Film review

  • The Birth of a Nation (1915)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    D W Griffith (1915)

    Kate Muir in the Times described the recent film of Testament of Youth as ‘heartfelt and stirring in all the right ways’.  I haven’t seen Testament of Youth and the smug words ‘in all the right ways’ didn’t make me keener to do so.  But I wonder, having seen The Birth of a Nation for the first time, if I was unfair to be so irritated by what Muir wrote.   D W Griffith’s notorious, legendary picture could be described as heartfelt and stirring in all the wrong ways.

    According to Pauline Kael in Going Steady:

    ‘After the reactions to The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was so shocked that people could think he was anti-Negro that he decided to expand some material he had been working on and make it an attack on bigotry throughout the ages.  [The resulting film] Intolerance was intended to be virtuous and uplifting.’

    I think Intolerance is a tremendous film although it’s troubling that social reformers are Griffith’s bigots of choice in the early twentieth-century America section of the story.  His relatively small-scale Broken Blossoms seems a more unequivocal renunciation of racism but it’s nowhere near enough to erase the contrary message of The Birth of a Nation.  The instant public controversy – and widespread sense of outrage – caused by the film makes it impossible to downplay the racial views that Griffith expresses as an example of bygone benightedness, of that’s-the-way-people-thought-in-those-days.   If Griffith was ‘shocked that people could think he was anti-Negro’, it seems he’d recovered from the shock by the time The Birth of a Nation reappeared in 1930.  An introductory title to the re-released film explains that:

    ‘The prelude to our picture is the record of an intimate conversation between Mr D W Griffith and his friend Mr Walter Huston which occured [sic] on an evening in the Spring of 1930.’

    The film of this ‘intimate conversation’ runs about ten minutes and is divided into two parts, each part preceding one of the two halves of the picture itself.  The great director’s manner in the interview with Huston is self-consciously reflective, even rueful – but Griffith’s regret isn’t anything to do with the film he’d made.  It’s rather personal nostalgia for people who embodied the values that The Birth of a Nation celebrates.  Griffiths reminisces about his father, a colonel in the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, and about his mother, in the years after the war, ‘staying up night after night sewing robes for the Klan … the Klan, at that time was needed:  it served a purpose’.   He goes on to describe The Birth of the Nation as the story of ‘a tremendous struggle – about people who were fighting against great odds’, and to quote from the writings of Woodrow Wilson, in which the latter expresses his admiration for the Ku Klux Klan’s activities in the era of postbellum ‘Reconstruction’ of the American South.   (Wilson subsequently described The Birth of a Nation as ‘… like writing history with lightning … and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true’.)   The second part of the conversation with Huston includes a that-was-then-this-is-now disclaimer on Griffith’s part although he doesn’t explain how it is that things in the South have changed, he suggests conclusively, for the better.  It’s hard not to infer that he feels this is thanks not only to the disappearance of Yankee carpetbaggers but also to the decline of civil rights since the brief period during Reconstruction when blacks held elective office.

    The principal characters of The Birth of a Nation are the members of two families:  the Northern Stonemans and their Southern cousins, the Camerons, landowners whose estate is on the outskirts of the town of Piedmont, South Carolina.  The head of the Northern family is the politician Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln).  Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) has two sons (Elmer Clifton and Robert Harron) and a daughter, Elsie (Lillian Gish).  Dr Cameron (Spottiswode Aitken) and his wife (Josephine Crowell) have two daughters (Miriam Cooper and Mae Marsh) and three sons.  On a visit by the Stoneman brothers to their cousins, Phil, the elder brother, is strongly drawn to Margaret, the elder Cameron sister, while Ben Cameron (Henry B Walthall) falls in love with a picture of Elsie Stoneman.  When the Civil War begins, the young men enlist in their respective armies:  the two elder Cameron boys (George Beranger and Maxfield Stanley) are killed; Ben, who displays heroic courage during the Siege of Petersburg, is wounded and taken to a Northern hospital.  There he encounters the real Elsie Stoneman, who is working as a nurse.  Ben is sentenced to death for being a Confederate guerrilla but Elsie obtains for Ben’s mother, who has come to Washington to see her injured son, an interview with Abraham Lincoln (Joseph Henabery).  The President, moved by Mrs Cameron’s pleas, pardons Ben.   The first half of the film ends with Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater.

    The second half describes the horrors, as Griffith sees them, of Reconstruction – the results of a malign conspiracy of blacks and carpetbaggers.  Some of the most significant incidents in this part of The Birth of a Nation centre on or follow from the death of Flora, the younger Cameron daughter.  Alone in woods on the family estate, she is confronted by Gus (Walter Long), a black freedman who is now a military captain, and who tells Flora that he wants her for his wife.  (The iniquitous new legislature has allowed mixed marriages.)  She refuses and, terrified that Gus will have his way with her regardless, jumps from a high precipice.  Her brother Ben witnesses this and runs to his sister’s help but she dies in his arms.  Ben has by this stage formed the Ku Klux Klan, whose members hunt down Gus – then try him, find him guilty and lynch him.  They deliver his corpse to the doorstep of the mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), a protégé of Austin Stoneman and who is now the megalomaniac Lieutenant-Governor of Piedmont.  When Ben’s father is arrested by Lynch for possession in his house of his son’s Klan costume, Dr Cameron’s enduringly faithful black servants rescue him, with the help of Phil Stoneman.  The climax to the film sees Lynch, who lusts after Elsie Stoneman, trying to force her to marry him; her rescue by Klan sympathisers; and Ben Cameron leading the Klansmen into wresting back control of the town.  New elections are held, with armed Klansmen intimidating the blacks from voting; the proper order is thus restored.   Ben Cameron marries Elsie Stoneman and Phil Stoneman marries Margaret Cameron.  A giant warlike figure on the screen fades away and is replaced by the figure of Jesus Christ.  An accompanying intertitle 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 …’

    The screenplay was adapted by Griffith and Frank E Woods from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Khan, a novel by Thomas F Dixon of 1885, which its author subsequently adapted successfully for the stage (ten years before Griffith’s film was first released).  In fact, it’s largely the second half of The Birth of a Nation that derives from the Dixon material, much of the first half concentrating on military action during the Civil War.  The battle sequences represent an amazing logistical feat although I found them hard going – and not just because of the gruelling nature of what happens.  The assassination of Lincoln is, however, superbly staged and powerfully foreshadows Griffith’s world of Reconstruction – and the director is sufficiently fair-minded at least to respect Lincoln.  His death is presented as a mortal wound to conciliatory post-war policy and the cause of a power vacuum that Austin Stoneman and his kind are all too ready to exploit.  (D W Griffith’s first sound picture, one of only two full-length talkies that he made, was the biopic Abraham Lincoln – released in 1930 with Walter Huston in the title role.)

    In a way, the shape of The Birth of a Nation anticipates the structure of Gone With the Wind, nearly twenty-five years later, but Griffith’s melding of the antebellum and postbellum worlds is, in narrative terms, remarkably more sophisticated.  The racism is not sophisticated but relentless.  The closest Griffith gets to an acknowledgement that slavery was wrong comes in an early intertitle, which asserts that the arrival of Africans in America sowed the seeds of ‘disunion’.  There’s not a trace of discord, however, in Griffith’s description of the antebellum paradise that is the Cameron family homestead, where smiling, deferential slaves are only too happy to serve their masters.  It’s true that there are certain offensive elements of the film that reflect the conventions of the time when it was made – most obviously, the use of white actors in blackface to play many (not all) of the African-American characters.  But the focus on the racial aspect of the blacks-and-carpetbaggers partnership is unignorably offensive.  On Griffith’s account, power for the blacks during Reconstruction doesn’t corrupt – it gives vent to their native indolence, irresponsibility and rapacity, especially sexual rapacity, in a more dangerous way.   After Dr Cameron has been rescued and he, Margaret and Phil seek refuge from the black powers-that-be, a couple of former Union soldiers agree to hide the threesome.  This is summarised by the intertitle ‘The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright’.

    There’s consensus that The Birth of a Nation is, in terms of movie-making technique, a seminal piece of cinema.  Film scholars, and others who can appreciate in detail the magnitude of Griffith’s achievement and influence, must watch the picture with deeply mixed feelings.  The ardency of Lillian Gish, especially when Elsie Stoneman eventually sees the segregationist light, and the radiant naturalness of Mae Marsh’s playing of Flora Cameron were a challenge of sorts for me.   (The younger actresses – Miriam Cooper too – are much the most fluid performers.)  For the most part, though, I watched with a growing sense of relief that my cinema education is rudimentary enough for me not to feel conflicted about The Birth of a Nation and that I could loathe it.   The massed ranks of a US cavalry in the form of the Ku Klux Klan are something I don’t expect to forget in a hurry but I was grateful that the combination of their daft outfits and the speeded-up movement of the film made them ludicrous too.  If I saw an interview with a present-day KKK supporter, however, I wouldn’t be able to laugh it off.   Piedmont is a real place in South Carolina, about two hundred miles from Charleston.  It’s a coincidence that I saw The Birth of a Nation, in the year of its centenary, less than two weeks after a young white supremacist was arrested for the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, during their Bible study.  But the coincidence brings to mind D W Griffith’s religiose question at the conclusion of The Birth of a Nation (see above).  Of course it’s a rhetorical question but, since it’s asked from a racist perspective, it still deserves a dusty answer.

    28 June 2015

  • London Road

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rufus Norris (2015)

    The writer Alecky Blythe is well known for her work in verbatim theatre, in which, according to Wikipedia, ‘plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic’.  Blythe’s biggest success to date has been London Road, first staged by the National Theatre in 2011 and revived in 2012.   The piece draws on interviews that Blythe recorded with the residents of London Road, Ipswich, which, in late 2006, became the centre of national media attention.  London Road was a red-light zone and five prostitutes who worked the area were murdered within the space of a few weeks, between late October and mid-December 2006.  Steve Wright, who lived at 79 London Road, was subsequently arrested, charged and convicted of all five killings.  London Road was not only a piece of documentary theatre; it was a stage musical.  Adam Cork wrote the music and worked with Alecky Blythe on the lyrics, which, like the spoken parts of the script, derived from the transcripts of Blythe’s interviews.  The NT production was directed by Rufus Norris, and he and Blythe have now brought London Road to the screen.

    Although verbatim theatre is now recognised as a sub-genre of documentary theatre, the ‘documentary play’ isn’t yet an essential theatrical form in the way that documentary film is an essential form of cinema.   We may be more or less convinced by performances in documentary theatre but the basic validity of the actors, whether or not their playing is realistic, isn’t an issue.  On the stage, there’s no such thing as ‘real people’ with whom to compare the actors; the very act of putting a real person on a stage, removing them from their actual physical context, would compromise their reality (even before they began to move or speak).  It’s very different on screen:  the audience has a preconceived idea of the reality of people in a documentary film.  (And even when such people perform for the camera, they still express something of themselves.)  If screen actors pretending to be persons in a documentary seem like actors, they immediately limit our belief in the people they’re meant to be.   In the case of London Road, the songs and choreographed content might seem to reduce this inherent difficulty.  It could be argued that, because the traditionally non-realistic genre of the movie musical is being grafted onto the documentary aspect of the film, the audience can accept the whole as artificial – and perhaps many viewers will, especially since people in screen documentaries don’t normally sing (unless the film’s subject is a singer or singing).  But there are still big chunks of London Road without music and the settings are realistic rather than stylised.   (The film was shot in Sutherland Road, Bexley.)  Getting the viewer to receive and accept these elements as unrealistic on the basis that, sooner rather than later, the performers are going to sing and/or dance again would be a rather limited achievement.

    Turning London Road into a film is, in short, a considerable challenge and it’s good to report – and surprising, after his disappointing debut feature Broken – that Rufus Norris has risen to the challenge.  A legend on the screen at the start explains how the script was developed and promises that we’ll hear what the real London Road residents said ‘exactly as they said it’.  Whether ‘exactly as they said it’ means verbatim or more than that is a nice point.  Perhaps the actors are also imitating, as exactly as possible, the way that Alecky Blythe’s interviewees spoke their words to her.  (Mark Kermode’s Observer review of London Road links it to Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, in parts of which actors lip-synched the words spoken by the people whom the actors were pretending to be.)  The style of playing in London Road isn’t, I think, perfectly orchestrated:  some actors are more believably real than others.  Duncan Wisbey is wonderfully convincing as a resident called Gordon, right down to the suggestion that Gordon gets to like playing to his unseen interviewer and to the camera.  In comparison, Paul Hilton, as another resident, who can barely get a word in as his wife monopolises the interview, comes across as an actor sitting on a stage and impersonating an-ordinary-man.  Although Hilton seemed slightly familiar, I couldn’t place him in other roles; and I certainly didn’t recognise Wisbey.  The National Theatre cast, many of whom are in the film, didn’t include big names but Norris has now involved three very well-known faces not in the stage show:  Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman and Anita Dobson.  This trio, Hardy especially, might help to sell cinema tickets but would seem to be at a disadvantage in the reality stakes.  In fact, all three do well:  Tom Hardy, who seems to be doing his most interesting film work behind the wheel of a car, is both magnetic and true in the small role of an unsettling taxi driver.

    In musicals, characters conventionally break into song and dance as heightened expressions of what they’re feeling.  (Even in a musical-within-a-musical, the numbers will often occur at moments that are emotionally significant for the characters playing the musical performers).  There are some very effective speak-singing sequences in London Road.  ‘It Could Be Him’ features two teenage girls (Eloise Laurence and Meg Suddaby) dashing through fast-food joints and a shopping centre, chanting the refrain ‘You automatically think it’s him’.  (There’s some good use of the decor here, including male tailor’s dummies in a department store.)   The surviving prostitutes, their lives and livings transformed by the killing of their co-workers, perform an affecting lament for how things were before.  ‘London Road in Bloom’, reprised as the film’s finale, captures the positive community spirit the locals did so much to cultivate, in combination with their hanging baskets, in the aftermath of the murders.  A local television news journalist called Simon Newton (Michael Shaeffer), reporting on the Steve Wright trial, keeps messing up his script and repeated takes are required.  This is an excellent pretext for turning words into words with music and the resulting number, ‘Cellular Material’, cleverly exploits repetition – a feature of many of Blythe’s interviews and a crucial ingredient of song lyrics of many kinds.   But there are times too in the film when a number arrives for no reason more compelling than that it’s been a while since the last one.  (That often happens, of course, in conventional musicals too.)  Even ‘Cellular Material’ climaxes with viewers of Simon Newton’s eventual report joining in the final chorus although there’s not a strong rationale for their involvement.  London Road does include a deal of histrionic business-for-business’s-sake.  For television coverage of the crimes and trial, Norris and Blythe have evidently used transcripts of actual news reports.   Those who (like me) are familiar with the personnel of the BBC News Channel may find one such report, by Chris Eakin, particularly odd.  Eakin, in reality a slim white man, is played here by Jason Barnett, a thick-set black one.   Barnett has no characterisation – he just acts excited – yet, as he speaks, I could hear Chris Eakin’s voice echoing in my head.

    One of the real strengths of the film has little to do with its unusual form.  London Road is not judgmental:  Rufus Norris allows you to be ambivalent about the people on screen.   You may well feel that the residents are unkindly hostile to the prostitutes yet you recognise and respect their determination to smarten up the neighbourhood and enhance its reputation.  Steve Wright was arrested a few days before Christmas:  Gordon welcomes the police presence and wishes they could always provide this kind of service, pointing out that ‘The festive wreath hasn’t been stolen this year’.   One’s feelings of ambivalence are particularly strong about Olivia Colman’s character, Julie – and the qualities of the actress inevitably intrude here.  Colman is such a reliably likeable presence on screen that I’d begun to wonder (as I’ve continued to wonder about Julie Walters) if she could be convincing as someone dislikeable.  London Road may not fully answer the question but Colman’s Julie, a prime mover in the revival of a sense of community in the street, is a woman who tells us that she would, if she could, shake the hand of Steve Wright to thank him for what he’s done to improve London Road.  The words are more shocking because they’re coming out of Olivia Colman’s mouth.  I also liked Norris’s open-handed treatment of a character called Dodge (Paul Thornley), who’s presented in the early stages as shiftily antipathetic towards young women but ends up smiling as winner of first prize in the local gardening competition.

    For a street in a town in Suffolk, London Road seems to contain a strikingly high proportion of residents with London accents but perhaps I misheard.   The DoP Danny Cohen brings out well the details of the locale – the pebble-dashed houses, the plastic chairs – and the police crime-scene tape surrounding Wright’s house is used, at different points of the film, to express Dodge’s anger and for comic effect (Anita Dobson’s June gets tangled up in it).  The costumes by Edward K Gibbon are unobtrusively right.   At the concluding street party, I could have done without the bit where a young girl gives a balloon to one of the prostitutes, especially as Norris then pushes the latter’s isolation from the celebrations a bit too hard.   The balloon drifting away to become a speck in the blue sky is an arresting final image but I think it was a mistake to play extracts from Blythe’s actual interviews over the closing credits.   This has the usual effect – familiar from biopics that end with sights and sounds of the real thing – of making what you’ve been watching seem relatively artificial.  All in all, though, London Road is an admirable and engaging piece of cinema.

    26 June 2015

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