To Screen or Not to Screen: Birth of a Nation gets the boot

yeah, i actually don't think it's very wise to show this in public with a lot of publicity. it reopens old wounds, and not in a way that would probably lead to anything particular constructive. it is a historical document, but one with a strong ability to stir emotions--and a film screening at a commercial theater (even the Silent Movie Theater) isn't quite the historical society, or even MoMA.

that said it's a beautiful film, though deeply, deeply offensive.

"YOU STUPID SPECIES! FUCK YOU!"

the film center at the art institute of chicago gets away with showing it every now and then, probably because it has the imprimatur of a "museum" or "school."

You went to that! I thought about it, but then remembered it was DJ Spooky and thought better of it.

the thought that anyone would want to watch this outside of a film class baffles me.

I'm not in film class and I'd like to actually see a 'document' in American History of such importance. You can trust me. I promise.

the little colonel coming home to his mother's welcoming embrace: we see only her outstretched arms. his little sister making a "party dress" by glueing balls of cotton to her worn-out rags (a poetic--albeit in an antiquated way-- means of suggesting the privation of the war years). etc.

I DID NOT. I will not abide such vicious slander, sir.

Fair enough, but sme point as above. Why is censorship the answer?

the NAACP, in its early years, led the efforts to ban this film when it first came out (1915)! i read a pamphlet put out by the NAACP back in 1917 or so, decrying the film's "incitement of race hatred" and grotesque stereotyping.

the film was banned in several cities, including (briefly) boston and chicago. not so much b/c the local governments were enlightened folk, but because they were worried about race riots.

I really, really don't understand why the NAACP would want this censored. It's important to keep stuff like this around, wouldn't a better idea have been for them to approach the theatre to try to help sponsor or host it in order to create a civilized debate about it?

the DGA (Director's Guild of America) annual award was recently renamed from the D.W. Griffith award to...something else.

xpost

yeah lee is a really sophisticated/interesting guy who somtimes betrays his own intelligence by choosing really easy targets.

-- |a|m|t|r|s|t| (|a|m|t|r|s|t...) (webmail), August 10th, 2004 2:51 PM. (amateurist) (later) (link)

AHEM I AM PROVING U WRONG

the worst example of this sort of thing i've seen: a performance by...the guy who did "chansons de la mer froide" in front of nanook of the north. people were booing.

Momus?

http://www.stairwell.com/doc/images/lebowski.jpg

s1ocki: the chicago summer silent film festival tends to show the same things year after year after year. well, there are always one or two curveballs. but otherwise it's: one german expressionist classick (NOSFERATU/METROPOLIS/CALIGARI/GOLEM), one colleen moore-type flapper romance, one Fairbanks swashbuckler, one louise brooks films, one buster keaton, and one other slapstick (maybe harold lloyd).

i don't really blame them, because they need name-value films that will attract paying customers (they rent out a huge old theater so the operating costs must be high), but still it's a little disappointing to see the same thing--or more or less the same thing--year after year.

the music box is a great place that does make its money from tickets and sodas and popcorn, but no matter how great their main programming, their choices for weekend matinees tend toward the conservative (i.e. more orson welles movies than you can shake a stick at, casablanca, etc.)

Yes I have seen it. I did not find it beautiful as you did, because it is fundamentally ugly, and I can't manage the form/content split you seem to have undertaken in order to enjoy it.
The racism is very far from genteel, yes. But by saying most LiT/BoN comparison is one of the stupidest things you've read here, you seem to be saying 'genteel racism' is okay, in a sense, or that comparing it with un-genteel racism is stupid. Of course the racism is worse in BoN. But instead of saying 'look how far we've come' it might be useful to consider how little mainstream narrative cinema has advanced in its depiction of Other cultures.

fuller was a really articulate anti-racist. he made some interesting comments to joseph mcbride about the theme of miscegnation running through john ford's work. and then you have white dog, a film so aggressive in its attack on racism that it was actually mistaken for being racist by certain fools.

i wish there were a good way to see white dog--it's been six years since i've seen it (a dub with spanish subtitles found at kim's in new york) but i found it extremely powerful and disturbing.

floats like a puddle.

"one scene has mae marsh leap from a cliff to her death to be spared the "fate worse than death"--being raped by a black man."

This is kind of a strange scene to pick out as an example of the film's racism.

the first half of this film is still pretty impressive -- the battle scenes are especially powerful and eerie to watch, it's almost like seeing newsreel footage of the civil war.

the second half is kind of boring, honestly.

i love that wilson quote - 'like history written in lightning'

Godfrey Cheshire on this week's uncomfortable centennial of its release:

The Birth of a Nation of 2015 is not the Birth of a Nation of 1985 or 1965 or 1935 or 1915. And that’s a key to the paradoxical feelings the movie inevitably generates today. On the one hand, the advocacy of white supremacy of a century ago has been decisively bested by a common philosophy of equal rights for all — indeed, overt *public* attitudes about race have shifted 180 degrees since 1915 — and it’s hard to imagine most Americans are not profoundly grateful for that change. On the other hand, the sentiments expressed in Griffith’s film are undeniably baked into the nation’s DNA, as events of the last century, from Selma to Ferguson, keep reminding us. In that sense, The Birth of a Nation survives — very uncomfortably for some, no doubt — as perhaps the greatest documentary ever made about the stain of racism on America’s soul. As such, pace my students, it is required viewing for anyone wanting to understand this country’s history.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/why-we-arent-celebrating-100-years-of-movies.html

required viewing for anyone wanting to understand this country’s history

but only if the viewer understands that the film's depiction of this country's history is as much a piece of detestable propaganda in the service of evil as was 'triumph of the will'

Thing is, I had TotW in my film history class as an assignment, the film society had a public screening of it - no controversy at all. Not so "Birth of a Nation" - I understand why, there are too many yahoos who would misunderstand it. But I would live to see BoaN in an academic context. Frankly I can't stomach it - again, because it's too close to home, and I've never been able to finish watching it.

there are too many yahoos who would misunderstand it

this could be extended to suppressing a great many things, in theory.

i'm not sure the problem is misunderstanding it

I'm pretty sure a public screening of TotW at a movie theater in present day Germany would stir up a lot of controversy, too.

there's nothing ignorant racist mouth-breathing rednecks like better in 2015 than kicking back with a cold brewski and watching a 100-year-old silent movie

I saw BoaN in a big concert hall with live orchestra and a big audience in their finest clothes. It was a weird experience in the second half. When the KKK rode through the town to save the day (well, SPOILER...) the score played Ride of the Valkyries.

I first saw it on public TV, probably in the late '70s (same for TotW). It was certainly fully notorious (and i think Valkyries was also on the score on that print).

btw the Film Forum in NY is showing it on March 2 as part of a Griffith mini-retro, and their pre-emptive strategy is a very large photo of the black documentarian who's introducing it.

http://filmforum.org/events/event/the-birth-of-a-nation-introduced-by-don-perry-event-page

This thing is 3 fuckin hours?

It's hard not to reply to ignorance. You know Islam started through violence? Have you spoken to Armenians and Serbs, and others wiped out by Islamic armies from 635 AD to today's ISIS. Listen, I suggest just staying away from the subject. Within seventy five years England will no longer exist anyways.

KKK is evil in its means and really no longer exists except back woods Alabama. There is an interesting movie you should check out titled "The Birth of A Nation." A very true depiction of history by DW Griffith and very true indeed.

well yeah hence the first American film "epic" xp

Intolerance was also 3 hours, Whiney, Griffith's follow-up that crosscut between the oppression of assorted minorities in different historical epochs. It failed at the box office.

can't wait for Whiney's review of Greed

Are they gonna show "Within Our Gates" or any Micheaux? That would be another "pre-emptive strategy"

Or run the DJ Spooky "formless bloops" soundtrack.

(Speaking of which: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kinolorber/pioneers-of-african-american-cinema )

i am pretty sure they've run an Oscar Micheaux series in the past. xp

(his stuff plays as a lot more avant-garde than DWG's, tho)

"one scene has mae marsh leap from a cliff to her death to be spared the "fate worse than death"--being raped by a black man."

This is kind of a strange scene to pick out as an example of the film's racism.

― buttslam is a pretty good move (circa1916), Saturday, April 18, 2009 6:50 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that was me who picked out that example, about ten years ago. but i think it's completely apposite, because it's all about how left to their own devices—and encouraged by northern "carpetbaggers" and "race-mixers"—blacks (or a sizable subset of them) will naturally chose to prey upon their former masters. the vision of black male sexuality depicted in that scene is precisely the stereotype that fueled, or permitted, decades of lynchings of black men for taking white women's "honor." if there's a particular pernicious stereotype that the film gives form—and there are many—that might be among the worst of them.

there are so many marvelous things in Birth of a Nation, as i remember every time I see. the Ford's Theatre sequence is an astonishing action sequence, edited and staged with breathtaking precision. there are also many poetic moments typcial of Griffith (though none really represent an advance on what he was doing in his Biograph films). but the racism of the film—and its distortions of American history—is really, if anything, worse than it's usually made out, even today.

anyway, i probably said most of this way upthread.

film history has moved far beyond the whole "griffith invented cinema!" (or the close-up, or the feature, or the epic, or whatever) thing. if anything griffith is kind of a stylistic outlier in american cinema of the 1910s, advanced in many ways but also capable of certain strategies of editing/staging/framing/narration that already seem kind of retrograde. i don't mean "retrograde" in a bad way, just that griffith was kind of stubborn in a way that made it hard for him to adjust to the rapid changes in film style that took place in the 1910s–20s the way folks like allan dwan and raoul walsh were able to do.

I saw BoaN in a big concert hall with live orchestra and a big audience in their finest clothes. It was a weird experience in the second half. When the KKK rode through the town to save the day (well, SPOILER...) the score played Ride of the Valkyries.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, February 10, 2015 12:43 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that cue was in the original (1910s) score, which was largely a "compilation" score, i.e. made up out of parts of other, often famous, musical compositions.

the advocacy of white supremacy of a century ago has been decisively bested by a common philosophy of equal rights for all — indeed, overt *public* attitudes about race have shifted 180 degrees since 1915

maybe not 180 degrees—attitudes were more diverse then and now.

there were anti-racists in 1915, and indeed the NAACP led a boycott of the film back then (when they were a new organization; the boycott actually got the NAACP their biggest public exposure in some contexts). the revisionist history the film depicts /was/ pretty mainstream at the time, and griffith seemed genuinely blindsided by accusations that the film distorted history, but the racial caricatures did get quite a bit of pushback.

nice piece (tho i don't find the entire western genre "virtually unwatchable"); things i didn't know about the premiere protests, and DWG endorsing it being pulled from public view after some years.

Monroe Trotter, a Harvard graduate and newspaper editor—along with the NAACP—helped expose the racist depictions and erroneous history in The Birth of a Nation to an otherwise oblivious nation. Not too many listened but the persistent and sustained effort had Griffith one day admitting that the film should be reserved for instructional purposes, for studying the art of film, and not be shown in public—a major step for the director who never publicly faced his racism but little comfort to the kid who enrolls in film school....

Griffith and his producers knew trouble was coming, as the NAACP had tried to get the film censored in L.A., and, for the film’s East Coast debut, the organization lobbied members of the New York City’s board of censors to ban it or at least insist on cuts. Meanwhile, to generate publicity for the NYC premiere, horses and their riders were hired to gallop around Broadway outfitted with Klan hoods and robes, apparently without incident. Thomas Dixon, the North Carolina native and unapologetically bigoted author of the original source material (a successful novel and successful play), helped forestall negative reaction to the film by writing to his old school chum Woodrow Wilson and arranged for the first ever White House screening.

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/kicking-and-screaming-the-birth-of-a-nation-at-100

always something to new to loathe about Woodrow Wilson, it seems

i never knew the NAACP actually tried to make a film that directly responded to this one, it's a shame that never got made.

that was not a bad summary, but this--

No one seemed to mind the insidious setup of the first reels that present the antebellum South in soft-focus idyllic tones, a myth that didn’t get its widespread public busting until Steve McQueen’s deft, unflinching adaptation of the memoir by Solomon Northup.

is weird. there have been several generations of high-profile books, films, and TV shows busting the myth of American slavery, "roots" to mention just one.

icymi

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/06/21/prominent-actors-criticize-bowling-green-removing-name-lillian-gish-campus-theater