The first half of the movie seemed quite mild. The northern Stoneman family, and the southern Cameron family, are on good terms, despite disparate politics. There is a definite southern bias, but like I say, quite mild. Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) is clearly the heroine, but I found Margaret Cameron (Miriam Cooper) more attractive. I'm surprised to find that Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) was actually born in Madrid, New Mexico: who knows, maybe she actually knew my forbears from that neighborhood?
Before seeing the movie, I wondered whether the Birth of the title referred to the Confederacy. Apparently not. Then I wondered whether it referred to the refounding of the United States after the Civil War.
We still look at the events of 1776 as the beginning of the nation, but there is an alternative interpretation, that it was only after Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House that the nation actually was founded, and the States finally eclipsed. It's definitely a minority opinion, but still, it's a respectable opinion that some historians find attractive. Griffith seems to endorse this view, but nevertheless, that isn't the Birth he refers to.
Abraham Lincoln seems quite distant at first, but because of his magnanimous nature, and his mercy, he is seen as a genuine statesman. His assassination is treated by the southerners as a great disaster. So, excepting some weirdness regarding Austin Stoneman's mulatto maid, and many characters appearing in blackface, the first half of the movie is quite mild.
Then, the movie heads out into outer space. The second half of the movie is all about Reconstruction. A mongrel army of Negroes, mulattoes, scalawags, carpetbaggers, and Radicals afflict the South. Watching the Ku Klux Klan save the day, cavalry-style, to 'The Ride of the Valkyries' left me dumbfounded, my mouth agape. The 'Birth' of the Nation refers to the Birth of the Aryan Nation - Northern and Southern whites united together against the black horde. Oh, so this is why the movie is controversial!
The movie was accompanied with a small documentary explaining the origins of the movie and matters related to its filming. Very impressive! The documentary featured a quote from John Hope Franklin (related to some extent here):
As John Hope Franklin has written, "The supreme tragedy is that in The Clansman (the book on which the film is based) and in 'Birth of a Nation,' [author] Thomas Dixon succeeded in using a powerful and wonderful new instrument of communication to perpetuate a cruel hoax on the American people that has come distressingly close to being permanent."And Griffith's influence, of course, was profound, deeply affecting directors like Sergei Eisenstein:
..."First," Professor Franklin said, "we have a picture of negro rule that existed no where in the South. ... Second, it is a picture of a prolonged drunken brawl ... and third, it is a picture of a reign of black terror that began with the surrender at Appomattox and continued until the withdrawal of the last troops from the South."
Some 50 million people saw "The Birth of a Nation" in the five years after its release. And, as Pat Loughney, curator in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, writes in his notes to the film, "Griffith's heavily propagandized version of race history, reinforced by an emotionally charged melodrama, was absorbed as truth by a majority of those who saw it."
A great deal of the film's effectiveness can be attributed to the astonishingly innovative techniques Griffith brought together for the first time in a feature-length motion picture. Before Griffith, motion pictures were shot from random distances. Griffith varied the perspective from close-up, to medium, to long shots according to the dramatic effect he wanted to achieve. He edited the shots for continuity. He discovered that the audience had the capacity to follow cross cutting and multiple story lines within the same film. And he coached his actors toward a naturalistic style, away from the stilted, artificial poses that were the norm.
The heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as a sort of SWAT team of righteousness led to a dramatic rebirth of this secret organization. Although there was some disagreement among the panelists as to how much the film was used for actual recruitment, author Scott Cutlip provided a number of convincing historical details in a letter published after the event in The New York Times. According to Mr. Cutlip, the modern Klan had its beginning in 1920 when two out-of-work World War I publicists in Atlanta formed a partnership with the owner of a bottle club that was going out of business because of Prohibition.
In only three years, the 3,000- member club grew into a national force for bigotry and hatred with 3 million members, thanks to a propaganda campaign that featured sponsored screenings of "The Birth of a Nation," according to Mr. Cutlip.
...As a young man working on his Ph.D. dissertation 55 years ago in Raleigh, N.C., Dr. Franklin told the audience that he would regularly pass a courtly gentleman outside the courthouse. The gentleman always greeted Franklin with a warm smile.
The young graduate student was forced to reevaluate the significance of the man's cordial expression, however, when he found out his identity. It was Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman, the very source of Griffith's racist version of Reconstruction. Far from offering a smile of welcome, Franklin concluded, Dixon's smile probably was more a reflection of his secret delight at keeping "the likes of me" out of any governmental office more influential than "a Jim Crow cubbyhole in the State Archives."
But Dixon's smile would have changed to a frown had he known that a cubbyhole was all Franklin needed. It was the start of a distinguished career that would enable him, among many other accomplishments, to marshall the facts to contradict Dixon's fabrications.
"The long reach of 'The Birth of a Nation' is nowhere seen and felt so much as in the picture of Reconstruction that continues today to dominate the thinking and even the writing of most lay persons and indeed too many professional historians who labor apparently under the spell of Thomas Dixon and 'Birth of a Nation,' professor Franklin said. "It is as if a certain picture of Reconstruction must be perpetrated in order to bar permanently African Americans from positions of public trust in the United States."
Among other things that reflected a "profound ignorance" of actual events, Griffith depicted a tide of corrupt black rule in Southern legislatures after the Civil War.
"No such thing happened," Dr. Franklin said.
...He concluded saying that "the only value that 'Birth of a Nation' has lies in its enormous contribution to the development of cinematography." He quoted Walter Lippmann's remark that "no one who had seen the film could ever hear the name [Griffith] again without seeing those white horses."
The horses, bearing members of the Ku Klux Klan, came at the audience straight out of the screen in a head-on tracking shot. The effect was electric. When the film was first released, audiences reportedly ducked to avoid being run over. Little did they know they had been hit already.
The American director D W Griffith, considered by Eisenstein to be (despite his politics) the first great storyteller in film, took Porter's parallel montage technique and introduced different camera lengths, giving us the close up and the extreme long shot. Instead of Porter's objective distancing from the action, Griffith pulled the spectator into the scene through the subjective close up and different viewpoints, controlling what the spectator saw and manipulating their emotional and intellectual response. In his seminal films, Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation, Griffith not only utilised close ups for emotional emphasis, he also used flashbacks and dissolves, maximising tension and excitement by increasing the pace of cutting towards the climax.I thought Griffith's telling of Col. Ben Cameron's charge at Petersburg was wonderful filmmaking!
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