by Greg Johnson
Despite its compelling narrative, Broken Blossoms viciously maligns the white family and blatantly promotes race mixing. Ideologically, it is an insidious film. It is significant that Griffith flipped a key element of Thomas Burke’s story on its head. In the original, the Chinese protagonist is a sordid Shanghai drifter pressed into naval service who frequents opium dens and whorehouses. Griffith transforms him into a Yellow saint.
There is no denying that Broken Blossoms is an extremely well-made film. But a committed racialist—and that’s how Griffith is presented to the world—would never have made such a thing.
It is hard to see the film as anything but a conscienceless effort to curry favor with the powers that be, who continued to assail the director mercilessly year after year. Griffith did not approach his self-appointed task cynically, either, but in a sincere “I truly DO love Big Brother” manner. Griffith may also have harbored a peculiarly “Southern brand” of racism, which rejects blacks but embraces Jews and other non-whites. Finally, the “racism” of Birth of a Nation may have owed more to the happenstance of Thomas Dixon’s underlying story and the director’s implicit Southerness (regionalism), than to any commitment to whites as a race.
As an aside, Thomas Dixon opposed the Second Ku Klux Klan and penned anti-Klan novels during the period of its resurgence. He even sought Jewish financial backing for a Hollywood movie attacking the Klan, which he optimistically believed would be as successful as The Birth of a Nation had been.
DISINGENUOUS PACIFIST
Griffith once called Pickett’s charge, a Confederate infantry assault at the Battle of Gettysburg resulting in thousands of casualties on both sides, “a beautiful thing.” This illustrates his dark side when it came to war. (When asked years later why his charge at Gettysburg failed, General George Pickett replied: “I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.”)
Griffith’s films abound in scenes that glorify combat, belying his many mawkish antiwar pronouncements.
Hearts of the World (1918) is a propaganda film made in Europe in partnership with Jewish tycoon Adolph Zukor at the behest of Lloyd George and the English and French governments. Its aim was to draw the still-neutral United States into the European slaughter. Lillian Gish said in an interview that the request from European leaders to make the film greatly flattered the director. (Another WWI propaganda film, The Girl Who Stayed at Home [1919], was initially designed to popularize the draft.)
In Hearts, Griffith, so often the cloying pacifist (one is reminded of Robert Frost’s cynical description of Carl Sandburg as a “pacifist between wars”), cunningly presented “the dash and drama of war,” as he called it, complete with the stereotypical bestial Hun played in Hearts and so many other silent films of the era by Erich von Stroheim.
In one non-Griffith silent movie von Stroheim played a lust-crazed German officer so intent upon raping a young Frenchwoman in her home that he interrupted his crime just long enough to frenziedly hurl the woman’s screaming, terror-stricken baby out an upper-floor window to its death because its cries were distracting him.
Star Lillian Gish said, “Hearts of the World enjoyed great success until the Armistice when people lost interest in war films. The film inflamed audiences. Its depiction of German brutality bordered on the absurd. Whenever a German came near me, he beat me or kicked me.”
Gish, whose father was of German Lutheran descent, was an outspoken anti-interventionist and active member of the America First Committee before WWII. She was blacklisted by the film and theater industries until she signed a contract promising to cease anti-interventionist activities and never disclose the existence of the agreement. Obsessive, control freak behavior like this greatly distorts Western culture.
Another large-scale melodrama based upon a popular, long-running stage play performed hundreds of times since the 1870s, translated into 40 languages, and already filmed twice by the time Griffith shot his version (three times, if the German remake filmed contemporaneously with Griffith’s is included), was Orphans of the Storm (1921), a story of the French Revolution starring sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish and Austrian-born Jew Joseph Schildkraut.
The oblique lesson, according to an introductory intertitle, is that “the French Revolution rightly overthrew a bad government. But we in America should be careful lest we with a good government mistake fanatics for leaders and exchange our decent law and order for Anarchy and Bolshevism.” (Emphases in original.)
Attitudes toward the French Revolution are a good ideological barometer. The fact that Griffith supported the Revolution to a degree suggests underlying Leftism. On the other hand, his opposition to Jewish Communism, at least in 1922, indicates more soundness of character than most successful, well-to-do people of the era displayed.
Orphans was only a modest success: the popularity of melodramas had waned. Following the enormous ticket sales of The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Hearts of the World (1918), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920), Orphans marked the end of Griffith’s great epics. None of his later films attained the money-making heights of the earlier films.
PROPHET WITHOUT HONOR
Griffith spent his final years in a succession of apartment-hotels. On July 23, 1948, he was discovered unconscious in the lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles, where he had been living alone. He was 73 years old. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) on the way to the hospital.
D. W. Griffith is buried at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard in Oldham County, Kentucky, together with his mother and father.
In 1953 the Directors Guild of America (DGA) created the D. W. Griffith Award, its highest honor. Recipients include Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, John Huston, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and Stanley Kubrick.
But in 1999 the DGA’s National Board eliminated the pioneer filmmaker’s name from the trophy because The Birth of a Nation “helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes.” They renamed it the “DGA Lifetime Achievement Award.”
To his credit, in sharp contrast to such priggishness, actor-director Orson Welles stated:
I met D. W. Griffith only once, in the last days of the last year of the 1930s. Hollywood’s golden age, but for the greatest of all directors it had been a sad and empty decade. The motion picture which he had virtually invented had become the product—the exclusive product—of America’s fourth-largest industry [emphasis added], and on the assembly lines of the mammoth movie factories there was no place for Griffith. He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without honor, a craftsman without tools, an artist without work. I loved and worshipped him, but he didn’t need a disciple. He needed a job. I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man. He is beyond tribute.290
D. W. Griffith was a great filmmaker. But his so-called “racism” is a red herring. The facts do not support the familiar narrative. It is sustained by focusing obsessively on The Birth of a Nation to the exclusion of his other work.
There is no doubt that D. W. Griffith was race conscious. A variety of races are featured in his films, though blacks—the notoriety of Birth of a Nation notwithstanding—only rarely. Moreover, Griffith’s race consciousness a century and more ago was explicitly framed in terms of whiteness—a very striking fact.
Unfortunately, the majority of his films display hostility toward whites vis-à-vis their racial competitors. There are only a handful of exceptions, including The Adventures of Dollie (1908), The Fatal Hour: A Stirring Incident of the Chinese White-Slave Trade (1908), The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), and, of course, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Far more common are movies with racially harmful messages such as Ramona (1910) and Broken Blossoms (1919).
There are many reasons why we’re in the fix we’re in. One of them is that our predecessors weren’t the uncompromising racists those who hate us say they were.
Counter-Curren
ts/North American New Right
June 3, 7, 17, & 21, 2013
GOD HAS BECOME CANCER:
DAMIEN HIRST, RELIGION, & DEATH
CHRISTOPHER PANKHURST
For the radical Right, the issue of contemporary art is something of a non-starter. The past century or so of developments in the fine arts have been dominated by American (and often Jewish) theoreticians who have fashioned a sensibility wherein anything that smacks of European tradition is automatically verboten, unless it can be refracted through a distorting lens of ironic detachment or disinheritance.
Given this, the attitude of nationalist commentators is to dismiss contemporary art out of hand and to long for a return to a more representational art. One of the best statements of this position is provided by Lasha Darkmoon.291
While this is certainly a coherent position, and one that accords well with the observations of the common man, it is lacking in visionary ambition. What I mean by this is that the desire to return to something resembling Renaissance art is a limited and parochial view of art history. The sort of art produced from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards was visually determined by the discovery of perspective in the early 15th. It is certainly true that this art represents some of the jewels in the Western crown, but it is not really Traditional art at all.
TRADITIONAL ART
In Traditional art, symbolism and meaning take precedence over naturalism. The use of perspective in art tends to elevate naturalism above meaning, or at least it greases the tracks of this decline. Furthermore, perspective puts the observer of the work into the position of ultimate authority. David Hockney wittily referred to some of his landscape works as figurative paintings because the viewer becomes a figure in the landscape. He was right, and perspective in art inevitably tends to privilege the position of the observer as a special locus of interpretation.
In this sense, even Renaissance art and its successors foreshadow the assumptions of post-structuralism and deconstructionism: that there are no pre-existing hierarchical arrangements in the world, merely socially organized ones, and that the work of art has no objective existence, but is merely subject to fresh interrogation by each individual who encounters it. If you hate Tracy Emin, blame Brunelleschi.
A more radical response to the shallowness of contemporary art would be to advocate for a return to pre-Renaissance art forms, to iconography, illuminated manuscripts, and the like.
But the obvious flaw in such a return would be that those preceding art worlds came from a very different time and place to where we are today. In Traditional societies, there was no clear sense of demarcation between art and craft, or between art and religion. The creation of an artwork would have been an act of worship in itself. Perhaps the closest we have to such art today might be the creations of someone like Andy Goldsworthy, but even here the value of the art arises from the aesthetic and spiritual talents of the individual artist.
We do not live in a time when collective worship through shared iconography is a possibility. To long for a return to either Renaissance or pre-Renaissance art forms is misguided, because the social conditions that gave rise to those art forms no longer exist. Art that tries to return to those forms will produce surface imitations that may be aesthetically pleasing but will fail to achieve the same sense of numinous expression, because they will only communicate from individual to individual rather than arising from the shared experiences of a particular community.
So, at one level, the artistic revolution of the 20th century was entirely healthy and necessary. The Post-Impressionists and their successors recognized that the Pre-Raphaelites’ hopes had not been realized and that the world was plunging headlong into modernity. The artwork of the 20th century reflects the breakdown and fragmentation suffered by the individual, and posits fresh ways for the individual to come to terms with this sense of disintegration. But this is not sufficient; there needs to be a reintegration. Where contemporary art has been useful is as an antenna, receiving and transmitting the metaphysical chaos of a secular age. But it has failed to articulate anything resembling a genuine European ethos appropriate for modernity and post-modernity. Early attempts such as Futurism and Vorticism were rendered stillborn after 1945. (After 1945 there can be no European art, perhaps?)
Given this rather depressing situation, it seems to me reasonable to investigate some of the more meaningful occurrences in contemporary art and to ask whether there might be some latent residue of a Traditional perspective lurking beneath the often tawdry surface. My motivation here is backed up by a suspicion that post-modernism will inevitably undo itself; that, in a world where all values must be equalized, there is always the chance that values detrimental to the present system orthodoxy will be able to smuggle themselves into the Academy and into popular consciousness. And it is with these considerations in mind that I turn to the work of Damien Hirst.
CONCEPTUAL ART
Hirst’s primary medium is conceptualism, and he is probably the most famous and successful conceptual artist ever. The narrative of conceptual art tells us that when Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in 1917, this allowed the art object to attain a degree of ontological autonomy that had never before been thought possible. Instead of art creating a representational or symbolic picture of the world, it now became possible for actual elements of the real world to enter into the field of art appreciation, thus challenging the hierarchy of aesthetic value judgement.
The point of such conceptualism is essentially twofold. Firstly, it asserts that the process of selection that had previously been a necessary prerequisite to the production of an artwork is redundant. The accepted symbolism and subject matter of Western art, so the argument goes, are part of a wider matrix of ideological oppression that seeks to assert a regressive sense of order and hierarchy, and to validate such notions. The task of the artist, then, is to undermine such systems of oppression by undermining the symbolic structures of Western discourse. So, a urinal becomes sculpture, as does the artist’s own shit as it sells for its weight in gold. A false alchemy of commercial and conceptual praxis replaces Western metaphysics.
Secondly, the locus of meaning retreats a step back in the process of artistic production. Whereas it had always been axiomatic in earlier times that the conceptualizing of the artwork is the prior stage to its execution in a particular craft context, it now becomes possible to formulate a particular concept in the mind and then present it in a more or less unadorned fashion. The “artistry” involved in the process has become less important as the artist’s own conceptualization of the object has become foregrounded.
The effect of this is that contemporary conceptual art en masse is badly formulated and badly executed. In theoretical terms it fails to achieve an objective correlative in two ways. First, the subject matter of the artwork is badly chosen; it is precisely that which should be excluded from the artwork, or at least be subordinated to other dominant functions of the work. Second, there is no clear objective manifestation of that which is to be expressed. The signification of the work is not contained within itself but points back to the anterior formulation that inspired it; it points to the mind of the artist.
For many observers, these considerations alone are sufficient to condemn conceptual art entirely. The common sense view, that an unmade bed or a pile of bricks cannot possibly be considered genuine art, has a great deal of merit. But it cannot be denied that art praxis and theory during the 20th century developed a unique and telling language, a language that has become culturally dominant. For most of today’s critics who set the agenda for contemporary art, representational art has been superseded by photography, film, and television, and the only practicing artists worthy of note are those who work with some form of conceptualism.
HIRST’S WORKS
Within this critical milieu, the figure of Damien Hirst looms large. Both an enfant terrible and a fêted celebrity, his work is simultaneously central and tangential to the focus of late twentieth and early 21st century art appre
ciation. This dual aspect stems from the nature of the work itself, which achieves a remarkable duplicity of intent: both sincere and removed at the same time. To a large degree, this bipolarity of intention is a reflection of Hirst’s core subject matter which consistently revolves around ideas of death; what, if anything, death means to the living, and how we should orientate ourselves towards death now that religion is deemed outmoded. Hirst presents these questions (and occasionally tentative answers) in stark and illuminating ways. The apparent coolness and lack of emotional engagement evident in his work marks it out as a wholly contemporary project, but the obsessive return to this rather metaphysical subject matter suggests that Hirst is less of a modern than he would necessarily admit.
Hirst’s early work consisted of Jeff Koons-style conceptual objects and are of little note. The turning point came at the beginning of the 1990s with A Thousand Years (1990), and was followed with some of his signature works, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), and Away from the Flock (1994).
A Thousand Years presents a cow’s head in a glass cube on which maggots feast, and from which they emerge as flies only to find that the cube also contains an insect-o-cutor which ends their brief lives. This is an artwork that attempts to present the entire life cycle, but in a repellent way. Blood from the severed head pools on the floor as do the increasing number of dead flies. Watching this piece is a depressing and somewhat repugnant experience, but it does exert a grim fascination nonetheless. In its attempt to exhibit death as a stark fact, it represents the beginning of Hirst’s mature style.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and Away from the Flock are representative of the work that Hirst is best known for, namely dead animals floating in formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, or Dead Shark as it is often known, is a huge triptych of steel-framed glass cubes, within which a dead shark floats, its fearsome jaw forever agape in a static parody of its former ferocity.