William M. Drew’s “D. W. Griffith’s House With Closed Shutters” is a real life detective story laced with much heretofore unavailable information about the single most important and most maligned artist in the history of motion pictures, an art form and an industry which would not exist without him.

In a time when not only film makers but nearly everyone else are eager to give their employers what they want it is important to recall Griffith’s advice to the men he trained (Erich Von Stroheim, Sidney Franklin, Elmer Clifton, Donald Crisp, Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Ingraham, Paul Powell, Allan Dwan, Tod Browning, Edward Dillon, Joseph Henaberry to name just a few), “Don’t give them what they want. Give them what you want.”

When so many around us say, “Get with the program. Go with the flow,” it is important to remember that the only fish that go with the flow are the dead ones.

I have read this book through three times. I am going to be delving into it again and again and again. Very rich. Very rewarding. Eminently re-re-readable.

Get a copy today. You can order it here: http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Griffiths-House-Closed-Shutters/dp/1466215100

“A great discovery about a remarkable, unknown chapter in D. W. Griffith’s early life. It is a genuine surprise as I never supposed there was anything more to find out about Griffith. Yet William M. Drew has uncovered high drama. I was riveted throughout by this amazing story, full of revelations.”–Kevin Brownlow, Film Historian and Documentarian.

I first came in contact with Mr. Drew a few years back when a local journalist who aspires to be an authority on film published a carelessly written piece on THE BIRTH OF A NATION and D. W. Griffith that had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

I wrote him about it. So did Mr. Drew with whom he put me in touch. That lead to a long and much appreciated dialogue between Mr. Drew and myself which can be read along with other pieces on Griffith in this post.

The present state of film journalism and scholarship is at its lowest.

More info on these sites:

http://william-m-drew.webs.com/

http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.ca/2012/07/book-choices-one-two-from-william-drew.html

http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12391

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15737269-mr-griffith-s-house-with-closed-shutters

http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.ca/

“Our gratitude to D. W. Griffith will always be mingled with shame. For while his genius has gone, the spirit that destroyed him remains strong as ever…”—Kevin Brownlow, THE PARADE’S GONE BY.

In the small town I grew up in there was an old woman whom many said was a witch. Her daughter had Down’s Syndrome. We called her a Mongloid Idiot (which was the term used in those times http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Mongoloid+idiot ).

One day when I was eight I gathered up all my courage, walked down the long path to her lonely house and knocked on her door.

She invited me in. We became friends. Her husband had been killed in World War Two. The daughter was all she had of him.

I do not know what became of her or her daughter though I have often wondered. Perhaps it is time I found out though I lack the means to help in any concrete way.

That spirit of mean spiritedness that so easily labeled this tragic woman a witch is not limited to small towns. It is found in big cities. I have felt its sting personally more than once. I have felt it so often I am immune to it.

It began to sting me the moment I walked out of her house and away from the people who labeled her a witch.

“Don’t mind him. He is eccentric,” they said.

The only thing that troubles me about being called an eccentric is that the people who say that are saying that they are not. Too bad for them.

My point in relating this story is simply to say I made a conscious choice which I have never regretted to have the spiteful people say spiteful things about me rather than stand with them against those they slander.

Not content with destroying Griffith physically that spirit has now done everything in its power to destroy Griffith spiritually. I was shocked a few years ago when I found out that Cinematheque Ontario had taken the name of David Wark Griffith off its top membership level.

Their reason? “Griffith was a racist,” they said.

I met James Quandt, a gay man who should know better than to submit to such silliness and who then was chief programmer for Cinematheque Ontario, on the street.

“How could you do that? It is not true,” I said.

“But it is,” he replied.

David Wark Griffith had a commanding vision of the movies as a power to illuminate darkness in the four corners of the world. No racist had or has a vision like that.

Anyone who takes the trouble to actually seek out and see the man’s films will find out for themselves how rich that vision was.

In INTOLERANCE for example, Griffith consciously chose to reference Walt Whitman who had scandalized America with LEAVES OF GRASS in which he spoke about love, real, physical love, not only between men and women but also between men and men. Said his supervisor at THE POST OFFICE where Whitman worked after he found a copy of the book in Whitman’s desk and read it, “You are lucky I don’t have you fired.”

As for Oscar Wilde, his fall from grace was spectacular.

Griffith, by including them in his film about INTOLERANCE, stood up for gay/queer rights long before anyone else even dreamed about doing it.

Since Griffith’s departure from the movies as a film maker after the financial failure of his last film, THE STRUGGLE (1931) and his death in 1948 that power has been used not to illuminate the darkness but to make it deeper.

Monday I went to see THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the latest film starring The Batman.

For ordinary movie goers it may well be a satisfying popcorn movie. That is all that it is.

As someone familiar with THE BATMAN from the books in which his stories are published I walked away from the film with a deep sense of dissatisfaction that such a rich trove has been and continues to be so poorly mined.

The death of Heath Ledger boosted by huge degrees the box office for THE DARK KNIGHT but here again the original material was poorly presented when contrasted with the original source.

I am reminded of THE HUNGER with Catherine De Neuve and David Bowie which, on first viewing I thought terrific. “Read the book,” said my friend Barb Schofield who had taken me to see it.

All too often the movies make a silk purse into a sow’s ear.

That is how it was when Griffith began making  his 508 films starting in 1908.

That is how it is now.

Charles Beaumont, a terrific writer who wrote for the movies, said, “Writing for the movies is like climbing a mountain of feces to smell a rose.”

On the shelf at The Cineforum are the books on Griffith by many who  knew and worked with him including the ones by Billy Bitzer (his cameraman), Karl Brown (a young man who learned his trade by assisting Bitzer and rose to become one of the greatest cameramen in the movies) and Griffith stars Miriam Cooper, Lillian Gish, and others.

There is also a photocopied copy of the Seymour Stern FILM CULTURE issue devoted to THE BIRTH OF A NATION and books on Griffith by others.

Back in the 1970’s I mounted a series of silent films with a man who had accompanied them on piano and organ for THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART in New York.

I mentioned him to Lillian Gish, the star of many of Griffith’s films, when I first spoke with her.

“He is not really very good,” she said.

Silently I said to myself, “Amen.”

In 1980 I brought Bernard B. Brown to Toronto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_B._Brown

Mr. Brown had begun his career playing first violin in the orchestra which accompanied THE CLANSMAN (as THE BIRTH OF A NATION was then titled) when it premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. He had played in that orchestra throughout the film’s entire run.

My reason for doing this was that many “scholars” write that THE BIRTH OF A NATION no longer has the power to move audiences as it once did.

I felt that the film properly scored would have that power. Long ago I had learned from my brief experience as an actor that our job in the theater is not to meet the expectations of our audience but to surpass them.

After Mr. Brown’s departure I presented THE BIRTH OF A NATION as part of THE TORONTO FILM SOCIETY’s silent series in a 600 seat auditorium.

I got there to find out the projector they were using ran faster at silent speed than the one I used to create the score while the reel to reel tape player they gave me ran slower.

Faced with an impossible situation I knew I could not back out. I was between a rock and a hard place.

I had an inspiration. The projection booth was sound proof. I could run parts of the film in silence and use the monitor speakers in the booth to synch up the score.

For three hours I sweat blood.

When the film ended the audience in the theater was on its feet stomping and cheering just as they had in 1915.

The director of the TFS Silent series opened the door of the booth, surged up the steps and said, “That score is brilliant! I especially admired your inspired use of silence.”

In that moment I realized that there are moments in silent films that are best seen in silence. It affected me deeply. I threw out all of my old scores and started fresh.

This is how we learn.

Imagine seeing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY with the soundtrack turned off and someone hamming it up on a piano for the picture’s duration.

That is how all too often we see silent films.

“Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton.

In my teens I was encouraged by my teachers to be a writer. I saw motion pictures as the medium in our day print had been in the 19^th century when Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Tolstoy and others had worked.

That is no longer true.

For a very brief moment, under Griffith, it was true. It began and ended with him.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION was shown to the public at a top Broadway price of $2 a seat. This was, at the time, unheard of for a mere movie.

Imagine paying top Broadway price for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (or any other motion picture today).

“The public won’t pay that kind of money for a movie,” said the industry and the critics in Griffith’s day.

They were wrong.

In first release in America alone THE BIRTH OF A NATION was seen by over four times the population of that country.

That was what launched the motion picture industry from a nickel and dime affair into the art form of our day.

We owe so much to this man that there is no way we can ever repay the debt.

There is, unfortunately, no shortage of small minds.

Griffith’s films were about ideas.

For August I am offering the picture many feel (correctly) the greatest film ever made, D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1915).

Part one will be shown with a score from the music of Philip Glass. Part two will be shown with a score from the music of Jean Sibelius.

Conventionally people who score this film try to match the music to the film’s four historical periods (ancient Babylon, the Holy Land of Jesus, the massacre of the French Hugoneuts by Catherine De Medici and a modern day story of capital versus labor).

Unconventionally I have chosen to use the music of a single composer for each section of the picture to bind these four threads into one rope.

INTOLERANCE has been called the only film fugue (a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts).

It is not. But it sure as Hades is the greatest one.

I first came in contact with William M. Drew, the author of D. W. Griffith’s House With Closed Shutters, when a local film scribe published a piece on Griffith and THE BIRTH OF A NATION that had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

I wrote to him about it.

So did Mr. Drew with whom he put me in contact.

I will share with you here what I gained from that contact. It is certainly worth sharing.

David Wark Griffith had many writers he could have quoted from for his film INTOLERANCE. Instead of choosing the safe path he chose to quote from two men damned in the public eye for their sexuality: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. That alone should have given James Quandt pause for thought but James has never been the brightest bulb in the patch.

INTOLERANCE was as vilified in its day as was THE BIRTH OF A NATION.

 

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

D. W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) is the single most important work in the history of world cinema. With it Griffith single-handedly propelled the motion picture from a side show novelty into the greatest art form of all time. Today Griffith is a much maligned man. Much that will be written here probably will not sit well with his detractors. I am not writing for them.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Griffith Scholar William M. Drew

 

 Following is an email conversation between Griffith Scholar William M. Drew and myself which took place after the publication in a Toronto paper of an all too typical article on THE BIRTH OF A NATION.

 

 

1. Jan. 8, 2005. 12:34 PM

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent movie The Birth of a Nation conquered a new frontier of filmed storytelling, but generated a powerful backlash for its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as the valiant heroes of the U.S. Civil War.

A confederacy of Klansmen

GEOFF PEVERE <http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=970599109774&ce=Columnist&colid=969907620784>
ARTEFACTS

Among the many places in America where the Ku Klux Klan rode to the rescue 90 years ago, perhaps the most conspicuous was the White House.

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson insisted on it. He’d been hearing about this “photoplay,” directed by the already-famous David Wark Griffith, that people across the country were lining up to pay the unprecedented sum of $2 a head to see.

The year also marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the War Between the States, and popular interest in the still-vivid event was high.

The photoplay was called The Birth of a Nation. It was about how the post-Civil War American South had been saved from rapacious carpetbaggers and marauding former slaves by the Ku Klux Klan.

It was the first nationwide sensation in the history of moving pictures and it made something new of its actors – Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall – something that would soon come to be called “stars.”

It conquered a new frontier of filmed storytelling, a frontier comprised of rhythmic editing; the calculated alteration of camera positions, from the intimate close-up to the panoramic battle sequence; visual compositions in depth and the manipulation of primal emotional response.

This movie juxtaposed the historical with the personal, letting a story of lovers torn apart by war unfold against a backdrop that included dramatic recreations of real events, such as General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Said actor Walter Huston years after first seeing it, “It made the blood tingle.”

The Birth of a Nation created an appetite for cinematic spectacle that still enthralls us.

In the wake of its success, which alerted people like the young mogul-to-be Louis B. Mayer to the potential of producing features like Birth on an assembly line, the nickelodeon era was over and the day of the movies as a mass attraction was established.

President Wilson joined millions of Americans in being impressed. After emerging from the sweeping, three-hour epic (based on two novels by the bestselling white supremacist Thomas Dixon), the president offered what may rank as the first blockbuster blurb: “This is history written with lightning,” he is alleged to have said.

To the extent that it scorched wherever it struck, Griffith’s pioneering long-form feature (previously, the longest American movie, also from Griffith, had run four reels, or 40 minutes) was like American history disgorged by a flamethrower.

The story of two families, one Northern and one Southern, whose fates would be fused together then ripped apart by the Civil War and its aftermath, Griffith’s silent movie was the most significant event in American popular culture of its day.

This film consolidated just about every narrative and stylistic development in the barely two-decade-old medium into a powerful and propulsive experience.

It also single-handedly redefined the business and established movies as the century’s most influential form of mass communication. All we know of movie culture today began with The Birth of a Nation.

But Wilson’s legendary assessment was also a masterstroke of political doublespeak, because lightning can dazzle but also destroy.

Almost immediately after Birth began a commercial run that would continue in one fashion or another into the early years of the sound era – the most popular silent film ever made, it eventually reaped an astounding $60 million (in pre-Depression U.S. dollars) on a $110,000 investment – Griffith’s vision of the South ravaged by Reconstruction generated a massive backlash.

Led primarily by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the anti-Birth movement decried the film’s sensational depiction of freed black slaves as lazy, lecherous, ignorant and vindictive.

In one sequence, the virtuous “Little Sister” (Mae Marsh) of the once-genteel, Southern aristocratic Cameron family is driven to suicide by a lust-crazed black soldier (a white actor in blackface). Another features the spectacle of a state assembly dominated by blacks guzzling booze, gnawing fried chicken and plopping dirty bare feet onto desks (images Griffith drew from racist editorial cartoons of the Reconstruction period).

Not surprisingly, the NAACP and its supporters sought to block the film’s release.

As aesthetically and technically groundbreaking as it was, The Birth of a Nation is virulent and unequivocal in its depiction of the former Confederacy (for which Griffith’s father fought as a colonel) as a fallen Eden beset by black devils and sneering Yankee exploiters.

In the movie’s climactic moment – which must have had audiences cheering, crying and howling – the humiliated Cameron patriarch holds a pistol over his only living daughter’s head as black soldiers attempt to pound their way into the cabin where a small group of white people have barricaded themselves against the dark hordes.

This man is ready to sacrifice his own child if the brutes get in, but then a sound is heard – or, to be precise, is suggested by Griffith’s evocative editing. It’s horses. It’s a rescue. It’s the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan. In the nick of time.

For the rest of his life, Griffith claimed not to understand what upset so many people about the movie. As far as he was concerned, he was simply chronicling his personal experience listening to his parents describe the deprivations that had befallen his childhood home of Kentucky during Reconstruction.

In 1930, at the time he was making his penultimate movie – a historical biopic of Lincoln – the 55-year-old Griffith filmed an interview defending The Birth of a Nation. Clearly well-rehearsed, conducted over cigarettes by Abraham Lincoln star Walter Huston in a plush sitting room, the interview ran prior to the film in a fresh commercial release.

In this interview, Griffith – who had not had a successful film in nearly a decade – defends the movie’s heroic portrayal of the KKK.

Wistfully, he claims the Klan had “a purpose” in those days, that it “saved the South.”

The great contradiction of Birth, between the monumental nature of its expressive achievement and the reprehensible message it expressed, has always tempered its historical status.

Over the years, many have attempted to either defend Griffith or mitigate his prejudice by insisting he be granted consideration in context – that is, as a 19th-century sentimentalist and southerner for whom the post-Civil War south really seemed a ravaged place saved by the KKK. But it’s simply impossible today to watch the film and not be appalled.

In his Griffith entry in the most recent edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson calls the movie’s racial politics “embarrassing.”

In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan, which had originally formed as a secret society dedicated to exacting vigilante justice against what it saw as the enemies of the defeated South, was a moribund, depleted and antiquated organization. That changed with the movie’s release. In Georgia alone that year, KKK ranks ballooned to 8 million, and 22 Klan-related lynchings took place. This is historical fact. But it is also something else: The birth of history as something shaped by the movies.

While Griffith’s film proved an effective recruitment campaign for a reborn Klan in throughout the 1920s, the popular image of the organization itself tarnished immediately. It would seem that the backlash, combined with the growing civil rights consciousness of the 20th century, prevailed.

Few, if any, heroic portrayals of the hooded, white vigilantes followed. If anything, the image that stuck was one of irredeemable ugliness. The Klan became the symbol of white Southern race hatred, and the figure of the hooded Klansman was invariably associated with burning crosses, redneck ignorance and gruesome lynchings.

By 1939, the year that Gone With the Wind was released, the most popular and eagerly anticipated American movie since The Birth of a Nation conspicuously omitted the KKK subplot in Edna Ferber’s original novel.

Birth of a Nation‘s “history written with lightning” struck the KKK only once. The fire burned bright but left only ashes.

Sources: The Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz.; Griffith Masterworks, Kino on Video (DVD); The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson; The Silent Cinema, by Liam O’Leary; The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson.

 

gpevere@thestar.ca <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>

=======================================================

2. Not sent–draft

Geoff Pevere is a writer from whom I expect better than we received in his piece on D. W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION which is replete with errors, not the least of which is ascribing to Edna Ferber the authorship of Margaret Mitchell’s novel GONE WITH THE WIND.

We are also told that Griffith had not made a successful film in nearly the decade from 1920 to 1930. That era includes both WAY DOWN EAST (1920) and ORPHANS OF THE STORM (1922) which were huge popular hits and a number of other pictures that not only did respectably at the box office but also still hold up today.

We are told that Woodrow Wilson is alleged to have said, “This is history written with lightning.” The implication is that he might not have. Left out is that Wilson was an historian of that period and ably qualified to speak.

Lenin described THE BIRTH OF A NATION as “An express train among pushcarts.” But then the Russians were not deflected by skin color. They saw the film for what it truly is a depiction of class struggle.

Had the revolution failed they would all have been hung as outlaws instead of remembered as heroes.

I had great difficulty presenting this film until I read Seymour Stern’s excellent in-depth study of the picture in FILM CULTURE magazine. Not only did Stern traces the creation of the picture he also traced the roots of the slave trade, established that the South knew slavery could not continue and that the impetus to end it faster than the south could handle came from an industrialized north looking to create wage earners who could spend money on the products they were creating. Stern also established that the money to industrialize the North came from the sale of slaves to the South.

Pevere writes, “In his Griffith entry in the most recent edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson calls the movie’s racial politics ‘embarrassing.’” What is embarrassing about them?

No one who takes the time to investigate the issue would find them so. Contemporary film writing is all too often sophomoric at best.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION presents the time of its setting as it was from the point of view of the losers, the White American South. That view is given us by a man who was a member of that society and whose father, “Roaring” Jake Griffith was one of the authentic heroes of that conflict whose deeds were recorded in Great Britain as Griffith found out when he went there to film ISN’T LIFE WONDERFUL.

Scott Simon in THE FILMS OF D. W. Griffith, writes, “As anyone who sits with an audience through the film in the 1990s recognizes, its return as formalist masterpiece or even as visceral adventure is possible only in the imagination.”

Not when I screen it.

In 1980 I brought Bernard B. Brown to Toronto for three days. Among Mr. Brown’s accomplishments, which included directing the recording of the sound on THE JAZZ SINGER (1927), introducing multi-track recording, ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL (1939), receiving eleven Academy Award nominations for film and film sound as well as two Oscars, being head of sound at Warner Brothers and then at Universal until he retired, teaching film and film sound at UCLA and playing tennis with Charlie Chaplin, among Mr. Brown’s considerable accomplishments was the fact that he played first violin in the orchestra at Clune’s Auditorium ion Los Angles from the premiere of THE BIRTH OF A NATION (as THE CLANSMAN) through 365 performances.

With Mr. Brown as my mentor (by the way as far as popular success goes, I had only three people come out over the three days Mr. Brown was in this city. The event was a huge popular failure) with Mr. Brown as my guide I studied in depth film and film sound at a level no one else in the world ever has.

Shortly after I was invited to screen the film for 500 grade thirteen students. Their teachers told me not to be disturbed by their reactions to the film as they would talk and laugh throughout the picture (doing that at all the films they were shown). “Not today,” I said.

Three hours later those young people were applauding and cheering. They had said not a word to each other during the length of the film. “I don’t understand,” said their teachers, “they have never done that before.”

I was also invited to present the film, with my score, for The Toronto Film Society. Barry Hayne, a University of Toronto Film Studies teacher, was head of the Silent Series. I arrived to find out the projector they gave me ran faster and the tape recorder slower. There was no way to synchronize the film and taped score.

On reflection I realized I could run parts of the film in silence and use the monitor speaker in the projection booth to synch up the score. I sweat blood. The screening was at the Ontario Institute for Studies auditorium which seats hundreds. At the end of the film this modern day audience was reacting as wildly as audiences had when the picture first exploded across screen. Barry Hayne came charging into the both shouting, “REG! THAT SCORE IS BRILLIANT! I ESPECIALLY ADMIRED YOUR INSPIRED USE OF SILENCE!”

The brilliance was Griffith’s. I was just following his cues.

A few days ago Martin Knelman wrote singing the praises of Garth H. Drabinsky, a man whose chief claim to fame is that he took the movies back to the shoebox cinemas David Wark Griffith lifted them out of with this film.

At the time Drabinsky’s CINEPLEX first opened I spoke for the first time with Miss Lillian Gish, the star of THE BIRTH OF A NATION. “Theatres have shrunk,” she told me. I thought of Garth’s 25, 50 and 100 seat cinemas and said, “Yes.” “My last film, Robert Altman’s THE WEDDING, opened in a 500 seat theatre,” she said. “That is a big theatre,” I thought to myself wopndering what she was complaining about. Then she said, “My pictures opened in 5,000 seat cinemas.”

Yes and that began with THE BIRTH OF A NATION. While Geoff does mention that THE BIRTH OF A NATION eventually reaped an astounding $60 million (in pre-Depression U.S. dollars) on a $110,000 investment and that people across the country were lining up to pay the unprecedented sum of $2 a head to see the film he does not explain that $2 in 1915 amounts to almost $50 a seat today. No other film maker, excepting one, has taken his risk nor surpassed his success.

That one other was Metro Studio head Richard Rowland who produced, against the advice of his board of directors, the Rex Ingram, June Mathis Rudolph Valentino film, THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1920), the only film to surpass THE BIRTH OF A NATION in box office success in the silent period.

When I brought in a 16mm print, obtained from Charles Vesce in New York, one of the longest established and most reputable suppliers of great films in America, I heavily researched the music for the film which not only established Valentino as a star (the first great star) but also introduced to the world the Argentine Tango.

Ed Jull, of the Toronto Film Society, told me the TFS had screened the film long ago and that musicians in the audience had claimed the music for the film was not “on the beat.”

I invited your film writers to see the presentation. They did not come. One person who did come was John Roberts P.C., our Minister of Culture under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Another was an older Argentine couple. “The music! The music!” said the woman. “You had that score on the beat all the way,” said her husband who added, “We are going to send Argentine people here.”

THE BIRTH OF A NATION remains the single greatest work in the history of world cinema. It established forever the art and the business of motion pictures. It presents the only honest and accurate picture of the American Civil War and the Aftermath of Reconstruction from the point of view of the American White South. We are not asked to agree with that perspective. Certainly, we should not. But to color that moment with the popular prejudice of our own time is a far greater sin.

As well, THE BIRTH OF A NATION is the only motion picture that allows us to see and understand the depth of the wound at the heart of the American soul.

========================================================================

3.Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.

Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg

========================================================================

4. Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is
crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.

Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
=========================================================================

5.Plenty. I run the risk of looking hysterical by listing them.–Reg

.

—– Original Message —–

From: Pevere, Geoff <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>

To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>

Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 10:33 AM

Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.

Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg

=====================================================

6. You? Hysterical? Perish the thought.

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/9/2005 1:43 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Plenty. I run the risk of looking hysterical by listing them.–Reg

.

—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 10:33 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE
WIND.

Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
====================================================

7.And then you called her a liar! Just kidding.

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/9/2005 6:44 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

One of my favourite moments showing THE BIRTH OF A NATION was when I was introducing it at Innis College as part of my series there. A number of people called me a liar. Jane Jacobs was in the audience. She got up and said, “He is telling you the truth.”

—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 11:45 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

You? Hysterical? Perish the thought.

—–Original Message—– —–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/9/2005 1:43 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Plenty. I run the risk of looking hysterical by listing them.–Reg

.

—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff < <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>
<<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>> >
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ < <mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>
<<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>> >
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 10:33 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.

Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
=============================================================

8. Reg,

What a pal. Thanks.

Geoff
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: lettertoed thestar
Cc: T. Casey Brennan; Simon Waegemaekers; Sharif Khan; rob salem; richard ouzounian; Robert Fulford; michael valpy; Murray Glass; liz braun; john tutt; john bentley mays; jim slotek; julian grant; John Ferri; JBeck6540@aol.com; jadams@globeandmail.ca; hanna fisher; martin goodman; Gino Empry; George Anthony; editor@boxmagazine.com; Ryan Burt; bruce macdonald; al aronowitz; Roger Ebert; Geoff Pevere; ed jull

Sent: 1/10/2005 1:40 PM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Geoff Pevere is a writer I enjoy reading. His piece on THE BIRTH OF A NATION in Saturday’s STAR was so full of errors however that I am forced to speak.

While it is true that THE BIRTH OF A NATION was the first film to be shown at The White House this was not because then President Woodrow Wilson was curious to see the film. He had been asked by The Reverend Thomas Dixon, whose book THE CLANSMAN the film was adapted from, to look at the picture. Wilson was in mourning for his first wife and did not want to be seen in public. For that reason and that reason alone the film was taken to the White House.

It began showing in Los Angeles on February 8 under the title THE CLANSMAN (this title was used throughout the film’s Los Angeles run). Wilson knew nothing of the film until he was contacted by Dixon. He agreed to see the film because long before at a moment he needed a hand Dixon’s was the one that reached out.

The White House screening took place on February 18, 1915. The film did not open to the public in New York until March 3, 1915.

After seeing the film it is reliably reported Wilson, an American historian and highly qualified to pass judgment, said, “It is like history written with Lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Later, when the stuff hit the fan Wilson, ever a politician, retracted the remark. J. P. Tulmuty, Wilson’s chief public relations adviser, wrote, “The President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented, and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old friend.”

In doing research on this film and the rest of Griffith’s work I obtained copies of the autobiographies of D. W. Griffith, cameramen Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown, and actressess Miriam Cooper and Lillian Gish as well as an extensive list of books devoted to Mr. Griffith, the best of which is Richard Shickel’s . The best exploration of the film remains Seymour Stern’s for FILM CULTURE in 1965.

Geoff tells us that in the decade between 1920 and 1930 Griffith had no commercial successes. The reverse is true. He had huge hits with WAY DOWN EAST and ORPHANS OF THE STORM (the two pictures he self-produced). The films he made for both Paramount Pictures and United Artists did respectable business. I was surprised to discover, reading Shickel’s book that Griffith withdrew from film making not because his pictures were not popular but because he got tired of producers mucking them up. This continues to frustrate serious film artists. Animation director Chuck Jones told me the most common thing he heard from producers was, spoken as one word, “That’snewtakeitout.”

THE BIRTH was not the most popular film of the silent era. Rex Ingram’s THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE holds that honor. I built up a score for that film from the Argentine Tango. Ed Jull, of the Toronto Film Society, told me when the TFS screened the film years before musicians in the audience complained the soundtrack was not “on the beat.” At a screening of THE FOUR HORSEMEN one man said to me, “I am from Argentina. You had that score on the beat all the way through. I am going to send Argentine people here.”

THE FOUR HORSEMEN begins its story in Argentina.

Geoff winds up crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND. Mitchell described THE BIRTH as “the only honest film about the American Civil War and the Aftermath of Reconstruction.”

Its honesty lies in showing that period from the point of view of the White South. The wounds from that time have still not healed. THE BIRTH OF A NATION, more clearly than any other film, shows why they exist.

THE STAR has not always been so unkind to Griffith and his film. Urjo Kareda, one of the most astute critics the paper enjoyed, wrote “D. W Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION is not only the oldest film in town but quite the best as well.”

There is so much misinformation (and deliberate slander) about Griffith and his work that it pains me to see Geoff write so sloppily about what is, after all, the most important film ever made.

One writer, Scott Simon, in his THE FILMS OF D. W. GRIFFITH, writes that whatever power the picture had to move an audience it does not have that power today.

Well, it all depends on how it is presented.

It is not generally known that however great the advances were that Griffith made in film technique with this film (and they are considerable) the true power of the film rose from the special music score Griffith had created for the picture.

In 1980 I brought to Toronto Bernard B. Brown who played first violin in the orchestra which accompanied the film throughout its Los Angeles run. In 1927 Mr. Brown directed the sound recording on THE JAZZ SINGER. He got eleven Academy Awards and two Oscars for his work with film and film sound which he taught at UCLA when he retired from the film industry. After consulting with him I built a score for the film. When I screened the picture to The Toronto Film Society a few years back the audience went wild on their feet cheering and stomping when the film ended just as audiences had in 1915.

University of Toronto Film Prof Barry Hayne, then in charge of the TFS Silent Series, came surging up to me shouting, “That score is brilliant! I especially admired your inspired use of silence.”

The brilliance was Griffith’s. The silence was from necessity. I can take no credit for it. I learned a lot in the fire of that moment. I threw out all of my old silent film scores and started anew. I looked to use silence instead of covering it up.

I have also presented the film to hundreds of high school students whose teachers were astonished to see them so caught up in the picture’s power. The kids were more astute than the adults. They were amazed to find out how vulnerable we all are to mass media manipulation (which is why I continue to show the film).

David Wark Griffith singlehandedly lifted motion pictures up from shoe box theatres and transformed the medium into the art form of our time.

Garth Drabinsky, whom Martin Knelman praises regularly, singlehandedly took it back to the shoeboxes. That $2 a seat audiences paid to see this film would be almost $50 a seat today.

Griffith deserves better, way better, than the sophomoric and hysterical piece Geoff delivered up.

Lillian Gish informed me that Griffith had no idea his film would lead to the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan and personally felt that no matter what it had achieved it was not worth the price of a single black man’s lynching. It must have been a source of great horror and pain to see such diabolical fruit fall from his work.

10.Yeah, you’re a prince.

—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/10/2005 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

If the best friend I ever had wrote misinformation about you I would take him/her to task for it. Most especially so if you were not able to do it for yourself. –Reg

—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 11:51 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Reg,

What a pal. Thanks.

Geoff
=======================================================

11. Dear Mr. Hartt:

I don’t know why you sent this particular article to me, but you might be interested in an anecdote of my own.

Several years ago, I was teaching a course on Griffith at Columbia College in L.A.. As any course on Griffith must, I included a showing of BIRTH OF A NATION. I happen to have a beautiful, complete version with an excellent orchestral score.

The class included a couple of black students. After the showing, one of them came up to me and said, “Mr. Glass, I hated some of the basic stories in the film, but I couldn’t help rooting for the Klan as they were riding to the rescue of the beseiged people in the cabin!”

Murray Glass

————– Original message from “Reg Hartt” <rhartt4363@rogers.com>: ————–
=================

12. 2nd response. You are Jewish. I am Irish Catholic. The Ku Klux Klan hated Jews and Irish Catholics as much as it did Blacks. I think that gives both of us a slightly better perspective dealing with the issues this film raises.–Best, Reg Hartt

—– Original Message —–

======================

13. Wow – great piece of writing. I really appreciate all the knowledge you have brought to this film. I hope to make it down in a few weeks to catch it!

Thanks again,

Happy New Year!

TOOTS CAPITAL

Val Dooley

Director of Communications

Tel: 416 488-9649

Fax: 416 488-8173

val@tootscapital.com <mailto:val@tootscapital.com>

www.tootscapital.com <http://www.tootscapital.com/>

============================================================

14. Reg,

Thought you might be interested.

Geoff

—–Original Message—–
From: ReelDrew@aol.com
To: gpevere@thestar.ca
Sent: 1/11/2005 3:52 AM
Subject: on maligning D. W. Griffith
Dear Geoff Pevere,

In your zeal to denigrate D. W. Griffith and “The Birth of a Nation,” you are guilty of several gross errors and untruths. As a film historian who has for years attempted to bring recognition to Griffith’s relevance as a great artist (among my publications is the 1986 book, “D. W. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’: Its Genesis and Its Vision”), I have had to continually respond to those who, under the guise of presenting facts, consistently perpetrate myths and outright falsehoods about the director. The apparent objective is to unmask Griffith as an evil-minded racist who caused great harm to American society, and in the service of such an endeavor accuracy is of no concern whatever. I do not believe these inaccuracies and misstatements are all accidental slip-ups but represent a calculated effort on the part of these critics to justify censorship and military occupation, things which they would normally oppose After a lifetime of battling people such as yourself, I am frankly sick and tired of the controversy and am presently debating with myself whether I should even bother to respond to your reckless disregard for the truth. Nevertheless, I will point out several gross  errors in your article:

1. Margaret Mitchell, not Edna Ferber, was the author of “Gone With the Wind.” This bizarre inaccuracy has already been pointed out on the newsgroup, alt.movies.silent. It seems to be typical of your approach to scholarly research in general.

2. You state that the longest American film made prior to “The Birth of a Nation” was a four-reel film by Griffith running 40 minutes (presumably, you mean the 4-reel “Judith of Bethulia” which, at the proper projection speed, runs about one hour). In fact, most of the early American features of 1912, 1913 and 1914 were five or six reels in length. The first full-length US feature, “Richard III” (1912), the rediscovery of which received great publicity some years ago, was 5 reels in length; Helen Gardner’s “Clipart” (1912) was 6 reels. In 1914, Mack Sennett’s famous comedy feature, “Tile’s Punctured Romance,” was 6 reels, as was the “The Squaw Man,” co-directed by Oscar Capful and Cecil B. Demille. Other films Demille directed that year, such as “The Virginian,” were 5 reels long. In the case of Griffith, the four reels of “Judith,” his final film for Biography (filmed in 1913, released in
1914), was a compromise between the studio’s insistence on shorter films and his desire to expand with longer films. After that, Griffith left Biography and, in partnership with the Aitken brothers, formed his own company for the purpose of making feature films. In 1914, he directed the following four features prior to “The Birth of a Nation”: “The Battle of the Sexes” (5 reels), “The Escape” (7 reels), “Home, Sweet Home” (6 reels), “The Avenging Conscience” (7-8 reels). I believe the longest American feature released in 1914 may have been Selig’s version of the famous Western story, “The Spoilers,” 9 reels in length or nearly two hours running time at silent speed. 1914 also saw the release of the first Canadian feature, “Evangeline,” produced by Bioscope at 5 reels. (It was also shown widely in the US.) I guess you simply didn’t bother to look up the acknowledged facts in making your statement that a four reel film was the longest American feature prior to “The Birth.”

3. You state that “The Birth” was the most popular film of the entire silent era. This may be more excusable than the others, but it is still something which has long been refuted by more scholarly studies. The biggest box office hit of the whole silent period was King Vidor’s World War I epic, “The Big Parade,” released in 1925. “The Birth” was the single most popular American film of the 1910s, no question about that, but the exaggerated claims of how much money it made and how many people saw it stem from the Griffith company’s publicity department and the film’s various distributors over the years. Initially, it was an understandable way of attracting favorable publicity and increasing its box office pull during its later revivals. More recently, however, it has been used as a tool against Griffith and the film by those who, by accepting the inflated numbers, now assign the film to the central position in American race relations, in effect, making Griffith responsible for the entire course (in a negative sense) of the black experience in much of the 20th century.

4. This leads to your most egregious misstatement, one that is absolutely unforgivable. You write that, in the year of 1915, membership in the revived Klan in the state of Georgia alone suddenly “ballooned to 8 million, and 22 Klan-related lynchings took place. This is historic fact.”

Er–not quite. In 1915, the total population of was between two and three million people. 50 years later, the state’s population was just under four million. It has only been in recent years that Georgia’s population reached and then surpassed eight million. As for the figures regarding the number of Klan members in the US in the period beginning in 1915, membership grew slowly; it was only in 1920 and 1921, following the breakdown of Progressivism in World War I and the Red Scare, that the Klan emerged as a powerful organization in the US. Even so, it never attained 8 million members nationwide, much less in the state of Georgia. In 1921, it was estimated that over 100,000 people had joined the Klan; at its peak of popularity in the mid-20s, membership is estimated to have been 6 million for the entire country. After that, however, it quickly declined after a series of scandals and widespread corruption brought upon them well-merited scorn. The attempt to blame the whole thing on Griffith, which, as the title of your article suggests, seems to be your main point is excessively misleading and simplistic. The immediate spark that brought the Klan back into existence in Georgia was the sensational Leo Frank case which raged in Georgia throughout 1913 and 1914, climaxing in his lynching in 1915. A Jew from the North, he had been falsely accused of raping and murdering a young girl named Mary Phagan. Ironically, the real culprit was a black man who falsely implicated Frank. Members or supporters of Frank’s lynch mob, calling themselves the Friends of Mary Phagan, soon started a new Ku Klux Klan, which first appeared in Georgia in November of 1915. However, they were only a minor organization at that time. Had the United States managed to stay out of involvement in World War I, the new KKK would probably have gotten nowhere. What provided the shot in the arm to turn them into a national phenomenon was the hatreds and repressive climate spawned by World War I and the reaction to the demands for greater equality by minorities and labor. The KKK rode the wave of this reactionary mood for several years, not because of Griffith’s film (which, in 1920, when the Klan began its first major recruiting drive, had not been screened for several years) but because of the right-wing climate of the time. However, most people these days, instead of undertaking a sophisticated examination of the social, economic and political strains that gave rise to the revived KKK, prefer a simple demonization of D. W. Griffith. That Griffith had earlier directed a film in 1911, “The Rose of Kentucky,” which depicted the Klan as heavies, and that his pleas for tolerance in “Intolerance” (1916) and “Broken Blossoms” (1919) were totally opposed to the kind of bigotry embodied by the revived KKK is something his critics now choose to forget.

The myths, exaggerations and total fabrications have had their effect of erasing Griffith’s reputation in his own country. It was 30 years ago that his centennial was widely observed here and a postage stamp issued in his honor. Griffith was largely revered as, in the words of Orson Welles, “the premier genius of our medium.” Sadly, with the passing of the “Griffith generation” (those directors from Allan Dwan and King Vidor to Orson Welles and John Huston who were most directly  influenced by him) as well as close associates like Lillian Gish, there were elements who emerged that were bent on destroying him. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, symbolized several years ago by the Director’s Guild of America dumping their DWG lifetime achievement award amidst a torrent of anti-Griffith invective justifying the move.  In his own country, Griffith is now largely remembered, not as the visionary who transformed an art worldwide but merely as the “racist” who allegedly poisoned American race relations. His detractors never mention his criticism of the capitalist system in his films, his championship of women, the poor, the Native Americans, his opposition to war, the death penalty and (in a number of films) racism. Instead, they have created a monster bearing no resemblance to the real individual.

In order to create this unlovely, fanciful portrait, they will not hesitate to make up any story, circulate any outrageous claim. A number of years ago, a writer named Homer Croy wrote a fictionalized account of Griffith’s life in which he included an invented tale and character, a black maid of Griffith’s who was allegedly so offended by “The Birth” that she angrily departed his service. Although this incident never took place nor did the woman even exist, the story of Cora the black maid who stood up to the nefarious Griffith was related as fact in a widely-seen PBS documentary on black filmmakers and has continued to circulate ever since, despite my own efforts to point out the falsity of this anecdote. I would be typing a far longer letter than this if I were to point out the errors and outright lies that inevitably crop up in articles, books, documentaries etc. intending to malign Griffith. In fact, I have never yet seen an article slamming Griffith over “The Birth” without its including at least one or two such falsifications.

The beleaguered few who still try to uphold his reputation are, by contrast, usually much more accurate.  As to why people persist in this pattern of distortion instead of relating the simple facts, I believe it is largely because they subscribe to the same kind of “noble lie” advanced by the Straussian neocons to justify such actions as the US conquest of Iraq. After all, if the goal is the lofty one of creating a democratic Middle East or a racially egalitarian society, why bother with a little thing like the truth? So go ahead–repeat the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Al Qaeda–and that Griffith was the main source of all of America’s racial problems and that his film led to hundreds of people being killed. (I’ve done considerable research in the papers of that period, and I’ve yet to uncover a single instance of a showing of “The Birth” provoking a lynching or a deadly race riot.

The violence it caused was mainly in the form of scattered fist fights and vandalism during the course of protest demonstrations. Significantly, no one has ever sought reparations because of some  supposed harm done to them or their family because of the release of “The Birth.”) However, if Griffith’s enemies have their way, the film may finally lead to bloodshed–any individual publicly showing “The Birth” in the US today runs the risk of being killed. Just last year, when Charlie Lustman announced his intention of screening “The Birth” for one night only at his Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles, his life was threatened and protestors spoke of burning down the theatre.

Thus, Griffith’s foes through their litany of errors and falsehoods have succeeded in creating such a climate of fear that it is virtually impossible now to have even a limited public screening of the film. And they have so tarnished Griffith’s name that few people here are even willing to discuss any of his work with the blending of sympathy and objectivity that is essential to all valid aesthetic criticism. That in discrediting the film’s depiction of history in favor of a rosy picture of the Reconstruction era they are also trying to justify military occupation is perhaps another reason for their persistence. In their heart of hearts, they know “The Birth of a Nation” is essentially truthful in its portrayal of the harshness of a civilian population being subjected to military rule. The nagging feeling that many of these critics have that Griffith’s film IS valid is one reason they are driven to such frenzies. An outrageously foolish distortion of historical reality would hardly arouse such fierce opposition for such a long time. It is the truth which hurts–and the truth which must be suppressed. There is no such thing as a “nice” military occupation–as is being demonstrated once again in the US aggression in Iraq and was also true in the defeated South in the 19th century.

Given my great respect for Canada and Canadians, I am sorry to see that even a Canadian publication has signed on to the mountain of misinformation that has destroyed D. W. Griffith’s reputation in his own country. Griffith was very much a friend of Canada and in the mid-20s made a speech in the Canadian parliament in which he urged them to develop their own film industry independent of both Hollywood and Britain. However, it appears that the use of a common language, English, facilitates the spread of the anti-Griffith propaganda since it is largely in the non-English-speaking world (countries like France and Japan) that Griffith is now most highly regarded.

Perhaps this letter has been another exercise in futility on my part. But in closing, I’m providing a link to my own online article on Griffith which, I believe, places his achievements in the proper perspective.

The URL is: <http://www.gildasattic.com/dwgriffith.html>
<<http://www.gildasattic.com/dwgriffith.html>>

It is part of my series of articles on great silent film directors representing every inhabited continent of the globe at: <http://www.gildasattic.com/pioneers.html>
<<http://www.gildasattic.com/pioneers.html>>

I have also included some of Griffith’s anti-war statements in my online “pamphlet,” “Hollywood’s
Answer to War,” at: <http://www.gildasattic.com/answer.html>
<<http://www.gildasattic.com/answer.html>>

Sincerely,
William M. Drew
PS. The photo used to accompany your article is from Griffith’s “Abraham Lincoln,” not “The Birth of a Nation.” Yet another error.

=========================================================

15. I am. Thanks. I understood THE FOUR HOSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE to be the only film that surpassed THE BIRTH at the box office. Had someone else written a letter to the editor I would not have. We both know you are not a member of any “conspiracy” or “cabal.” You have too much integrity for that kind of silliness. The fact that you are your own person is why I read you.

I once heard a priest deliver a sermon that was 100% anti-Christ. I asked him, “Do you know what you just said?” He turned to a woman and asked. “Did I say that?” “You could not have,” she said, “but it sounded like you did.” Shortly after I got the heave from that church. I stopped going to churches a long time ago.

For me, Griffith is the only way out. You have not done what I have done. By that I mean not only the on the road presentations to packed cinemas across the country at premium prices only to have them come to an abrupt end because the fellow who ran Ottawa’s Towne Cinema slandered you from coast to coast (John Tutt, of Waterloo’s Princess Cinema, was told by this man, “I can’t believe you still do shows with Reg Hartt?” John replied, “The audience loves him. His shows fill the theater.”) nor have you tried to work with Famous Players or Cineplex Odeon only to discover if I do I will wind up owing more money than I make.

You have not researched a film like THE BIRTH, THE FOUR HORSEMEN, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, METROPOLIS, etc., created a bitching score for it, watched the current generation go nuts over the film (due to the music which causes them to see the film in a new and exciting way) and then seen your labors dismissed by the so-called “intelligentsia” (which is never intelligent and always elitiest) all the time watching people like NFB vet Doug Eliuk, Hanna Fisher and John Roberts (our Minister of Culture under Trudeau) applaud your efforts.

You have not seen the smarmy, dismissive smiles on the faces of many in the film community who say, “Well, if you go there, you have to listen to him,” only to have the very great pleasure of hearing a Jane Jacobs, a Tibetan Lama, a host of others say, “The best part of these programs is what you bring to the table.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am not bowed under by those who dismiss my work. I am carried up by those who, without being told, recognize a value in it.

No, you have not done that. But you have done things I do not know of that have been equally frustrating for you.

I have always wanted to make films. I don’t want to make a film and, at the last moment, have the money men say, “Well, you can not do that.” So I chose the hard path.

The first time I was asked to speak in school extemporaneously I saw a word coming out that carried the penalty of a trip to the office and the strap. I accepted the penalty. To my surprise I did not have to pay it.

The next day a fellow who hated me used the same word. He got the strap. I was furious. I asked the teacher why he was being punished and I had not been. “Are you trying to make me look like teacher’s pet?!” I asked.

“I watched you choosing. I watched you accepting the responsibility of your choice. You were right. He was just walking through the door you opened.” I was told.

Griffith lifted movies up out of the Nickelodeon. There may well have been other features before him. He was the first to charge $2 $200 today) a seat for a movie. He did that because he saw no other way to quickly pay back the money his producers were hounding him for (the top price for a live play was $2.50. He figured if they’d pay $2.50 for George M. Cohan they’d pay $2 for him).

What people pay for movies today is the same as the 5cents they paid yesterday. Garth Drabinsky singlehandedly took the movies back to where they were before Griffith.

Anyway, live is short. I don’t care to rant at someone I care about (and I am not ranting).

One time I showed Eisenstein’s TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD (1927) with a purely perfunctory music track. One fellow came up to me and said, “You can do a better job than that.” I did not get angry with him because he was right. At that moment he gave me the kick in the ass I needed to do the job right. That week I went to work creating a new score for the film. I was forced to stretch myself and it was a good thing.

There is much in the piece you sent that I did not know (especially about the KKK). Thanks.

You have no idea how much of a joy it is to open the paper and discover you talking about things no one else in this country does. When we make mistakes we give our enemies the ammunition they need to dismiss us. Your worst mistake in the Griffith piece was crediting Edna Ferber for Margaret Mitchell’s work because that is the one that most obviously shows the error.

That is why it is important to be “on the beat.” Obviously, The Toronto Film Society does not give a damn about being on the beat. Neither do most folk in the film scene. But the kids who line up across the country for my programs (and once in a while in the United States) walk out saying, “I did not know this much fun was allowed.” (A kid actually said that).

Here’s one I just got for Sunday’s KID DRACULA show:

hi Reg,

i was at the showing of Kid Dracula last night (which was awesome by the way) and i just wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts with us when the movie was over. besides being entertaining i thought you made a lot of very interesting and valid points that really got me thinking. my boyfriend and i were talking about many of the things you said long after we left your place. although i throurouly enjoyed the show, the highlight of the night was definately your talk at the end. i have to tell you that i admire your openess and honesty, but most of all your willingness to pass on your knowledge and opinions to others. i was wondering if you could email me the names of the three books you mentioned are worth reading. i tried as hard as i could to remember them, but my short term memory doesn’t tend to be very reliable… i also wanted to ask you what the lifetime membership to the Cineforum is all about and if you play the same movies every sunday (i really want to see Dark Side of Oz sometime soon). anyway, thanks again for sharing your thoughts and i hope i get to hear more of what you have to say sometime soon.

cheers,
Christina

March marks the 90th anniversary of THE BIRTH OF A NATION. I have been acquiring Griffith titles (including the Biograph shorts few of which I have seen). Would you like to join me in honoring this much maligned man?

Remember. THE BIRTH OF A NATION was an independent film. Griffith is the father of that too. The only future I can see for the serious film artist is the path Griffith walked. He “four-walled” (rented outright) The Liberty Theatre for THE BIRTH.

Chaplin four-walled THE GEORGE M. COHAN THEATRE for CITY LIGHTS. Chaplin was told silent films were old hat. No one wanted to show his film. He gambled on himself. After a few weeks those who had turned their noses at his silent film were begging to be let play it. The fellow who made BILLY JACK did the same.

I once saw a dog get run over by a car. I went to where it ran to hide (I was amazed it had not been killed as both the front and rear wheels passed over it) and offered it my hand, palm down, saying over and over, softly, “It is okay.” The dog snapped its jaws shut on my hand (which I expected it to do). I did not expect it to do that so gently there was only a slight dent from one tooth on a finger. Then it stopped barking and let me help it.

There is no such thing as an “hysterical person.” I saw, peripherally, an old man get roughed up by two young men on Yonge street. I was on the west side. He was on the east. He got angry. They passed by. No one but myself saw what had happened. The sleepwalkers woke up to his rage (“hysteria”) and got scared. A police car stopped. The old man was roughly handled and shoved in the back of the car. I crossed the street saying to one of the cops, “Can I talk with you? “Mind your own business,” I was told. “I am minding my own business. I saw what happened.” At that they listened, got the old man out of the police car, apologized for handling him so roughly and took him into a coffee shop. I learned the need to do that from Doris Mehegan (who ran THE SPACED OUT LIBRARY, now THE JUDITH MERRIL COLLECTION).

Yesterday, at 5am, I heard the sound of someone being beaten in front of this house. I woke up, stumbled to the window (without my glasses) and at once called 911. It turned out to be the police catching a suspect. It was a pretty horrendous sight. More horrendous was the emergency operator’s dismissive voice as if them doing that somehow made it okay to beat this man to a pulp. Every once in a while the veil lifts and we see we are living in a police state (as all states are).–Reg

—– Original Message —–

From: Pevere, Geoff <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>

To: ‘rhartt4363@rogers.com’ <mailto:’rhartt4363@rogers.com’>

Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 6:24 AM

Subject: FW: on maligning D. W. Griffith

Reg,

Thought you might be interested.

Geoff

=====================================================

16. If you want to astonish the person who wrote you accusing you of belonging to a conspiracy thank him for the info. There’s certainly a lot there to be thankful for.–Reg

—– Original Message —–

From: Pevere, Geoff <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>

To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>

Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 10:01 AM

Subject: RE: one of a kind

Reg,

Thanks for this. And, by all means, carry on.

Not that you need me to tell you that…

best,

Geoff

19. Dear Reg Hartt,

Many thanks for your fascinating letter and your comments and recollections about scoring “The Birth of a Nation.” With respect to the preparation of the original score, I had heard that Griffith and Joseph Carl Breil (by the way, while it is often spelled “Briel,” the correct spelling is “Breil”) had some more or less friendly disputes about how to best present the music. (Lillian Gish in her book says the disagreement over the Klan call involved Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries,” although I know Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was also used). I had not heard before that Carli D. Elinor had taken part in a three-way discussion (with Griffith and Breil) over how the music should be utilized. Breil is best-known today for his work with Griffith, although he prepared musical scores for many other films, including such well-known imports as Sarah Bernhardt’s “Queen Elizabeth” and the Italian epic, “Cabiria.” As you may know, he also composed several operas but his work in that field was never as successful as his work in film scoring in which he was a major pioneer. Sadly, he died in early 1926, only in his mid-50s, and, like Elinor, is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery. While searching on the Internet, I found that his “Incidental Music from ‘The Birth of a Nation’” had been published by Chapelle, the music publishers. Also, the famous love theme from “Birth,” “The Perfect Song,” as you probably know, was issued as a popular song in sheet music. In this form, the lyrics for Breil’s music were by the well-known Canadian composer, Clarence Lucas. By a further irony of history, “The Perfect Song” was, in the early ’30s, adopted as the theme song of the “Amos N’ Andy” radio show, a borrowing which was noted in the black press of the time and added further to the controversy over “Amos N’ Andy” among some Afro-Americans in that era.

I had heard that live sound effects often accompanied showings of “The Birth” during its original run as well as a chorus who sang during certain scenes in the film. However, I had never heard before that a woman in the audience was employed to scream during Flora’s leap from the cliff. In my opinion, that was a terrible idea, highly inartistic and sensational to the point of bordering on camp, and totally unnecessary in what was supposed to be a silent film. I would hope that it was soon dropped or not widely used, and since I had never come across references to it in reviews of the period, I would think it was not extensively employed. I know, though, that they do include the scream in the 1930 sound reissue of “Birth,” along with voices of crowds and innumerable ear-splitting sound effects. So that would seem to be a holdover from the original presentation. By contrast, the use of sound effects in Griffith’s 1931 music and effects reissue of “Way Down East,” which he prepared just a few months later, is much more restrained and is not overburdened with ear-splitting noises. Obviously, if “Birth” had been presented in the United States with a live “benshi” performer providing narration and dialogue as was the custom in the Japanese silent cinema, such vocal effects as a scream would not be out of place. However, I have no problem with the sound of the music itself as recorded in the 1930 “Birth” reissue. Some have called it “tinny,” but James Agee, for one, enjoyed it and found it quite appropriate.

Regarding the musical arrangement of Breil’s score used in the Kino version, this is actually the most inadequate of the three versions I mentioned. There are mismatched cues, and in one instance, there is a small but memorable moment that is omitted from the print they used which is included in both the Brownlow Photoplay edition and the 1930 reissue. During the siege of Atlanta, the youngest Cameron son is killed and there is a close-shot of an old man holding his body. When I first saw that image in the 1930 reissue, it lingered with me, as it reminded me of Jean Valjean holding the unconscious Marius in “Les Miserables.” However, these few shots were apparently torn off in projection at the start of the reel in the print David Shepard used. It would have been a simple matter to splice in this footage from another source as Kevin Brownlow’s company did. This image is important because it is repeated later in the second half of the film, when an embittered Margaret, hesitant to accept Phil Stoneman’s love, thinks about her dead brother, killed in the battle for Atlanta. Failing to include the first use of the image in “Birth” robs its repetition in Part II of much of its poignancy and is typical of the rather slapdash approach to the music as well in the Kino edition. Part of the reason for the inadequacies of the Shepard version (musically and otherwise) is that it was basically a rush-job which they sought to get out in advance of the competing Brownlow release. I had heard that the Brownlow version is supposed to come out here on DVD sometime soon (it was released on VHS in Britain but was seen in the US only on TCM–because of the even greater controversy over the film these days, it doesn’t look like TCM will be airing it again). I suggest that you try to obtain copies of these other versions in order to arrive at a final judgment on the effectiveness of Breil’s score. The Photoplay version has the score arranged by the late John Lanchbery with some changes but substantially Breil’s original and performed by a full symphony orchestra. And, despite its technical imperfections, even the 1930 reissue, as I indicated, is musically much more effective, on the whole, than the Kino release. In this case, Breil’s score was revised for the synchronized rerelease by another well-known composer and arranger of the silent era, Louis F. Gottschalk, who had prepared the memorable scores for Griffith’s “Broken Blossoms” and “Orphans of the Storm.”

Since you asked me about Seymour Stern and why Scott Simon called him “notoriously unreliable,” bearing in mind that this is private correspondence, I will endeavor to give some idea of Stern based on what I have heard. I must state that I was never in contact with Stern although he was still living at the time I began working as a film historian. First of all, in Stern’s defense, he often did write with insight about Griffith’s films, including his use of mature, challenging themes. While, as I shall point out, I have problems with many of Stern’s opinions, he was capable of effectively analyzing Griffith’s social and political themes, analyses upon which I have drawn for my own writings on D. W. On one level, Stern did take film art seriously, championing, in addition to Griffith, Eisenstein and others. To his credit, Stern was one of the few American critics of his time to recognize the artistic importance of Abel Gance, who was often overlooked here until the “Napoleon” revival of the early 1980s. Stern appeared to be a close friend of Griffith at the end of D.W.’s life and often kept him company during Griffith’s last days living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel.

That much can be said for him. But on the other side, Stern, as Griffith’s grand-niece, Gerrie Griffith Reichard, put it to me in a 1976 phone call when Stern was still alive, was “nuts.” Simply stated, Stern was a paranoid schizophrenic who ended up hating Griffith as much as he loved him. In particular, many of the things he wrote about “The Birth of a Nation” in later years have ended up being used as ammunition against the film by others–even though Stern, claiming to be the guardian of Griffith’s reputation against all those who would diminish it, seemed to think he had thus also gained the exclusive right granted no other to brand the film as “racist” and a work which allegedly caused great harm to the black community. I admit I was a bit taken aback when, quoting Stern, you wrote rape is the main theme of the film. If you mean this in a metaphorical sense (war, conquest, imperialism, slavery all being in a sense forms of rape), then I thoroughly agree, as would Griffith. If, however, this is intended, as Stern apparently meant it to, to refer solely to black men raping white women, then while that was clearly the theme of Thomas Dixon’s original narrative, there is no evidence that Griffith ever consciously thought of it in quite those terms, however much he utilized Dixon’s story as the basis for his film. Indeed, Griffith was quite clear on what he thought the central theme of his film was. In a 1916 article that he wrote for “The Kine Year Book,” he stated: “‘The Birth of a Nation’ does not profess to be a sermon, but if, incidentally, it does something to show the real character of ‘glorious war’ it will, I think, have served at least one useful purpose.” I do not know if the opening title in the prints of the silent version of “Birth” we see today was included when it was initially shown in 1915 or first added to the 1921 reissue (it disappeared from the 1930 reissue), but it also sounds the anti-war theme: “If in this work we have conveyed to the mind the ravages of war to the end that WAR MAY BE HELD IN ABHORRENCE, this effort will not have been in vain.” Despite the controversy at the time, there were a number of observers in 1915 who also saw that as Griffith’s theme. For example, the Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, a leading clergyman of the era, writing at a time when Americans were still hoping to stay out the war raging in Europe, stated: “Every lover of peace must experience a certain painful gratification that just at this time the ghastly horrors of carnage can be brought so closely home to the eye. . . .On Griffith’s screen we see the real thing. There is no magnificence, no glory, but horror, brutality, and stark butchery. It sickens with the sense of man’s inhumanity to man. It makes war despicable and devilish. It conveys an indelible lesson to all who have been bewitched by those who have decked out the naked hideousness of war with tinsel drapery.”

To be sure, rape is the inevitable by-product of war and military occupation and it is to be expected that rape would be at least be suggested in “The Birth of a Nation.” Just a few years back, the news was full of stories of the mass rape of women by local military forces in the Balkans. Currently, I suspect there may be quite a few instances of US soldiers raping Iraqi women, but, needless to say, that is something the media is hushing up. Obviously, one reason Iraqi women have, under the occupation, lost the social freedom they once had is because of the terrible fear in this conservative Middle Eastern society that, if they go out more, they will be sexually assaulted by American troops. And that is not an idle fear. For years, there have been some notorious, well-publicized instances of these kinds of crimes in Okinawa, for example, where there is a longtime US military presence. At the very beginning of the American occupation of Japan proper just after World War II, nearly 2,000 Japanese women were raped by US GIs. Of course, that is not the sort of thing you will read in sanitized accounts of the “benevolent” American occupiers, but it is a matter of historical record. That black soldiers occupying the defeated South may have sexually assaulted white women is entirely probable, and I do not regard Griffith as an evil racist trying to stir up contemporary lynch-mobs simply because he implied this was part of the ineluctable fruit of war and occupation. At the same time, there are those who have pointed out a definite ambiguity in Gus’ approach to Flora. I will send you one of those quotes in a subsequent e-mail, along with some rather unorthodox thoughts of my own on how the film could be interpreted or reinterpreted today.

But first, I must return to Seymour Stern. It is clear from his writings that he had some absolutely bizarre obsessions and a very peculiar approach to the subject of Griffith. Touted as Griffith’s authorized biographer, he announced that he would not discuss Griffith’s personal life at all (isn’t that what a biographer is supposed to do ever since the time of Plutarch?) but instead write a “biography” of Griffith’s films. However, even here his method was to interweave useful facts and analyses of the films with his various hobbyhorses, including his consuming hatred of religion. If there is anything worse than a religious fanatic, it is an anti-religious fanatic. Indeed, Stern’s hysterical, bigoted atheism had become for him a form of religion. Judging from what I know of his life, Stern as a young Jewish radical from New York had been a convert to the political religion of Marxism. Despite his early interest in, and enthusiasm for, Griffith, in the early ’30s–a time when Griffith really needed intellectual support if he had any hope of sustaining his career as a director–Stern’s no. 1 idol then was not Griffith but Eisenstein. Stern was then proclaiming in the pages of “Experimental Cinema” and elsewhere his devotion to the Russian master as the cinema’s principal genius, the artistic voice of a great social and political revolution that would transform the world. While Stern continued to express respect for Griffith’s achievements, he seems to have regarded him at that time as belonging to the past, a genius whose best days were behind him and who, for all the social criticism in his films, was not the progressive harbinger of the new order that Eisenstein was.

During the course of the ’30s, Stern seems to have experienced some sort of spiritual and political crisis. The rise of the Stalinist tyranny in the Soviet Union and Eisenstein’s fluctuating fortunes there combined with Stern’s own unhappy experiences working in the Hollywood industry apparently produced in him a profound disillusionment. As a result, he increasingly retreated to his study of Griffith, and with his own marginalized position in the film world became something of a soul mate of the aging, long-retired Griffith whom he had first known in the 1920s when, as a youth growing up near D.W.’s Mamaroneck, New York studio, he had witnessed the shooting of several films and even worked as an extra in “America.” When, in the late ’30s and early ’40s, some elements of the Communist left in the United States began attacking “The Birth” (partly in conjunction with their protest of the big new Civil War film, “Gone With the Wind”), Stern, now thoroughly estranged from the Stalinist forces then in charge of the US Communist Party, vigorously denounced them and defended Griffith against the charges of racism. Publicly, he continued to take this line in articles he wrote for mainstream publications like “Films in Review” well into the ’50s. But as ultimately became apparent in his monograph for the more “underground” “Film Culture,” he took a much harder line when writing for a more specialized audience. The 1965 “Film Culture” issue on “Birth” is, in fact, one of the most schizoid pieces of writing on film history I’ve ever read–as though its author was on some sort of medication or narcotic resulting in wildly different mood swings and completely contradictory viewpoints.

While, unlike so many others of his contemporaries, Stern did not abandon the organized left with which he became disillusioned for a new home on the right wing of the political spectrum, he tended to float in a lonely world of his own, unable to accomodate the culture of his country or indeed any society. The logic of some of his statements are sometimes so incredible that one rubs one’s eyes and wonders how anyone in his right mind could seriously believe such nonsense. (Except that Stern was not in his right mind.) To take one of his weirdest pronouncements, one that seems especially off the mark today in light of the contemporary US political climate, in the 1965 “Film Culture” issue, he declares that organized religion (the Church) in the United States, while not necessarily condoning homosexuality, prefers it, prefers anything to heterosexulity! Given how in the last few years, we in the United States have been subjected to an epidemic of homophobia launched by the religious right, indeed a deciding factor in the recent unhappy election, one can only shake one’s head in bewilderment that Stern could have written such nonsense in all seriousness.
And what of his overall approach to modern culture in general? Although Stern constantly railed against the puritanism of religion, he was himself highly puritanical in many of his attitudes. Like some backward neanderthal, as late as the 1960s, he expressed his hatred of jazz music and just about every popular music of the 20th century. The genius of such titans as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart, among others, was totally lost on Stern. Although he included Charlie Chaplin in his pantheon of great filmmakers, he had nothing whatever to say about the other titans of silent comedy, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. But then, he clearly had very little sense of humor, judging from his writings. In fact, he despised the vast majority of films that were ever made, regarding them as so much commercial garbage. Even such masterpieces of the silent era as Vidor’s “The Crowd” and Murnau’s “Sunrise” he dismissed as “pseudo-artistic concoctions,” and claimed that “Greed” was Erich von Stroheim’s only notable achievement. He was equally scornful of Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and the great early sound films of France’s Rene Clair. And even where Griffith was concerned, he saw his one period of true greatness as the years when he was an independent from 1913 to 1925. Stern claimed that, while a number of Griffith’s early Biographs were creatively important, the majority were commercial “junk.” He also dismissed Griffith’s last films from 1925 to 1931 as largely commercial ventures in which he had surrendered to the demands of the Hollywood film industry. That several of Griffith’s independent features were frankly lesser commercial ventures, probably more so than most of his usually impressive late films, was something he did not acknowledge in his effort to create an artificial barrier between D. W. and the Hollywood film industry. Stern even poured scorn on one of Griffith’s and the cinema’s greatest stars, Mary Pickford, whom he despised for some unknown (to me) reason and pointedly (and absurdly) omitted her from his list of the great Griffith actresses.

Except for his increasingly paranoid rantings, there was really nothing all that revolutionary or truly unconventional about Stern’s approach to cinema. Beyond mentioning Gance favorably in passing, he never wrote an extended piece on him that might have brought him greater recognition in the United States in those years. I haven’t found in his writings any evidence that Stern had any particular interest in feminism or women’s issues. He certainly never championed such great, long-overlooked pioneer women filmmakers as Lois Weber and Nell Shipman. Nor, while he traveled through Europe in the late ’20s and wrote about their filmmaking at that time, did he ever pay attention to the early cinemas of Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. To be sure, the majority of critics in his generation were equally myopic in their view of world cinema. But there were some contemporaries of Stern’s, notably Georges Sadoul and Jay Leyda, who did explore these lesser-known cinemas.

I realize that my criticism of Stern is very severe, especially since some of the more lucid passages he wrote did significantly increase my interest in, and appreciation of Griffith as an artist. But much of what Stern wrote also did Griffith harm, repeating as fact the unsubstantiated claims that “The Birth of a Nation” was responsible for a great deal of racial violence. As I wrote to Geoff Pevere, I’ve researched this issue for years in the documents of the time and have been unable to find any evidence that the bloodiest, most notorious incidents of racial conflict in those years (e.g., the 1917 East St. Louis race riots, the 1919 Chicago race riots, the 1921 attack by whites on the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the 1923 lynchings in the small town of Rosewood, Florida) had anything whatever to do with “The Birth” which was not even being screened in those particular cities at the time of the bloodshed. To be sure, the Klan used occasions of the film’s screening over the years to distribute pamphlets propagandizing their organization. But that no more makes Griffith responsible for their actions than he is for the simultaneous actions of the new Soviet government which in the ’20s used showings of “Intolerance” to bolster support for the Bolsheviks. (A representative from the Soviets told Griffith that “Intolerance” “was a powerful influence . . . in cementing the feeling for the new government,” and that “you–unknown to yourself–were one of our biggest agents.”)

Much of what Stern wrote was, in fact, intellectually dishonest, even if in his mind it had come to be the reality. For example, when Lillian Gish cited a scene of black-white brotherhood in Griffith’s “The Greatest Thing in Life” (1918) as evidence that the director was not a racist, Stern immediately tried to refute her in print, saying the scene had no real significance and could hardly be evidence of Griffith’s tolerance. What Stern conveniently failed to mention was that “The Greatest Thing in Life” was one of Griffith’s few lost films and that he (Stern) had never, in fact, seen it. Therefore, he was trying to judge a film of which he had no first-hand knowledge in order to dispute the woman who had actually starred in it.

Added to that was Stern’s jumbled approach to research, evidence of his confused mind, as in his apparent inaccurate recollections of the musical score and his continual mixing up the intertitles in the silent version of “Birth” with the rewrtitten captions in the 1930 reissue. While I have little use for Scott Simon’s overall approach to Griffith, I think he does have a point when he disputes Stern. Stern repeatedly claimed he saw some truly horrific scenes in rare uncensored prints of “Birth,” including some shots supposedly showing close-ups of Gus, blood flowing from his mouth, as he was being castrated to death by the Klan. Simon seems to think this may be a product of Stern’s bad memory or feverish imagination since there does not seem to be any real contemporary evidence that such a grisly piece of footage was ever included in the film. To me, Stern’s making this and other claims is proof that part of him had indeed, however subconsciously, come to hate the artist whose legacy he felt he owned. I’ve seen it happen over and over again–people will become so possessive of something in film history they think they own that they will become insanely jealous of any potential rivals in the field and will become so consumed with their cherished subject that they will end up hating it. Stern’s obsession with Griffith did indeed have the effect of scaring off any other potential biographers for many years. Additionally, there was a much more responsible rival Griffith biographer with a similar background to Stern’s, Barnet Bravermann who had also first known Griffith in the ’20s and then been part of the same radical, left-wing film scene as Stern in the early ’30s. Bravermann continued his association with Griffith through the ’40s and appeared to be the one who would become D.W.’s biographer, to Stern’s jealous chagrin. But Stern hung around Griffith at the end and seems to have emerged as the top candidate for the role. In any case, however, Bravermann met an untimely end in 1954, leaving the field clear for his hated rival, Seymour Stern.

In his paranoid rantings and his ultimately lonely position in the world, Seymour Stern actually bears more than a passing resemblance to someone who was theoretically his opposite politically, Thomas Dixon, Jr. But like Stern, Dixon was a man consumed with malice, an explosive personality constantly looking for demons, fanatic in his sexual obsessions, and forever disillusioned with the world in which he lived. Whereas Stern would be eternally scarred by his disillusionment with the failure of the Russian Revolution and the radical social experiments of his time, Dixon’s disenchantment lay in his apprehensions that the progressive reform movements he initially supported were continually being undermined by the “lessers” they were intended to benefit, whether it was the “uppity” blacks, the suffragettes, the forces of organized labor. All threatened to undermine Dixon’s Eden in which the wiser white patriarchy would always maintain the guiding upper hand in the march towards ultimate progress. Confronted with the seemingly radical demands of the “ungrateful” masses, Dixon responded with a continual flow of insanely paranoid, hate-filled rants that animate his frenetic, melodramatic novels and plays. And much like Stern, Dixon, consumed with his inner and outer demons, ended up a lonely individual, totally at odds with the modern world and its new cultural forms such as jazz music.

In their ultimately damaging effect on Griffith’s reputation, Dixon and Stern have served as bookends. Emerging from his years of anonymous creativity at Biograph, Griffith suddenly found national fame as the director of “The Birth of a Nation.” But amidst the raging fires of controversy, much of it fuelled by Dixon’s own desire to incite racial passions, many people began to assume that Griffith’s motives and personality were the same as Dixon’s. To this day, you will read in some sources that they were close friends and that Griffith was enamoured with Dixon’s writings. In reality, Griffith merely saw Dixon’s crude melodrama as a hook on which to build something much greater and far more eloquent. It was not, in fact, his idea to film “The Clansman” in the first place, but that of a man who was a close friend of his, the critic and scenarist Frank E. Woods. Woods brought a screen treatment of “The Clansman” to Griffith and extolled its possibilities as the basis for a great film. Griffith and Woods worked closely together throughout the film, pruning the narrative of Dixon’s most explicitly racist passages (which could easily have been included in the intertitles) to produce an essentially tragic depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Afterwards–well, the rest is the history which you well know. But Dixon, soon jealous of Griffith receiving the acclaim he felt he deserved and resentful that D. W. was never prone to acknowledge his contribution, may have had his own subconscious desire to injure Griffith by issuing a stream of blatantly racist pronouncements in 1915 which had the further effect of inflaming protest groups against the film and its director. In any event, while Griffith and Dixon were never open enemies, their relations quickly became strained. They were formally correct and polite over the years, but this only served to mask their cool personal feelings towards each other. By the time Dixon finally died in 1946, Griffith’s own life was starting to come apart. Cast adrift by the failure of his second marriage, he allowed someone who turned out to be another obsessive paranoid, Seymour Stern, to define him at the end much as Dixon had defined him at the beginning. That Stern would end up interpreting “Birth” in terms of Dixon’s vision rather than Griffith’s was perhaps inevitable given the essential similarity between Dixon and Stern as disillusioned paranoiacs tormented by their sexual obsessions. Neither Dixon nor Stern, however, could truly speak for Griffith. Griffith never shared Dixon’s fanatic belief in the reactionary myth of a godly white male patriarchy, having early in his life suffered at the hands of bullying children who came, in D. W.’s words, from “what is termed ‘good, clean American stock,’” “families of allegedly high moral principles and, of course, church-going people.” At the same time, precisely because these traumatic early experiences had given him a darker, more realistic picture of humanity, Griffith was also wary of the kind of radical utopianism that had fuelled Stern’s early dreams and whose disappointment caused his later disenchantment.

Stern’s passing in 1978, however, did not herald a new era of greater enthusiasm for Griffith. The explosion of interest in early cinema and Griffith in the late ’60s and the ’70s, while benefiting Griffith for a time (climaxing with his centenary), had pretty much left Stern behind. For all the valuable information contained in his “Film Culture” monograph, the inclusion of his personal ravings ultimately undermined his usefulness as a Griffith scholar, although, as I’ve indicated, a later generation of Griffith’s enemies would find ammunition for their attacks in some of what he wrote.

In the ’80s, Griffith would come under fire again from those among the politically correct who would seek to make the Father of the American Cinema the symbol of everything retrograde in American culture. And in the ’90s, with the passing of all those who had known and been directly influenced by him, the attacks became a deafening roar, climaxing in the 1999 decision of the Director’s Guild of America to publicly repudiate the D. W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award they had given since 1954 as a way of showing their disapproval of the pioneer filmmaker they now deemed nothing but a racist. And leading the attack, by the way, was none other than Richard Schickel. Although Schickel had produced a superficially correct biography of Griffith in 1984 and included some good material, supplied by a battery of researchers, he admitted even then he didn’t much like D. W. as a person. Now that the entire generation of directors to whom Griffith meant everything and with whom Schickel sought to ingratiate himself–now that they are all gone and a new generation has appeared, Schickel has freely given vent to his anti-Griffith prejudices, publicly assailing him in the press as a lousy director and “Birth” as an aesthetically ridiculous, inferior film. (Schickel has also attacked Lillian Gish in recent years and for good measure, John Ford as well. Apparently, Schickel had a lot of hostility he had kept bottled up for years and is on;y now letting out. Or perhaps he is simply being the rank opportunist that ensures continuing success in this society. The old king is dead! Long live the new sovereign! Out with the old, in with the new!) Whatever Schickel’s motives, his present denunciations of Griffith are part of a continuing pattern in which the great director has been repeatedly victimized by both paranoiacs and opportunists, all with various politicized agendas that have nothing to do with art and humanity and everything to do with their overwhelming desire to control.
With that, I will end this lengthy epistle for the time being and address other possible approaches to Griffith and “Birth” in a follow-up.

Warmest regards,
William M. Drew

====================================================================

20. Mr. Drew,

Thank you for your thoughtful (and thought provoking) letter. There is much here that is both new and welcome.

Bernard B. Brown played first violin in the Los Angeles presentation of THE BIRTH. He was 16. He had been concert master for the combined high schools of Los Angeles. Among his duties were ordering sheet music for the schools. D. W. Griffith made extensive use of his talents.

He told an interesting story about Briel, Carli Elinor and Griffith. Griffith wanted to use Dukas’ SORCERER’S APPRENTICE with alterations as the Clan Call. Briel objected to altering the music. Carli Elinor said, “We are not doing a concert of Dukas. We are scoring a film.” Evidently Briel was not so progressive.

While he was here I projected the Claude Rains’ PHANTOM OF THE OPERA for Mr. Brown (who had not seen the film for years). After he said, “Now I know why Susanna Foster sends me Christmas cards every year.” He also told me he recorded Nelson Eddy standing next to some wood. When Eddy heard the playback he thought his voice had been dubbed. “Nelson, I just put a little ‘timbre’ in it,” Mr. Brown told him.

His greatest battle came with ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL (1939). Prior to that a single microphone was used to record the orchestra. He insisted on recording the bass, wood, winds, etc., separately and then mixing them. There was a huge fight. Finally, he told me, Leopold Stokowski said, “Let’s do it Brownie’s way. Let’s do it the right way. Let’s just get it done.” Note: “Let’s do it Brownie’s way” came first. When we want to introduce a new idea we have to be willing to throw a tantrum.

Next day Stokowski apologized on the set. Mr. Brown got his first Academy Award for that.

I, like you, used Seymour Stern’s FILM CULTURE issue on THE BIRTH as my primary source. Scott Simon in THE FILMS OF D. W. GRIFFITH describes Stern as a “notoriously unreliable Griffith scholar.” What do you know about this?

According to Mr. Brown when Mae Marsh dives of the cliff in the film they had a woman planted in the audience who would scream at the top of her lungs. They also used a sound effects crew for horses’ hooves, guns shot, cannonade, etc.

In creating a score for a Canadian audience I looked at things like the fact that THE AMERICAN ANTHEM to us is GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. The music carries an entirely different emotional resonance for us.

Right after Mr. Brown returned to California I was invited to show THE BIRTH to 50 students at an art college. I got there to discover 500 grade thirteen students had been bicycled in (no one thought to ask me first). I had not enough money for a hamburger and was further I reflected that these kids were the perfect audience to test the score with,

In the first half of the film they were restless. There is no narrative to grab them nor is there until the assassination of Lincoln. In my own presentations I point out to audiences that this is the epic style. In Kubrick’s space epic 2001 and in David Lean’s PASSAGE TO INDIA, to name just two, the first half of the film consists of a slew of seemingly loose threads which are then yanked together.

When an audience knows this in advance they can settle in and watch the film at a deeper level than they can not knowing it. This was not the case with this screening (to the students).

They watched the film but were not pulled in by it.

In the second half of the picture I had broken completely with Griffith/Briel and used Samuel Barber’s MEDEA (Suite) which, as it is about a mother devouring her children, thematically matched the South being devoured by the North. I did this because I could find nothing else to bridge a long section of the film. At this point I saw something remarkable happen. Every teenaged kid in the audience moved forward as a body in their seat. From that moment on the film held them in its spell. What it was, of course, was that that long piece of music (nearly 30 minutes) was able to grab them where the short, choppy clips had not.

I revised my thinking for the first half of the film. I no longer concerned myself with Mickey Mousing Griffith’s score so much as I did with capturing the spirit of his intention that the audience become one with what they were experiencing.

My key to scoring the film came from these words in Stern’s study of the film’s score, “The effect of Briel’s Negro-theme is that of a black penis pushing into the vagina of a white virgin.” Strong stuff but there we have it.

As luck would have it at that time two sound track recordings had become available on vinyl. One was Briel’s music for THE BIRTH. The second was Max Steiner’s score for KING KONG. I was able not only to hear what Briel had written but also to realize Steiner had drawn on the same source for his KONG jungle music.

So I scored the film from start to finish with the idea of rape as the main thrust. Yes, I know that is loaded but that is the theme of the picture, period.

Once I had the direction I could give the film an underlying unity. From start to finish we are moving towards a rape.

Again, bear in mind I am doing this in Canada. For us a lot of the civil war songs, though nice to hear, don’t carry the emotional charge they do in your country. As well, I want the audience to forget this film they are seeing was made ninety years ago. Once the lights go out I want them to feel this is a brand new film. That is why they are here. People come out to be astonished not to have their preconceptions confirmed. We have to surpass their expectations.

I have seen only the KINO version of THE BIRTH. The score is okay but lacks dramatic tension. When the rioting starts the music is too slow. I have a hard time believing that is what was used. It might have worked in 1915 but I doubt it. The Ride of The Klan is flat. The rhythms go against the spirit of the scene. They give the audience time to think which is the worst thing we can do. (I am playing it now as I write this). We have only to look at any cavalry riding to the rescue film to see and hear how this sequence should be played.

For the whole section from when the rioting begins until the Klan is seen in long shot I use the KONG “ABORIGINAL SACRIFICE DANCE” as it suggests rape and nothing but rape. And I play it LOUD. Today I also use the chase music from Steiner’s THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. Even the RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES on this soundtrack sounds like a funeral march. I use a snatch of it clear and then overlay it with more dramatic music plus gun shots, screams, the whole nine yards. Then, when the ride begins to the cabin I overlay all that with the William Tell Overture. The main thing is to make the audience feel as if they are in the grip of the Niagara river and about to heard over the falls. By the time the Klan finally does arrive all the audience can says is, “THANK GOD!” At that point they have to have had a collective orgasm so that what remains is conversatioon after great sex.

The next big screening was for the august TORONTO FILM SOCIETY. Despite huge media coverage no one had come out for my event with Bernard B. Brown. I had invited two of the directors of the TFS Silent series out to meet him and they arranged for me to show THE BIRTH as part of their series.

I got there to find out the projectors they were using ran faster (at silent speed) and the tape recorder slower than my own. There was no way, I thought, this could be done. I could not walk out. I was stuck between the proverbial “rock and a hard place.”

Finally, I realized I could run parts of the film in silence and use the monitor speaker in the projection booth to synch up the music with the film.

I re-invented the thing in the process.

Three hours later the Director of the TFS silent series came charging into the booth shouting, “That score was brilliant! I especially admired your inspired use of silence.” Outside the auditorium was packed with people saying to each other, “I had no idea that is such a great film!” Forget about words like “powerful.” It was “great.” In other words, the picture did what a movie is supposed to do. They were on their feet applauding for a good five minutes.

Of course, I threw out all of my old tape scores for silent films and began redoing everything with an eye and an ear towards using silence.

I created a score for Fritz Lang’s NIBELUNGEN film using Wagner, Liszt and Sibellius (for the second half). Wagner ignored that part of the story). At one screening an elegant older woman came up to me and said, “I saw this film in Berlin when it first came out. This is not the music I heard with the film then. Did you do this?”

“Yes,” I told her. “PERFECT!” she said, snapping her fingers.

I’d like to read your book on INTOLERANCE.–Best, Reg Hartt

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21. Dear Reg Hartt,

Many, many thanks for your thoughtful letter and your excellent insights on “The Birth” etc., with which I largely agree.
Regarding my comments on Seymour Stern (which, by the way, I’ve never published before in any form or even, to the best of my recollection, written down in a letter), they are, as I said, privately expressed, and I don’t wish to seem highly judgmental. In fact, I can understand how a combination of pressures might have driven him to take some of the stands that I find unsettling. From my own experiences, film history is a highly competitive field. There are plenty of people who view it as their own private turf, which can breed an opposing possessiveness in the putative rival. Over the years, I have expressed myself strongly on a number of issues in film history besides Griffith. Also, when I began interviewing many of the great ladies of the silent and early sound eras, I had to deal with those historians who viewed me as a rival to their dominance, a circumstance that hampered me in my work at times. Added to that is the status of film history in general, which, after more than a century, is still not fully accepted by many as truly the record of a genuine art form but rather a convenient platform for people seeking to either create political controversy or indulge in scandalmongering (often of a highly inventive nature) about the past. In the case of Stern, I know, for example, that he often felt shut out by the US archival establishment, which, in those days, centered around New York’s Museum of Modern Art almost exclusively. Without being able to hear all sides of the story (including some presumably more neutral third parties), I would not at this point jump to any conclusions about how much blame should go around in this matter. I do know, however, speaking in general terms, that many film archivists have tended to view their collections almost as their own private domains, as though they were the high priests of some kind of elite cult rather than the custodians and preservers of material that should be rightfully shared with the public (including free-lance scholars such as Stern was). Perhaps having to confront this type of closed door policy from the Museum of Modern Art (still, by the way, one of the most restrictive archives with respect to the public), combined with political disillusionment and polarization and unhappy relations with the Hollywood studios, tended to push him over the edge. When he first appeared on the scene writing about cinema in 1926 (at the very early age of 18), Stern was quite precocious, seemingly in the forefront of those propounding theories about the new art of cinema (still all silent at that time). Griffith himself, in a Los Angeles Times interview in the fall of 1926 on the occasion of his return to the film capital after a seven year absence, specifically mentioned by name “young Seymour Stern” as one of those with unusual ideas about the uniqueness of the cinema art.
Fearing that, in my own case, I might eventually end up as marginalized as Stern, I would be very reluctant to dismiss him out of hand as simply crazy. I agree with you that, once you cut through the contradictions and what I see as “rantings,” Stern was capable of good insights into Griffith’s work. The point of my relating the problems and flaws in his work is that, for various reasons, one has to proceed with caution.

Some of what I see as his shortcomings are not uniquely his own but are part of the broader problem of film history as it emerged in his time. Stern was part of the generation in the United States and Europe which, during the 1930s, created film history as we know it. These include the writers Lewis Jacobs, Georges Sadoul (born 1904), Paul Rotha (born 1907), Seymour Stern (born 1908), Jay Leyda (born 1910), the team of Maurice Berdache and Robert Brasillach, and the archivists Iris Barry, Ernest Lindgren, and Henri Langlois. Collectively, they all deserve credit for attempting to document (and in the case of the archivists) preserve the films of the then-recent past. Before the 1930s, while there were some early efforts at recording film history, it tended to be on a fairly superficial level. (While I find the movie magazines and the newspapers of the 1910s and 1920s to be, on the whole, excellent sources of information about the early film artists and their work, they are more like reading lively diaries of what was happening at the time rather than any kind of deep analysis of the past.) And, until the creation of the first archives in Europe and the United States in the 1930s, nowhere in the world were there instittutions or structures specifically intended to preserve the films themselves. The advent of the pioneering film historians and archivists in the 1930s definitely marked a change for the better. But, while this would, of course, vary among individuals, there were widespread prejudices many of these people shared that have had negative consequences on subsequent interpretations of film history ever since.
Fundamentally, what I see as the overriding flaw of this first generation of cineastes is their establishment of an assumptive polarity between the European art film (regarded as the epitome of cinematic aesthetics) and the Hollywood entertainment film (viewed as technically slick but artistically and intellectually inferior), with the other great early cinematic traditions built around local production in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australasia roundly dismissed as inferior, purely commercial imitations of foreign models lacking even Hollywood’s technical finesse, much less Europe’s artistry. While Stern was more zealous than some others at that time in paying homage to Griffith as an artist, his writings are shot through with broad, sweeping condemnations of Hollywood cinema as a vast wasteland of commercialism. His attitude towards jazz and all of America’s glorious heritage of popular music in the first half of the 20th century as constituting nothing more than products of “the commercial amusement culture of the United States” merely carried to its “reductio ad absurdum” a variant of the Hollywood vs. Europe binary into another field and another art, one in which (fortunately) his attacks would carry no weight.

The stereotypes and generalizations of Hollywood cinema as little more than commercial vulgarity for the masses, which Stern, like other cinematic intellectuals of his time, was only too eager to propound would have grievous consequences in a number of instances. To take one example, most of Colleen Moore’s silent starring vehicles for First National were lost during the 1940s, even though copies of them were, for a time, in the Museum of Modern Art’s possession. Why? In large part, because the film intelligentsia of the period did not consider such works to be worthy of the serious attention that would favor preservation. Even Buster Keaton, who later became the pet of film intellectuals, was, for most of the 1940s, forced to eke out a living as a gag man, so little attention did he receive from historians at the time. And there were some directors, like Lois Weber and James Cruze, who ended up in even worse shape than Griffith, without any recognition or support from the leading cineastes of the day.

However, it was the early cinemas of the East and the South–what I call “the Third Wave” of silent film in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australasia–that suffered the most from this filmic imbalance, reinforced in these instances by even broader cultural stereotypes of these societies. Convinced of their utter inferiority to even the Hollywood product, the pioneer historians and archivists mainly ignored them without making any effort whatever to study them. When they deigned to mention them at all, it was to dismiss them with even broader generalizations than they applied to Hollywood films. Had they undertaken any serious study of these films, many more might have survived than is now the case. But far, far fewer of the silent films from these countries have survived than in the United States and Europe. No one individual in the film history field can be blamed for this neglect and certainly not Stern, although, in my opinion, he would have been a much more far-seeing cinephile had he, like Sadoul and Leyda, later investigated the histories of some of these other cinemas. But it is indicative of the limited outlook of the first generation of cineastes of which Stern, for all his eccentricities, was all too typical that he simplistically reduced all cinema to a tiny, elite handful of creative filmmakers amidst a vast swamp of commercialism. And, unlike some others, there is no evidence that he outgrew his limited focus in later years. Even though the West had discovered many of the major Japanese directors in the 1950s, Stern failed to list any of them as those he deemed in the 1960s to be among the handful of truly creative filmmakers. And with respect to American filmmakers, I note that Stern (whether deliberately or not) failed to include Buster Keaton in his 1965 list of the great pioneer filmmakers, even though Keaton by then was being lauded by most film intellectuals as one of the titans of film art. Perhaps, having ignored Keaton since he began writing about film in the 1920s, Stern was simply unwilling to acknowledge that he might have been guilty of an oversight.

I mention all this because, in many respects, I have felt the need to correct the conceptual flaws in the traditional interpretation of film history. In recent years, my focus has been increasingly on the early cinemas of Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australasia (I have now a fairly extensive collection of video copies of silents from these countries) and my effort to undertake a new approach to film history that will finally incorporate these cinemas into the cinematic mainstream. So I am more sensitive than ever as to how the standard view of world film history first took shape and why I feel we need a new, far more expansive model than the one that still exists.

My alternative approach to early cinema also has for some years placed a strong emphasis on the pioneer feminine stars as harbingers or agents of women’s modern emancipation. You are very accurate in pointing out that, as little as a century ago or less, women (in our supposedly enlightened Western society, not just that of the East, as the current crop of cultural missionaries and imperialists would have it) were regarded by many as little more than chattel. Also, that Griffith shows this and condemns it in his work. Griffith, in fact, unlike many men of his era, publicly came out in support of woman suffrage at a time when many women seeking the vote were chaining themselves or taking part in demonstrations in order to make their voices heard. One of the most moving experiences I have ever had in a cinema was some years ago in the 1990s when “Way Down East” was screened at a nearby arthouse theatre with whose silent film programming I was then involved. When Lillian Gish as Anna Moore denounced sexism and the double standard, the emotional reaction (in the film’s favor) was almost visceral in its intensity. Members of the audience, particularly women, not only applauded but actually shouted out their agreement with the sentiments being expressed by Gish and Griffith in the film!

Unfortunately, you will not find any mention of this in the standard approach to Griffith in the United States today. Increasingly since the 1980s, he has been symbolically blacklisted from our culture, and most here now know him (if they know him at all) as little more than “that racist” who also played some early role in inventing film techniques like the close-up. While it makes painful reading, under separate cover, I’ll be sending you copies of letters I have e-mailed to Tom Mayer, a documentarian in the US and admirer of Griffith who is currently trying to complete a documentary on DWG’s years working in New York. These letters of mine include links to articles, some of them quite negative, detailing the extent to which Griffith has been demonized in the United States.

Warmest regards,
William M. Drew

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22. To receive such a lengthy and well thought out piece of correspondence from someone I do not know is a very great honor. It is going to take me a bit of time to digest this material.

I see the theme of rape as what happens whenever we stop thinking for ourselves and surrender to an ideology. Rape of the mind. Stern saw it as pure and simple physical rape. Anyone who doubts the horrors unleashed by war should go and see HOTEL RAWANDA.

The quote re Breil’s Negro-theme is on pg. 118 of Stern’s FILM CULTURE piece. I met his son briefly in Ottawa at a presentation I did of Lang’s METROPOLIS for which, again, I had created a score. It was a very interesting night. Stern’s son was just an ancillary to it. The fellow who brought me there had never done a show before. He did everything wrong. I figured it was his first time and let a lot ride.

Before he introduced me to the audience (pretty large crowd) he spent an hour selling memberships in his series. I know when an audience has been driven around the bend so when he told them I was going to speak I was about to say, “Why don’t we let the film speak for itself,” when a fellow shouted, “I did not come here to hear you,” to which I replied, “Well, I just came all the way here to speak.”

That led to a near riot. People got up and went to the programmer who began flashing the house lights off and on. I continued. We lost about ten people. When the evening ended the entire audience (over two hundred) lined up to speak to me on the way out. Each person said, “The film was good. It was more important to meet you.” One of those people identified himself as Stern’s son. I would like to have been able to hear more from him but the situation did not allow for that.

It was the first and last show I did with that person.

Have a good day and thanks much for your letter. I am now endeavouring to spell Briel Breil.–Best, Reg Hartt

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23. Dear Reg,

The following letter of mine to Tom Mayer is dated September 6, 2003, in response to an e-mail from him renewing our correspondence of two years before (I realize there will probably be a lot of repetition of points I have made in this area, but you may also find some fresh information or documentation in these communications):

Dear Tom Mayer,

Many thanks for your letter and your kind comments on my e-mail of over two years ago on D. W. Griffith. I am certainly glad to hear you are continuing to work on the Griffith-Biograph-NY documentary as it will be a valuable contribution to the documentation of silent film history. Regarding the Mary Pickford documentary, all I can say is it’s still in the works. At least, the last I heard they were committed to it but were looking for a grant to bring it to fruition. This year, I have contributed to two new documentaries on silent stars: the A&E biography of Clara Bow which aired some months ago (I provided an audio interview I did with Esther Ralston on Clara) and a just-completed documentary on Olive Thomas for which I have been a consultant.

I’m glad you found my letter of use. Since I currently don’t have access to my files of two years ago (they’re stored on another computer), you will pardon me if at times in this new letter I repeat any of the points I made about D. W. Griffith in the old one. But with respect to your question about whether I have undertaken any new Griffith project since then, the answer is not really. I did publish online last year an article on Griffith I had written the year before for an encyclopedia. The article is part of my series, Great Pioneers of the Cinema, at: <http://www.gildasattic.com/pioneers.html> The series includes great silent film directors from every inhabited continent on earth. I am thinking of republishing on the Internet an article on Griffith that had originally appeared on the apparently now-defunct Silents Majority website. The article takes for its springboard a refutation of a fictional incident that has been passed off as true in a highly-acclaimed documentary on early black filmmakers. The sole reason for their inclusion of this material was an effort to discredit him. Because this particular myth continues to be circulated as fact, I think it is necessary to keep my own refutation available to the public.

Since you asked me whether I thought the public and critical climate towards Griffith had changed since we last corresponded in July of 2001–well, I find that a very intriguing question. On the surface, I would definitely have to say that, as far as I know, nothing has changed. The DGA has not restored the award honoring his name. Nor have Red Grooms’ sculptures of Griffith directing Lillian Gish in “Way Down East” that once graced a university campus in Kentucky been reerected to my knowledge. Although this controversy did not attain the national notoriety of the DGA affair two years later, it certainly presaged it. It was a local hot topic in the Cincinnati-northern Kentucky area and was a cover story in a Cincinnati magazine at the time. Some black groups on this campus agitated in 1997 or so that the sculptures honoring the “racist” Griffith be removed. To his credit, civil rights leader Julian Bond opposed the removal. But the PC crowd had their way and the sculptures are, I believe, still in storage somewhere. Note that the sculptures were not commemorating “The Birth of a Nation” or indeed any Griffith film with racial content but instead the proto-feminist “Way Down East.” It was an example of the guilt-by-association that has clouded just about anything connected with DWG in the decade that has passed since the death of Lillian Gish placed the director in the realm of past history and hence more vulnerable to sustained attack. From the controversy over the sculptures, it was only a step to the more systematic trashing of DWG by the DGA. And since there have been no dramatic new developments here affecting Griffith’s reputation–no national revival of one of his films, no new documentary–not much seems to have changed. To be sure, the Kino Griffith releases have now come out as a set on DVD. And while one can certainly say that this keeps his name alive, I would not call the migration of these presentations and restorations from VHS to DVD to be the kind of startling new circumstance that would radically alter people’s preexisting perceptions of DWG, whether positive or negative.

Obviously, the nation (and the world) has drastically changed since you wrote me two summers ago due to 9/11 and all the developments since. And one would think that events of this magnitude would have some longterm effects on the reputation of a filmmaker who was deeply sensitive to the ravages of war and its aftermath, the use of ideological intolerance to justify a monopoly of power, the rapacity of capitalism. In “Intolerance,” Griffith had even put on the screen a dramatic depiction of the first conquest of Iraq by a superpower. Perhaps beneath the surface or over a protracted period of time, the consequences of the 9/11 seismic shift will cause a dramatic reevaluation of Griffith and even a new approach to the interpretation of the Reconstruction era. The romanticized treatment of the post-Civil War period by several generations of revisionist historians as a noble experiment in racial democracy has had a particularly adverse effect on DWG’s reputation in recent years. But the current experiences in which exalted official claims that US military might and postwar occupation are intended to promote radically democratic change in Iraq and Afghanistan while corporate interests reap a windfall–there might eventually emerge a group of historians who see a parallel between this and the older (and in my view) more accurate interpretation of Reconstruction as a time in which similarly exalted slogans of democratic intent masked the unsavory realities of the military occupation of the defeated South and the invasion of the profiteering carpetbaggers. A return to favor of the traditional interpretation of Reconstruction might clearly benefit Griffith who has long suffered from the notion that his opposition to the colonial subjugation of his region in the aftermath of the Civil War is analogous to mid-20th century Southern racists’ objection to peaceful, legal efforts at societal change in the civil rights era. But if there has been any fresh effort to reevaluate the Reconstruction era as America’s first quagmire in the light of current events, I am unaware of them as of now. Most self-styled liberals and radicals continue to cling to the illusion that the politicians of the Reconstruction era were selfless idealists genuinely committed to radical change. And for their part, both the libertarians and the Confederate flag wavers who might have at least offered some alternative view of the Reconstruction era seem to be far more interested in demonizing Abraham Lincoln and justifying secession than in presenting a reevaluation of the post-Civil War period.

As I’ve indicated, I don’t see any immediate shift in the current view of DWG in the US despite the dramatic new historic developments. Indeed, quite the contrary, I can relate a rather frustrating example of this right at the time of the 9/11 attacks. There is a newsgroup devoted to silent films to which I sometimes contribute. Just after the WTC disaster, some posters there were making ominous comments about “The Birth of a Nation” and its supposedly evil effects on US society, including its (and Griffith’s) alleged responsibility for the revival of the KKK in the 20th century. Partly under the strain of the horrifying event that had just taken place and all the potentially frightening consequences, this line of discussion seemed to me especially insensitive and foolish. We still didn’t know how many thousands of people might be dead and what the outcome would be–and here were people seriously writing as if the production of “The Birth of a Nation” were the most horrific circumstance in US history! I made my objections clear and pointed out (as I have before) that, despite their exploitation of “Birth” screenings for publicity purposes, the fundamental reason for the widespread revival of the KKK in the 1920s lay in the climate of national intolerance that emerged in the wake of the US involvement in World War I and the post-war Red Scare. Had the US stayed out of World War I and the Progressive Era continued, the KKK would never have gotten beyond a few members in Georgia. To me, the moral lesson should be, not that it is dangerous to society to grant freedom of expression to an individual artist such as Griffith, but to consider the consequences of a mass, government-directed action like US involvement in World War I. Perhaps our participation in the war was necessary and justified, perhaps not, but any discussion of its worth should acknowledge the conflict’s responsibility in reviving the Klan. Given the action we as a nation were about to undertake in response to the 9/11 attacks, I felt then that what we should be arguing from history with respect to the Klan’s revival was the responsibility for World War I and the Red Scare for its emergence, not another scapegoating of DWG.

Part of the reason for the decline in Griffith’s reputation since its posthumous high at the time of his centenary in 1975 surely includes the passing of the generation (or generations) that knew and loved his work when it was new–not only those, like Blanche Sweet and Lillian Gish, who worked with him, but someone like Orson Welles who experienced DWG’s work as a child and who, as an adult and extremely influential filmmaker, continually lauded Griffith as the world’s greatest film artist. Had Welles been alive in 1999 when the DGA made their decision to remove the award, he would surely have protested and been an eloquent spokesman in the American cinema for DWG. Given Welles’s long commitment to the civil rights movement, he might even have been able to act as a sort of mediator between those for whom the battle against racism was the no. 1 issue and those whose allegiances and interests were primarily aesthetic. But although Welles died as comparatively recently as 1985, the Griffith controversy in his lifetime was still something of a fringe issue. By that, I mean it had continued to be, first and foremost, a debate over one film, “The Birth of a Nation,” not something that had morphed into a vast public controversy over DWG’s total standing as an artist and human being. It is instructive to remember that, while much of the American public opinion of the 1970s was certainly sensitive to civil rights issues, there was no public outcry, no criticism by the NAACP or any other organization as far as I know of Griffith being honored by the US government itself with a special commemorative stamp. How could the situation have deteriorated in the 1990s to such an extent that a private, non-governmental film industry organization was forced to withdraw its honor for the director and that a college campus removed sculptures commemorating Griffith directing another film entirely? After all, it’s not as though some “shocking” new facts about DWG’s life had come to light since the ’70s. But as I’ve said, the people for whom Griffith was such a vital presence had pretty much died out by the ’90s. There was, at the same time, the rise of a political correctness movement that was much stronger than anything seen in the ’90s, a tendency that fed on the growing polarization between the ultra-left and the extreme right in American life. In such a climate, there has been little tolerance for the kind of rational intellectual discussion that might be more sympathetic towards Griffith.

These are just some of my random thoughts about the current reputation of DWG at this time. I think the documentary you are working on can certainly help to focus on other aspects of Griffith’s life and work in contrast to the present-day obsession with “The Birth of a Nation.” Indeed, so programmed are many commentators to see everything through the “lens” of the Civil War-Reconstruction film that they repeatedly misinterpret other films of his to make it appear that they reflect the same bias and racism they find in “The Birth.” It used to be that most people recognized “Broken Blossoms” as a strong indictment of Western racist attitudes towards Asians. But, as I’ve found through searching the Internet, you will find any number of comments claiming that it is really racist and anti-Asian, not only because of the use of a white player (Richard Barthelmess) in the Chinese role but also because he doesn’t marry the 15-year-old white girl or even have sex with her! Instead, he dies as does she. Therefore, Griffith must once again be revealing his horror of miscegenation. (Can anyone explain to me how an audience, even today, would accept as positive sexual relations in a film between an adult male of any race and a minor? I think we still have laws against it, and I’m unaware of people of any political faction arguing they should be changed.) In truth, this is just another case of commentators trying to fit all of Griffith into their Procrustean view of his work. If any other director’s name were attached to the credits of “Broken Blossoms” (e.g., Frank Borzage or Clarence Brown), I think most of these same critics would view the film very differently and would accept it as the strong indictment of racism that it in fact is. Interestingly, the film was a great success with Japanese audiences and continues to be a great favorite with cinephiles in Japan, all of whom are Asian, after all. But in the United States, critics who view DWG as an unregenerate racist because of “The Birth” are unable to accept that he was capable of condemning racism in other films.

I have fought many battles in Griffith’s behalf over the years including my first book, “D. W. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance:’ Its Genesis and Its Vision,” published in 1986 by McFarland and recently reprinted by them in a softcover edition. While I have hardly changed my interpretation of Griffith, I realize that in the present climate in the US it sometimes seems as though I’ve been hitting my head against a brick wall. In any case, I’ve been devoting more of my time and research to exploring the silent cinema beyond Hollywood and Europe–the rich flowering of the early cinema in the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Latin America. The standard histories of world cinema have for far too long ignored this heritage of silent cinema, something I am attempting to correct through my articles. As an example, an article I wrote last year on the importance of the Middle East’s film heritage and the need to preserve it was published last year by Arab Celebs, a Cairo-based website, at: <http://www.arab-celebs.com/article.asp?ID=15>

And the website which hosts my Great Pioneers of the Cinema series also includes other articles of mine on international film history at: <http://www.gildasattic.com/Bluebook.html>
Many thanks again for your letter. There is much more I could say about Griffith–many more ideas I have on the subject–but as this e-mail has already become another long one, I will reserve those thoughts for another time.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you again soon. And if it’s not too much trouble, would it be possible for you to forward to me a copy of the letter I e-mailed you in 2001? As I said, it’s on the files of an older, now damaged computer so I can’t access it at the present time.

Warmest regards,
William M. Drew
On November 12, 2003, after Tom Mayer sent me a print-out of my e-mail of two years before, I wrote him as follows concerning honors accorded Griffith in his native country:

Dear Tom Mayer,

I received my old e-mail of more than two years ago. Thank you for sending it to me. It helps to have what I wrote then before me, so I can avoid, as far as possible, repeating what I had already written!

One thing I’m interested in determining with respect to D. W. Griffith’s current status is to what extent he has been (or continues to be) commemorated or honored in the US. I’ve already discussed the 1998 removal of the Red Grooms sculptures from the Northern Kentucky University campus and, of course, the infamous 1999 DGA decision to drop the DWG awards which they had been giving out since the 1950s. In both cases, these measures were taken in response to deliberate political pressure. The DGA award was actually one of two such honors given in the director’s name. The other was the D. W. Griffith Awards annually given by the National Board of Review beginning in 1979. I’ve been trying to find out if it is still being given by the NBR. Judging from the following article at: <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,40485,00.html>, the award was dropped several years before the DGA abandoned it. Searching through Google, I’ve found that the NBR was giving out their Griffith awards through 1994. But, according to a former NBR member quoted in this article, they changed the name around that time. There is no indication here that the change, if it was indeed made then, was for specific political reasons. The man quoted in the article seemed to think that the NBR board members in more recent years just don’t know much about film history, as he found out when he suggested that, if they were going to change it, they ought to call it the Lumiere. And the person he spoke to at NBR didn’t seem to know who the Lumieres were! Still, given the mounting attacks on DWG that seemed to get only worse after Lillian Gish’s death in early 1993, I have to wonder if some sort of political pressure to remove DWG’s name might have been going on as early as the mid-1990s. (Unless, of course, the information in this article is inaccurate. But in my Google search, I’ve been unable to find any evidence that the NBR’s Griffith awards were given out after the mid-1990s.) In any case, if NBR’s Griffith award was a thing of the past by the end of the 1990s, that would then mean that the DGA had removed the only existing honor being given in his name.

As for other commemorations or honors for Griffith, I believe there is still a David Wark Griffith Middle School in Los Angeles, despite some attempts by local NAACP members to have the name changed. (The school was named after him in the 1950s, as I recall.) As far as museums or markers, there is a commemorative plaque in San Fernando on the site where he shot many of his early Biograph westerns, which is also near the ranch he owned for a number of years. The plaque was dedicated in 1959 at a ceremony attended by both Blanche Sweet and Mae Marsh. I don’t think it’s very visible today from what I hear, although it’s still there. The National Register of Historic Sites includes the D. W. Griffith House in La Grange, Kentucky, although it is still privately owned, I think. It was actually his sister Ruth’s house, but for much of the 1930s, Griffith lived there in semi-retirement in the years following the release of his final film, “The Struggle.” Of course, his grave with a marker put up by the DGA in 1950 is there. (As a particularly depressing example of how DWG has been hounded even in death, there is a site called Find a Grave (<http://www.findagrave.com/>), in which you can leave symbolic flowers and messages for illustrious departed people. Almost always, the messages for great figures of the silent and early sound era are warm and appreciative. Griffith was the only one I could find where some people were leaving negative messages about the alleged harm he had done with his “racism.” I haven’t looked at it lately, so I don’t know if that is still the case. Mercifully, as far as I know, no one has vandalized his actual grave or sprayed it with graffiti.)

Part of the problem, of course, with respect to erecting museums in DWG’s honor has nothing to do with political correctness but rather with the facts of his life and the toll taken by time on buildings that were central to his career. Griffith never built a lavish home or estate of his own that might have been turned into a museum or monument after his death. Most of his adult life, when not working on his films at the studio, he lived in a succession of hotels. The three main studios with which he was associated have all disappeared. The Biograph studio on 11 E. 14th St. in NYC was torn down many decades ago. During the 1975 centenary, a commemorative plaque was placed on the apartment building standing on the site, but, as Blanche Sweet related to me, it was stolen shortly thereafter, reputedly by junkies. Griffith’s Fine Arts Studio in Hollywood that he had from 1914 to 1919 has also long since disappeared. And unless you have found some information to the contrary, it’s my understanding that most of the Mamaroneck studio buildings have also vanished. Over twenty years ago, I corresponded with an organization in Los Angeles that was trying to save Clune’s (Philharmonic) Auditorium where most of his films from 1914 to 1919 had their West Coast premiere. I thought, as did the preservationists, that, due to its centrality to his life and work, it could house a special museum exhibit permanently commemorating Griffith’s life and work. Unfortunately, it was the same old Hollywood story–the preservationists soon lost the battle to the wrecking ball, so perhaps the one ideal remaining site for a DWG monument in the 1980s vanished.
That, at least, is my present knowledge regarding the extent to which Griffith is formally honored today. I am not aware of any streets or parks named after him (Los Angeles’ Griffith Park was named after another individual well before DWG even first arrived in Hollywood with the Biograph company), and obviously, there are no cities or towns named after him. Given all that has happened to his reputation since the public controversies of the late 1990s resulting in the removal of existing honors, there appears to be even less incentive to widen his commemoration beyond the paltry formal recognition he had received in the years separating his 1948 passing from that of Lillian Gish in 1993.

Many thanks again. I will be looking forward to more news and information regarding your documentary and, of course, to seeing it when it is completed. With respect to the points I raised in this e-mail, do you have any more information about existing Griffith honors or memorials? For example, do you have any contacts in New York that might be able to shed light on whether the National Board of Review’s Griffith awards were indeed terminated during the latter part of the 1990s? If so, is there any reason to think that politics had anything to do with it?: Also, in the course of your research on your documentary, have you been able to find any site or existing building associated with Griffith’s work in New York State that conceivably might some day be turned into a museum honoring the man and his work?

Warmest regards,
William M. Drew

(More of my Griffith correspondence to follow)

September 4, 1948

Three writers on D. W. Griffith

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Jan. 22, 1975 (Editorial):

In much the same way that trumpeter Louis Armstrong devised a new musical vocabulary that was to have massive influence on the playing of jazz, David Wark Griffith developed a new grammar of film that altered the art of making motion pictures. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it could have been called an art until Griffith, born 100 years ago today, began his remarkable explorations of its potential.

Film-making was pretty raw when Griffith came on the scene, consisting of little more than the stiff, fixed-position filming of stage plays. Griffith’s genius yielded ideas that are now commonplace —the closeup, fade-in and fade-out, the long shot, vista, back lighting, and tinting, among others—but which, like most other bold innovations, encountered much opposition.

However, comfortably within his lifetime (he died in 1948), there was broad recognition of the fact that under his guidance film had emerged as a medium of expression as distinct from the stage as it was from the world of literature. The late author and film critic .James Agee summed up the wonder:  “To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of a melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, co-ordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize . . . this is the work of one man.”
There is ample testimony to the soundness of Griffith’s instincts when it came to molding screen actors and actresses into movie stars. Mart Pickford and Lillian Gish are outstanding examples, and it can be added that it was Griffith who induced the famous Douglas Fairbanks to leave the stage for the screen.
In the course of a career that earned for him such grand accolades as “father of the film art” and “king of directors,” Griffith produced and directed almost 500 pictures costing $23-million and grossing about $8O-milllon. At the time of his death, his most famous film, The Birth of A Nation, had earned more than $48-million.
This epic of the Civil War and the reconstruction period, heavily biased as it was, nevertheless had a majestic sweep to It and went a long way toward capturing the essential genius of the man. Many critics agree, however, that his 1916 film, Intolerance, was the Griffith masterpiece, though it fell far short of the popular acclaim showered on The Birth of A Nation.
Intolerance, on the same grand scale, wove four stories together (the complexity of the device seemed to bother the audiences of the day), each depicting an example of intolerance. Some idea of the scale of Griffith’s operation may be obtained from the fact that he used 16,000 extras in one scene.
It seems doubtful that we will ever see the like again. Griffith’s talents were unique—and no one today could afford 16,000 extras.

“A very great experience”—Urjo Kareda, Toronto Star

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is not only the oldest movie in town—made in 1914—but quite the best as well. …

Seeing it again offers the chance not only for a reunion ‘with an archetype but also for a return to the source beginnings of this century’s enchantment with the movies.

The Birth of a Nation is a tremendous, heroic, lyrical melodrama about the Civil War and the period of reconstruction. (It’s strange to think that when the film was made, there must have been many people who remembered that historical period just as people remember the 1920s now).

NOTORIOUS THEME

It is always difficult to come to terms with an old film which winds up on the wrong side of the political- moral fence.

Of course, the immediately notorious thing about The Birth of a Nation is its violent anti-Negro bias and its final hosanna of praise for the Ku Klux Klan. (It was based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, and at the end it is the Klan which rides in for the rescue).

This moral lapse, in addition, to a few sequences which may seem naive or stilted, still leads some people—surprisingly in this supposed time of sophisticated film audiences—to sit sniggering through the film.

But this wasted act of condescension (seemingly unavoidable if a film is more than 10 years old) closes the door to the countless remarkable and memorable qualities of such a masterpiece as The Birth Of A Nation.

Griffith’s film is immersed in technical innovation.

Nobody who has ever seen a major battle scene can fail to see the beginnings in Griffith’s extraordinary staging, photographed (in part) aerially, at a lower angle than usual, in superb compositions of movement punctuated by clouds of smoke.
Nobody who has ever seen scenes of farewell can ignore the originality of Griffith’s version, in which the screen is alive with outstretched arms and crazily waving handkerchiefs.
No amount of frantic editing can match the excitement and genius of Griffith’s system of intercutting as his narrative reaches its climax.
Moving from roaming marauders to beleaguered victims to the advancing rescuers, the film moves forward with cumulative impulse and tension.
Griffith’s use of fragile, vibrant actresses—Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh in this film—remains very moving. The famous scene in which Miss Marsh welcomes her brother home from the war is as rending as anything ever put on celluloid.
They stand, staring at one another for an aching moment. Then, sudden chatter (we can’t, of course, hear it, but can assume its triviality). He picks vaguely at some silly, frills that she’s put on her dress, she goes to straighten his hat.
SWEET EMOTIONS
Pause; another overeaching moment. Suddenly, with all the swiftness of human emotions, she is in his arms and weeping. She draws him into the house, and as they stand framed in the doorway, his mother’s hands are seen moving out to embrace him. The perfect scene ends.

The Birth of a Nation is filled with such treasures. Most of the sequences are very brief—a matter, of seconds, usually—but they fuse almost subliminally to form a mosaic of illuminated moments in human achievement and personal destinies.
The film is a very great experience. Nobody interested at all in their own cultural history can afford to miss it.

–Urjo Kareda was a major figure on the Toronto live theater scene. His influence on this city was tremendous. This was one of his rare film reviews.
 

James Agee: David Wark Griffith
HE ACHIEVED what no other known man has ever achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.
We will never realize how good he really was until we have the chance to see his work as often as it deserves to be seen, to examine and enjoy it in detail as exact as his achievement. But even relying, as we mainly have to, on years-old memories, a good deal becomes clear.
One crude but unquestionable indication of his greatness was his power to create permanent images. All through his work there are images which are as impossible to forget, once you have seen them, as some of the grandest and simplest passages in music or poetry.
The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in The Birth of a Nation. I have heard it praised for its realism, and that is deserved; but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a perfect realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans might remember it fifty years later, or as children, fifty years later, might imagine it. I have had several clear mental images of that war, from almost as early as I can remember, and I didn’t have the luck to see The Birth of a Nation until I was in my early twenties; but when I saw that charge, it was merely the clarification, and corroboration, of one of those visions, and took its place among them immediately without seeming to be of a different kind or order. It is the perfection that I know of, of the tragic glory that is possible, or used to be possible, in war; or in war as the best in the spirit imagines or remembers it.
This is, I realize, mainly subjective; but it suggests to me the clearest and deepest aspect of Griffith’s genius: he was a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples. If he had achieved this only once, and only for me, I could not feel that he was what I believe he is; but he created many such images, and I suspect that many people besides me have recognized them, on that deepest level that art can draw on, reach, and serve. There are many others in that one film: the homecoming of the defeated hero; the ride of the Clansmen; the rapist and his victim among the dark leaves; a glimpse of a war hospital; dead young soldiers after battle; the dark, slow movement of the Union Army away from the camera, along a valley which is quartered strongly between hill- shadow and sunlight; all these and still others have a dreamlike absoluteness which, indeed, cradles and suffuses the whole film.
This was the one time in movie history that a man of great ability worked freely, in an unspoiled medium, for an unspoiled audience, on a majestic theme which involved all that he was; and brought to it, besides his abilities as an inventor and artist, absolute passion, pity, courage, and honesty. The Birth of a Nation is equal with Brady’s photographs, Lincoln’s speeches, Whitman’s war poems; for all its imperfections and absurdities it is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country. And among moving pictures it is alone, not necessarily as “the greatest”—whatever that means—but as the one great epic, tragic film.
(Today, The Birth of a Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.)
Griffith never managed to equal The Birth of a Nation again, nor was he ever to strike off, in any other film, so many of those final images. Nevertheless, he found many: the strikers in Intolerance—the realism of those short scenes has never been surpassed, nor their shock and restiveness as an image of near-revolution; the intercutting, at the climax of that picture, between the climaxes of four parallel stories, like the swinging together of tremendous gongs; the paralyzing excitement of the melodrama near the waterfall, in Way Down East; Paul Revere’s ride and the battle of Bunker Hill, in America; Danton’s ride, in Orphans of the Storm; most subtle and remarkable of all, the early morning scene in his German film, Isn’t Life Wonderful?, in which the ape-like Dick Sutherland pursues Carol Dempster through a grove of slender trees. All these images, and so many others of Griffith’s, have a sort of crude sublimity which nobody else in movies has managed to achieve; this last one, like his images of our Civil War, seems to come out of the deep subconscious: it is an absolute and prophetic image of a nation and a people. I will always regret having missed Abraham Lincoln, his last film to be released: a friend has told me of its wonderful opening in stormy mid-winter night woods, the camera bearing along toward the natal cabin; and that surely must have been one of Griffith’s finest images.
Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. (With all that “understanding,” I look forward to killing, some day, some specially happy giggler at the exquisite scene in which the veteran comes home, in The Birth of a Nation.) But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant, so well as I can remember, the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength; and there are, besides, Griffith’s overwhelming innocence and magnanimity of spirit; his moral and poetic earnestness; his joy in his work; and his splendid intuitiveness, directness, common sense, daring, and skill as an inventor and as an artist. Aside from his talent or genius as an inventor and artist, he was all heart; and ruinous as his excesses sometimes were in that respect, they were inseparable from his virtues, and small beside them. He was remarkably good, as a rule, in the whole middle range of feeling, but he was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge. He was capable of realism that has never been beaten and he might, if he had been able to appreciate his powers as a realist, have found therein his growth and salvation. But he seems to have been a realist only by accident, hit-and-run; essentially, he was a poet. He doesn’t appear ever to have realized one of the richest promises that movies hold, as the perfect medium for realism raised to the level of high poetry; nor, oddly enough, was he much of a dramatic poet. But in epic and lyrical and narrative visual poetry, I can think of nobody who has surpassed him, and of few to compare with him. And as a primitive tribal poet, combining something of the bard and the seer, he is beyond even Dovzhenko, and no others of their kind have worked in movies.
What he had above all, his ability as a craftsman and artist, would be hard enough—and quite unnecessary—to write of, if we had typical scenes before us, or within recent memory; since we have seen so little of his work in so many years, it is virtually impossible. I can remember very vividly his general spirit and manner—heroic, impetuous, tender, magniloquent, naive, beyond the endowment or daring of anybody since; just as vividly, I can remember the total impression of various major sequences. By my remembrance, his images were nearly always a little larger and wilder than life. The frame was always full, spontaneous, and lively. He knew wonderfully well how to contrast and combine different intensities throughout an immense range of emotion, movement, shadow, and light. Much of the liveliness was not intrinsic to the characters on the screen or their predicament, but was his own vitality and emotion; and much of it— notably in the amazing flickering and vivacity of his women—came of his almost maniacal realization of the importance of expressive movement.
It seems to me entirely reasonable to infer, from the extraordinary power and endurance in the memory of certain scenes in their total effect, that he was as brilliant a master of design and cutting and form as he was a composer of frames and a director of feeling and motion. But I cannot clearly remember one sequence or scene, shot by shot and rhythm by rhythm. I suspect, for instance, that analysis would show that the climactic sequence on the icy river, in Way Down East, is as finely constructed a piece of melodramatic story-telling as any in movies. But I can only venture to bet on this and to suggest that that sequence, like a hundred others of Griffith’s, is eminently worth analysis.
My veneration for Griffith’s achievements is all the deeper when I realize what handicaps he worked against, how limited a man he was. He had no remarkable power of intellect, or delicateness of soul; no subtlety; little restraint; little if any “taste,” whether to help his work or harm it; Lord knows (and be thanked) no cleverness; no fundamental capacity, once he had achieved his first astonishing development, for change or growth. He wasn’t particularly observant of people; nor do his movies suggest that he understood them at all deeply. He had noble powers of imagination, but little of the intricacy of imagination that most good poets also have. His sense of comedy was pathetically crude and numb. He had an exorbitant appetite for violence, for cruelty, and for the Siamese twin of cruelty, a kind of obsessive tenderness which at its worst was all but nauseating. Much as he invented, his work was saturated in the style, the mannerisms, and the underlying assumptions and attitudes of the nineteenth century provincial theater; and although much of that was much better than most of us realize, and any amount better than most of the styles and non-styles we accept and praise, much of it was cheap and false, and all of it, good and bad, was dying when Griffith gave it a new lease on life, and in spite of that new lease, died soon after, and took him down with it. I doubt that Griffith ever clearly knew the good from the bad in this theatricality; or, for that matter, clearly understood what was original in his work, and capable of almost unimaginably great development; and what was over-derivative, essentially non-cinematic, and dying. In any case, he did not manage to outgrow, or sufficiently to transform, enough in his style that was bad, or merely obsolescent.
If what I hear is right about the opening scene in Abraham Lincoln, this incapacity for radical change may have slowed him up but never killed him as an artist; in his no longer fashionable way, he remained capable, and inspired. He was merely inadaptable and unemployable, like an old, sore, ardent individualist among contemporary progressives. Hollywood and, to a great extent, movies in general, grew down from him rather than up past him; audiences, and the whole eye and feeling of the world, have suffered the same degeneration; he didn’t have it in him to be amenable, even if he’d tried; and that was the end of him. Or quite possibly he was finished, as smaller men are not, as soon as he had reached the limit of his own powers of innovation, and began to realize he was only repeating himself. Certainly, anyhow, he was natural-born for the years of adventure and discovery, not for the inevitable following era of safe-playing and of fat consolidation of others’ gains.
His last movie, which was never even released, was made fourteen or fifteen years ago; and for years before that, most people had thought of him as a has-been. Nobody would hire him; he had nothing to do. He lived too long, and that is one of few things that are sadder than dying too soon.
There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else.

“(Agee) was superbly intelligent, informed, sensitive, witty; and he could write like an angel. He was the best movie critic this country ever had.”–Arthur Knight, Saturday Review.

“What he says is of such profound interest, expressed with such extraordinary wit and felicity…that his articles belong in that very select class–the music critiques of Berlioz and Shaw are the only other members I know–of newspaper work which has permanent literary value.”–W. H. Auden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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