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