremendous
enterprise, with big battle scenes and outdoor actions more ambitious
than anything they had done before. The $40,000 allotted to the
production was soon used up, and the picture was nowhere near finished.
The story of how sufficient money was
scraped together to finish the film is one of the great and
characteristically garbled legends of the screen. A few lucky
people invested; many others passed up the golden chance. Shooting
was completed in October, and Griffith spent three months editing.
Word got around that the project ran to an impossible length, that it
was "a dirty nigger picture," the brainstorm of a nut, and that it cost
over $100,000, which was unheard of in those days.
Griffith and his associates decided they
would have to exhibit the, film, originally titled
The
Clansman, in a new way: on
a two-a-day schedule of showings and at a $2 top admission scale.
A special musical score, prepared by Joseph Carl Breil, was introduced
to be played as an accompaniment by full symphonic orchestras set in the
theater pits.
On February 8, 1915, the completed picture
was first publicly shown in Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Audience reaction was tremendous, unevenly divided between vociferous
enthusiasm and ugly criticism of the film's contents and length. A
print was brought east by Griffith. When Dixon saw it at a
screening, he is said to have exclaimed, "It's great! It should be
called The Birth of a Nation!" And that it was, when it was
given its world premiere at the Liberty Theater in New York City on
March 3. Openings in Boston and Chicago followed in a few days.
Reactions were swift and explosive.
Negro leaders were shocked and dismayed at the gross and patronizing
representations of their race. Mayor John Purroy Mitchel of New
York City demanded that several of the scenes be cut. The former
president of Harvard, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, publicly denounced it as
false. Critics and sober historians tagged it an inflammatory
show.
It was, beyond any question. So
powerfully did it excite romantic imagination and the sensitive
vestigial remains of partisan feelings among the many Americans who were
only one generation removed from the painful experience of the War
Between the States that it sent audiences forth from theaters boiling
with excitement and enmity.
Actually, the "documentary quality "—the
"naturalness" with which Griffith made the viewer sense the vast
eruption of a Civil War battle, the reek of carnage on a smoking
battlefield, the dismal aspects of postwar desolation, the bold
appearance of the charging Ku Klux Klan—was only one of the film's
persuasive features, and not the most valid one at that. There was
a good deal of lush romanticizing and exaggeration in Griffith's action
scenes.
For all his meticulous staging and spotting
of tableau "facsimiles" of key historical events, such as President
Lincoln's putting his signature to the call for federal volunteers, the
surrender at Appomatox and the assassination of Lincoln in Ford's
Theater, and for all his deliberate imitating of Matthew Brady's Civil
War photographs, it cannot be conceded that Griffith was a devoted
realist. He was a remarkable reproducer of the dramatic look of
things as the distended mind's eye would see them and as nostalgia would
have them be.
In Dixon's original novel and in the fustian
melodrama made from it for a generally unsuccessful stage production in
1906, the story was commonplace and hackneyed, typical of that day when
the tragedy of the 1860's was a favorite topic in books and plays.
But with the medium of motion pictures, Griffith was able to give a new
charge to imaginations, a pictorial comprehension to the throb of
dramatic events and a tingling illusion of personal reality.
Still impressive about The Birth of A
Nation is the speed with which the issue is laid down, the
characters assembled and the drama got under way. In the opening scenes,
after the main titles, the theme of slavery is introduced with shots of
Africans being brought to America and sold at auction in the South.
Thus "were planted the first seeds of dissension," says the title, and
slavery is naively proposed as the singular issue over which the Civil
War was fought.
With this idea deftly planted, Griffith
proceeds to set the stage with his major dramatis personae. To
represent "the North," he has one family—the Stonemans of
Pennsylvania—of which the imposing head is the Hon. Austin
Stoneman, a United States Senator and abolitionist of fanatical fervor
(he is Thaddeus Stevens in thin disguise). He has a lovely
daughter, Elsie, and two light-hearted sons who are jolly friends of the
Cameron family of South Carolina.
The Camerons represent "the South." They are
plantation gentry—a father and mother who are plump parental types, two
pretty daughters (the younger of whom, Flora, is full of perpetual joy)
and three sons, the oldest of whom, Ben, becomes the hero—the Little
Colonel—of the plot. They live in the town of Piedmont, but their
cotton plantation is nearby. It is a place of idyllic beauty, with
singing Negro slaves working in the fields.
The friendly association of the Stoneman and
Cameron boys (with strong possibilities of romance developing with the
sisters on either side) is quickly established as prelude to the shock
of mortal conflict that comes as the southern states demand their right
to maintain slavery and President Lincoln calls for troops to prevent
them from seceding from the Union.
The drama now flows into the next phase,
which includes the outbreak of war, the departures of the Stoneman and
the Cameron boys to join the respective armies of the Union and the
Confederacy, the bloody battles that follow, the difficulties on the
southern home front, the slow defeat of the South, the surrender at
Appomatox and the assassination of Lincoln.
The third phase has to do with the period of
Reconstruction. Now Senator Stoneman comes to the fore as the
impassioned champion of Negro equality in the South. But he is soon
superseded as the villain by his mulatto lieutenant, Silas Lynch, a
fierce and florid zealot for "black supremacy."
In this phase, the course of the drama, all
of which takes place in the South, is from lurid and angry display of
the arrogance of the Negroes, urged on by "scalawags" from the North,
and the humiliation of the whites, to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan
by the Little Colonel and its triumph in bringing "order" to the South.
_NRFPT_01_small.jpg) Actually, the historical implications are
vague and presumptive all the way. The tie-ups of the endless personal
crises with political and social developments are loose at best.
Griffith was not a historian, as his prejudices reveal, and he was not
concerned with presenting a lesson in history. He was putting on
the screen a strong romantic drama of personal hardship, humiliation and
heroism. Historical truth and logic were only secondary and
incidental.
Thus his summation of the issue is made in
strictly personal terms. The ultimate debasement of the Negroes is
demonstrated in two events. The first is an attempted rape of
Flora by an emancipated house servant, Gus, to avoid which the Little
Sister jumps off a cliff and is killed. Gus is captured, tried and
executed by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan. The second event is an
effort by Lynch to force Elsie Stoneman to marry him, with the promise
that he will make her "queen" of a black empire.
The drama is brought to a thundering climax
with the rising of the Klan, first to rescue Elsie, who is threatened
with rape by Lynch, and then to rescue the entire Cameron family, along
with one of the Stoneman boys, from a rabble of Negroes and
carpetbaggers who have them besieged in a cabin on the edge of town.
The arrival of the Klan—in both cases, just in the nick of time—and its
tangible triumphs over the villains constitute the victories that
symbolize the emergence of the South from its valley of defeat.
From the plateau of this emotional high
point, Griffith grandly foresees, in quick tableaux, the union of the
Little Colonel and Elsie, sitting poetically by the sea; the apotheosis
of mankind in heaven; and the reign of peace and brotherhood throughout
the world.
Obviously, The Birth of a Nation is
not rational or intellectual. On the one hand, it is deeply
sentimental; on the other, it is bitter and cruel, blazingly intolerant
and shameful in its racist attitudes. But we refrain from
condemning Griffith in the knowledge that prejudices were rampant in
those days. And we forgive him because he gave us a tremendously
illustrative film, the strength of which is evident in countless
eloquent scenes.
One thinks of his simple clarification of
the stabbing pain of war. In one scene the younger Cameron
brother, charging across a battlefield, abruptly stops beside the corpse
of a Union soldier that he seems to recognize; he stoops, with evident
apprehension, to scan the face of the fallen youth and sees with horror
that it is his chum, the younger Stoneman boy. At that instant, a
bullet strikes him and he falls dead across the body of his friend.
The pathos in what might be a cliche is made to suffuse the simple scene
as the camera holds for a thoughtful moment on the two still, immutably
dead boys.
Griffith follows this with a second, broader
comprehension of the horror of war. It is a sequence visualizing
the siege and devastation of the South by General Sherman's forces,
first with long shots of the firing of Atlanta and the flight of the
populace, then a close corner shot of an anguished mother, sitting on
the side of a hill and clutching a group of frightened children as she
looks off down the hill. The scene opens out on a majestic expanse
of fertile, forest-fringed valley through which a long line of Sherman's
army marches off, while on the edge of the forest a small house
forlornly burns.
So it goes. There is a stunning
sequence depicting the return home of the Little Colonel after the war.
In a long shot, he is seen hobbling sadly and alone down the empty
street (the street in which he has previously been seen leading his
gallant company off to war). He comes to the gate of his own home
and pauses briefly to note its disrepair. As he does, the Little
Sister bounces joyously out the front door. But as she sees his
tattered condition, the look of despair on his face, she stops in solemn
amazement. Sadly the two embrace. Then, as the Little Sister
guides the weary soldier to the door, the camera steps to one side to
see tender hands reach out and slowly draw the Little Colonel inside.
_NRFPT_01_small.jpg) _NRFPT_02_small.jpg) There are notable touches of humor, many of
them provided by the broad clowning of the family servants, referred to
as Faithful Souls. The scene in which little Flora is chased
through a sun-splattered woods by Gus is a classic example of dramatic
contrasts achieved with light and shade. And all the mighty
expositions of the gathering and the riding of the Klan have an eerie
excitement about them that has seldom been surpassed on the screen.
It is easy to view the picture as a
grotesque period piece, a changeless relic of a long-past style and
taste—which it is, if one sees it only in contrast to a modern sound
film. There is much that is florid about it. The subtitles
flaunt such rhetoric as "The first flag of the Confederacy, bathed in
glory at Bull Run" or "Bitter memories will not allow the poor bruised
heart of the South to forget." The acting is broad and bold, full
of extravagant gestures, which was the style of the day.
H. B. Walthall's heroic Little
Colonel, Ralph Lewis' Stoneman, George Siegmann's Lynch, Lillian Gish's
Elsie, Mae Marsh's Little Sister, Mary Alden's Lydia Brown, the mulatto
mistress of Stoneman, and many more (including Joseph Henaberry' s
Abraham Lincoln) emote enthusiastically. But, to the understanding
viewer, this sort of acting has historical authenticity, because it is a
believable illusion of the natures of the people of those times.
There is no question that The Birth of a
Nation was an explosive film, hot and demagogic. But it is
precisely because it was that it detonated public interest, earned
millions of dollars around the world (no one will ever know how much
because of the looseness of film rentals then) and demolished forever
the highbrow notion that moving pictures were merely a toy. |
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