Developing and Editing
At the end of each day’s shooting, the film was delivered to a laboratory built at the studio, where Abe Scholtz and Joe Aller, two Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia, developed it with enormous, painstaking skill.118 Since each scene was usually shot only once, there was only one negative.119 That negative, at least by the standards of a later day, was treated in a most cavalier fashion. To verify details of plot and continuity, Griffith and Bitzer needed to be in a position to make continual reference to film already shot. Because Bitzer had been dissatisfied with the quality of the test prints he had done (the local Los Angeles water, he believed, contained too much alkali to wash the prints properly), the positive prints were processed and printed in New York.120 Rather than risk delaying shots or making mistakes over continuity while they awaited these prints’ arrival, Griffith and Bitzer developed the habit of carrying sections of the negative with them for constant consultation. These negatives, Karl Brown recalled many years later, were passed “from hand to hand to check costume [continuity] … and such things. Seems strange, these days, to think of a negative like that being stacked away in loose rolls, in cans, to be gone through by anybody who wanted to find out something. No gloves, no anything.”121
Editing work on the film began immediately after shooting got under way. At the end of each day’s filming, Griffith went to the projection room to look at the previous day’s rushes. Two projectionists—Billy Fildew and George Teague—divided the work between them. Each, as he hand-ground the projector, had to be ready to stick a slip of paper into the uptake reel whenever Griffith’s buzzer sounded. The slip told Griffith’s expert editors, Jimmy Smith and his wife Rose, where to begin or end a cut in the film.122 Since there was no shooting script, the scenes were numbered consecutively as they had been shot. As Bitzer’s assistant, Karl Brown had the job of chalking the numbers on a slate to be photographed by the camera at the very beginning of the take. Cleaning the slate well enough to show the number clearly was difficult, so Brown invented the plywood board with inset numbers that would soon come into general use with moviemakers (who would continue, as a result of its origins, to refer to it as a “slate”). It was Brown’s job also to record in a book the date of the shooting, scene number, characters involved, some hints as to the action, the space involved (Interior, Exterior, etc.), the camera stop number, and the amount of footage.123
Once shooting finished, Gish remembered that Griffith spent three months “on cutting, editing and working on the musical score.” During this time, a third projectionist, George Richter, was added as Griffith “did his editing on a day and night schedule.”124 Everything shot had been developed and printed—150,000 feet in all.125 Griffith had to cut this down to manageable proportions (around 12,000 feet in the version finally released) and edit the film actually used into a coherent and absorbing narrative.126 It was, as Richard Schickel comments, a “brutal task.”127 Even to those closely involved in the film’s production, it seemed “one long disjointed puzzle.” Brown, who had watched every scene being shot, observed that “nothing seemed to go together, nothing seemed to fit.” Gish, who often watched the rushes, remarked that seeing “these snatches of film was like trying to read a book whose pages had been shuffled. There was neither order nor continuity.”128
Working endless hours in the projection room, Griffith slowly constructed the final version of his monumental film. As A. R. Fulton observed, “only he knew how the parts were to be fitted together.”129 Yet this was true only in the most general sense: Griffith knew roughly the narrative order that underpinned the movie, the approximate sequence of events that would characterize its story line. When editing started, he did not know the combination of shots that would compose particular sequences. It took endless hours in the projection room, running segments of film over and over again, taking short sections from several takes and assembling them together, continually altering and changing before the “final” version of such scenes began to emerge.130
The sequence dealing with Lincoln’s assassination is a case in point. As Karl Brown recalled, this “took so long to shoot, with so many individual shots from so many different angles, that I couldn’t see how they could possibly be put together in anything much better than a series of set pieces.”131 After its editing by Griffith, the sequence eventually incorporated more than fifty shots.132 These varied spatially, with eighteen long shots (with the human figures occupying around half the frame), twenty-four medium long shots (entire bodies occupying the frame), four medium shots (a human figure from the knees up filling the frame), ten medium close-ups (of the human figure from the waist up), and one extreme close-up (the face of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth). They also differed in duration as well. But in general, as Fulton notes, the ultimate effect of Griffith’s editing of this scene is to create a coherent and convincing narrative through the establishment of relationships
between Lincoln and Booth—showing Lincoln’s unconsciousness of danger and Booth’s intention; between Lincoln and the play—showing where Lincoln’s attention is directed; between the bodyguard and the play—showing why the bodyguard leaves his post; and even between Lincoln and the audience in Ford’s Theater, particularly Elsie and Phil—showing that the audience too is unconscious of the terrible deed about to be committed.133
The première at Clune’s Auditorium on February 8, 1915, did not mean the end of Griffith’s editing of the film. As Karl Brown pointed out, he “depended absolutely, even slavishly, upon audience reactions.”134 Griffith had unquestionably changed parts of the film in response to the reaction of the preview audiences at Riverside on January 1 and 2. He continued to alter the movie based on the reaction of the audience at Clune’s. Also, over the next few weeks and months, he was asked, or compelled, to cut scenes by political authorities and censorship boards. The scale of these cuts is open to question. Seymour Stern argued in 1965 that The Birth of a Nation was composed of 1,544 shots in its original form and later cuts reduced this to 1,375. Although he gave no source for his initial estimate of 1,544 shots, the later figure was clearly derived from Theodore Huff’s shot-by-shot analysis of the film, published posthumously in 1961.135 More recently, John Cuniberti and Robert Lang have agreed that the best surviving prints of the film contain in all 1,610 scenes, with Cuniberti emphasizing that this was only thirty-one scenes fewer than the number recorded for copyright purposes five days after the Clune’s opening.136
Although this suggests the possibility of fewer cuts being made in the film after its Los Angeles première than previously thought, some scenes had either never been shot or else were later removed. The budget for the film in the Griffith papers includes provision for an interior scene showing the area below deck on a slave ship. “Exteriors” listed include slaves in Africa, shipping slaves at the dock, the ship at sea, slaves on sale in a Southern market place, and a cavalcade effect for the two and a half year chronological break that occurs during the Civil War. An autograph list of scenes in Griffith’s own hand suggests that the original plan was to include initial scenes of a proclamation against slavery and men receiving money for the slaves. Further shots were to include the Northern reaction to Lincoln’s election, Southern congressmen in the House of Representatives, Northern soldiers marching off to war, a scene in the middle of the battle sequence cryptically referred to as “Nigger in the jungle,” speeches on the franchise in the House of Representatives, a sick Stoneman being carried in to vote, a Union League picnic, and martial law being introduced in South Carolina.137 None of these shots survive in available prints of the film. Corroborative evidence exists, however, for at least one of them: a review in the Nashville Banner commented that the film opened with a scene of slaves being sold, and Karl Brown later remembered seeing a scene of this type being filmed.138
There is evidence with varying degrees of reliability of sequences that may have been seen by the film’s first audiences. In a March 1915 review, W. Stephen Bush menti
oned a shot of an old lady at an abolitionist meeting recoiling in disgust from the odor of a young black boy. This was one of the highly racist scenes that New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchell insisted must be removed.139 Bush’s review also supported Seymour Stern’s insistence that the opening sequences of the film linked the rise of the abolitionist movement to the hypocrisy of the descendants of the original slave traders who had “no further use for the slaves.” Stern also claimed that there had originally been a shot of black men abducting screaming white women into the back streets of Piedmont and that toward the end of the film, an intertitle of “Lincoln’s solution” had been followed by shots of the mass deportation of blacks; these claims also found substantiation in contemporary reviews.140 Stern’s most controversial assertion, however—that Griffith had filmed the actual rape of Flora by Gus on the rock—has no evidence whatever to back it up. In a letter of 1974, Karl Brown specifically denied that such a sequence had ever been shot.141
While Griffith was editing the film, he was also supervising the production of the intertitles. These were first written by Frank Woods and printed at a downtown shop. They were then filmed by Brown who had developed a complicated technique of his own to achieve maximum definition (clear white lettering on an all-black background). This obliged him to “shoot on lantern plates, print the plates on more lantern plates, then shoot the result on positive film stock, which became the negative for the picture.” Once the intertitles written by Woods and photographed by Brown were inserted in the film, Griffith viewed them and suggested revisions, at which point the entire cumbersome process began again. Since Griffith was a perfectionist and intertitles were relatively cheap to produce, deciding on the final titles was a lengthy process.142
Much if not all of the film was also tinted, although when this was done is uncertain. Gish remembered that Griffith used tinting “to achieve dramatic results and to create mood.” She gave as an illustration of this the scene of the battle of Petersburg where “the shots of Union and Confederate troops rushing in to replace the dead and wounded are tinted red, and the subtitle reads “In the red lane of death others take their places.” Karl Brown maintained, in an interview in 1975, that “no sequences were in black and white, that everything carried some sort of tint to offset the visible electric blue of the projector’s arc.”143 Certainly, the statement of receipts and disbursements for the film prepared for the Epoch Producing Company includes the sum of $621.65 for the cost of tinting ($371.22 for labor, $250.43 for materials). Who actually did the tinting is unclear, although Brown recalled being given the “endless” task of coloring the final shot of Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron. The two were on a bluff overlooking the ocean with a double-exposed celestial city also visible on the left; Brown had to turn this scene into “a roseat dream” by hand-tinting the whole sequence “with a fine brush and a solution of … Erythrosine.”144
The Musical Score
As Russell Lack has commented, Griffith was one of the very small number of filmmakers who took music seriously and tried to improve the musical accompaniment of their films.145 From the recollections of his co-workers, including Lillian Gish and Karl Brown, it is clear that he knew a lot about music. He often sang operatic arias on set during filming (Brown recalled extracts from I Pagliacci and Tosca and his attempts to model himself on Titta Ruffo’s style of singing in preference to that of the more famous Caruso).146 Some of the plots of his films were “borrowed” from operas: A Fool’s Revenge (1909) was based on Rigoletto.
During the early years of his career, however, Griffith had no control whatsoever over the music that accompanied his films. He was probably aware, however, of comments by critics suggesting that if the local nickelodeon manager insisted on good music, then his own films were more successful. A Fool’s Revenge, noted the Moving Picture World, was a film that
made a deep impression on the audience … A pleasant variation from the eternal ragtime was a refined deliverance of classical music corresponding to the character of the picture, including Schumann’s “Träumerei” and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” The first time, indeed, we ever heard Beethoven in a five-cent theater.147
A few months later, a critic writing in the New York Dramatic Mirror commented:
When the Biograph film In Old Kentucky [directed by Griffith] was exhibited at the [Keith and Procter movie house on Union Square] … the applause was more frequent throughout the reel than at the other houses where the same subject was shown, and the difference is attributed to the excellent musical selections that were used.148
Although attempts were made by some studios to improve the quality of the music in movie houses during this period—around 1909, for example, Edison and Vitagraph began to furnish exhibitors with “musical suggestion sheets” (later known as cue sheets) of suitable music for particular films—it was the arrival of the film d’art from France that signaled the start of a new relationship between movies and music.149 The pioneering French film d’art, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908), had been produced together with a full score by Camille Saint-Saëns, then probably France’s most distinguished composer. Yet L’Assassinat, edited down and probably without its accompanying score, made little impact in the United States when it was released there (for just five weeks) in 1909. It took until 1911–12 for the type of “art films” produced by Pathé to begin to attract sizable American audiences—and for American producers to learn how to “sell” such films with music. One successful 1912 import was Queen Elizabeth, the filmed version of a French play starring Sarah Bernhardt that was distributed in America by Adolph Zukor’s new Famous Players Film Company.150
Plays on screen, however, suffered greatly by comparison with plays performed on stage. Of necessity, they were much briefer, being reduced to presenting what was essentially a series of tableaux. In addition, they were unable to use the principal instrument of stage drama: speech. Producers of these plays consequently turned to music (which had itself long been associated with “live” theater) to help convey moods and emotion. Zukor accordingly commissioned Joseph Carl Breil to write a special score for the opening of Queen Elizabeth in July 1912 at the Lyceum Theater in New York. Breil, who had first made his name composing incidental music for the theater, may have provided scores for two earlier examples of French film d’art, Camille (also featuring Bernhardt) and Mme. Sans-Gêne (starring another famous French actress, Réjane). After the success of Queen Elizabeth, he composed scores for three American films produced by Famous Players in 1913 (The Prisoner of Zenda, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and In the Bishop’s Carriage). He also could have compiled (and certainly frequently conducted) the music for Cabiria (1914), the long and spectacular Italian film that enjoyed a highly successful American run.151
At some point of early 1914, after his arrival in California, Griffith saw a performance of Cabiria. Breil would later claim that the experience gave him the idea of a complete musical score for his own film and simultaneously brought Breil himself to Griffith’s notice.152 Once the shooting of The Clansman was completed in early November 1914, Breil was asked to begin work on a score. He would not do so completely alone, however, because Griffith took an active role in the scoring, helping to choose the music and match it up to the images. “Mr. Breil would play bits and pieces,” Lillian Gish remembered, “and he and Mr. Griffith would then decide on how they were to be used.” As Charles Berg comments, this was “the first time that a director had personally undertaken control over the musical accompaniment of a major film.”153
Approximately half the music in the final score was composed by Breil. There were two other types of music making up the other half of the score. First, there were borrowed tunes, from “Auld Lang Syne” to “Dixie.” According to Martin Marks, twenty-six of these have been identified. They were all derived “from the standard repertoire for home and community singing” and their words, though not actually heard, helped underpin the film’s action: “Auld Lang Syne,” for example, was used t
o emphasize the sequence in which most of the Cameron family take refuge in a cabin owned by some former enemies from the North (“old acquaintance”).154 Second, the score included ten excerpts from symphonic music. All except one were taken from the nineteenth-century tradition of romantic music, including works by Beethoven, Grieg, Weber, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner.155 Many of these excerpts were probably unfamiliar to most of the American public. Concertgoing was still rather rare in much of the United States (only in 1915, for example, did Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony have its first performance west of the Mississippi). Some of the pieces had been made available in printed form only relatively recently: Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” in 1882 and Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” in 1888.156 Both Breil and Griffith may have felt that by using pieces from celebrated composers, they were helping to legitimate their film in cultural terms. At the same time, they arranged and adapted such music to meet the needs of the action. Even Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” used to accompany the ride of the Ku Klux Klan in the final stages of the film, had been reworked in this way.157
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 16