These are chapters 4 and 5 of my previously unpublished book on the birth of the American popular culture; From This Twisted Root: The Silent Movie Era and the Birth of the American Popular Culture.
CHAPTER 4 – THE BIRTH OF A CONTROVERSY
Perhaps the first American filmmaker to realize that the cinema might have the power to affect the entire society and to overtly set out to influence his viewers through his movies was film legend, David Wark Griffith.
D.W. Griffith was the son of the Confederate war hero, Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith. Growing up in the South during the Reconstruction Era, David, who idolized his father, had the sad experience of watching as his fortunes steadily declined. Colonel Griffith died a broken man when David was just ten years old. In 1885, their patriarch dead, their home lost, the Griffith family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where David was able to secure work in a dry goods store.
David had always dreamed of being a novelist and playwright. His plan for achieving his goal was to pursue a career in acting until he had managed to establish himself as a writer. In 1897, 22 year old David Wark Griffith, using the stage name, Lawrence Griffith, began his theatrical career. Unfortunately, the money he earned from acting was not enough to sustain him, particularly after his marriage. In order to “put beans on the table,” he was forced to accept all sorts of menial jobs outside the theater.
One of the most humiliating jobs that he took during this period was as a “player” in the motion pictures that were being produced by “The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company.” At this time, acting in a movie was not the sort of thing an aspiring actor would display proudly on his resume. Griffith was so embarrassed at having to stoop to such depths he would not even use his own name, even though it would be several years before actors’ names would be included in the credits of the films they made. He chose to go by his stage name (coined originally because the theater was not considered all that respectable either).
In 1908, Biograph gave the young actor the opportunity to direct his first movie, “The Adventures of Dollie.” He was assisted in this enterprise by a man who was to become his partner, a gifted cameraman, “Billy” Blitzer. Together they would form the nucleus of a legendary film making team.
When Griffith began his directing career, Biograph was in serious trouble. Its films were of such poor quality that it was becoming increasingly difficult to sell prints to distributors. Within one year after Griffith went to work, all of this had changed. In fact the quality the product had improved so dramatically that Biograph films had become the fan’s favorites. Suddenly, the same distributors who had been reluctant to purchase a Biograph print the year before were now clamoring for copies of their latest releases.
In the early years the viewers did not know who the actors and actresses were or who was directing the action but by 1910, directors were beginning to be recognized for the quality of their work and paid well for it too.
With sucess came a measure of respectability. By 1915 the culture was beginning to take this new art form seriously and Griffith had become one of its most prominent artists. It was around this time that he dropped his stage name and proudly let the world know that the films they were enjoying were work of David Wark Griffith, movie director.
Griffith’s innovations were legion, his energy endless, and his desire to make the very best pictures possible was insatiable. When epic films from Europe began to make their debut early in the second decade of the twentieth century, Griffith, who had wanted to produce longer running films for some time, desperately craved the opportunity to compete with them by producing epic films of his own. Biograph, on the other hand, was content to have its top director continue to crank out an endless flow of profitable twenty-minute masterpieces. Soon the disagreement between the director and Biograph had reached the place that Griffith began to look for other employment.
An opportunity soon presented itself when that the “Mutual Film Corporation” offered him an proposition he could not refuse. Mutual offered to pay Griffith $1,000 per week (this in an era before income taxes), grant him the final say on all the films they released, and, most important for him, they promised that he could to make two independent motion pictures every year. On the first of October 1913, D.W. Griffith left Biograph and went to work for Mutual. Two years later, his most famous film opened at the Liberty Theater in New York City.
Griffith’s film was based on two novels written by Rev. Thomas E. Dixon, The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots. He had originally planned to call it The Clansman but when the Reverend Dixon previewed the finished product, he thought it deserved the grander title. Griffith agreed. It was called, The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation was an epic story about the American Civil War and the South during the Reconstruction Era. Griffith felt the truth about reconstruction had never been told, and his movie was his obvious attempt to set the record straight. In making his “statement,” Griffith became the first film maker to attempt to harness the power of the cinema in an effort to persuade his viewer to buy into his personal point of view.
Griffith’s film purports to be a monumental history of the nation from the idyllic days before the Civil War through the agonies of reconstruction. It is a story of how the South, beaten and exploited, was able to regain its freedom and dignity, largely through the courage of the Ku Klux Klan.
The last half of the movie is loaded with black stereotypes that can only be regarded as racist. African-Americans are portrayed either as lovable, comical Uncle Toms; ignorant, lazy fools; or villains with nothing but the rape of white women on their minds. But the ultimate villains in the picture is a radical, northern congressman, Austin Stoneman. Stoneman is pictured as a monster, hell bent on crushing the Southern white man under the foot of the newly-emancipated Blacks.
To the surprise and consternation of the director, a storm of controversy was stirred up in the weeks and months following the release of The Birth of a Nation that was unprecedented in the brief history of the motion picture industry. In fact the strife engendered by this film may never have been duplicated since.
African-Americans and their friends were understandably offended and resentful of the movie’s portrayal of their race. Some critics in their anger demanded that the film be banned and that those responsible for it be prosecuted. One of the most violent reactions occured in Boston where riots broke out.
Suddenly Griffith found himself in the center of a storm of controversy. He was, after all, the man responsible for all the commotion. He had sincerely intended The Birth of a Nation to be an accurate reenactment of the Reconstruction Era as he remembered it from his childhood. Was it accurate? Of course not. The perceptions of a child trying to make sense out of a senseless situation seldom are. But, accurate or not, these childish perceptions have a way of affecting the outlook of a person long after he has become an adult. This was clearly the case with Griffith.
One of the stars of the movie, Lillian Gish, observed; “As the son of ‘Roaring Jake’ Griffith, he firmly believed that the truth of the Civil War and Reconstruction had never been told, and he was quite ready to tell…the story he believed in above all else in the world. I am sure it seemed more real to him than the World War which was then taking place.” And so, factual or not, “The Birth of the Nation” was the truth – as Griffith remembered it. He was stunned and outraged by the criticism it received.
Whatever Griffith felt about his movie, African-Americans and others who remembered a different history and took exception to Griffith’s portrayal can hardly be blamed for their reaction. The film was not billed as the distorted memories of a child growing up in the home of an impoverished Confederate hero. Rather, The Birth of a Nation claimed to be an accurate portrayal of the era, the “TRUE” story that had never been told before. As such, it richly deserved the criticism it received.
Unable to understand or accept the criticism directed at his masterpiece, Griffith set out to defend his artistic statement. First he dug into history books to find actual incidents from the Reconstruction period which would bolster “his side of the story.” Some of these he edited into the film just before Part II of the film, which purports to document the Reconstruction Era. In addition, he produced a small booklet entitled, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America!. In this short publication Griffith set yet another precedent by becoming the first film maker to wrap himself in the flag and the first amendment to dismiss well deserved criticism as “censorship” and an attack on free speech. He also edited an excerpt from this publication into his motion picture. All subsequent prints of his film carry these inspiring words at the beginning:
“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.”
Clearly, the director had a very high regard for his own work.
Finally, Griffith produced another film, The Mother and the Law, which was his artistic response to those who had raised their voices in criticism of his work.
This sort of self justification is not surprising from an artist. Artists tend to bask in praise, but have never been particularly open to criticism. An artist will generally identify so closely with his product that he will construe a critique of his art as a personal attack. The reason it is difficult for an artist to separate his artistic statements from his identity is he recognizes that his art is an extension of himself, his heart and soul made visible.
There was quite a bit of D.W. Griffith’s heart in that production as he reluctantly admitted in his only recorded interview. The Birth of the Nation was his father’s story. No doubt, the criticism it received stung.
CHAPTER 5 – CONTROVERSY SELLS TICKETS – ART IMPACTS THE HEART!
In spite of its factual shortcomings, The Birth of a Nation was a great financial success. The price of a ticket was two dollars, not a small price in 1915, and a substantial jump from the five cents that had purchased admission just a few years before. Yet the public willing plopped down its money.
In that frugal age The Birth of a Nation’s earnings were an enormous accomplishment and one that even Wall Street could not ignore. All told, it grossed more than $18,000,000 and netted over $5,000,000. As incredible as it seems to us today, the film was so popular that it was still being shown in theaters as late as 1939 when other silent films had long since been set aside.
Though the controversy surrounding the picture hurt and angered its director, it was one of the principal reasons for its financial success. D.W. Griffith was the first film maker to discover and profit from the principle that “controversy sells tickets.” This principle continues to prove itself true even in our own day and age.
For example, every so often a controversial film such as, The Last Temptation of Christ, is released. In response, moral men and women raise their voices in protest, decrying the errors, the immoral philosophy or images in the film. Soon after they discover that their impassioned cries have only succeeded in providing the movie with free publicity, which generally results in increased ticket sales. This, in turn, puts money into the pockets of the producers, directors and actors whose work was an affront to them in the first place. This then, gives the film makers notoriety and the means to make even more objectionable films in the future.
Unfortunately for the moralits, it has consistently proven true that the main thing protesting a movie accomplishes is increasing its audience and therefore its impact. This leads us to a second principle: once a film has been released there is nothing that can be said or done, in a free society, which will prevent it from having its impact. Only its own internal or artistic shortcomings can muffle its message.
This is not to say that individuals of morality should not speak out when an objectional movie is made. However, they should realize that, as a practical matter, their protest may prove to be counter-productive.
In fairness, it should be pointed out that there was a sense in which Griffith was justified in taking pride in his production. There is a fact that the contemporary critics of this powerful and controversial film overlooked; The Birth of a Nation was an artistic triumph.
Whether his critics liked it or not, D.W. Griffith was good at making movies, and The Birth of a Nation represented the most visually exciting epic that had been produced to that point in time. Film critic James Agee was exaggerating very little when he described the film as “equal with [Matthew] Brady’s photographs, Lincoln’s speeches, Whitman’s war poems” He went on to assert that it is “equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country.”
Among the techniques Griffith pioneered or perfected in filming The Birth of a Nation were the iris, the fade, masking, panning, tracking, closeups, expressive lighting and parallel editing. Among the artistic flourishes often cited by those interested in the artistry of the cinema are, “his intercutting of massive battle scenes with shots of a family praying, the famous ride of the Klan, intercut with simultaneous events, and gathering momentum toward an overwhelming climax; the iris of a mother and children huddled together upon a hilltop, from which Griffith opens out to reveal an extreme long shot of soldiers wreaking devastation far bellow; and the memorable shot in which the arm of an unseen woman comes out of a doorway and gently draws her homecoming son inside.” (Griffith and Mayer)
All of these innovations, and more, gave the film the capability to pack a powerful wallop. Like The Great Train Robbery before it, The Birth of a Nation was able to draw the audience into its action, and once they were drawn in, it had the ability to impact them.
Among those who felt its impact and could testify to its power was the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. The Birth of a Nation has the distinction of being the first motion picture ever shown in the White house. After President Wilson saw it, he declared, “It is like writing history with lightning and my one regret is that it is all so terribly true” [emphasis added].
Upon reflection, Wilson, who was one of the most intelligent men ever to occupy the Oval Office and who surely knew better than to have pronounced The Birth of a Nation accurate history, retracted his endorsement. Nevertheless, the fact that a man as knowledgeable as Woodrow Wilson could be moved by such a film demonstrates that, like so many other movies since, The Birth of a Nation possessed that special ability to make an end run around the mind and sell its message by overwhelming the emotions.
Thus, another principle was established. A film need not be factual or logically sound to impact the audience, It only needs to be artistically well done, (i.e. Well-written, well-produced, well-directed, well-acted.)
The impact that the movies have had on our society reminds one of the way in which “invincible” castles walls were breached in an earlier age. The favorite tactic for capturing a castle during the Middle Ages was to tunnel underneath a predetermined point of attack, fill the tunnel with anything that would burn, and set it on fire. This subterranean fire would then cause an explosion, which would cause a breach in the wall, through which an invading army would pour in to capture the stronghold. The movies have done a similar thing to Judeo\Christian civilization.
Since “The Birth of a Nation” was released in 1914, countless other movie makers have found that the formulas pioneered by D.W. Griffith work for them as well. Through the years we have witnessed numberless deliberate and inadvertent attempts by movie makers to use the movies to sell their own personal value systems. Their success in doing this is one of the principal reasons for the rapid dissemination of the philosophies liberalism, humanism, and in recent days, pantheism and postmodernism in our society. It is also one of the primary ways in which traditional Judeo-Christian values, which were once the bedrock of our civilization, have been undermined.
