Film historian: "In the battle scenes for instance..."
Student: "Wait, isn't this the movie where the klan are portrayed as good and the freed slaves as bad?"
Film historian: [nervous laughter] "Well, yes, but..."
Student: "And the black people are all portrayed as either lazy and deceitful or outright Uncle Toms?"
Film historian: [clearing throat] "Um, yes, that's true, but..."
Student: "And it ends with a shot of the klan drawing guns on black people to keep them from voting and the shot is presented in a comical way? And then Jesus appears, condoning the whole thing, right?"
Film historian: [coughs, adjusts collar] "Like I was saying about Citizen Kane..."
Really, fuck you, Griffith.
I wrote a whole piece on it years ago where I tried to convince the reader it shouldn't be taught at all but, honestly, I don't know that I even convinced myself. I just find it hard to believe sometimes that of all the early full-length feature films that clearly helped invent the language of modern film, the most important early one happened to be based on a racist novel by a dimwitted racist asshole named Thomas Dixon. So now we're stuck with it. Do you know how many movies in the two or three years surrounding 1914, 15 and 16 had no plot devices whatsoever concerning evil, scheming black men battling saintly klansmen? All of them, that's how many! But this had to be the one that, on the technical side of things, did it all right. And, man, that just sucks.
4 comments:
Racism infects America the way rainfall strikes a given area in a week or a month. You don't know precisely when it will pour, but you know sooner or later it will happen.
It was not one of those terrible unlucky breaks, it was really inevitable that racism would turn up somewhere soon and in a major way in the early history of film. Griffith was the American master of film, he was also an American racist. These two worlds did not collide, they were just waiting to become combustible.
Racism still pervades America like rain, except now we don't get thunderstorms,just showers. Witness the "voter fraud" identification laws. No one talks about it much now, but school and housing segregation remain major problems in this country. And I don't need to tell you how limited black opportunities are in the movie biz.
Esco, I don't disagree with a thing you say, in fact, you say it very well. It's just that it's kind of amazing that, say, Way Down East didn't happen in 1915 and Nation in, say, 1919. Then, we could study Way Down East as the big movie with all the firsts and Nation as a well made racist tract that we could just ignore but as (bad) luck would have it, Nation came it first.
Still, I'm hoping by writing little "Things that Suck about Film History" posts like this I can get more thoughtful comments like yours.
Well, yeah, I saw Birth of a Nation as part of cinema studies at NYU where it was argued that Griffith was made aware of the error of his ways, which is why he made Intolerance. For some of us the big point of interest was seeing Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth.
On a similar note, in another class, we saw Night and Fog. The teacher wanted to discuss the formal aspects of Resnais' film, but the students voiced the opinion that the content here was more important than the form.
Peter, I think that's incredible and that's exactly the type of thing I've often touted. I've said so many times that a film is a work of art. It may be a good work, a bad work or an ugly one but it's art and first and foremost, it has to be addressed on an emotional level. Only then can you begin to analyze on any other level. With Nation, the emotional level takes over thanks to the content.
Of course, it's difficult to claim it's a badly made movie because it's a greatly made movie and so we know, artistically, the movie succeeds but emotionally, it fails except, of course, to someone who holds the same racist views as Griffith or Dixon, at which point it succeeds on that level as well.
It really is one of the most fascinating, infuriating films this country ever produced. A film with content so despicable it dares you to admire it on the formal level alone.
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