D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: Art, culture and ethics in black and white

By Manchester University Press

In 1915, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith released a film that went on to become one of the most controversial of all time. Over a century later, The Birth of a Nation continues to stimulate debate on the relationship between Hollywood and racism. This volume reveals new perspectives on Griffith’s film across ten original chapters, re-considering it as text, historical milestone and influence. The volume also includes a helpful timeline that lists key publications and events in Birth’s ongoing history, revealing the rich and stimulating discourse on its art, its cultural impact and its ethical dimensions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526164445

Book preview

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth

of a Nation

Art, culture and ethics in

black and white

Edited by

Jenny Barrett, Douglas Field and Ian Scott

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 526 16445 2 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Figures

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: the legacy of The Birth of a Nation – Ian Scott, Douglas Field and Jenny Barrett

1Black faces in The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith’s art and the African American actor – Corin Willis

2The afterlife of stereotype: Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, DJ Spooky and The Birth of a Nation – Robert Burgoyne

3Kunle Olulode in conversation with Dr Jenny Barrett

4Desegregating the screen: Oscar Micheaux and the rise of activist cinema – Jeffrey Geiger

5Examining the ‘White Saviour’ in The Birth of a Nation – Jonathan Ward

6A rope with two ends: Nate Parker, D. W. Griffith and the tangled legacies of The Birth of a Nation – Lydia J. Plath

7The birth of an origin – Oliver C. Speck

8The Birth of a Nation, Black documentary and the 1992 L.A. uprisings – E. James West

9‘Go see it because it will make a better American of you’: The Birth of a Nation in the era of ‘fake news’ – Jenny Barrett

10Standing their ground: a southern community’s response to The Birth of a Nation – Van Dora Williams

11The Birth of a Nation: a timeline – Jenny Barrett

Afterword: The Birth of a Nation and the temporalities of race – Robert J. Corber

Index

Figures

1.1The African American boy in the Prologue, The Birth of a Nation

1.2The raid on Piedmont, The Birth of a Nation

1.3The Southern Union League Rally, The Birth of a Nation

1.4The African American jury, The Birth of a Nation

1.5The member for Ulster and other delegates, The Birth of a Nation

1.6Gus spies Flora in close-up demonstrating his ‘realistic’ blackface, The Birth of a Nation

2.1Rebirth of a Nation, 2007

2.2Rebirth of a Nation, 2007

2.3Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994

2.4Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014

2.5Rebirth of a Nation, 2007

4.1Segregated movie theatre, Belzoni, Mississippi (1939)

4.2Newspaper advertisement for Within Our Gates

4.3Still from The Birth of a Nation

4.4Still from Within Our Gates

5.1Theatrical release poster for The Birth of a Nation, 1921

5.2‘The Scourged Back’, Mathew Benjamin Brady, 1863

7.1The second titlecard, The Birth of a Nation

7.2Always already in bondage, The Birth of a Nation

7.3The cliff, The Birth of a Nation

7.4Lydia as gypsy, The Birth of a Nation

9.1Audience postcard from ‘A Mighty Spectacle, A Despicable Film: The Fate of The Birth of a Nation’

List of contributors

Jenny Barrett is Senior Lecturer in Film at Edge Hill University and is the author of Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2009). She has published on the Western, cultural representations of the American Civil War, African Americans in genre films, gender representations, racialised performance and Hollywood’s consensus memory of the past. She helped to lead the research network ‘Art, Culture and Ethics in Black and White: 100 Years of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation’, 2014–5, with Ian Scott and Douglas Field.

Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centres on the theory and representation of history in film. The author of five books and numerous essays, his work has been translated into nine languages. He has lectured in thirteen countries. He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews, and Professor of English and Film Studies at Wayne State University. He is currently working on a book-length project on post 9/11 American war films, provisionally entitled War and Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11.

Robert J. Corber is William R. Kenan, Jr Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College. He is the author and editor of many books including most recently Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity and Hollywood Cinema.

Douglas Field is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the co-founding editor of the James Baldwin Review, the editor of American Cold War Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and A Historical Guide to James Baldwin (Oxford University Press, 2009), and the author of James Baldwin (Writers and Their Work series, Liverpool University Press, 2011) and All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (Oxford University Press, 2015). His work has appeared in publications including African American Review, Callaloo, Religion and Theology, English Literary History, as well as chapters in a number of collected essays.

Jeffrey Geiger is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Essex, where he was the first director of Film Studies and established the Centre for Film and Screen Media. Books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (W.W. Norton, 2005, 2013, co-edited), and Cinematicity in Media History (Edinburgh University Press, 2013, co-edited). His work has appeared in numerous collections and journals such as New Formations, Studies in Documentary Film, Third Text, African American Review, Film International, Cinema Journal, and PMLA.

Kunle Olulode is the director at Voice4Change England, a Black, Asian and minority ethnic charity and infrastructure support body which aims to strengthen the BAME voluntary sector to meet the needs of disadvantaged communities. As a trade union activist at Camden Council, from 2002 to 2011, he led the Camden Black Workers staff group and founded its award-winning Camden Black History Forum. Kunle was the creative director of the Anglo-Spanish arts group Rebop Productions, involved in the seed development of British and American artists such as Amy Winehouse, Neneh Cherry, and hip-hop heads, The Roots. His time in Catalonia also included the founding of the legendary WTF jam sessions at the Jamboree Club, Barcelona. Kunle is a trustee of the English Heritage Trust, becoming one of its first black board members. He is on the programming board of the BFI’s African Odysseys programme.

Lydia J. Plath is Associate Professor of US History in the History Department at the University of Warwick, where her research explores racial violence and its representations. She is the co-editor with Sergio Lussana of Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800–2000 (Cambridge Scholars, 2009), and the author of several book chapters that explore how slavery has been represented in American film in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She teaches courses on the history of whiteness, African American history, and race and racism, and she also writes regularly about racism, anti-racism and American Studies pedagogy.

Ian Scott is Professor of American Film and History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Hollywood’s politics and history, including American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and, most recently, Robert Riskin: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Screenwriter (University Press of Kentucky, 2021). He also works in TV and radio documentary and his series The Californian Century (2020) broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service was nominated in 2021 for Radio Programme of the Year by the British Broadcasting Press Guild. His writing has featured most recently in Cineaste, The Daily Beast, and BBC World Histories, and he makes regular appearances on local and national, independent and BBC radio.

Oliver C. Speck teaches Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia and is the director of VCU’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in Media, Art, and Text. His book, Funny Frames: The Cinematic Concepts of Michael Haneke (Bloomsbury, 2010) explores how a political thinking manifests itself in the oeuvre of the Austrian-born director Michael Haneke. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, a collection of essays that Oliver Speck edited, appeared in 2014 (published by Bloomsbury). Oliver Speck (together with Robert von Dassanowsky) is also the co-editor of New Austrian Film (Berghahn, 2011). He is currently working on a monograph on depictions of slavery in cinema.

Jonathan Ward is a lecturer in Race and Diversity Studies at King’s College London, in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries. He researches somatic disciplinarity and representations of the body in Black Atlantic literary and visual culture. Recent publications include examinations of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and RuPaul’s Drag Race. He is on the executive committee of the British Association for American Studies and is the founder of The Abolitionist Curriculum https://abolitionistcurriculum.wordpress.com/.

E. James West is a historian and writer. His work focuses on popular history, race and media in the modern United States. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020), A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2022) and Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022). See www.ejameswest.com.

Van Dora Williams, a multiple Emmy-award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, is Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of Administration for the Division of Communication and Creative Media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Her research interests in African American history, social movements, civil rights and film studies were the driving force for her 2017 dissertation on The Birth of a Nation as well as the various news programmes and documentary films she has written and produced over the past thirty years. She earned her PhD in Communication from Regent University in 2017.

Corin Willis is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and his general research interests are in the close analysis of film and the representation of race. He has a specialist interest in the use of blackface in Hollywood film and has published chapters in this area.

Acknowledgements

This collection of chapters began as a series of papers given at events marking the centenary of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation between 2014 and 2015 in the United Kingdom. Over a number of years, a small group of us formed a research network that eventually hosted a launch, two symposia, one in Manchester and one in Liverpool, and a dramatised lecture. Speakers and filmmakers came from the UK and the US, each with something new to say about Griffith’s most notorious film. Without the generous support of specific people and funding bodies this book would not have been possible. Special acknowledgement should go, therefore, to Phil Davies, who was accosted at an Eccles Centre event about the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War and agreed to fund and host a launch there at the British Library. Similarly, the support of the Manchester Research Networking Fund, based at the University of Manchester, along with Edge Hill University, made it possible for us to meet, plan and cover costs for the events. The British Academy and the BFI Library should also be thanked for their resources which contributed to a number of chapters in this collection.

Particular thanks have to go to Professor Alan Rice of the University of Central Lancashire whose wisdom and experience guided our network and encouraged our vision to participate in the ongoing discourse that has surrounded The Birth of a Nation. We are greatly indebted also to Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, to Dr Richard Benjamin of the International Slavery Museum and Bryan Biggs of The Bluecoat, both in Liverpool, all of whom opened their doors to us as hosts. Our sincere thanks go to the expertise and encouragement of Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press, particularly over the gruelling experience of creating an edited collection during lockdown.

Finally, we want to thank our partners and families who were coerced into joining the ride over several years as our project came to fruition. Your patience was never underestimated.

Jenny, Douglas and Ian

Introduction: the legacy of The Birth of a Nation

Ian Scott,Douglas FieldandJenny Barrett

‘Reform was sweeping the country. There were complaints about everything, so I decided to reform the motion picture industry.’¹

In some ways it is no surprise that the legacy of American film director David Wark Griffith should reverberate across a century or more of cinema. The myths, rumours and controversy that surrounded his career all contributed to stories and deeds that defined the early Hollywood. These include his devout and religious mother, his father’s Confederate army service in the Civil War, and his working life before motion pictures, which included a stint in a travelling troupe, and periods spent being jobless in California and roaming the streets of New York. These myths grew as Griffith stepped behind the camera, contributing to the construction of fables and fantasy in which the west-coast movie colony happily indulged.²

Hollywood’s formative years shaped the legends even though few filmmakers survived beyond the silent era; for no sooner was the history being documented than it was smothered in a blanket of sound-infused technology, and new studio behemoths came to rule the industry. The early days were soon condemned, not just to history, but to scattered fragments of recollection. Griffith became a victim of this abandonment like almost everyone else. Certainly, nobody matched his run of silent epics, which were popularly and critically acclaimed well into the 1920s, thanks to Intolerance (1916), Hearts of the World (1918), Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921). But, as the decade wore on, talking pictures emerged and tastes changed. Griffith’s style of filmmaking was as much a contributory factor to his decline at this stage as was his association with what was even then American cinema’s most notorious movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Despite a foray into talkies – most notably with Abraham Lincoln (1930), almost a complementary piece, some called it a corrective, to Birth – he faded from the scene in a manner recounted many times in the literature concerning the director. Ultimately cast aside, lonely and forgotten by the later 1930s, a number of directors nevertheless did seek Griffith out in the years that followed and utilised his experiences as mentor long after his directorial heyday had vanished.

But, if Griffith’s career went into abeyance, the presence of The Birth of a Nation in his canon, and in wider American film lore, did not disappear. If anything, the unease, criticism and ultimately the disavowing of all the film claimed, stood for and represented became louder and more vociferous as the years went by. Griffith rather grandly proclaimed that he had set out to reform and even save the fledgling film industry he was intimately involved with as it took off in the 1910s. As Lary May writes, Griffith’s need to use every technical and compositional technique available was driven by an almost puritanical desire to reflect and reveal the world to his audience through film, its possibilities and transformative effect upon society. Innocence driven by purity, saintly women and mothers protecting the sanctity of the American family, ‘a composed Arcadia ... bringing a sense of divine order’, as Alan Bilton has termed it.³ No wonder May sees Griffith as a kind of ‘revivalist preacher’ in the form that the young David had been said to hear as a child.⁴ But, over time, technique and cinematic creativity became simply the apologetic cover for something more dreaded and deceitful lurking in Griffith’s vision that couldn’t be ignored; a conception of race and racism in America that was rooted in the nation’s inability to reconcile the horrors of slavery. Thus, the film faced increasing opposition to its constant revivals in the inter-war years, and a significant critical backlash in the 1960s. By the 1970s James Baldwin was describing The Birth of a Nation as ‘an elaborate justification of mass murder’.⁵

From Birth’s initial release, however, on through Griffith’s subsequent retreat from the limelight in the 1930s, and into a post-war world where Hollywood’s early history remained lauded in cineaste circles, some filmmakers who had admired him were prepared to turn a blind eye to the controversy that his film continued to generate, their objections to the film seemingly blindsided by the brilliance they saw in his art. This uneasy respect from the establishment reached its zenith when the Directors Guild of America (DGA) instituted the D. W. Griffith Award in 1953 as its highest honour. It was forty-six years later before the then president, Jack Shea, rebranded the prize the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, citing The Birth of a Nation’s modern reception and the racial intolerance it promoted as a reason why the honour should no longer be associated with Griffith and his beliefs. It had taken the industry the best part of half a century to catch up with the prevailing social and cultural climate, but now Birth’s inflammatory presentation, and Griffith’s long-standing defence of his movie, finally brought out into the open ruptures that had been festering for a hundred years.

As Michael Rogin famously described it, right from the beginning Griffith’s film seemed less a route to understanding history and more a replacement for it.⁶ When Griffith had a synchronised sound treatment added in the 1930s in an attempt to revive the movie’s popularity in towns and cities where it had only been intermittently shown, protests and campaigns inevitably followed.⁷ By the late twentieth century, as the DGA repudiation demonstrated, the film and Griffith had become a poisonous legacy of attitudes that were believed to be rooted in another time. In the twenty-first century, however, as the Trump era was going to demonstrate, those attitudes had not in fact faded into the past but were very much present in places and communities where the misconstrued history Griffith once presented was still received as gospel.

And the film’s legacy too, as bad as it was, simply wouldn’t die. Revival in the twenty-first century was, however, less a re-evaluation of the movie’s position than it was a reconstitution of the principles that had made the picture so problematic in the first place. For just as Oscar Micheaux had attempted to quickly redress the scars of Birth in his affirmatory presentation of the ‘new Negro’ in the north and mid-west in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Within Our Gates (1920), so the likes of Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) recast the movie as Rebirth of a Nation (2007) in a sound and visual hip-hop mash-up commissioned by the Lincoln Center in New York. This edited-down version homed in on the film’s racial epithets and overt prejudices through the look, pose and behaviour of characters in certain scenes, all played out to the accompaniment of Spooky’s music aided by the Kronos Quartet.

DJ Spooky is only one of several well-known artists in recent years to grapple with the legacy of The Birth of a Nation. Its importance to US culture – unwanted as it was from many quarters – is thus illustrated by its pervasiveness, albeit at times in oblique ways. Alfred Leslie’s film, Birth of a Nation, which was released fifty years after Griffith’s film, references, and sought to revise, the earlier movie, but was never completed. The Birth of a Nation was famously mocked by Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), while Spike Lee included a montage of Griffith’s film in Bamboozled (2000), along with other examples of pernicious US racist culture. The film makes an appearance in Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), underscoring the ways that Griffith’s unwelcome masterpiece refuses to go away. Indeed, the film was included in the National Film Registry in 1993, while five years later the American Film Institute named The Birth of a Nation one of the hundred Best Films of the Century.

Baldwin’s assessment of The Birth of a Nation as ‘an elaborate justification of mass murder’ was accompanied by his acknowledgement of the film as ‘one of the great classics of the American cinema’, a paradox that is played out in Peter Bogdanovich’s comedy-drama Nickelodeon, a film about the early days of the movie business (1976). When a silent-era filmmaker, Leo Harrigan, attends the premiere of The Clansman – which was shortly retitled The Birth of a Nation – he is pictured looking despondent while the audience bestows a raucous standing ovation to Griffith’s film. Harrigan, played by Ryan O’Neal, is downcast it seems, not because of the film’s appalling racism, but because he is aware that he cannot make such a dramatic film.

All these examples trod an uneasy path between recognition and revulsion as the art and influence of American film gathered pace over the years. Then in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival, Fox Searchlight Pictures paid a festival record $17.5 million to purchase the rights to director Nate Parker’s retelling of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia during August 1831. Parker titled his film, The Birth of a Nation, a self-conscious choice designed to upbraid and once more expose cultural America’s most contested and scurrilous piece of art. Parker’s screening of his movie at Sundance seemed inconceivably apt, for it hitched the title to a series of racial events going on in the nation at large during the 2010s that his historicisation of Turner’s uprising seemingly became an echo of. ‘The Birth of a Nation presented itself as an indispensable document not only of the country’s brutal past but also of its inflamed and polarised present. There was no question that you would have to see it,’ suggested A. O. Scott’s later review in the New York Times.⁸ From the spate of violence perpetrated against African Americans – often instigated by law enforcement – to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement via the mendacious and ultimately divisive juggernaut that was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, all of these events swirled around the film’s festival debut as if the lessons of Turner’s insurrection nearly two centuries before were specifically designed for the forces buffeting contemporary America. To an increasingly fearful public, the odds seemed bafflingly long that a film 101 years after the last with the exact same title should play to the same prevailing predilections and fears as those that rested on American shoulders in the early years of the twentieth century.

The talk at Sundance in 2016 therefore – on the back of the film’s Grand Jury and Audience prizes – was of Academy Awards, of the most important Black film of the decade if not the century so far, and of the emergence of a Black ‘auteur’ finally ready to document a new birth of racism and prejudice in, supposedly, post-racial America.⁹ As if to prove the necessity of Parker’s film and the point of his title, the Oscars had just produced a nominations list for that season’s awards which, despite outstanding contributions from Black artists in a number of productions, was all-white in its appreciation.¹⁰ The time seemed ripe, therefore, a century on from Griffith’s marker of reactionary intent, to take back African American culture, art and progress, and Parker was seen as the man to do this.

The ‘new’ Birth of a Nation never won its place in the pantheon, however. Indeed, it barely crossed the start line and, by the autumn of 2016, had largely been side-lined, lost amid the allegations of sexual assault that emerged from Parker’s past. He found himself answering questions about a 1999 case which had taken place during college far more than he spent time promoting the film, to the extent that the storyline’s historical veracity and Parker’s judgement for inclusion of a rape scene that appeared never to have taken place were severely criticised. Parker had been cleared of the charges back then but, adding to the controversy, his friend and now filmmaking partner, Jean Celestin – who was co-story accredited on The Birth of a Nation – had not.

When, finally, The Birth of a Nation went on general release in October 2016, its box-office return was a disappointing $16 million, prompting Fox Searchlight to cancel the film’s theatrical release in parts of South-East Asia, Latin America and Europe. In October 2016, Vinson Cunningham wrote of the movie’s tumultuous year in The New Yorker. Cunningham’s account wasn’t leaning heavily on a character study of Parker, but his words about The Birth of a Nation’s faded credibility were marked: ‘The early euphoria surrounding the movie was prompted by the way it seemed to answer the demands of its time’, he commented, going on to suggest that the picture’s attention to the political zeitgeist masked a number of cinematic flaws in Parker’s direction and performance.¹¹ By the closing months of the year, while racism and factionalism grew ever more heated, the end game of a tumultuous election campaign drew nearer and the unlikely prospect of Trump as president became a dawning reality. In early 2017 renewed focus on the rights and position of women in society, culminating in a series of marches across America the day after Trump’s inauguration, drew on evidence against the new and openly misogynistic chief executive, while Parker and his film had by now been all but shunned. In February 2017, another Black director and writer, Barry Jenkins, won the Best Picture Oscar for Moonlight, a filmmaker Cunningham had highlighted the previous October as someone, along with Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler, whose work, contrary to Parker’s, ‘addresses urgent material by genuinely original means’.¹²

Moonlight’s ages-of-man storyline follows the trials and tribulations of Chiron as he negotiates the poverty-riddled communities of Liberty City in Miami. Jenkins’s focus on coming-of-age identity and sexual awakening allied to a sub-plot focusing on rigid law enforcement and lack of social provision tapped into just the sort of issues American society and film were fixing upon in 2016–17. Moonlight complemented historically oriented pieces such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit and Jeff Nichols’s Loving (both 2017) that cast a spotlight upon sixties police brutality and inter-racial marriage, all of which seemed ever more pressing in the wake of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others, as well as the events in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, and later Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Parker’s film wasn’t Griffith’s, not a reworking, nor a reaction to or condemnation of Griffith’s polemic in the way Micheaux’s and, later, Spooky’s works were. Yet in so many ways, a century after Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s Birth promised some sort of cinematic catharsis. But events conspired so that the long-overdue explosion of Black cinema into the mainstream arrived courtesy of other filmmakers than Parker, presenting very different kinds of correctives to Griffith’s invective a century before.

The films released around the same time and following Parker’s Nat Turner movie only added to the sense that the weight of The Birth of a Nation’s hundred-year legacy was finally being thrown off in the aftermath of a series of Black cinematic successes. Filmmakers like Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You), Kasi Lemmons (Harriet) as well as Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) and of course Spike Lee continued to push the boundaries of what African American visual art could achieve, forcing the legacy of Griffith’s film into a multitude of contested cultural spaces, historical, penal, legal and political. Lee especially, appropriating some of Griffith’s most incendiary visuals for his movie BlacKkKlansman in 2018, positioned Birth next to the barely believable and yet true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington). An African American cop from Colorado Springs who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan by posing on the phone as a white man, Stallworth maintains the illusion by having his Jewish police partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) represent him at Klan rallies. In one scene Zimmerman as Stallworth attends a Klan screening of The Birth of a Nation, complete with running commentaries and hallelujahs from the robed audience in praise of the Klan’s on-screen actions, notably the scene in the film where Gus (Walter Long) is murdered, and his body dumped outside the Lynch family home.

Lee’s portrayal is of an organisation wracked by internal disputes with self-interested characters distantly removed from the realities of society at large. Theirs is a prejudicial warping of reality where everything and anyone not fitting their delusional view of the world are damned or dismissed, demonstrating that BlacKkKlansman was really the conscious subjugation of Griffith’s presentation that Hollywood had been waiting for.

Griffith had boasted of industry reform at the height of his career and arguably attempted to sidestep that which Robert Sklar summed up in his classic Movie-Made America, quoting Bertrand Russell. ‘All industries are brought under the control of capitalism’, said Russell. ‘You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.’¹³ Griffith might have sided more with Steve Ross’s excellent account of working-class Hollywood in stating that art in the movies could be matched by financial returns and greater and better patronage in the theatres. ‘Improve your pictures and you will improve the class of patrons who come to your theatre’, the Nickelodeon magazine was reported to have said at the height of Griffith’s dominance.¹⁴ Ross means idealism and social responsibility as a form of quality too and there is evidence to believe that Griffith sincerely meant to inscribe his movies, including Birth, with that kind of cultural charge. He preached ‘catharsis not change’, suggests Ross, and forged a relationship with working people who watched his films by representing them on screen as from good American stock. That’s not to say that Griffith failed to spot social tensions and mixed, melting-pot messages.¹⁵ The Musketeers of Pig Alley in 1912 – pre-Birth – is a gangster movie showing how those from different social strata can be flung together by circumstance, while Way Down East (1920), post-Birth, sees rural waif Lillian Gish’s world turned upside down when she becomes involved with small-town gadfly Lowell Sherman (Lennox Sanderson). Some of these attendant social realisations made Birth’s reactionary racism difficult to fathom, but Griffith’s strident defence of the movie’s bigotry made his social observations in other films redundant in any case.

Whether ‘quality’ in all its manifestations helped the exponential growth of cinema in the 1910s or not, Hollywood as the specific geographical epicentre of the industry was consolidated by Griffith’s influential period of production. In 1914 Hollywood already produced around half the world’s movies. Five years later, it made 90 per cent. By 1921, Hollywood was a $1 billion industry.¹⁶ So, if by reform Griffith meant to establish a working capital-orientated industry capable of generating huge profits for feature-length stories, then reform was certainly his to claim. His involvement with the creation of United Artists would add some further evidence to this. Quite simply, Griffith consciously made bigger pictures; and bigger to the self-realising extent that, as he himself had done in making 300–500 films for Biograph in his first few years, well-made, decently reviewed, well-attended one-reel pictures were all well and good, but film could generate untold publicity, debate and even action, given the right circumstances. In other words, Griffith brought simple old-fashioned ambition to the process – ambition on a scale never conceived by raising cinema up by its bootstraps to become no longer an end-of-the-pier, sideshow affair, but a full-blown artistic and socio-cultural vehicle for all. The Birth of a Nation did those things of course, but ultimately exposed Griffith’s industrial template to the common though dangerous belief that any and all publicity, however bad, was somehow a boon to the film colony. He thought he and the industry could survive anything; and the fact that he continued