William M. Drew’s “D. W. Griffith’s House With Closed Shutters” is a real life detective story laced with much heretofore unavailable information about the single most important and most maligned artist in the history of motion pictures, an art form and an industry which would not exist without him.
In a time when not only film makers but nearly everyone else are eager to give their employers what they want it is important to recall Griffith’s advice to the men he trained (Erich Von Stroheim, Sidney Franklin, Elmer Clifton, Donald Crisp, Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Ingraham, Paul Powell, Allan Dwan, Tod Browning, Edward Dillon, Joseph Henaberry to name just a few), “Don’t give them what they want. Give them what you want.”
When so many around us say, “Get with the program. Go with the flow,” it is important to remember that the only fish that go with the flow are the dead ones.
I have read this book through three times. I am going to be delving into it again and again and again. Very rich. Very rewarding. Eminently re-re-readable.
Get a copy today. You can order it here: http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Griffiths-House-Closed-Shutters/dp/1466215100
“A great discovery about a remarkable, unknown chapter in D. W. Griffith’s early life. It is a genuine surprise as I never supposed there was anything more to find out about Griffith. Yet William M. Drew has uncovered high drama. I was riveted throughout by this amazing story, full of revelations.”–Kevin Brownlow, Film Historian and Documentarian.
I first came in contact with Mr. Drew a few years back when a local journalist who aspires to be an authority on film published a carelessly written piece on THE BIRTH OF A NATION and D. W. Griffith that had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
I wrote him about it. So did Mr. Drew with whom he put me in touch. That lead to a long and much appreciated dialogue between Mr. Drew and myself which can be read along with other pieces on Griffith in this post.
The present state of film journalism and scholarship is at its lowest.
More info on these sites:
http://william-m-drew.webs.com/
http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.ca/2012/07/book-choices-one-two-from-william-drew.html
http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12391
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15737269-mr-griffith-s-house-with-closed-shutters
http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.ca/
“Our gratitude to D. W. Griffith will always be mingled with shame. For while his genius has gone, the spirit that destroyed him remains strong as ever…”—Kevin Brownlow, THE PARADE’S GONE BY.
In the small town I grew up in there was an old woman whom many said was a witch. Her daughter had Down’s Syndrome. We called her a Mongloid Idiot (which was the term used in those times http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Mongoloid+idiot ).
One day when I was eight I gathered up all my courage, walked down the long path to her lonely house and knocked on her door.
She invited me in. We became friends. Her husband had been killed in World War Two. The daughter was all she had of him.
I do not know what became of her or her daughter though I have often wondered. Perhaps it is time I found out though I lack the means to help in any concrete way.
That spirit of mean spiritedness that so easily labeled this tragic woman a witch is not limited to small towns. It is found in big cities. I have felt its sting personally more than once. I have felt it so often I am immune to it.
It began to sting me the moment I walked out of her house and away from the people who labeled her a witch.
“Don’t mind him. He is eccentric,” they said.
The only thing that troubles me about being called an eccentric is that the people who say that are saying that they are not. Too bad for them.
My point in relating this story is simply to say I made a conscious choice which I have never regretted to have the spiteful people say spiteful things about me rather than stand with them against those they slander.
Not content with destroying Griffith physically that spirit has now done everything in its power to destroy Griffith spiritually. I was shocked a few years ago when I found out that Cinematheque Ontario had taken the name of David Wark Griffith off its top membership level.
Their reason? “Griffith was a racist,” they said.
I met James Quandt, a gay man who should know better than to submit to such silliness and who then was chief programmer for Cinematheque Ontario, on the street.
“How could you do that? It is not true,” I said.
“But it is,” he replied.
David Wark Griffith had a commanding vision of the movies as a power to illuminate darkness in the four corners of the world. No racist had or has a vision like that.
Anyone who takes the trouble to actually seek out and see the man’s films will find out for themselves how rich that vision was.
In INTOLERANCE for example, Griffith consciously chose to reference Walt Whitman who had scandalized America with LEAVES OF GRASS in which he spoke about love, real, physical love, not only between men and women but also between men and men. Said his supervisor at THE POST OFFICE where Whitman worked after he found a copy of the book in Whitman’s desk and read it, “You are lucky I don’t have you fired.”
As for Oscar Wilde, his fall from grace was spectacular.
Griffith, by including them in his film about INTOLERANCE, stood up for gay/queer rights long before anyone else even dreamed about doing it.
Since Griffith’s departure from the movies as a film maker after the financial failure of his last film, THE STRUGGLE (1931) and his death in 1948 that power has been used not to illuminate the darkness but to make it deeper.
Monday I went to see THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the latest film starring The Batman.
For ordinary movie goers it may well be a satisfying popcorn movie. That is all that it is.
As someone familiar with THE BATMAN from the books in which his stories are published I walked away from the film with a deep sense of dissatisfaction that such a rich trove has been and continues to be so poorly mined.
The death of Heath Ledger boosted by huge degrees the box office for THE DARK KNIGHT but here again the original material was poorly presented when contrasted with the original source.
I am reminded of THE HUNGER with Catherine De Neuve and David Bowie which, on first viewing I thought terrific. “Read the book,” said my friend Barb Schofield who had taken me to see it.
All too often the movies make a silk purse into a sow’s ear.
That is how it was when Griffith began making his 508 films starting in 1908.
That is how it is now.
Charles Beaumont, a terrific writer who wrote for the movies, said, “Writing for the movies is like climbing a mountain of feces to smell a rose.”
On the shelf at The Cineforum are the books on Griffith by many who knew and worked with him including the ones by Billy Bitzer (his cameraman), Karl Brown (a young man who learned his trade by assisting Bitzer and rose to become one of the greatest cameramen in the movies) and Griffith stars Miriam Cooper, Lillian Gish, and others.
There is also a photocopied copy of the Seymour Stern FILM CULTURE issue devoted to THE BIRTH OF A NATION and books on Griffith by others.
Back in the 1970’s I mounted a series of silent films with a man who had accompanied them on piano and organ for THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART in New York.
I mentioned him to Lillian Gish, the star of many of Griffith’s films, when I first spoke with her.
“He is not really very good,” she said.
Silently I said to myself, “Amen.”
In 1980 I brought Bernard B. Brown to Toronto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_B._Brown
Mr. Brown had begun his career playing first violin in the orchestra which accompanied THE CLANSMAN (as THE BIRTH OF A NATION was then titled) when it premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. He had played in that orchestra throughout the film’s entire run.
My reason for doing this was that many “scholars” write that THE BIRTH OF A NATION no longer has the power to move audiences as it once did.
I felt that the film properly scored would have that power. Long ago I had learned from my brief experience as an actor that our job in the theater is not to meet the expectations of our audience but to surpass them.
After Mr. Brown’s departure I presented THE BIRTH OF A NATION as part of THE TORONTO FILM SOCIETY’s silent series in a 600 seat auditorium.
I got there to find out the projector they were using ran faster at silent speed than the one I used to create the score while the reel to reel tape player they gave me ran slower.
Faced with an impossible situation I knew I could not back out. I was between a rock and a hard place.
I had an inspiration. The projection booth was sound proof. I could run parts of the film in silence and use the monitor speakers in the booth to synch up the score.
For three hours I sweat blood.
When the film ended the audience in the theater was on its feet stomping and cheering just as they had in 1915.
The director of the TFS Silent series opened the door of the booth, surged up the steps and said, “That score is brilliant! I especially admired your inspired use of silence.”
In that moment I realized that there are moments in silent films that are best seen in silence. It affected me deeply. I threw out all of my old scores and started fresh.
This is how we learn.
Imagine seeing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY with the soundtrack turned off and someone hamming it up on a piano for the picture’s duration.
That is how all too often we see silent films.
“Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton.
In my teens I was encouraged by my teachers to be a writer. I saw motion pictures as the medium in our day print had been in the 19th century when Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Tolstoy and others had worked.
That is no longer true.
For a very brief moment, under Griffith, it was true. It began and ended with him.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION was shown to the public at a top Broadway price of $2 a seat. This was, at the time, unheard of for a mere movie.
Imagine paying top Broadway price for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (or any other motion picture today).
“The public won’t pay that kind of money for a movie,” said the industry and the critics in Griffith’s day.
They were wrong.
In first release in America alone THE BIRTH OF A NATION was seen by over four times the population of that country.
That was what launched the motion picture industry from a nickel and dime affair into the art form of our day.
We owe so much to this man that there is no way we can ever repay the debt.
There is, unfortunately, no shortage of small minds.
Griffith’s films were about ideas.
For August I am offering the picture many feel (correctly) the greatest film ever made, D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1915).
Part one will be shown with a score from the music of Philip Glass. Part two will be shown with a score from the music of Jean Sibelius.
Conventionally people who score this film try to match the music to the film’s four historical periods (ancient Babylon, the Holy Land of Jesus, the massacre of the French Hugoneuts by Catherine De Medici and a modern day story of capital versus labor).
Unconventionally I have chosen to use the music of a single composer for each section of the picture to bind these four threads into one rope.
INTOLERANCE has been called the only film fugue (a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts).
It is not. But it sure as Hades is the greatest one.
I first came in contact with William M. Drew, the author of D. W. Griffith’s House With Closed Shutters, when a local film scribe published a piece on Griffith and THE BIRTH OF A NATION that had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
I wrote to him about it.
So did Mr. Drew with whom he put me in contact.
I will share with you here what I gained from that contact. It is certainly worth sharing.
David Wark Griffith had many writers he could have quoted from for his film INTOLERANCE. Instead of choosing the safe path he chose to quote from two men damned in the public eye for their sexuality: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. That alone should have given James Quandt pause for thought but James has never been the brightest bulb in the patch.
INTOLERANCE was as vilified in its day as was THE BIRTH OF A NATION.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
D. W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) is the single most important work in the history of world cinema. With it Griffith single-handedly propelled the motion picture from a side show novelty into the greatest art form of all time. Today Griffith is a much maligned man. Much that will be written here probably will not sit well with his detractors. I am not writing for them.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Griffith Scholar William M. Drew
Following is an email conversation between Griffith Scholar William M. Drew and myself which took place after the publication in a Toronto paper of an all too typical article on THE BIRTH OF A NATION.
1. Jan. 8, 2005. 12:34 PM
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent movie The Birth of a Nation conquered a new frontier of filmed storytelling, but generated a powerful backlash for its portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as the valiant heroes of the U.S. Civil War.
A confederacy of Klansmen
GEOFF PEVERE <http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=970599109774&ce=Columnist&colid=969907620784>
ARTEFACTS
Among the many places in America where the Ku Klux Klan rode to the rescue 90 years ago, perhaps the most conspicuous was the White House.
In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson insisted on it. He’d been hearing about this “photoplay,” directed by the already-famous David Wark Griffith, that people across the country were lining up to pay the unprecedented sum of $2 a head to see.
The year also marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the War Between the States, and popular interest in the still-vivid event was high.
The photoplay was called The Birth of a Nation. It was about how the post-Civil War American South had been saved from rapacious carpetbaggers and marauding former slaves by the Ku Klux Klan.
It was the first nationwide sensation in the history of moving pictures and it made something new of its actors – Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall – something that would soon come to be called “stars.”
It conquered a new frontier of filmed storytelling, a frontier comprised of rhythmic editing; the calculated alteration of camera positions, from the intimate close-up to the panoramic battle sequence; visual compositions in depth and the manipulation of primal emotional response.
This movie juxtaposed the historical with the personal, letting a story of lovers torn apart by war unfold against a backdrop that included dramatic recreations of real events, such as General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
Said actor Walter Huston years after first seeing it, “It made the blood tingle.”
The Birth of a Nation created an appetite for cinematic spectacle that still enthralls us.
In the wake of its success, which alerted people like the young mogul-to-be Louis B. Mayer to the potential of producing features like Birth on an assembly line, the nickelodeon era was over and the day of the movies as a mass attraction was established.
President Wilson joined millions of Americans in being impressed. After emerging from the sweeping, three-hour epic (based on two novels by the bestselling white supremacist Thomas Dixon), the president offered what may rank as the first blockbuster blurb: “This is history written with lightning,” he is alleged to have said.
To the extent that it scorched wherever it struck, Griffith’s pioneering long-form feature (previously, the longest American movie, also from Griffith, had run four reels, or 40 minutes) was like American history disgorged by a flamethrower.
The story of two families, one Northern and one Southern, whose fates would be fused together then ripped apart by the Civil War and its aftermath, Griffith’s silent movie was the most significant event in American popular culture of its day.
This film consolidated just about every narrative and stylistic development in the barely two-decade-old medium into a powerful and propulsive experience.
It also single-handedly redefined the business and established movies as the century’s most influential form of mass communication. All we know of movie culture today began with The Birth of a Nation.
But Wilson’s legendary assessment was also a masterstroke of political doublespeak, because lightning can dazzle but also destroy.
Almost immediately after Birth began a commercial run that would continue in one fashion or another into the early years of the sound era – the most popular silent film ever made, it eventually reaped an astounding $60 million (in pre-Depression U.S. dollars) on a $110,000 investment – Griffith’s vision of the South ravaged by Reconstruction generated a massive backlash.
Led primarily by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the anti-Birth movement decried the film’s sensational depiction of freed black slaves as lazy, lecherous, ignorant and vindictive.
In one sequence, the virtuous “Little Sister” (Mae Marsh) of the once-genteel, Southern aristocratic Cameron family is driven to suicide by a lust-crazed black soldier (a white actor in blackface). Another features the spectacle of a state assembly dominated by blacks guzzling booze, gnawing fried chicken and plopping dirty bare feet onto desks (images Griffith drew from racist editorial cartoons of the Reconstruction period).
Not surprisingly, the NAACP and its supporters sought to block the film’s release.
As aesthetically and technically groundbreaking as it was, The Birth of a Nation is virulent and unequivocal in its depiction of the former Confederacy (for which Griffith’s father fought as a colonel) as a fallen Eden beset by black devils and sneering Yankee exploiters.
In the movie’s climactic moment – which must have had audiences cheering, crying and howling – the humiliated Cameron patriarch holds a pistol over his only living daughter’s head as black soldiers attempt to pound their way into the cabin where a small group of white people have barricaded themselves against the dark hordes.
This man is ready to sacrifice his own child if the brutes get in, but then a sound is heard – or, to be precise, is suggested by Griffith’s evocative editing. It’s horses. It’s a rescue. It’s the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan. In the nick of time.
For the rest of his life, Griffith claimed not to understand what upset so many people about the movie. As far as he was concerned, he was simply chronicling his personal experience listening to his parents describe the deprivations that had befallen his childhood home of Kentucky during Reconstruction.
In 1930, at the time he was making his penultimate movie – a historical biopic of Lincoln – the 55-year-old Griffith filmed an interview defending The Birth of a Nation. Clearly well-rehearsed, conducted over cigarettes by Abraham Lincoln star Walter Huston in a plush sitting room, the interview ran prior to the film in a fresh commercial release.
In this interview, Griffith – who had not had a successful film in nearly a decade – defends the movie’s heroic portrayal of the KKK.
Wistfully, he claims the Klan had “a purpose” in those days, that it “saved the South.”
The great contradiction of Birth, between the monumental nature of its expressive achievement and the reprehensible message it expressed, has always tempered its historical status.
Over the years, many have attempted to either defend Griffith or mitigate his prejudice by insisting he be granted consideration in context – that is, as a 19th-century sentimentalist and southerner for whom the post-Civil War south really seemed a ravaged place saved by the KKK. But it’s simply impossible today to watch the film and not be appalled.
In his Griffith entry in the most recent edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson calls the movie’s racial politics “embarrassing.”
In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan, which had originally formed as a secret society dedicated to exacting vigilante justice against what it saw as the enemies of the defeated South, was a moribund, depleted and antiquated organization. That changed with the movie’s release. In Georgia alone that year, KKK ranks ballooned to 8 million, and 22 Klan-related lynchings took place. This is historical fact. But it is also something else: The birth of history as something shaped by the movies.
While Griffith’s film proved an effective recruitment campaign for a reborn Klan in throughout the 1920s, the popular image of the organization itself tarnished immediately. It would seem that the backlash, combined with the growing civil rights consciousness of the 20th century, prevailed.
Few, if any, heroic portrayals of the hooded, white vigilantes followed. If anything, the image that stuck was one of irredeemable ugliness. The Klan became the symbol of white Southern race hatred, and the figure of the hooded Klansman was invariably associated with burning crosses, redneck ignorance and gruesome lynchings.
By 1939, the year that Gone With the Wind was released, the most popular and eagerly anticipated American movie since The Birth of a Nation conspicuously omitted the KKK subplot in Edna Ferber’s original novel.
Birth of a Nation‘s “history written with lightning” struck the KKK only once. The fire burned bright but left only ashes.
Sources: The Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz.; Griffith Masterworks, Kino on Video (DVD); The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson; The Silent Cinema, by Liam O’Leary; The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson.
gpevere@thestar.ca <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>
=======================================================
2. Not sent–draft
Geoff Pevere is a writer from whom I expect better than we received in his piece on D. W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION which is replete with errors, not the least of which is ascribing to Edna Ferber the authorship of Margaret Mitchell’s novel GONE WITH THE WIND.
We are also told that Griffith had not made a successful film in nearly the decade from 1920 to 1930. That era includes both WAY DOWN EAST (1920) and ORPHANS OF THE STORM (1922) which were huge popular hits and a number of other pictures that not only did respectably at the box office but also still hold up today.
We are told that Woodrow Wilson is alleged to have said, “This is history written with lightning.” The implication is that he might not have. Left out is that Wilson was an historian of that period and ably qualified to speak.
Lenin described THE BIRTH OF A NATION as “An express train among pushcarts.” But then the Russians were not deflected by skin color. They saw the film for what it truly is a depiction of class struggle.
Had the revolution failed they would all have been hung as outlaws instead of remembered as heroes.
I had great difficulty presenting this film until I read Seymour Stern’s excellent in-depth study of the picture in FILM CULTURE magazine. Not only did Stern traces the creation of the picture he also traced the roots of the slave trade, established that the South knew slavery could not continue and that the impetus to end it faster than the south could handle came from an industrialized north looking to create wage earners who could spend money on the products they were creating. Stern also established that the money to industrialize the North came from the sale of slaves to the South.
Pevere writes, “In his Griffith entry in the most recent edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson calls the movie’s racial politics ‘embarrassing.’” What is embarrassing about them?
No one who takes the time to investigate the issue would find them so. Contemporary film writing is all too often sophomoric at best.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION presents the time of its setting as it was from the point of view of the losers, the White American South. That view is given us by a man who was a member of that society and whose father, “Roaring” Jake Griffith was one of the authentic heroes of that conflict whose deeds were recorded in Great Britain as Griffith found out when he went there to film ISN’T LIFE WONDERFUL.
Scott Simon in THE FILMS OF D. W. Griffith, writes, “As anyone who sits with an audience through the film in the 1990s recognizes, its return as formalist masterpiece or even as visceral adventure is possible only in the imagination.”
Not when I screen it.
In 1980 I brought Bernard B. Brown to Toronto for three days. Among Mr. Brown’s accomplishments, which included directing the recording of the sound on THE JAZZ SINGER (1927), introducing multi-track recording, ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL (1939), receiving eleven Academy Award nominations for film and film sound as well as two Oscars, being head of sound at Warner Brothers and then at Universal until he retired, teaching film and film sound at UCLA and playing tennis with Charlie Chaplin, among Mr. Brown’s considerable accomplishments was the fact that he played first violin in the orchestra at Clune’s Auditorium ion Los Angles from the premiere of THE BIRTH OF A NATION (as THE CLANSMAN) through 365 performances.
With Mr. Brown as my mentor (by the way as far as popular success goes, I had only three people come out over the three days Mr. Brown was in this city. The event was a huge popular failure) with Mr. Brown as my guide I studied in depth film and film sound at a level no one else in the world ever has.
Shortly after I was invited to screen the film for 500 grade thirteen students. Their teachers told me not to be disturbed by their reactions to the film as they would talk and laugh throughout the picture (doing that at all the films they were shown). “Not today,” I said.
Three hours later those young people were applauding and cheering. They had said not a word to each other during the length of the film. “I don’t understand,” said their teachers, “they have never done that before.”
I was also invited to present the film, with my score, for The Toronto Film Society. Barry Hayne, a University of Toronto Film Studies teacher, was head of the Silent Series. I arrived to find out the projector they gave me ran faster and the tape recorder slower. There was no way to synchronize the film and taped score.
On reflection I realized I could run parts of the film in silence and use the monitor speaker in the projection booth to synch up the score. I sweat blood. The screening was at the Ontario Institute for Studies auditorium which seats hundreds. At the end of the film this modern day audience was reacting as wildly as audiences had when the picture first exploded across screen. Barry Hayne came charging into the both shouting, “REG! THAT SCORE IS BRILLIANT! I ESPECIALLY ADMIRED YOUR INSPIRED USE OF SILENCE!”
The brilliance was Griffith’s. I was just following his cues.
A few days ago Martin Knelman wrote singing the praises of Garth H. Drabinsky, a man whose chief claim to fame is that he took the movies back to the shoebox cinemas David Wark Griffith lifted them out of with this film.
At the time Drabinsky’s CINEPLEX first opened I spoke for the first time with Miss Lillian Gish, the star of THE BIRTH OF A NATION. “Theatres have shrunk,” she told me. I thought of Garth’s 25, 50 and 100 seat cinemas and said, “Yes.” “My last film, Robert Altman’s THE WEDDING, opened in a 500 seat theatre,” she said. “That is a big theatre,” I thought to myself wopndering what she was complaining about. Then she said, “My pictures opened in 5,000 seat cinemas.”
Yes and that began with THE BIRTH OF A NATION. While Geoff does mention that THE BIRTH OF A NATION eventually reaped an astounding $60 million (in pre-Depression U.S. dollars) on a $110,000 investment and that people across the country were lining up to pay the unprecedented sum of $2 a head to see the film he does not explain that $2 in 1915 amounts to almost $50 a seat today. No other film maker, excepting one, has taken his risk nor surpassed his success.
That one other was Metro Studio head Richard Rowland who produced, against the advice of his board of directors, the Rex Ingram, June Mathis Rudolph Valentino film, THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1920), the only film to surpass THE BIRTH OF A NATION in box office success in the silent period.
When I brought in a 16mm print, obtained from Charles Vesce in New York, one of the longest established and most reputable suppliers of great films in America, I heavily researched the music for the film which not only established Valentino as a star (the first great star) but also introduced to the world the Argentine Tango.
Ed Jull, of the Toronto Film Society, told me the TFS had screened the film long ago and that musicians in the audience had claimed the music for the film was not “on the beat.”
I invited your film writers to see the presentation. They did not come. One person who did come was John Roberts P.C., our Minister of Culture under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Another was an older Argentine couple. “The music! The music!” said the woman. “You had that score on the beat all the way,” said her husband who added, “We are going to send Argentine people here.”
THE BIRTH OF A NATION remains the single greatest work in the history of world cinema. It established forever the art and the business of motion pictures. It presents the only honest and accurate picture of the American Civil War and the Aftermath of Reconstruction from the point of view of the American White South. We are not asked to agree with that perspective. Certainly, we should not. But to color that moment with the popular prejudice of our own time is a far greater sin.
As well, THE BIRTH OF A NATION is the only motion picture that allows us to see and understand the depth of the wound at the heart of the American soul.
========================================================================
3.Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.
Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
========================================================================
4. Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is
crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.
Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
=========================================================================
5.Plenty. I run the risk of looking hysterical by listing them.–Reg
.
—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 10:33 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.
Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
=====================================================
6. You? Hysterical? Perish the thought.
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/9/2005 1:43 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Plenty. I run the risk of looking hysterical by listing them.–Reg
.
—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 10:33 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE
WIND.
Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
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7.And then you called her a liar! Just kidding.
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/9/2005 6:44 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
One of my favourite moments showing THE BIRTH OF A NATION was when I was introducing it at Innis College as part of my series there. A number of people called me a liar. Jane Jacobs was in the audience. She got up and said, “He is telling you the truth.”
—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 11:45 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
You? Hysterical? Perish the thought.
—–Original Message—– —–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/9/2005 1:43 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Plenty. I run the risk of looking hysterical by listing them.–Reg
.
—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff < <mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>
<<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>> >
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ < <mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>
<<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>> >
Sent: Sunday, January 09, 2005 10:33 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Thanks for keeping my posted on my mistakes. Apart from the Edna Ferber fuckup — my dumb fault entirely — how else was I remiss?
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Geoff Pevere
Sent: 1/9/2005 11:56 AM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Your piece on THE BIRTH is replete with errors not the least of which is crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND.
Lenin described THE BIRTH as “an express train among pushcarts.” But then, the Russians were not distracted by the color issue and saw the struggle in the film for what it really is.–Reg
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8. Reg,
What a pal. Thanks.
Geoff
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: lettertoed thestar
Cc: T. Casey Brennan; Simon Waegemaekers; Sharif Khan; rob salem; richard ouzounian; Robert Fulford; michael valpy; Murray Glass; liz braun; john tutt; john bentley mays; jim slotek; julian grant; John Ferri; JBeck6540@aol.com; jadams@globeandmail.ca; hanna fisher; martin goodman; Gino Empry; George Anthony; editor@boxmagazine.com; Ryan Burt; bruce macdonald; al aronowitz; Roger Ebert; Geoff Pevere; ed jull
Sent: 1/10/2005 1:40 PM
Subject: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Geoff Pevere is a writer I enjoy reading. His piece on THE BIRTH OF A NATION in Saturday’s STAR was so full of errors however that I am forced to speak.
While it is true that THE BIRTH OF A NATION was the first film to be shown at The White House this was not because then President Woodrow Wilson was curious to see the film. He had been asked by The Reverend Thomas Dixon, whose book THE CLANSMAN the film was adapted from, to look at the picture. Wilson was in mourning for his first wife and did not want to be seen in public. For that reason and that reason alone the film was taken to the White House.
It began showing in Los Angeles on February 8 under the title THE CLANSMAN (this title was used throughout the film’s Los Angeles run). Wilson knew nothing of the film until he was contacted by Dixon. He agreed to see the film because long before at a moment he needed a hand Dixon’s was the one that reached out.
The White House screening took place on February 18, 1915. The film did not open to the public in New York until March 3, 1915.
After seeing the film it is reliably reported Wilson, an American historian and highly qualified to pass judgment, said, “It is like history written with Lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Later, when the stuff hit the fan Wilson, ever a politician, retracted the remark. J. P. Tulmuty, Wilson’s chief public relations adviser, wrote, “The President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented, and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old friend.”
In doing research on this film and the rest of Griffith’s work I obtained copies of the autobiographies of D. W. Griffith, cameramen Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown, and actressess Miriam Cooper and Lillian Gish as well as an extensive list of books devoted to Mr. Griffith, the best of which is Richard Shickel’s . The best exploration of the film remains Seymour Stern’s for FILM CULTURE in 1965.
Geoff tells us that in the decade between 1920 and 1930 Griffith had no commercial successes. The reverse is true. He had huge hits with WAY DOWN EAST and ORPHANS OF THE STORM (the two pictures he self-produced). The films he made for both Paramount Pictures and United Artists did respectable business. I was surprised to discover, reading Shickel’s book that Griffith withdrew from film making not because his pictures were not popular but because he got tired of producers mucking them up. This continues to frustrate serious film artists. Animation director Chuck Jones told me the most common thing he heard from producers was, spoken as one word, “That’snewtakeitout.”
THE BIRTH was not the most popular film of the silent era. Rex Ingram’s THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE holds that honor. I built up a score for that film from the Argentine Tango. Ed Jull, of the Toronto Film Society, told me when the TFS screened the film years before musicians in the audience complained the soundtrack was not “on the beat.” At a screening of THE FOUR HORSEMEN one man said to me, “I am from Argentina. You had that score on the beat all the way through. I am going to send Argentine people here.”
THE FOUR HORSEMEN begins its story in Argentina.
Geoff winds up crediting Edna Ferber with writing Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND. Mitchell described THE BIRTH as “the only honest film about the American Civil War and the Aftermath of Reconstruction.”
Its honesty lies in showing that period from the point of view of the White South. The wounds from that time have still not healed. THE BIRTH OF A NATION, more clearly than any other film, shows why they exist.
THE STAR has not always been so unkind to Griffith and his film. Urjo Kareda, one of the most astute critics the paper enjoyed, wrote “D. W Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION is not only the oldest film in town but quite the best as well.”
There is so much misinformation (and deliberate slander) about Griffith and his work that it pains me to see Geoff write so sloppily about what is, after all, the most important film ever made.
One writer, Scott Simon, in his THE FILMS OF D. W. GRIFFITH, writes that whatever power the picture had to move an audience it does not have that power today.
Well, it all depends on how it is presented.
It is not generally known that however great the advances were that Griffith made in film technique with this film (and they are considerable) the true power of the film rose from the special music score Griffith had created for the picture.
In 1980 I brought to Toronto Bernard B. Brown who played first violin in the orchestra which accompanied the film throughout its Los Angeles run. In 1927 Mr. Brown directed the sound recording on THE JAZZ SINGER. He got eleven Academy Awards and two Oscars for his work with film and film sound which he taught at UCLA when he retired from the film industry. After consulting with him I built a score for the film. When I screened the picture to The Toronto Film Society a few years back the audience went wild on their feet cheering and stomping when the film ended just as audiences had in 1915.
University of Toronto Film Prof Barry Hayne, then in charge of the TFS Silent Series, came surging up to me shouting, “That score is brilliant! I especially admired your inspired use of silence.”
The brilliance was Griffith’s. The silence was from necessity. I can take no credit for it. I learned a lot in the fire of that moment. I threw out all of my old silent film scores and started anew. I looked to use silence instead of covering it up.
I have also presented the film to hundreds of high school students whose teachers were astonished to see them so caught up in the picture’s power. The kids were more astute than the adults. They were amazed to find out how vulnerable we all are to mass media manipulation (which is why I continue to show the film).
David Wark Griffith singlehandedly lifted motion pictures up from shoe box theatres and transformed the medium into the art form of our time.
Garth Drabinsky, whom Martin Knelman praises regularly, singlehandedly took it back to the shoeboxes. That $2 a seat audiences paid to see this film would be almost $50 a seat today.
Griffith deserves better, way better, than the sophomoric and hysterical piece Geoff delivered up.
Lillian Gish informed me that Griffith had no idea his film would lead to the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan and personally felt that no matter what it had achieved it was not worth the price of a single black man’s lynching. It must have been a source of great horror and pain to see such diabolical fruit fall from his work.
10.Yeah, you’re a prince.
—–Original Message—–
From: Reg Hartt
To: Pevere, Geoff
Sent: 1/10/2005 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
If the best friend I ever had wrote misinformation about you I would take him/her to task for it. Most especially so if you were not able to do it for yourself. –Reg
—– Original Message —–
From: Pevere, Geoff <<mailto:gpevere@thestar.ca>>
To: ‘Reg Hartt ‘ <<mailto:rhartt4363@rogers.com>>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 11:51 AM
Subject: RE: THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Reg,
What a pal. Thanks.
Geoff
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11. Dear Mr. Hartt:
I don’t know why you sent this particular article to me, but you might be interested in an anecdote of my own.
Several years ago, I was teaching a course on Griffith at Columbia College in L.A.. As any course on Griffith must, I included a showing of BIRTH OF A NATION. I happen to have a beautiful, complete version with an excellent orchestral score.
The class included a couple of black students. After the showing, one of them came up to me and said, “Mr. Glass, I hated some of the basic stories in the film, but I couldn’t help rooting for the Klan as they were riding to the rescue of the beseiged people in the cabin!”
Murray Glass
————– Original message from “Reg Hartt” <rhartt4363@rogers.com>: ————–
=================
12. 2nd response. You are Jewish. I am Irish Catholic. The Ku Klux Klan hated Jews and Irish Catholics as much as it did Blacks. I think that gives both of us a slightly better perspective dealing with the issues this film raises.–Best, Reg Hartt
—– Original Message —–
======================
13. Wow – great piece of writing. I really appreciate all the knowledge you have brought to this film. I hope to make it down in a few weeks to catch it!
Thanks again,
Happy New Year!
TOOTS CAPITAL
Val Dooley
Director of Communications
Tel: 416 488-9649
Fax: 416 488-8173
val@tootscapital.com <mailto:val@tootscapital.com>
www.tootscapital.com <http://www.tootscapital.com/>
============================================================
14. Reg,
Thought you might be interested.
Geoff
—–Original Message—–
From: ReelDrew@aol.com
To: gpevere@thestar.ca
Sent: 1/11/2005 3:52 AM
Subject: on maligning D. W. Griffith
Dear Geoff Pevere,
In your zeal to denigrate D. W. Griffith and “The Birth of a Nation,” you are guilty of several gross errors and untruths. As a film historian who has for years attempted to bring recognition to Griffith’s relevance as a great artist (among my publications is the 1986 book, “D. W. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’: Its Genesis and Its Vision”), I have had to continually respond to those who, under the guise of presenting facts, consistently perpetrate myths and outright falsehoods about the director. The apparent objective is to unmask Griffith as an evil-minded racist who caused great harm to American society, and in the service of such an endeavor accuracy is of no concern whatever. I do not believe these inaccuracies and misstatements are all accidental slip-ups but represent a calculated effort on the part of these critics to justify censorship and military occupation, things which they would normally oppose After a lifetime of battling people such as yourself, I am frankly sick and tired of the controversy and am presently debating with myself whether I should even bother to respond to your reckless disregard for the truth. Nevertheless, I will point out several gross errors in your article:
1. Margaret Mitchell, not Edna Ferber, was the author of “Gone With the Wind.” This bizarre inaccuracy has already been pointed out on the newsgroup, alt.movies.silent. It seems to be typical of your approach to scholarly research in general.
2. You state that the longest American film made prior to “The Birth of a Nation” was a four-reel film by Griffith running 40 minutes (presumably, you mean the 4-reel “Judith of Bethulia” which, at the proper projection speed, runs about one hour). In fact, most of the early American features of 1912, 1913 and 1914 were five or six reels in length. The first full-length US feature, “Richard III” (1912), the rediscovery of which received great publicity some years ago, was 5 reels in length; Helen Gardner’s “Clipart” (1912) was 6 reels. In 1914, Mack Sennett’s famous comedy feature, “Tile’s Punctured Romance,” was 6 reels, as was the “The Squaw Man,” co-directed by Oscar Capful and Cecil B. Demille. Other films Demille directed that year, such as “The Virginian,” were 5 reels long. In the case of Griffith, the four reels of “Judith,” his final film for Biography (filmed in 1913, released in
1914), was a compromise between the studio’s insistence on shorter films and his desire to expand with longer films. After that, Griffith left Biography and, in partnership with the Aitken brothers, formed his own company for the purpose of making feature films. In 1914, he directed the following four features prior to “The Birth of a Nation”: “The Battle of the Sexes” (5 reels), “The Escape” (7 reels), “Home, Sweet Home” (6 reels), “The Avenging Conscience” (7-8 reels). I believe the longest American feature released in 1914 may have been Selig’s version of the famous Western story, “The Spoilers,” 9 reels in length or nearly two hours running time at silent speed. 1914 also saw the release of the first Canadian feature, “Evangeline,” produced by Bioscope at 5 reels. (It was also shown widely in the US.) I guess you simply didn’t bother to look up the acknowledged facts in making your statement that a four reel film was the longest American feature prior to “The Birth.”
3. You state that “The Birth” was the most popular film of the entire silent era. This may be more excusable than the others, but it is still something which has long been refuted by more scholarly studies. The biggest box office hit of the whole silent period was King Vidor’s World War I epic, “The Big Parade,” released in 1925. “The Birth” was the single most popular American film of the 1910s, no question about that, but the exaggerated claims of how much money it made and how many people saw it stem from the Griffith company’s publicity department and the film’s various distributors over the years. Initially, it was an understandable way of attracting favorable publicity and increasing its box office pull during its later revivals. More recently, however, it has been used as a tool against Griffith and the film by those who, by accepting the inflated numbers, now assign the film to the central position in American race relations, in effect, making Griffith responsible for the entire course (in a negative sense) of the black experience in much of the 20th century.
4. This leads to your most egregious misstatement, one that is absolutely unforgivable. You write that, in the year of 1915, membership in the revived Klan in the state of Georgia alone suddenly “ballooned to 8 million, and 22 Klan-related lynchings took place. This is historic fact.”
Er–not quite. In 1915, the total population of was between two and three million people. 50 years later, the state’s population was just under four million. It has only been in recent years that Georgia’s population reached and then surpassed eight million. As for the figures regarding the number of Klan members in the US in the period beginning in 1915, membership grew slowly; it was only in 1920 and 1921, following the breakdown of Progressivism in World War I and the Red Scare, that the Klan emerged as a powerful organization in the US.