One hundred years ago, D. W. Griffith's proto-blockbuster The Birth of a Nation was released in theatres across the United States. The film, which showed the Ku Klux Klan rescuing white America from an uncontrollable black mob, immediately met with great critical acclaim. President Woodrow Wilson watched it at the White House, and his alleged endorsement – ”It's like writing history with lightning” – was used in promotional materials.Footnote 1 The Birth of a Nation was also extremely controversial: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People tried to have it banned, and as the decades passed and the civil rights movement approached, the opposition steadily grew. Nevertheless, long after the film's political message had been widely discredited, film critics continued to admire its formal achievement. A Variety poll of two hundred critics voted it the greatest motion picture in the industry's first fifty years, and in 1998 the American Film Institute deemed it one of the “Top 100 American Films.”Footnote 2
The early scholarly literature on The Birth of a Nation also perpetuated a split between form and content. The chapter on the film in Thomas Cripps's classic 1977 account of the representation of African Americans in the first forty years of cinema, Slow Fade to Black, was characteristic of the studies from the 1960s and 1970s. Cripps provided a detailed summary of the production and reception of The Birth of a Nation, but in turning to the film itself, he offered only a five-page summary of the plot. The Birth of a Nation, he said, was “at once a major stride for cinema and a sacrifice of black humanity to the cause of racism” – a statement which, while obviously true, provided no connection between these two aspects of the film.Footnote 3
In 1985, Michael Rogin confronted the problem head-on. “Celebrants of Birth’s formal achievement,” he wrote, “either minimize the film's racialist content or separate its aesthetic power from its negrophobia.” Rogin proposed a different approach: instead of separating the film's form from its content, he sought to examine the relationship between the two. In his essay “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” he discussed not only the political context of the film, but also the social history of movies and even D. W. Griffith's personal history. He pointed out that the North was ready for a film in 1915 that sympathized with the antebellum South, and he proceeded to argue that the film used formal techniques to subjugate and dismember black people and then to re-empower white men.Footnote 4 In his perceptive analysis, he opened up the film and reoriented the discussion so that it was no longer possible (in academia, at least) to celebrate any aspect of The Birth of a Nation.
As Rogin was making his contribution, another important development was taking place in the discipline of cinema studies. Until the 1980s, historians and film scholars had characterized early cinema as a primitive art form. They had assumed that the cinema in its first decade was a “theatrical” medium, and that the director D. W. Griffith had liberated the medium from its dependence on theatre through the invention of new formal techniques. A group of film historians, most notably Tom Gunning, overturned these assumptions by paying closer attention to the images themselves. Instead of portraying Griffith as the figure who brought the cinema out of its infancy, Gunning claimed that Griffith was responsible for replacing one kind of cinema with another. He and André Gaudreault coined the term “cinema of attractions” to refer to the earlier kind of cinema which, in their estimation, sought to surprise and to shock. Griffith's particular contribution was to seize on formal techniques that already existed and put them in the service of a story.Footnote 5
This new understanding of early cinema spawned many valuable works in cinema studies that traced the development of film as a medium.Footnote 6 It also provided a methodology that could be used to explore the way a film's formal elements connected to its message. In recent years, there has been much fascinating work on The Birth of a Nation, including Linda Williams's discussion of the film's contribution to American racial melodrama and Susan Courtney's reading of its representation of miscegenation. Melvyn Stokes has also released a book that provides a history of The Birth of a Nation by assembling a wide variety of archival materials relating to the production, exhibition, and reception of the film.Footnote 7 This essay builds on these works by showing how the development of the language of cinema contributed to the history of American racism.
It is my contention that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, American cinema played a major role in transforming what George Fredrickson has called “the black image in the white mind.”Footnote 8 This transformation began with the invention of cinema and climaxed with The Birth of a Nation, a film whose appeal derived not from its content, but rather from Griffith's ability to seize on this content to provoke an intense emotional response in his viewers. From 1908 onwards, Griffith had developed a series of techniques to work his audiences into a frenzy, and in 1915 he used these techniques to promote a fear of the “black menace.” If we are to understand the tremendous impact of The Birth of a Nation, therefore, it is necessary to pay close attention to Griffith's distinctive way of selecting and combining particular images. Or, to put it another way, it is necessary to seize on Gunning's methodology to fulfill the aim that Rogin originally formulated thirty years ago.
Rogin was aware of the developments in cinema studies when he wrote his groundbreaking essay on The Birth of a Nation. Noting one of Gunning's early articles, he argued against the film scholar by claiming that “parallel editing didn't simply contribute to storytelling; its juxtapositions, contrasts, dismemberments, and boundary breakdowns endangered narrative control and threatened chaos.”Footnote 9 In fact, this article argues, close attention to Griffith's use of editing and other formal devices reveals that even during the most chaotic moments of The Birth of a Nation, the director was carefully controlling the viewer's reception of his racist message. His transformation of the black image in the film took place in three separate stages that built consciously and deliberately on the African American characters that he had introduced in his earlier pictures.
This essay therefore draws on methods from cinema studies not to trace the development of film as a medium, but rather to pose a historical question: how did the advent of the cinema contribute to the subordination of black people in the United States? The analysis simultaneously considers film's formal elements and its significance to the history of racism, rather than allowing them to have misleadingly parallel histories. The essay begins by examining some of the first images of African Americans captured on camera, then turns to Griffith's innovations in his one- and two-reelers at the Biograph Company, and finally provides a detailed analysis of how he achieved his effect in The Birth of a Nation.
The earliest recorded images of African Americans do not fit neatly into our current conception of the cinema. Thomas Edison's A Morning Bath, which showed a black mother washing her baby for twenty seconds, was a typical example.Footnote 10 To present-day eyes, the film appears unobjectionable, even innocent. In 1896, however, it was categorized as “humorous.” “This scene presents a dusky African mother in the act of giving her struggling pickaninny a bath in a tub of suds,” the catalogue description ran. “This is a clear and distinct picture in which the contrast between the complexion of the bather and the white soapsuds is strongly marked. A very amusing and popular subject.”Footnote 11 Until relatively recently, film historians have claimed that primitive camera techniques in the late nineteenth century permitted only the simple recording of the world. Cripps, for example, writes that “The Morning Bath, like many topical films, recorded raw, unedited reality.”Footnote 12 But the “amusing and popular subject” of A Morning Bath referred to the joke that “no matter how hard the mother scrubbed, she could never get [her baby] ‘truly clean’ (i.e., white).”Footnote 13 This joke was widespread in America at the turn of the century; it even formed the basis for an advertising campaign for washing powder.Footnote 14 While the film appears harmless enough to present-day audiences, at the time of its release it carried a sinister message.
A Morning Bath was not an unfortunate exception in an otherwise value-free set of images, but rather a single example from the well-known baby-washing genre. Two other “humorous” sets of films were also very popular at the turn of the century. First were the “dancing” films such as The Pickaninnies (1894), a fifteen-second shot of African Americans dancing the jig.Footnote 15 The original catalogue claimed that the film “represent[ed] Southern plantation life before the war,” but audiences were expected to make this connection for themselves, conjuring up images of “happy darkies” easily swayed by music in the mythical Old South. Audiences were also expected to believe that African Americans had a natural ability to pick up rhythm because of their lower position on the evolutionary scale. In addition to the baby-washing and dancing films were the images of African Americans eating watermelons. A film like Edison's Watermelon Contest (1897), which showed four black men greedily devouring melons, relied on several well-known associations.Footnote 16 First, the watermelons were assumed to be stolen. Second, they were sliced in the shape of a grin, resembling the stereotypical black figures who were eating them. Finally, the watermelons represented African Americans’ supposed natural preference for simple foods they could eat with their hands.Footnote 17 By the turn of the century, the compressed iconic racism of these three distinct film genres functioned in a way we have come to forget.
A series of films that emerged only a few years later provided a variation on the earliest representations by involving African Americans in comic scenarios. In Edison's thirty-second-long What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), a white woman and her black maid are sitting next to each other on a train, and the white woman starts flirting with the white man sitting behind her. A fade-out is used to indicate that the train has entered a tunnel; when the frame fades back in, the women have switched places, and the man is kissing the black maid. Horrified at his mistake, he goes back to reading his newspaper, and the women laugh at their joke.Footnote 18 What Happened in the Tunnel based a comic scenario around a popular stereotype. The film presented a fuller sequence than the earlier images, but ultimately it expected its viewers to be familiar with the perceived undesirability of kissing a black maid.
These earliest images of African Americans are prime examples of what Tom Gunning has called the “cinema of attractions” – a cinema that, until around 1904, saw its main task not as the presentation of narratives but rather as a display of curiosities. “Telling a complete and coherent story was either secondary to the effect of film tricks or the thrill of a famous moment,” Gunning writes, “or else narrative coherence came from outside the film through the audience's previous knowledge of the source.”Footnote 19 The images of African Americans dancing or taking baths or eating watermelons all fit squarely into this description, relying heavily on audience foreknowledge to achieve their effect in a single shot. They also depended on the long history of blackface minstrelsy, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States during the nineteenth century. Audiences watching the earliest images of African Americans on the screen were familiar with these racist stereotypes because they had already encountered them on the stage, and they were expected to understand them and find them amusing.Footnote 20 During the cinema of attractions, in other words, filmmakers presented audiences with a series of jokes about black people that derived, for the most part, from an earlier form of popular entertainment.
The impulse towards narrative started to become apparent in around 1905, and over the next few years American cinema underwent a period of transition. Nevertheless, the images of African Americans did not deviate fundamentally from those in the original one-shot comic scenarios. The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mt. Express (1906) provides a simple example of this trend. The film contains a series of shots, including one of the interior of the train in which a white woman hits a grinning black waiter with her umbrella, causing him to fall, drop everything, and stop grinning.Footnote 21 Biograph provided the following summary of the film: “The action shows a railroad run, an interior comedy scene, the hold-up as viewed from the inside, then from the track, finishing with a race between the train and the bandits, who first take to the hand car and then to a horse and wagon.” This listing of the features of The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mt. Express captures the motivation behind its use of editing: the film seeks not so much to tell a story as to string together a series of attractions. In other words, the film simply inserts a one-shot “interior comedy scene” reminiscent of What Happened in the Tunnel to elicit laughter at the expense of a stereotypical figure.Footnote 22 This scene is demeaning towards African Americans, to be sure, but it depends in no way on the other shots of the film for its effect.
Although the late Edison films are affected by the impulse towards narrative, they are ultimately confined to the world of the cinema of attractions by their particular use of editing and their continued reliance on audience foreknowledge. But in the years following the release of these films, D. W. Griffith enacted a dramatic change in the language of American cinema. He replaced the old cinema of attractions with a new “cinema of narrative integration” – one that subordinated all formal elements to the central task of telling a story.Footnote 23 Griffith managed to create coherent, self-contained films, many of which contained black characters, and as a result he opened up new possibilities for racism on the screen. An early example is The Valet's Wife (1908), which tells the story of a playboy bachelor who needs to pretend that he has a wife and baby when he learns that his benefactor uncle is coming to visit. The uncle arrives and is shown into the main room, and the bachelor tells him that his wife and baby will be there shortly. But when the “wife” (really just a friend) appears with her son, the bachelor's friends react angrily, sending the boy to pick up a baby from an orphan asylum, and thrusting the woman into the room. The boy arrives at the asylum and is given a black baby, and when he returns home, the “wife” opens the blanket to expose that the baby is black. There is a brief close-up of the baby, and the film ends with images of the distraught family.Footnote 24
By putting a range of filmic techniques in the service of a story, The Valet's Wife differs fundamentally from all the other films we have seen so far. Griffith strings together a series of shots to enact a dramatic scenario, and as a result, the close-up of the black baby at the end has a striking effect. In Watermelon Contest, the prolonged close-up of four black characters eating watermelons relied entirely on the viewer's recollection of a popular stereotype, and in no way on the shots that preceded it. But whereas a thirty-eight-second shot of African Americans eating watermelons is demeaning in itself, an isolated two-second shot of a black baby is not. The close-up still relies on the viewer's assumption that a black baby is undesirable. But the film only allows the viewer to make this assumption by setting up the close-up in relation to two earlier shots: the one of the boy at the orphan asylum, and the one of the group when the baby arrives. Through this dramatic build-up, the film manipulates the viewer's reception of its racist message. First, the shot in the orphan asylum creates suspense, making the viewer wonder how the blackness of the baby is going to disrupt the bachelor's plan. In this context, the cut-in from the group to the close-up of the baby does not surprise the viewer (for he or she already knows that the baby is black), but emphasizes the characters’ realization of this fact. By subordinating a close-up to the telling of the story rather than using the story as an excuse to insert a close-up, the film plays on the viewer's emotions in an entirely new way.
The Valet's Wife allows us to see how racism in American cinema began to be constructed and controlled through a film's particular combination of images. Griffith created a series of assumptions within a film and then made a statement that relied on those assumptions, thus enabling the emergence of a much greater variety of racist possibilities. Films did not need to be about watermelons or dancing or baby washing anymore. Instead, a film like The Valet's Wife could produce a new kind of message by relating a climactic shot to a world that the film itself had constructed. But the shift in the language of cinema did not merely lead to the emergence of new kinds of jokes about black people; it also led to the emergence of new kinds of black characters. By creating coherent, self-contained films, Griffith was able to develop the psychology of his characters in a way that had previously been impossible, forging the path to a picture that was so dangerous that it incited random acts of violence towards African Americans and was used by the Ku Klux Klan as a recruitment tool.Footnote 25 From 1908 onwards, Griffith made a series of films in which he introduced to the screen two new black characters who would occupy important positions in The Birth of a Nation. And as he introduced these characters, a second, related shift took place: black actors, who had often appeared in the earlier pictures, tended to disappear and were replaced by white actors in blackface.
The Girls and Daddy (1909) tells the story of two young girls who are chased through their house by a dangerous thief who is coded as a mulatto character. Early in the film, a white thief climbs into the house through a window, takes a few small possessions, and escapes to the roof. The mulatto character then enters and makes a noise that wakes the girls up, and a dramatic chase ensues. At the film's climax, the girls are blocked behind a door that the mulatto thief is trying to break down. One girl helps the other up to the roof, but she remains trapped in the room herself. The girl on the roof then stumbles upon the white thief and tells him to save her sister. The white thief jumps down just as the mulatto thief has broken through the door, pulls him away from the white girl, and “after a terrific conflict the brute is laid out.” The father arrives home with the police, and the film ends as the girls help the white thief to escape at the same time as they expose the black one.Footnote 26
In this picture, Griffith does not expect viewers to understand the psychology of the mulatto character as soon as they see him. Instead, the director does considerable work to distinguish this new kind of villain from other, more easily recognizable, characters. In an early sequence, Griffith compares the mulatto figure to a group of stereotypical black figures. After a shot in which the villain has been spying on the two girls from under their house, we cut back in time to a bar frequented by an African American clientele. At the beginning of the sequence, a clownish couple in blackface walk into the frame in a silly manner and adopt exaggerated facial expressions. The couple then walk out of the frame, and the mulatto character rushes in. He looks around suspiciously, sits at a table with a black woman, and tells her his plan. With great determination he holds up two fingers (“There are these two girls”), rubs his fingers together (“they've got a lot of cash”), and points to himself (“I'm going to get it”). Throughout this scenario, the two clownish black characters have still been in the frame: one has been wiggling uncontrollably at the bar, and the other has been tapping his feet and waving his hands in the air. Griffith is conveying the evil motivation of the mulatto character by juxtaposing it with the old image of carefree African Americans. He is introducing a new character to the screen by putting him in the same frame as a stereotype that the viewer knows all too well.
Griffith's construction of the mulatto character also depends on a contrast with the white thief. But whereas the director merely uses framing to distinguish between black characters, he enacts a more rigid separation between black and white characters through the use of editing. Griffith's technique here is to provide the viewer with images of how the thieves act differently when confronted with similar circumstances. A striking example occurs when each of the thieves discover that the girls have money. When the mulatto thief learns this, he stands up triumphantly, and his determination never falters once throughout the narrative. The white thief has a different reaction. In a rather complicated scenario, he unwittingly wakes up one of the girls as he is taking something from the bedroom. She sees him, pretends to be asleep, and wakes up her sister when she thinks he has left. The girls rejoice upon discovering that their money has not been stolen, unaware that the thief is still in the room. Then, when the thief sees that the girls have gone back to sleep, he realizes that he cannot take their money. By using separate shots to convey similar experiences, Griffith distinguishes the white thief's conscience from the mulatto thief's ruthlessness, casting the latter as the worse kind of villain.
But more important than the contrast between the two thieves’ intent to steal is the threat of rape that underlies the entire film. Griffith refers to this threat in several shots that further distinguish the character of the mulatto thief from that of the white one. When one of the girls wakes up to see the white thief in her room, for example, she puts her head down calmly and pretends to be asleep. The girls’ immediate reaction to the mulatto thief, on the other hand, is one of absolute panic. Similarly, at the climax of the film, the white character goes to great lengths to save one of the girls from the mulatto character. Since the white character is a thief himself, the mulatto character must pose a different kind of threat. Despite these clues, however, rape is the film's subtext, not its explicit subject. The Girls and Daddy does not offer a detailed characterization of the black rapist, but instead relies to a degree on the audience's familiarity with this figure at this point in time. According to Fredrickson, “the Negro's overpowering desire for white women was often described as the central fact legitimizing the whole program of legalized segregation and disfranchisement.”Footnote 27 No one could have watched The Girls and Daddy without having the stereotype come to mind.
Whereas The Girls and Daddy tells a story that merely includes a black character, Griffith's two-part drama His Trust (1911) and His Trust Fulfilled (1911) bases a narrative on what it sees as the development of black psychology. These two pictures draw not on the relatively new stereotype of the “Negro as beast” but on the nineteenth-century tradition of romantic racialism, offering a melodramatic narrative that is nostalgic for a black figure that has been lost with the end of slavery.Footnote 28 To be sure, His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled do not constitute the first cinematic representation of the idealized, loyal black; in 1903, Porter adapted a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin for the screen. But Griffith's films are the first to take active steps in developing this character psychology. Uncle Tom's Cabin consists of fourteen tableaux that provide a series of highlights from George Aiken's stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel. Because these tableaux do not provide a plot summary, the film is incomprehensible to a viewer unfamiliar with the story. His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled harness the same kind of stereotype that the viewer is expected to recall while watching Uncle Tom's Cabin, but use techniques to create a character wholly within the world of the film. Consequently, while Griffith draws from an old tradition, his representation of the central character is completely new.Footnote 29
In the opening shot of His Trust, the master of a southern home tells his slave George to take care of his wife and daughter as he leaves to join his regiment of Confederate soldiers. The master is killed in battle, and a fellow soldier brings the master's sword back to his wife to preserve his memory. Union forces soon appear to plunder and burn down her house, and the first part ends with George allowing the wife and child to stay in his log cabin while he sleeps on the doorstep.Footnote 30 When His Trust Fulfilled opens, George has been taking care of the woman and child for four years. In the first shots of the film, the woman dies, and George arranges for the girl to live with a white lawyer. He pays for her board and education out of his own pocket. At the end of the film, George receives a single handshake from the lawyer for leading a life of devotion to his master: the dead man's trust is fulfilled.Footnote 31
Griffith uses several filmic techniques to develop George's character in His Trust. The first is a continuation of the strategy he used in The Girls and Daddy of distinguishing between different kinds of black characters. In this case, however, Griffith emphasizes not the motivation of an evil black character, but the maturity of a loyal one. At the beginning of the film, a group of slaves enthusiastically wave goodbye to their master. George appears more reserved, sensitive to the sadness of the wife who is standing next to him. The African Americans in the frame, all of whom are played by white actors in blackface, become more and more expressive, some dancing out of control, others joking around in a manner that is obviously demeaning. Out of respect for the burden of the white woman, George turns to the group standing on the porch, and tells them to go inside. In a similar sequence at the opening of His Trust Fulfilled, George refuses to join a group of free, dancing black characters, knowing he has a duty to take care of his master's wife and child.
George's “trust” has implications for his comparison with white characters as well, and once again the film perpetuates a formal hierarchy in these two stages of characterization. Whereas Griffith distinguishes George from other black characters in a single frame, he uses editing to separate George from white characters. Early in the film, for example, Griffith juxtaposes the Civil War battles with the situation back home through parallel editing. While the master fights heroically, George gets on all fours, lets the daughter sit on his back, and crawls around the room like a dog. The white family bears a heavy burden, Griffith is saying, but at least a loyal black slave maintains his prescribed role in the home. Later in the film, Griffith uses editing to dramatize George's own heroic behavior. When the Union forces have set fire to the house, George immediately rushes in to save the daughter's life. Then, after carrying the girl outside, George realizes that something else is still in the house, and he rushes out of the frame. Cut to the inside of the house where George takes his master's sword from the wall, and cut again as he rushes out just before the house collapses. In this early use of editing to dramatize the heroic behavior of a black character, Griffith celebrates the character's recognition that his life is worth less than the memory of a dead white patriarch.
Up to this point, His Trust has not deviated fundamentally from The Girls and Daddy in its use of filmic techniques for the purpose of characterization. Both films first use framing to distinguish between black characters, and then use editing to distinguish black characters from white ones. The viewer's identification is firmly on the side of the two girls in The Girls and Daddy; thus far in His Trust, the viewer is meant to empathize only with the southern woman's burden. The climactic sequence, which occurs just after George has emerged from the house with his master's sword, provides one last twist to this state of affairs:
Shot forty-one: The woman sitting on a rock holding her child, George lying on the ground in pain. The woman suddenly lets go of her child and stands up, throwing her arm in the air. A horrified look on her face as she looks into off-screen space.
Shot forty-two: The house ablaze.
Shot forty-three: The woman looks down. The girl clutches at her mother. The woman looks up again, no less horrified, and takes a step to the left. She stares for a moment longer, then walks out of the frame in despair.
Shot forty-four: The house ablaze. The woman walks into the left-hand side of the frame with her child by her side. They have their backs to the frame. The woman continues to look at the house, standing motionless with her child.
Shot forty-five: George gets up, holding the sword. He turns and looks in the same direction that the woman was looking in during shots forty-one and forty-three.
Shot forty-six: The woman and the girl looking at the house with their backs to the frame. After a few seconds the house collapses. The woman throws her arm into the air, then lowers it and pushes her head down with her hand.
Shot forty-seven: George suddenly shifts to the left, still looking into off-screen space. He puts his hand to his heart, muttering something to himself with great emotion. He then walks out of the frame.
Shots forty-five to forty-seven provide what could potentially be the first point-of-view/reaction-shot pattern for a black character in American film history. Through the assembly of shots, George is granted a point of view, and the viewer is identified with his gaze. But a sinister paradox inheres in this sequence. The editing enables the spectator direct access to George's vision, identifying a shot with his point of view. It also provides access to his emotional reaction, allowing the viewer to identify with what George feels. But “what George feels” is not his own burden. This early black character granted a point of view is looking at a white woman and child who are looking at their burning house. The use of psychological editing here does not enable George's independent growth as it typically does for a white character. Instead, in Biograph's own words, “George now realizes the sacredness of his trust.”Footnote 32 The film thus subordinates George's point of view, like everything else, to its vision of romantic racialism. In His Trust, identification with a black character means identification with a white one.
From 1908 to 1911, as D. W. Griffith turned film into a storytelling medium, he made a series of decisions about how he would depict black people. He replaced the old stereotypes and jokes with two distinct characters whose psychology he developed in the world of the films themselves. These new characters drew on racist ideas that were widespread in the United States at the time, but when the racism appeared on the screen, it acquired a new kind of power. In The Girls and Daddy, Griffith used parallel editing to put viewers in a panic when confronted with a dangerous black male. In His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, he used a point-of-view structure to draw viewers into the consciousness of a subservient black character. When he came to make The Birth of a Nation in 1915, he would combine these techniques in complex but effective ways.
The inspiration for The Birth of a Nation was Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman (1905), a key racist text amid the virulent propaganda that proliferated in the South at the turn of the century. “For a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odor, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief,” declares Dr. Cameron, the head of the southern white family at the centre of the story. “And this creature, half-child, half-animal, the sport of impulse, whim and conceit, ‘pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,’ a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger – they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people.”Footnote 33 In its fidelity to post-Reconstruction southern negrophobia, The Clansman casts African Americans as wild beasts with uncontrollable sexual passions and criminal natures. It locates their unstoppable desire to violate white women in the character Gus. At first Gus's rise to power does not hide his savagery: “The full-dress officer's uniform, with its gold epaulets, yellow stripes, and glistening sword, only accentuated the coarse bestiality of Gus. His huge jaw seemed to hide completely the gold braid on his collar.” As soon as Gus gets the chance, he rapes a white girl in full view of her mother: “A single tiger-spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.”Footnote 34
There is nothing unique in any of this material. The Clansman promotes a straightforward hatred of the black menace that is characteristic of many literary and nonfiction works from the period.Footnote 35 On one occasion, however, Dixon unwittingly gives away the source of his characterization. After witnessing the rape, the mother waits for her daughter to regain consciousness, and they jump off a cliff together. When Dr. Cameron and his son Ben find the bodies, the doctor claims that a microscope of sufficient power will reveal the image of the villain in the mother's dead eyes. His exchange with Ben as he performs the experiment is very revealing.
“Look now and tell me what you see.”
Ben looked and said:
“I can see nothing.”
“Your powers of vision are not as trained as mine,” replied the doctor, resuming his place at the instrument.
“What do you see?” asked the younger man, bending nervously.
“The bestial figure of a negro – his huge black hand plainly defined – the upper part of the face is dim, as if obscured by a gray mist of dawn – but the massive jaws and lips are clear – merciful God! – yes! – it's Gus!”
The doctor leaped to his feet livid with excitement.
Ben bent again, looked long and eagerly, but could see nothing.
“I'm afraid the image is in your eye, sir, not the mother's” said Ben, sadly.
“That's possible, of course,” said the doctor, “yet I don't believe it.”Footnote 36
In this striking passage, the character who identifies the black image concedes for a moment that he may be imagining what he sees. Dixon thus exposes the device of projection that operates throughout the entire book. The figure of the savage Negro rapist is the product not of black reality but of white fantasy. The Clansman projects uncontrollable sexual desire onto a black character, and then conceals that act of projection, making its racism appear rational.
The Birth of a Nation diverges from The Clansman’s representation of Gus in several important ways. The most obvious difference is that Gus does not actually rape the girl in the film; rather, the girl jumps off a cliff in order to avoid this fate. At the same time, the film builds up suspense much more effectively than the book: whereas The Clansman merely implies a rape, Birth constructs an extended chase sequence around an attempted one. In order to investigate the way racism functions in the film, however, we need to focus not on simple differences in plot, but rather on deeper methods of characterization. Both The Clansman and Griffith's earlier film The Girls and Daddy provided unqualified depictions of black evil, prompting the reader or viewer to identify entirely with the white girls. In the early stages, The Birth of a Nation conforms to this straightforward presentation. The sequence in which Gus is introduced begins with a front-on long shot of the girl and her sister sitting under a tree. The branches cover most of the frame, leaving visible only three empty spaces in the background. Gus enters from the right-hand side and spies on the girls from the first empty space. He then runs to the left and reappears in the space at the centre of the frame. Cut in to a two-second close-up of Gus's intense glare. Cut back to the original shot of Gus spying on the girls from the empty space at the centre of the frame. Gus then runs left and exits, and the girls get up and leave. The close-up in this episode is not part of a point-of-view/reaction-shot sequence. Rather, it is a cut-in from the previous shot, serving to emphasize the black menace. This dramatic sequence therefore promotes absolutely no identification with Gus.Footnote 37
In a later episode, however, Griffith effects an important change in this characterization. The girl has ignored her brother's warning not to go out alone, and has ventured far from the house, unaware that Gus has been following her. In a remarkable sequence, the girl is throwing food to a squirrel in a tree and watching its reaction with delight. The film cuts from a medium shot of the girl to the squirrel in close-up, and briefly back to the girl. It then presents a three-second close-up of Gus staring intensely. Cut to the girl again, and then back to the squirrel. The shot of Gus in this sequence is almost identical to the earlier one, but it performs a completely different function from it. The close-up still emphasizes Gus's brutality, but in the context of this episode, it presents the subsequent shots of the girl from his point of view. Like the climactic sequence of His Trust, the black character looks at the white character who is looking at something else. But in this case, the black character's vision is not subordinated to that of the white one. Rather, the double point-of-view structure puts the black character entirely in control. By providing access to what Gus sees, the viewer is allowed to identify with his brutal desire.
Consequently, when Gus approaches the girl, the chase sequence that ensues is not a straightforward running away from the black menace. To be sure, the sequence realigns identification with the girl. But now she runs away from a desire that the viewer has experienced. The film employs no new techniques here. It first uses the strategy from His Trust to grant the black rapist a point of view. It then dramatizes a chase in the manner of The Girls and Daddy. But in combining narrative techniques already developed in the Biograph films, Birth’s racism differs from the straightforward depiction of black evil in The Clansman. Birth develops an identification with Gus's brutal sexuality and then throws that identification away. It allows the viewer to experience his desire, puts the viewer in a panic when the girl commits suicide, and finally resolves the situation by punishing Gus.
There is no moment in this series of events in which Griffith's use of formal devices, in Rogin's words, “endangered narrative control and threatened chaos.” On the contrary, Griffith was simply combining techniques that he had been developing over the course of nearly a decade. He was aware of the identification enabled by the point-of-view structure, and he consciously took advantage of it to deepen his audience's fear of an African American stereotype. The end result of all this is precisely what Rogin describes: Griffith is using film form to subjugate black people. But Griffith is doing so even more carefully and deliberately than Rogin suggested in his article, demonstrating not potential chaos but an unprecedented level of directorial control.
Birth’s representation of Gus in the above scenes is symptomatic of the film's overall transformation of the black image. This transformation takes place, as I see it, in three separate, but highly controlled, stages as the story unfolds. First, Griffith introduces the most important black character in the film, the leader Silas Lynch, whose ambition and sexuality threaten to break down the opening stability. The director then translates that threat onto ordinary black characters, turning them from “happy darkies” to dangerous revolutionaries with animal instincts. After promoting a brief identification with the uncontrolled sexuality of the black crowd, Griffith takes that identification away to leave only a rioting mass, and finally he brings in the Ku Klux Klan to produce a relieving separation.
Most of the black characters in Birth are recognizable from Griffith's Biograph films. The Camerons’ loyal black slaves derive from George in His Trust, and the first shots of Gus are prefigured by the mulatto character in The Girls and Daddy. But Griffith also introduces another black character, Silas Lynch, who is brought to power by the abolitionist Austin Stoneman (a thinly veiled version of the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens). In The Clansman, Dixon includes only a few scattered references to Lynch's desire for Stoneman's daughter Elsie, and no attempted rape.Footnote 38 Griffith reverses Dixon's description, putting the viewer in Lynch's position as he observes Elsie. The sequence begins with a two-second close-up of Lynch in iris, looking left. Cut to a close-up of Elsie arranging some flowers, unaware that Lynch is watching her. Cut to two more seconds of Lynch unable to look away. Cut back to Elsie who looks up and says a few words to Lynch, unaware that he has designs on her. By shifting the perspective from Elsie's recognition of bestial Lynch to Lynch's lust for innocent Elsie, Griffith indulges the viewer in the mulatto character's desire.
White men are never granted these direct points of view of women in The Birth of a Nation. In the above sequence, Stoneman is too weak to turn and see that Lynch is looking at his daughter. Later on in the film, the white hero Ben Cameron falls in love with Elsie after seeing her for the first time – not in the flesh, but in a photograph. Whereas black male characters in the film can immediately experience desire, a set of sublimated point-of-view structures serves to repress white male sexuality.
Before Birth can reach its climax, however, Griffith needs to depict a transformation in the wider black community. He begins the film with the plantation myth. Black slaves happily work in the fields, then dance and eat watermelons during their two-hour lunch break. When the Confederate troops leave for battle, the slaves mix harmoniously with white characters in the crowd, emotionally bidding their masters farewell. Then, in a transformative sequence, Griffith shows a black rally before the election. The sequence begins with union organizers desperately trying to convince ordinary African Americans to join their cause. The long shots of the hall capture both the disorganization of the union and the resistance of the black crowd. Black and white unionists are scattered randomly, surrounded by black characters arguing against their calls for “equality” and “forty acres and a mule.” Some black characters are asleep. From these long shots, Griffith cuts in to medium shots of a single black organizer who is failing to convince the small group around him. When Lynch enters the hall, however, Griffith employs different filmic techniques to portray the leader's hypnotic effect on the masses. Instead of cutting in from long shots of the hall, the director employs a shot/reverse-shot pattern. The first shot shows Lynch preaching passionately, waving his hand in the air and then banging it on the podium. Whereas the earlier medium shot contained a speaker surrounded by a defiant crowd, this one barely manages to contain Lynch's powerful figure. Cut to a group of black characters who are all staring in the same direction: they are under Lynch's spell. Cut to Lynch and then back to the same group who are now aroused by Lynch's words. Griffith finally cuts to a long shot of the hall. A similar shot earlier conveyed disorganization and resistance; in this one, Lynch raises his arms in the air and the crowd rises in unity. By utilizing a shot/reverse-shot pattern to incite a new kind of connection between Lynch and his audience, Griffith has translated the leader's political ambition onto the mass.
The impact of this transformation soon becomes apparent. In The Clansman, Dixon casts a bill “to permit the intermarriage of whites and blacks” as one of many outrages. Griffith turns this bill into a major event in a sequence that records “historic incidents from the first legislative session under Reconstruction.” He first shows images of black officials eating, drinking alcohol, and taking off their shoes in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He then quickly turns to the issue of miscegenation. “White visitors in the gallery,” an intertitle reads, and we shift to a medium shot of two young white women watching the session with their father. A black man in the gallery begins to stare uncontrollably at the women. Griffith then shifts from this straightforward depiction of the black menace to an identification with black desire. He cuts to a shot of five black legislators sitting at their desks in the chamber, who all suddenly turn and look in the same direction. He then cuts back to the shot of the girls in the gallery, identifying their image with the legislators’ point of view. “Passage of a bill providing for the intermarriage of blacks and whites,” an intertitle reads, and we return to a shot of the staring legislators. After four seconds they stop staring and start celebrating. The father escorts his daughters away, and the chamber erupts into violent celebration. By granting the legislators a group point of view, Griffith allows the viewer to identify with the immediate desire of the black crowd.Footnote 39
Consequently, when Lynch proposes marriage to Elsie, the viewer has been made to identify not only with his brutal sexuality but also with that of the black mob outside. Lynch is no longer an exceptional figure in front of a harmless mass; rather, every black image on the screen represents the immediate desire with which the viewer has been identified. But as soon as Griffith has exposed the chaos that this desire has produced, he realigns identification with the white characters, and establishes a firm separation between white and black. Through parallel editing he opposes the sexual black mass with the disembodied white Klan, and he builds up his trademark run-to-the-rescue. He juxtaposes close-ups of Elsie (whom Lynch has bound and gagged) and long shots of black characters creating havoc in the town with images of the Klan's growing power. When the clansmen are fully assembled, they depart to fulfill their mission “to disarm all the blacks that night.” Earlier in the film, in the Civil War sequences, Griffith depicted the painful confrontation of white troops. Because no difference was marked on the bodies of the troops, the images could only convey death, destruction, and the futility of war.Footnote 40 The climactic confrontation of the black mob with the white Klan produces a completely different sensation in the viewer:
Shot one: Extreme long shot. The Klan at the top of the frame, an empty space at the centre, an armed black crowd at the bottom. The Klan begins to charge towards the black characters.
Shot two: Long shot of a group of black characters firing their guns.
Shot three: Extreme long shot of the Klan filling more of the frame as they charge towards the black characters.
Shot four: Long shot of the Klan in iris charging forward. The camera moves with the moving Klan.
Shot five: Long shot of the group of black characters firing their guns. They begin to retreat.
Shot six: Extreme long shot of the Klan charging towards the black characters. The black characters retreat completely, leaving only the white Klan running forcefully through the frame.
In clearing the African Americans from the frame at the climax of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith resolves the conflict at the centre of the film. The figures that represent the viewer's reversion to primal sexuality disappear in an instant, and order is restored. Griffith repeats this technique in two final sequences. In the first, a group of African Americans are disarmed by clansmen with guns; they drop their weapons and run out of the frame in a matter of seconds. In the second, a few African Americans leave their houses to vote, and when they see the Klan standing at their doors, they turn around and go back inside. The film has replaced the organic harmony of plantation life with a justification of the use of terror to maintain a necessary separation between black and white.
With this message, The Birth of a Nation comes to an end, and Griffith completes his transformation of the black image on the white screen. He, more than any other individual, is responsible for film industry's turbulent relationship with African Americans in the early twentieth century. Before he embarked on his career, filmmakers had not put a great deal of thought into their representations of black people; they had simply presented audiences with a familiar set of stereotypes. Griffith reacted to this by using formal techniques to control his audience's response to African American characters. He used parallel editing to make audiences fear the savage rapist. He used the point-of-view/reaction-shot pattern to make them admire the faithful servant. And in The Birth of a Nation, he combined these techniques in brutally effective ways. At a fragile historical moment, with lynchings still taking place in the Jim Crow South, he seized on the invention of the cinema to breathe new life into American racism.
