D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  Griffith’s Reputation

  On December 3, 1913, a one-page advertisement appeared in The New York Dramatic Mirror, placed there by Griffith’s new personal attorney, Albert H. T. Banzhaf.74 At one level, it was intended to rescue the work Griffith had done at Biograph from the anonymity to which company policy had habitually condemned it. The ad identified Griffith as the “producer of all great Biograph successes” and listed 147 he had directed (around a third of the actual total). It also laid claim to the longer films he had done but which Biograph had not yet released, including The Massacre and films he had shot earlier in the year in California: Judith of Bethulia, The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, and Wars of the Primal Tribes.75 At another level, the ad was a skillful exercise in self-promotion, formulating and disseminating the idea of Griffith as the great director who had succeeded in “revolutionizing Motion Picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.” Among the innovations he had been responsible for, it was claimed, were the “large or close-up figures, distant views as represented first in Ramona, the ‘switchback,’ sustained suspense, the ‘fade out,’ and restraint in expression, raising motion picture acting to the higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.”

  Because The New York Dramatic Mirror ad was a crucial moment in the later construction of the Griffith legend, it is important to give the claims it made some consideration.76 Griffith was not, of course, the first to use close-ups: Edwin S. Porter, for example, ended his early 1903 film The Life of an American Fireman with a close-range shot of a hand opening a fire-alarm box and pulling the alarm.77 Porter also employed close-ups in the sense in which the ad in the Dramatic Mirror used the term: The Great Train Robbery (1903) included such a shot of the outlaw leader. Griffith, notes Edward Wagenknecht, had “been photographed in close-up in films made by others before he became a director.”78 Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s principal cameraman, would later confess that the invention of the “fade out” or dissolve ought “really” to be credited to French filmmaker George Méliès.79 The “distant” (or long or panoramic) shot also preceded the making of Ramona. It was often used in early Westerns. Griffith had made many of these, using locations at Fort Lee or Cuddebackville in the east.80 By 1909, however, notes Eileen Bowser, he was producing fewer such films, in part because “the authentic western scenery appearing in Selig and Essanay films was making eastern landscape less acceptable.”81 Moreover, while Griffith’s experiences in California in the early months of 1910 had a liberating effect on his filmmaking—Ramona proved only the first of a series of films in which the California landscape was used to accentuate the “spectacular” in filmic terms—he was not the first filmmaker to arrive in the state nor the first to see the possibilities it offered for location shooting.82

  While Griffith, in collaboration with Bitzer, was not as pioneering as the ad in the Dramatic Mirror claimed, the films he made for the Biograph were distinguished by continual experimentation. In August 1908, shooting For the Love of Gold, for example, Griffith demanded something almost unheard of until then: a change of camera angle in the middle of a scene.83 There were also many experiments with lighting, such as the firelight effects produced in The Drunkard’s Reformation (1909) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1909).84 Complicated patterns of lighting were also used in Pippa Passes (1909) to create the impression of a day as it progressed from sunrise to evening (so striking were these effects that The New York Times compared the film’s deployment of light and shade to the work of the contemporary Secessionist photographers).85 It is not clear from the record whether Griffith or Bitzer was primarily responsible for such effects (both would later independently claim the credit, for example, for the discovery of reverse or back-lighting).86 The two worked extremely closely together for sixteen years. “If Mr. Griffith asked for some effect,” Bitzer would later recall, “I tried one way or another to produce what he wanted. When it worked successfully, we were hailed as inventors.”87

  Griffith was one of a new group of film directors that included Ralph and Thomas Ince. Eileen Bowser points out that unlike the previous generation of filmmakers, most of whom had been “businessmen, technicians, cameramen with some variety-show people,” most of these new directors had a background in road show drama or legitimate theater.88 There were two main consequences of this change. The first was that the new directors often insisted on overseeing every aspect of their productions, including the composition of shots, lighting, and the makeup of the actors. In this sense, they were closer to successful contemporary stage directors such as David Belasco than to earlier filmmakers.89 The second consequence was that they perceived cinema, like the theater, above all as a means of telling stories. To Griffith, the tricks and illusions that the camera could be made to perform were of significance only if they helped support this narrative function. As Tom Gunning has pointed out, while Griffith did not invent devices such as the close-up and the fade-out, he used them primarily to express characterization and help develop the story.90 Filming After Many Years (based on Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” poem about a sailor supposedly lost at sea) in late October 1908, he asked Bitzer for a close-up of the grieving face of the wife. Bitzer was reluctant at first, not because close-ups were new (he had shot several himself) “but because they were virtually unheard of as a dramatic device in a narrative film.”91 Unlike the earlier close-up of the outlaw in Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, which had no narrative significance (exhibitors were informed that it could go either at the start or the end of the film), Griffith’s close-ups were designed to help audiences follow the story line by observing the emotional reactions of the characters at crucial dramatic moments.92

  The close-up, of course, required greater restraint from actors: small gestures and slight changes in facial expression were usually a more effective way of conveying emotion than broader, more melodramatic movements and gestures. Acting in Griffith Biographs generally, in fact, was sometimes praised for being more restrained in style than that in other American productions of the time. One contemporary critic praised the fact that in The Welcome Burglar (1908), “characters act naturally, as real people.”93 It may well be, therefore, that Griffith’s claim for “restraint in expression” in his Dramatic Mirror ad was more justified than some of the others he made. Roberta E. Pearson sees Griffith as playing a crucial role in the transformation of performance style in American film between 1909 and 1912, with the original “histrionic” style—heavily influenced by theatrical melodrama—giving way to a more “verisimilar” style, allied to the “realist” movements in literature and theater.94 Ironically, during his brief career before the cameras, Griffith seems to have been a highly histrionic actor (assessing his acting performance, director Wallace McCutcheon succinctly commented that “He stinks!”). Confronted with McCutcheon’s disapproval, however, and told off by Bitzer for waving his arms about, Griffith obviously learned from his own mistakes and was able, once he became a director, to pass on these lessons to his own actors.95

  The claims made in The Dramatic Mirror ad that the “switchback” and “sustained suspense” were first introduced by Griffith are less justifiable. The “switchback” involved alternating scenes showing what takes place simultaneously in two or more locations, frequently building suspense until the various lines of action are brought together in the film’s resolution. Half a decade before Griffith directed his first film, Edwin S. Porter had employed what Iris Barry termed “a rough form of cross-cutting” to display parallel action of this kind.96 Griffith was quick, however, to embrace the technique; only a month into his directorial career, he used alternate shots as a means of increasing suspense in The Fatal Hour.97 He was not, of course, the only moviemaker to use shots of this type: they appeared from 1908 onward in movies produced by a variety of companies, including Selig and Vitagraph.98 But his skill at the kind of parallel editing required to stitch such shots together into a fast-moving narrative soon became clear.99 It was a skill, moreover, that dev
eloped further over time; a comparison between The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Lonedale Operator (1911) shows Griffith’s growing ability to inject suspense into a story by terse, highly selective editing.100

  Clearly, Griffith’s ad in The Dramatic Mirror claimed far too much. He had not been responsible for “revolutionizing Motion Picture drama,” although one modern scholar, Tom Gunning, assigns him a major role in reorienting American cinema from being a “cinema of attractions” into a “cinema of narrative integration.”101 Nor had he really succeeded in turning film by 1913 into a “genuine art,” even if he encouraged writer Louis Reeves Harrison to construct a myth of him as a “dreamer-artist” forced to leave Biograph in the face of opposition from “practical businessmen who tried to hold him back.”102 His claims to have invented new cinematic techniques were false; it is more accurate, as Eileen Bowser notes, to see his role as being “to consolidate what had been done sporadically by earlier filmmakers.”103 In retrospect, the most crucial part of the ad was the list of Biograph films Griffith had directed. Within a few months, he had made Biograph into the leading brand among American film-producers, an advantage it retained during the rest of his time with the company. As a consequence of Griffith’s work as director, writes William K. Everson, “Biograph films became the yardstick by which all others were measured, critics referring to competing films as being ‘up to’ or ‘below’ Biograph standards.”104

  A New Commitment

  Whatever the precise purpose of Griffith’s December ad in the Dramatic Mirror, Richard Schickel points out that it was not a personal advertisement for work. Two days after the ad was published, the trade press announced that Griffith had signed a deal with Harry Aitken of Reliance-Majestic.105 Aitken, born in Wisconsin in 1877, had worked in the insurance business before founding the Western Film Exchange in Milwaukee. He and his brother, Roy, subsequently built up a chain of film exchanges in the Middle West. Attempting to move into film production, they were effectively “frozen out” by the MPPC. Trying to find enough films to keep their exchanges operating, they turned first to independent companies outside the MPPC and then to importing European films. Within six months, however, it became obvious to the two that to satisfy demand, they would have to produce films of their own. In the fall of 1911, they formed the Majestic Film Company in Los Angeles, mainly to produce pictures starring Mary Pickford and her husband, Owen Moore, whom the Aitkens had persuaded to defect from Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players. Soon afterward, they also acquired the Reliance Company and its studios in Yonkers, New York. The films produced by these studios, as well as a number of independents, were distributed through another Aitken company, the Mutual. Gaining the services of Griffith—a prominent director with a well-established reputation for productivity—made good business sense for the Aitkens. From the point of view of Griffith, the connection with the Aitkens was less immediately advantageous: his contract with the Majestic Company guaranteed him a salary of $300 a week (Zukor had apparently offered $50,000 a year). But it also removed two of his main grievances against the Biograph management. It guaranteed him stock in the company, and while committing him to direct and supervise the regular program features made by both Majestic and Reliance, it also allowed him to make two longer, independent films each year.106

  While he would later deny it, there can be little doubt that Griffith was greatly impressed by the European “historical-spectacle” films, particularly Dante’s Inferno, Quo Vadis and Cabiria, shown in the United States in 1912–13. His Judith of Bethulia may be seen, in part, as an answer to this European “invasion.”107 Filming in California since early 1910, moreover, he was aware that the scenery of the state offered a means of providing spectacle without the large and expensive sets used in such Italian productions as Quo Vadis.108 Yet however much Griffith might dream of an American spectacle to rival such European imports, there was no immediate opportunity of making one. Griffith’s own first independent film would have to wait until he had satisfied his contractual obligations to the Reliance-Majestic syndicate.

  Almost all of the Griffith team of actors and technicians went with him to Majestic. “None of us,” Lillian Gish later recalled, “felt that we were working for Biograph. Our ties were with Mr. Griffith.” The hardest person to persuade to leave, in the end, was Bitzer, who believed that the new company was just as likely to be critical of Griffith’s profligacy over film and money than was the old one.109 Conscious of the need to impress—and raise money for—his new company bosses, Griffith improvised a studio in a loft near New York’s Union Square, and quickly turned out a five-reel “potboiler,” The Battle of the Sexes. He then transferred his company to California, where he successively produced The Escape, an early film about the consequences of a social disease; Home Sweet Home, a fictional version of the life of songwriter John Howard Payne; and The Avenging Conscience, loosely based on “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story by Edgar Allan Poe.110 But by the spring of 1914, Griffith was increasingly preoccupied with what would be his first independent production and most ambitious project to date.

  It was almost certainly Frank Woods who suggested The Clansman as the basis for a film.111 Woods had been among several writers engaged in the doomed Kinemacolor project. He was apparently paid $200 for his efforts. Woods had not only returned to Biograph in late 1912, but he followed Griffith to Majestic a year later as scenario editor. When Griffith began to look for the story that could be the basis for his first really major film, Woods apparently showed him the version of the script of The Clansman he had written for Kinemacolor and suggested a new version of Dixon’s play.112 The story appealed to Griffith for all kinds of reasons, including his Southern background and the memories of his father. He probably read both novels by Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, at this point. According to Griffith’s later recollection, the visual qualities of the stories appealed to him immediately: “I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white robes flying.” He also saw Dixon’s work as the basis for the “chase” movie to end all chase movies:

  We had had all sorts of runs-to-the-rescue in pictures and horse operas. The old United States cavalry would gallop to the rescue—East, one week; West the next. It was always a hit … the most surefire gag in the business … Now I could see a chance to do this ride-to-the-rescue on a grand scale. Instead of saving one poor little Nell of the Plains, this ride would be to save a nation.113

  To clear the way to make the film, Griffith and the Aitkens set out to buy the rights to use both of his novels from Dixon himself. Negotiations did not run easily. When the four met together for the first time, Dixon apparently demanded $25,000.114 He later came down to $10,000, possibly because—as Raymond Cook comments—his own plans to turn The Clansman story into a film had now been turned down by several production companies.115 On top of the $40,000 Griffith estimated the filming was likely to cost, it was still too much for the Aitkens to consider (Roy would later recall that the “going rate” for a two- to four-reel script at the time was between $75 and $125). Dixon, who may have lost money in the Kinemacolor fiasco and was certain he needed cash up front, continued to demand $10,000 for the rights (Griffith remembered him as endlessly harassing the other three for this sum).116 Finally, however, he was persuaded to accept $2,000 in cash and a quarter-share of the profits of the forthcoming film.117 While he probably grumbled a good deal at the time, the deal in the end may have eventually earned him anything from one to several million dollars.118

  With Dixon’s agreement reluctantly secured, one major financial problem remained to be resolved. When Harry Aitken presented the plans to make The Clansman to the Majestic board of directors, they turned the project down. Even bankers Felix Kahn and Crawford Livingston, whom the Aitkens had counted on for support, argued that Griffith’s film would cost too much and be too big a risk. Finally, the Aitken brothers, with much difficulty, put together a syndicate to finance the picture. At some stage of the early summer of 1914, they wired Gr
iffith that $25,000 had been raised. A week later, they managed to find the additional funding to bring the total up to the $40,000 Griffith thought would be necessary to produce his film.119

  To the task of making the new film, Griffith brought all the skills he had acquired during his twelve years as an actor and six as a film director. He had already made eleven films about the Civil War era; there was no reason to suspect at least initially that the twelfth would be any more controversial. Opinions differ concerning the racism of Griffith’s earlier films. Daniel Bernardi argues that Griffith’s own racism was inextricably bound up with his mastery of cinematic form: that the narrative and stylistic techniques he used in his Biograph movies were deployed to help establish a hierarchy of races with the whites on top and non-whites beneath them.120 Yet Griffith also gave a degree of agency to some of his non-white characters—the black “hero” of His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, for example—and certain film scholars have seen his portrayal of Native Americans, in some films, as unusually liberal for his time.121 What he plainly did not foresee was that in seeking to make a spectacular film that would be seen by millions, he was also inaugurating a new struggle over the representations of racial and other groups in the new mass media.

  4

  Making The Birth of a Nation

  The Story