Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

contact: Gary William Jones gary@jonesfilmvideo.com

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010 Class #2 (The Birth of a Nation)

Glossary of Film Terms:

http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms1.html

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

(3^rd edition is fine)

Suggested reading: Chapter 3: “D.W. Griffith and the Development of Narrative Form”

…Griffith did more than any single individual to establish the narrative language of the cinema and turn an aesthetically inconsequential medium of entertainment into a fully articulate art form….He was unquestionably the seminal genius of the narrative cinema and its first great visionary artist, but he was also a provincial southern romantic with pretensions to high literary culture and a penchant for sentimentality and melodrama that would have embarrassed Dickens. Griffith was the film’s first great technical master and its first legitimate poet, but he was also a muddleheaded racial bigot who quite literally saw all of human history in the black-and-white terms of nineteenth century melodrama. In once sense, Griffith presents the paradox of a nineteenth-century man who found a uniquely twentieth-century art form, and this tension between ages accounts for many disparities of taste and judgment that we fin in his films today. But there is another contradiction in Griffith which is less easy to rationalize and which raises issues central to the nature of film art itself, and that is the very existence of such staggering cinematic genius side by side with the intellectual shallowness described above. Given the peculiar limitations of his vision, Griffith was never dishonest or hypocritical, but he was intellectually arrow to an alarming degree for a major artist in any medium. (p. 59)

David Wark Griffith, the seventh child of a Confederate Army colonel, Civil War hero, and local character, Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith, was born in a rural district of Kentucky near the Indiana border in 1875….Griffin was forced to quit public school and work to help support the family…after a succession of menial jobs in Louisville, he became stage-struck and began to tour the Midwest with traveling stock companies.

In 1907, Griffith tried unsuccessfully to sell a screen story to Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company studios, but, impressed with the young man’s looks, he offered Griffith the leading role in his current film, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, at a salary of five dollars a day. (p. 61)

In 1908, Griffith joined American Biograph and directed over 450 one- and two-reelers , experimenting with every narrative technique that he would later employ on The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), and which would pass into the conventional lexicon of the cinema. Yet Griffith seems to have been scarcely aware of his innovations, at least, in the process of making them. They were for him the unformulated results of practical problem-solving rather than of abstract theorizing, and his method of proceeding was always intuitive and empirical rather than formalistic….Ultimately, Griffith combined his own analogies between dramatic/novelistic modes and cinematic modes with those of others, like Porter and Pastrone, and molded them into the visual narrative language which we call generically “film”.

…Griffith was prominent, in fact pre-eminent, in the transformation of the production system from its primitive to its classical mode. The historical record is clear, for example, that Griffith’s Biograph films were enormously popular with contemporary audiences and widely imitated by other filmmakers, as were his day-to-day production practices. Nor c an there be any doubt that in terms of social history the fame and infamy of The Birth of a Nation (1915) changed forever the way that motion pictures were regarded by everyone from shoe clers to national politicians to Wall Street financiers. (p. 63)

Griffith’s first major innovation…was to alternate shots of different spatial lengths (i.e. of different camera-to-subject distance), none of which was dramatically complete in itself, to crate cinematic “sentences” within scenes.

Griffith’s next narrative articulation was a logical extension of the first: parallel editing (cutting between two different scenes in progress). To that he added “objects of attention” shots, which have come to be called “motivated point-of-view” (or POV) shots and flashback, or “switchback,” as he termed it—a shot or sequence of shots which interrupts the narrative present and returns us momentarily to the past.

Griffith’s next step was even more radical, for it involved spatial and temporal fragmentation of the reality continuum to create the illusions of three parallel actions and, by using this fragmentation not just as a form of narrative shorthand but as the basis of his film’s structure, to achieve a new kind of dramatic suspense. (pp. 65-6)

…Griffith has discovered that the length of time a shot remained on the screen could create significant psychological tension in the audience—that the shorter the length of time a show was held on the screen, the greater the tension it was capable of inducing. (p.66)

Griffith’s second major innovation, then, is the syntactical corollary of the first—to the alternation of shots of varying spatial lengths, he added the alternation of shots of varying temporal lengths, creating the basis for montage and the montage aesthetics which came to dominate the first fifty years of the cinema. (p. 67).

…in 1910 most film narratives—even those of Griffith—were structured mainly thorough editing, whether the units edited together were scenes or shots. In California, Griffith became increasingly interested in structuring his films through intraframe as well as interframe movement….becoming one of the first directors to compose his shots in depth, with simultaneous action in background, middleground, and foreground rather than on a single plane. (p. 69)

…aside from his cinematic genius, Griffith’s greatest attribute as a film-maker was his compulsion to take everything about the cinema seriously…Many of his “discoveries” were not discoveries at all but simply the result of bestowing a degree of care on operations which earlier directors had performed in a slapdash manner. (p. 70)

The Birth of a Nation

Adapted from the play The Clansman, which had in turn been adapted by southern-born clergyman Thomas E. Dixon, Jr., from his best-selling novel…Shooting began in total secrecy in late 1914, and…Griffith worked wholly without a written script. Through six weeks of rehearsal and nine weeks of shooting—a remarkable schedule in an era when most features were cranked out in less than a month—Griffith carried around in his head every detail of the editing continuity, titles, settings, costumes, and props…Originally composed of over 1,544 separate shots—in an era in which the most sophisticated of foreign spectacles contained fewer than one hundred—The Clansman (as it was initially called) took Griffith three months to edit and score. It was completed at a cost of $110,000…the longest (thirteen reels) and most expensive motion picture yet made in America. But within five years of its opening…(it) would return more than fifteen million dollars….not counting millions of dollars in concealed profits to regional distributors…Operating as the…distributor for Massachusetts, Louis B. Mayer alone made as much as one million dollars in rake-offs from the The Birth of a Nation (a fortune which would later enable him to become the driving force behind Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). (p. 77)

…after a special White House screening (the first of its kind), President Woodrow Wilson, who was himself a professional historian, is reputed to have said, “It is like writing history with lighting.” P. 77)

But the film’s extraordinary success was marred by controversy and scandal. Several weeks after the New York opening, Griffith yielded to pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, founded in 1908) and city officials to cut the film’s most blatantly racist sequences. He grudging removed some 558 feet, reducing the total number of shots from 1,544 to 1,375. (p.77)

..the governor of Massachusetts had the film banned throughout the state after a race riot at its Boston premiere. Riots also occurred when the film opened in Chicago and Atlanta, where it was directly instrumental in the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan. (p. 78)…whose membership had reached five million by the time of World War II. Indeed, according to the Klan’s current leaders, The Birth of a Nation was used as a key instrument of recruitment and indoctrination well into the sixties. Less pernicious socially, but perhaps ultimately more destructive, was the enormous financial success of the film, which seemed to valorize Hollywood’s taste for the emotional, sensational, and melodramatic as opposed to the rational, philosophical, and discursive at the very moment of its birth. As a supremely manipulative film , The Birth of a Nation showed the American industry how effectively and lucratively the movies could pander to public frustration, anxiety, and prejudice—a lesson that Hollywood has hardly ever forgotten in its ninety-year (now almost 100-year) history…Yet, precisely because of its remarkable emotional power, its tendency to incite and inflame rather than to persuade, The Birth of a Nation marked the emergence of film as a potent social and political force in the modern world…It as the first film to be taken seriously as a political statement…At the same time, The Birth of a Nation was so clearly a work of geniu,s however flawed, that it conferred great prestige upon the new medium of the feature film when it most needed it. The first film ever to be widely acclaimed as a great work of art and simultaneously reviled as a pernicious distortion of the truth, The Birth of a Nation is the cinema’s seminal masterpiece, and its paradox is the paradox of cinematic narrative itself. (p. 86)

…film constructs its fictions through the deliberate manipulation of photographed reality itself, so that in cinema artifice and reality become quite literally indistinguishable. (p. 86)

More persons saw The Birth of a Nation in the first year of its release than had seen any single film in history. (p. 88)

YouTube version (Part I-- 38 minutes):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPxRIF1c2fI

YouTube version (Part II—20 mintutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z2hZwDibPI&feature=channel

YouTube version (Part III—28 minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzDlC9a7Cao&feature=related