The Birth of a Nation

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The Birth of a Nation

Theatrical Poster
Directed by D. W. Griffith
Produced by D. W. Griffith
Written by T. F. Dixon, Jr.
Frank E. Woods
D.W. Griffith
Starring Lillian Gish
Henry B. Walthall
Mae Marsh
Music by Joseph Carl Breil
Cinematography G.W. Bitzer
Editing by D. W. Griffith
Joseph Henabery
James Smith
Rose Smith
Raoul Walsh
Distributed by Epoch Film Co.
Release date(s) February 8, 1915
(Los Angeles)
Running time 190 minutes
(at 16 fps)
Country United States
Language Silent film
English titles
Budget $110,000
estimated.
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Birth of a Nation is one of the most influential and controversial films in the history of cinema. It is set during the American Civil War and is directed by D.W. Griffith and was released on February 8, 1915. It is important in film history for its innovative technical achievements and also for its controversial promotion of white supremacism and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, who continue to actively use it as a recruiting tool.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film was originally presented in two parts separated by an intermission. Part 1 depicts pre-Civil War America, introducing two juxtaposed families: the Northern Stonemans, consisting of abolitionist Congressman Austin Stoneman (based on real-life Reconstruction-era Congressman Thaddeus Stevens), his two sons, and his daughter, Elsie, and the Southern Camerons, a family including two daughters (Margaret and Flora) and three sons, most notably Ben.

The Stoneman boys visit the Camerons at their South Carolina estate, a pinnacle of the Old South, and all it represents. The eldest Stoneman boy falls in love with Margaret Cameron, and Ben Cameron idolizes a picture of Elsie Stoneman. When the Civil War begins, all of the boys join their respective armies. A black militia (with a white leader) ransacks the Cameron house, attempting to rape all the Cameron women, who are rescued when Confederate soldiers rout the militia. Meanwhile, the youngest Stoneman and two Cameron boys are killed in the war. Ben Cameron is wounded after a heroic battle in which he gains the nickname, "the Little Colonel," by which he is referred to for the rest of the film. The Little Colonel is taken to a Northern hospital where he meets Elsie, who is working there as a nurse. The war ends and Abraham Lincoln is assassinated at Ford's Theater, allowing Austin Stoneman and other radical congressmen to "punish" the South for secession with Reconstruction.

Flora Cameron runs away from Gus.
Flora Cameron runs away from Gus.

Part two begins to depict Reconstruction. Stoneman and his mulatto protege, Silas Lynch, go to South Carolina to personally observe their agenda of empowering Southern blacks via election fraud. Meanwhile, Ben, inspired by observing white children pretending to be ghosts to scare off black children, devises a plan to reverse perceived powerlessness of Southern whites by forming the Ku Klux Klan, although his membership in the group angers Elsie.

Then Gus, a murderous former slave with designs on white women, crudely proposes to marry Flora. She flees into the forest, pursued by Gus. Trapped on a precipice, Flora leaps to her death to avoid letting herself be raped. In response, the Klan hunts Gus, lynches him, and leaves his corpse on Lieutenant Governor Silas Lynch's doorstep. In retaliation, Lynch orders a crackdown on the Klan. The Camerons flee from the black militia and hide out in a small hut, home to two former Union soldiers, who agree to assist their former Southern foes in defending their "Aryan birthright," according to the caption.

Meanwhile, with Austin Stoneman gone, Lynch tries to force Elsie to marry him. Disguised Klansmen discover her situation and leave to get reinforcements. The Klan, now at full strength, rides to her rescue and takes the opportunity to evict all of the blacks. Simultaneously, Lynch's militia surrounds and attacks the hut where the Camerons are hiding, but the Klan saves them just in time. Victorious, the Klansmen celebrate in the streets, and the film cuts to the next election where the Klan successfully disenfranchises black voters. The film concludes with a double honeymoon of Phil Stoneman with Margaret Cameron and Ben Cameron with Elsie Stoneman. The final frame shows masses oppressed by a warlike ruler transformed into angelic figures under a Christ-like representation. The final title rhetorically asks: "Dare we dream of a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more. But instead-the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace."

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Adaptation of source material

The film was based on Thomas Dixon's novels The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots. At its Los Angeles premiere in February at Clune's Auditorium it was entitled The Clansman, but on the advice of author Thomas W. Dixon was retitled for its official East Coast premiere at the Liberty Theater in New York's Times Square three weeks later (March 3).[citation needed]

The title was changed from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nation to reflect Griffith's belief that before the American Civil War, the United States was a loose coalition of states antagonistic toward each other, and that the Northern victory over the breakaway states in the South finally bound the states under one national authority.[1]

[edit] Production

Hooded Klansmen catch Gus, a black man whom the filmmaker described as "a renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers."
Hooded Klansmen catch Gus, a black man whom the filmmaker described as "a renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers."

Griffith agreed to pay Thomas Dixon $10,000 for the rights to his play The Clansman, but ran out of money and could only afford $2,500 of the original option. For the balance, he offered Dixon 25% interest in the picture. Dixon reluctantly agreed, but the film's unprecedented success made him rich: at the time, Dixon's proceeds were the largest sum any author received for a motion picture story, amounting to several million dollars.

Griffith's budget started at $40,000, but the film ultimately cost $110,000 (the equivalent of $2 million in 2006[citation needed]). As a result, Griffith constantly had to seek new sources of capital for his film. A ticket to the film cost a record $2 USD (the equivalent of $36 in 2006[citation needed]). However, it remained the most profitable film of all time until it was dethroned by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.

West Point engineers provided technical advice on the Civil War battle scenes and provided Griffith with the masses of artillery used in the film.[2]

The film premiered on February 8, 1915, at Clune's Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles.

[edit] Racism

[edit] Political ideology

Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People is quoted in The Birth of a Nation.
Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People is quoted in The Birth of a Nation.

The film is controversial due to its interpretation of history. University of Houston film historian Steven Mintz summarises its message as follows: Reconstruction was a disaster, blacks could never be integrated into white society as equals, and that the violent actions of the Ku Klux Klan were justified to reestablish honest government [3]. The film suggests that the Ku Klux Klan restored order to the post-war South, which is depicted as endangered by uncontrollable blacks and their allies (abolitionists, mulattos and carpetbagging Republican politicians from the North). This was the dominant view among white American historians of the day, chief among them the Dunning School, but it was vigorously disputed by W.E.B. Du Bois and other black historians of that era, all of whom the Dunning School ignored. Some historians maintained this viewpoint even after World War II, such as E. Merton Coulter's in his The South Under Reconstruction (1947), and it took the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s for a new generation of historians (such as Eric Foner) to rethink Reconstruction and other ideas of the period.[citation needed]

Many elements of the film seem astonishingly racist to modern audiences. For example, although the film made use of some black actors in minor roles, most of the black and mulatto characters are played by Caucasian actors in blackface. This was the prevailing Hollywood custom at the time, as any actor who was to come in contact with a white actress had to be played by a white male[citation needed] (for example, the Camerons' maid is both white and obviously male).

[edit] Responses

Though lucrative, and popular among some white movie critics and white moviegoers, the film drew significant protest from blacks upon its release. Premieres of the film were widely protested by the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[citation needed] Griffith said he was surprised by the harsh criticism.[citation needed] According to Spike Lee, the premiere of the film in California ended with lynchings outside the theatre.[4].

The film's politics made Birth of a Nation divisive when it was released. Riots broke out in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities, and the film was denied release in Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. It was said to create an atmosphere that encouraged gangs of whites to attack blacks. In Lafayette, Indiana, a white man killed a black teenager after seeing the movie[5].

Thomas Dixon, author of the source play The Clansman was a former classmate of President Wilson, and arranged a screening at the White House, for the President, members of his cabinet, and their families. Wilson was reported to have commented of the film that "it is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." In Wilson: The New Freedom, Arthur Link quotes Wilson's aide, Joseph Tumulty, who denied Wilson said this and also claims that "the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."[6] The source for the false quote, often repeated in print, was apparently Dixon himself, who was relentless in his publicizing of the film; he went so far as to promote it as "federally endorsed". However, after controversy over the film had grown Wilson wrote that he disapproved of the "unfortunate production"[7].

Several independent black filmmakers released director Emmett J. Scott's The Birth of a Race (1919) in response to The Birth of a Nation. The film that portrayed a positive image of blacks was panned by white critics but well-received by black critics and movie-goers attending segregated theaters.[citation needed] Likewise director/producer/writer Oscar Micheaux released Within Our Gates (1919) in response to The Birth of a Nation, and reversed a key scene of Griffith's film by representing a black woman assaulted by a lecherous white man.

The Birth of a Nation has been linked to the second emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which was revived the year of the film's release after a period of non-existence, and to changing Northern public opinion toward the South.[citation needed] Before Birth of a Nation, the white South remained bitter toward the Northern states and federal government, for both the disastrous Civil War and for the trampling of the former Confederacy that accompanied Reconstruction.[citation needed] Despite the passage of fifty years, a strong pro-Confederate idealism remained in the South and impeded national ideological reunification.[citation needed] Birth of a Nation attempts to unite Northern and Southern opinions into a cohesive nationalism, partly by blaming the present divisions on carpetbagging blacks and Reconstructionists. It carefully avoids criticism of Northern heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, and portrays both the Union and Confederate armies as heroic fighters, and featuring protagonists from both sides. While the Industrial North is not portrayed in a flattering light, this in itself was not necessarily hostile to Northern public opinion, as industrial workers generally did not like their working conditions. Working-class Northerners were thus also led to sympathize with an idealized agrarian society.[citation needed] The success of this attempt was demonstrated by the strength of the reformed KKK.[citation needed]

Clearly, the political thrust of the film was not to encourage a revival of Southern secessionism (a dead issue by 1915) but to foster a unity of Whites, North and South, in a common anti-Black racism. And indeed, the new KKK - unlike its reconstruction-time predecessor - gained considerable support in various Northern states.

Nearly a century later, the film remains controversial. On February 22, 2000, in an article entitled "A Painful Present as Historians Confront a Nation's Bloody Past", staff writer Claudia Kolker wrote in the Los Angeles Times,

"The end of World War I brought both economic crisis, and an anti-Red fever that extended to minority groups and trade unions. Just three years earlier, a defunct Ku Klux Klan leaped back to life with help from the film Birth of a Nation."[8]

[edit] Significance in film history

The film was released in 1915 and has been credited with securing the future of feature length films (any film over 60 minutes in length) as well as solidifying the language of cinema.

In its day, it was the highest grossing film, taking in more than $10 million at the box office according to the box cover of the Shepard version of the DVD currently available (equivalent to $300 million in 2006).[citation needed]

In 1992 the United States Library of Congress deemed it "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Despite its controversial story, the film continues to get high (if conflicted) praise from film critics such as Roger Ebert.[1]

[edit] Cast

[edit] Popular culture references

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  • In the January issue of the Beavis and Butthead comic series, David Van Driessen's class watches Birth of a Nation during a field trip in Intercourse, Pennsylvania.
  • On the first episode of Dennis Miller Live, the subject of the show was violence, and Dennis opened his rant with, "Look, America has always been a violent country. Rent Birth of a Nation if you doubt me."
  • Political rap group Public Enemy released an album named Rebirth of a Nation in 2006.
  • Punk rock band Anti-Flag wrote a song entitled "Death of a Nation" and also produced a DVD compilation of the same name.
  • Birth of a Nation is also the title of a graphic novel written by Aaron McGruder and Reginald Hudlin, and illustrated by Kyle Baker.
  • In the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, the racist school bully gives Chris a Betamax tape of Birth of a Nation, referring to it as a comedy after hearing that Chris got a Betamax.
  • In a segment of the Opie and Anthony Show, Birth of a Nation is said to have the first sequel ever, humorously entitled Loads of Laughs.
  • Forrest Gump features a scene from Birth of a Nation with Tom Hanks playing the title character's distant relative of Nathan Bedford Forrest, digitally inserted in so that he appears to be leading the Klansmen. Notably the scene features modern tracks from D. W. Griffith's filming equipment, which could have been digitally erased, but which Forrest Gump's creators decided to keep.
  • Immortal Technique's song, "Bin Laden (Remix)" contains the line, "devils run America like Birth of a Nation"
  • The spoken word poet Taylor Mali's "How to write a political poem" contains the line "I've seen D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation but preferred 101 Dalmations."

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Russell Merritt, "Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend." Cinema Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1. (Autumn, 1972).
  2. ^ "When Hollywood's Big Guns Come Right From the Source" Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, June 10, 2002
  3. ^ http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/slaveryfilm.cfm
  4. ^ Mark A. Reid. Do the Right Thing
  5. ^ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_birth.html
  6. ^ Letter from J. M. Tumulty, secretary to President Wilson, to the Boston branch of the NAACP, quoted in Link, Wilson.
  7. ^ Woodrow Wilson to Joseph P. Tumulty, April 28, 1915 in Wilson, Papers, 33:86.
  8. ^ http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/316.html

[edit] References

  • Addams, Jane, in Crisis: A Record of Darker Races, X (May, 1915), 19, 41, and (June, 1915), 88. + *John Hope Franklin, "Propaganda as History" pp. 10-23 in Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988 (Louisiana State University Press: 1989); first published in The Massachusetts Review 1979. Describes the history of the novel, The Clansman and this film.
  • Brodie, Fawn M. Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (New York, 1959) p. 86-93. Corrects the historical record as to Dixon's false representation of Stevens in this film with regard to his racial views and relations with his housekeeper.
  • Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: 1965) p. 30
  • Cook, Raymond Allen. Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, N.C., 1968).
  • Franklin, John Hope, "Propaganda as History" pp. 10-23 in Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988 (Louisiana State University Press: 1989); first published in The Massachusetts Review 1979. Describes the history of the novel, The Clan and this film.
  • Franklin, John Hope, Reconstruction After the Civil War, (Chicago, 1961) p. 5-7
  • Korngold, Ralph, Thaddeus Stevens. A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great (New York: 1955) pp. 72-76. corrects Dixon's false characterization of Stevens' racial views and of his dealings with his housekeeper.
  • Leab, Daniel J., From Sambo to Superspade, (Boston, 1975) p. 23-39
  • New York Times, roundup of reviews of this film, March 7, 1915.
  • The New Republica, II (March 20, 1915), 185
  • Simkins, Francis B., "New Viewpoints of Southern Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History, V (February, 1939), pp. 49-61.
  • Williamson, Joel, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1965). This book corrects Dixon's false reporting of Reconstruction, as shown in his novel, his play and this film.

[edit] External links

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