D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  While Breil’s score included two excerpts from different works by Wagner—the only composer to be treated in this way—it is possible that the debt to Wagner on the part of Breil and Griffith may actually have been considerably greater.158 Wagner’s dislike of traditional forms of opera, which he saw as tending to exalt the music at the expense of the drama, had led him to develop the idea of a “Gesamtkunstwerk” [total art work] to be produced through the combination of several single arts. Applied to opera, such a theory implied that music should be composed in relation to the drama, that it should be played continuously, and that a number of recurring themes or “leitmotifs” should be used to integrate music and drama.159 There was widespread interest in Wagner’s music and his ideas in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.160 Early writers on film quickly realized that his theorizing on the unity of music and drama could also be applied to cinema. A Moving Picture World editorial of 1910 hoped that “just as Wagner fitted his music to the emotions, expressed by words in his operas, so in the course of time, no doubt, the same thing will be done with regard to the moving picture.” A year later, critic W. Stephen Bush observed that “Every man or woman in charge of [the] music of a moving picture theatre is, consciously or unconsciously, a disciple of Richard Wagner.”161

  In 1910, Moving Picture World also began to publish a regular column by Clarence Sinn entitled “Music for the Pictures.” In 1911, Sinn fell under the spell of Wagnerian ideas and summarized them in these terms:

  Boiled down, it amounts to something like this: To each important character, to each important action, motif, or idea, and to each important object … was attached a suggestive musical theme. Whenever the action brought into prominence any of the characters, motifs, or objects, its theme or motif was sung or played … Such a method of applying music to the pictures is the ideally perfect one.162

  Breil seems to have been convinced in the same manner as Sinn (and perhaps as a consequence of reading him) that leitmotifs were just as important for movies as for operas. The score he created for Queen Elizabeth assigned a “motif” to each of the film’s characters. Both Breil and Griffith agreed that it was necessary to have similar motifs for The Clansman.163

  Although The Birth of a Nation would be heavily criticized, both at the time of its release and later, for the racial bias it displayed, it was also widely recognized as an aesthetic masterpiece. It signaled, as Jean Mitry would later assert, the birth of cinema “as an art.”164 If not a “total art work” in the Wagnerian sense, The Birth of a Nation at least emphasized the synthetic nature of cinema, combining together a filmed drama with highly appropriate and effective music. As Martin Marks notes, the film represented “a spectacular, moving, and deeply troubling marriage of image and music.”165 The musical score arranged or composed for it by Breil, under Griffith’s supervision, was conceived as an integral part of the film. It was intended to help in the development of both narrative and characterization, to preserve continuity, to create mood and, perhaps not least, to help maintain the interest of audiences in a film that lasted more than three hours. So successful was this blending of music and cinema that after Birth, it became harder and harder to think of producing a major film without a musical score.

  The key decision made by Griffith in the very beginning was to extend the chronology of Dixon’s story by devoting the first part of his film to the Civil War period.166 He also pared down the “political” aspects of Dixon’s story and increased the emphasis on two intersectional families. Griffith made The Birth of a Nation using methods he had worked out as a Biograph director: he shot each scene after prolonged rehearsals by his company of actors and actresses. The actual shooting involved few innovations (though nighttime cinematography was used for some sequences). As a director, Griffith proved equally adept at handling large, set-piece battle sequences and more intimate moments (and was also successful at raising the money to finish filming). Yet what were perhaps his greatest contributions to The Birth of a Nation came after shooting was over. He edited 150,000 feet of film down to around 12,000 to produce an absorbing narrative and, conscious that music could be a major source of the film’s impact on audiences, commissioned Joseph Carl Breil to compile a full accompanying musical score.

  5

  Transforming the American Movie Audience

  On February 18, 1915, The Birth of a Nation became the first motion picture ever to be shown in the White House. Operators wearing full evening dress utilized two Simplex machines to project the film onto the white wooden panels of the East Room. The screening was a personal favor by President Woodrow Wilson to Thomas Dixon Jr., a former classmate and longtime friend. Invited by Dixon to view Griffith’s film, the president had only one objection, and that was practical: he could not accept social invitations because he was still officially in mourning for his wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who had died a few months earlier. To get around this difficulty, Dixon suggested exhibiting the film at the White House, where the president, his daughters, and some members of the cabinet would be able to view it.1 There is a legend (one of many that would grow up around this movie) that at the end of the showing, Wilson remarked: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”2 He may have said this. After all, the film’s view of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods was not too different from Wilson’s own (his historical writings were several times quoted in the film’s intertitles). Moreover, it is unlikely that the Southern-born Wilson (who, as president, had extended segregation to all departments of the federal government) was bothered by the film’s rampant racism.3 But there seems to be no contemporary reference for the remark. In 1977, when the only survivor of the White House screening was interviewed, she recalled that the president “seemed lost in thought during the showing” and “walked out of the room without saying a word when the movie was over.”4

  Griffith may have presented his film personally at the White House screening: both a preview program and a subsequent letter from him to the president expressing his gratitude for the opportunity imply that he did.5 Certainly, on the following evening, he and Dixon were reported as sitting together at a screening of The Birth of a Nation in the grand ballroom of the Raleigh Hotel in Washington. At this private exhibition, organized under the auspices of the National Press Club, the guest of honor was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Edward White. (Dixon would later claim that White, who had never seen a motion picture before, finally agreed to attend because he had once been a Klansman and wanted to see the “true story” of the Ku Klux Klan.)6 In addition to White and his wife, other guests included “Secretary of the Navy [Josephus P.] Daniels, thirty-eight U.S. senators and about fifty members of the House of Representatives.” Many had brought their wives along. The large invited audience also included “a sprinkling of members of the Diplomatic Corps [and] scores of high [government] officials” as well as many journalists. One newspaper described this elite gathering (which “showered” Griffith with congratulations once the film was over) as “doubtless the mo[st] [dis]tinguished that ever saw motion picture reels unraveled.”7

  Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States (1913–1921). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-111452)

  On February 20, The Birth of a Nation was scheduled to be shown at a preview in New York. Reports of its racism had already been transmitted to the East Coast from the Los Angeles branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), so it seemed very likely that this and subsequent New York screenings would be controversial.8 It was probably for this reason that the film made its detour to Washington. Although the two Washington showings had been arranged on the basis of no publicity,9 Dixon and Griffith obviously intended, when protests from the NAACP and other black rights organizations arrived, to defend themselves against demands for censorship by citing the enthusiastic approval of the Washington establishment. The Washington screeni
ngs, however, can also be regarded as part of a wider strategy aimed at attracting a vast popular audience to The Birth of a Nation. That strategy, indeed, aimed at nothing less than a major reconfiguration of the American movie audience.

  Escaping the Nickelodeons

  In the first years after the April 1896 showing of moving pictures at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City demonstrated that they might be commercially viable, films were screened in vaudeville theaters, music halls, opera houses, cafés, storefronts, department stores, local fairs and schools, Chautauquas, YMCAs, churches, and church halls. Audiences for early film, reflecting such different locations, were socially heterogeneous. This situation began to change in 1905 with the advent of the store-front movie theater or “nickelodeon.” The nickelodeon, with its cheap seats, one-reel films, and musical accompaniment, demonstrated that there was a mass market for the movies. At least in the large cities that made up the biggest and most profitable market for films, that audience was primarily working class and often of immigrant origin. As the number of nickelodeons increased—there were 3,000 in the United States by 1907 and more than 10,000 by 191010—the type of viewers they attracted became a source of dissatisfaction to two critical groups in American society: the middle class and the nickelodeon proprietors. Many native-born members of the middle class, seeing only that the nickelodeon was a new form of entertainment, that it took place in the dark, and that its patrons were drawn mainly from the lower classes, embarked on attempts to regulate and control nickelodeons through various forms of censorship and safety regulations. While this generated a whole new public discourse concerning the nickelodeon and helped transform both the physical environment of the store-front movie theater and the nature of the filmic experience it offered, it was probably in the end less influential in terms of the evolution of cinema than actions of the other group: the movie exhibitors and nickelodeon proprietors themselves.

  As Russell Merritt argued, nickelodeon proprietors and movie exhibitors often looked down on their working-class patrons and sought to appeal to a better class of clientele.11 Ambitious and upwardly mobile, they sought to attract the middle-class family trade. By broadening the audience for movies to bring in the middle class, they sought to secure for movie entertainment a greater cultural legitimation, something they believed that would eventually generate higher profits. This strategy had two main strands. One was to improve the quality of the films shown. Between 1896 and the early stages of the nickelodeon era, most of the motion pictures on offer in the United States have been categorized by Tom Gunning as part of a “cinema of attractions” that concentrated its attention on showing views, often illusory, to audiences rather than attempting to focus on stories. The advent of the nickelodeons encouraged a shift to the chase films and “sequential farces” that quickly became the staples of movie entertainment. With more emphasis on storytelling, the “cinema of attractions” gave way to what Gunning refers to as a “cinema of narrative integration.”12 Griffith, of course, was a major pioneer in this shift. As he and other filmmakers became increasingly proficient in telling “stories,” through the use of continuity editing and other practices, films tended to become longer. Griffith himself quit the Biography Company in 1913 to make longer movies. By 1913–14, indeed, other film producers—including Kalem, Selig and Vitagraph—were producing multireel films.13 With the rise of the longer feature film as the characteristic product of the American film industry, the concept emerged of watching movies as an evening’s entertainment in their own right. (Nickelodeons had often varied their diet of short films with vaudeville acts and popular “sing-alongs”—the latter, according to one contemporary commentator, often led by a “breed of ‘singers’ in the cheaper theaters that in many cases [called] for suppression by either the police or the board of health, or both.”)14

  A second strand in the strategy designed to appeal to middle-class moviegoers concentrated on improving the exhibition environment. Better, more comfortable theaters with higher prices of admission began to appear in cities such as Los Angeles (where Clune’s Theater—later Auditorium—opened in 1910), Milwaukee, and New Orleans. By 1914, this trend had reached New York, with the transformation of the old Criterion Theater into a movie house and the opening of the purpose-built Strand Theater.15 By now it was beginning to become clear that the nickelodeon era of cheap moviegoing was coming to a close and the future lay with the picture palace.16 The Strand, in particular, located in the heart of the theatrical district on Broadway, symbolized the “new breed of movie houses … designed for comfort and deliberately situated in more prosperous parts of town in order to attract a more middle-class audience.” Closer in its facilities to existing theaters than to the nickelodeons, it boasted a thirty-piece orchestra to accompany the films it showed. “If anyone had told me two years ago,” observed the theater critic of the New York Times, “that the time would come when the finest looking people in town would be going to the biggest and newest theater on Broadway for the purpose of seeing motion pictures, I would have sent them down to … Bellevue Hospital.”17 An alternative to this approach, increasingly adopted for the longer French film d’art productions and Italian spectacles, was to book the film into a regular theater. Thus, Queen Elizabeth (1912) began its American run at the Lyceum Theater in New York. Les Misérables (1913), Quo Vadis (1913), The Last Days of Pompeii (1913), and Cabiria (1914) were also exhibited mainly in legitimate theaters.18

  Griffith and the Aitken brothers must have had these changes in exhibition practice in the forefront of their minds when planning the New York première of The Birth of a Nation. In the end, probably the closest parallel with their own film was Cabiria, a twelve-reel Italian spectacle whose distributors made “extravagant” claims for its cost and scale (a budget of $250,000, a cast of 5,000), touted its vast length and popularity, and charged admission ranging from 25 cents to $2.19 In his account of the making of The Birth of a Nation, Roy E. Aitken credited his brother Harry with the decisions to open the picture at the Liberty Theater, to hold a private matinée for drama critics and other influential New Yorkers in advance of the public première, and (over the initial resistance of Griffith and Dixon) to charge up to $2 for a seat.20 The Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street was familiar territory for Dixon: his original play, The Clansman, had opened there nine years earlier for its New York run.21 The theater was owned by the Klaw and Erlanger syndicate (ironically the same organization that had signed the deal with the Biograph Company to produce filmed plays that had prompted Griffith, feeling himself by-passed and excluded, to leave Biograph in the first place). According to the New York World, the syndicate did not want to lease the theater to Griffith and his partners “on the usual percentage basis” as they believed his film “would not attract patronage at two dollar prices.” The Aitkens, Griffith, and their partners were consequently obliged to lease the theater outright, taking on their shoulders all the burden of financial risk should the film fail. By the same token, of course, they guaranteed themselves nearly all the profits should the film succeed.22

  Selling The Birth of a Nation

  Between February 13, when Harry Aitken announced the leasing of the Liberty Theater, and March 3, when the film officially opened in New York, a series of private screenings occurred. It was at one of these, according to legend, that Thomas Dixon—impressed by the enthusiastic response of the audience—suggested to Griffith that The Clansman be renamed The Birth of a Nation.23 Even more crucially, perhaps, after considerable persuasion from Harry Aitken, Theodore Mitchell agreed to attend one of the previews. Mitchell, a publicity man for the Schubert Theater, was deeply skeptical of motion pictures. Yet he was simply overwhelmed by the experience of watching The Clansman. Within a matter of hours, Mitchell and J. R. McCarthy, another Schubert publicity man, had signed a contract with Harry Aitken to handle all the publicity and promotion for the film. Over the next few months, they would launch a deeply imaginative array of stunts and promotional devices.
In many ways they pioneered most of the major methods that would later be used by the Hollywood studios and their chains of theaters to “sell” moving pictures.24

  The main problem facing Mitchell and McCarthy in the beginning was how to attract a large audience willing to pay “live” theater prices to see what was still “only” a film. In their initial advertising, they attempted to draw a distinction between The Birth of a Nation and previous movies of the one- or two-reel variety by emphasizing the spectacular scale of the production. Truth became the first casualty of this attempt at “boosting” their film. They claimed that The Birth of a Nation had cost $500,000 to bring to the screen, and that 18,000 people and 3,000 horses had been involved—claims that were endlessly reproduced in the months that followed.25 The publicists also endeavored to make a distinction between Birth and previous imported epics from Italy and France. Ads presented it as “the mightiest spectacle ever produced,” “a colossal production” that was simply “too great for comparisons.” But they also appealed to American nationalism by describing it as “a red blooded tale of true American spirit” dealing with “national figures” and “stirring events in the development of our country.” They stressed that Birth had been “conceived, inspired and created in America.” While it was a film that offered sensational entertainment—“gripping heart interest and soul stirring emotions”—it was also one “rich in historical value.” Presenting the film as history, however, was only one means of trying to legitimate it in cultural terms. Another was the attempt to depict Griffith as a brilliant cinematic auteur: The Birth of a Nation was described as “the expression of genius in a new realm of art.” Finally, to remove the objections of anyone whose perceptions of motion pictures had been molded through watching out-of-focus movies with a honky-tonk piano accompaniment in a seedy nickelodeon, the publicity campaign emphasized that the Liberty Theater had been “remodeled according to scientific adjustment of focal requirements” and that music to accompany the film would be provided by a “symphony orchestra of 40.”26