[In the following essay, Noble outlines the racist trappings of The Birth of a Nation.]

Griffith has one of the great poetic minds of the cinema. He ranks with Chaplin, Von Stroheim and René Clair among the immortals of the screen, and it is in no way meant to decry his genius that I draw attention to a facet of his work which has not been fully examined. I refer to his anti-Negro bias, as demonstrated in that otherwise superb film The Birth of a Nation and in such of his later films as One Exciting Night. He is indeed a pioneer, but a pioneer of prejudice!

The Birth of a Nation is one of the cornerstones of the cinema as we know it now. It is a magnificent and impressive film, containing many lessons applicable to modern film production. Griffith pioneered a number of techniques still used in film-making today, and the immense sweep and power of this epoch-making production (as well as such others as Intolerance and Orphans of the Storm), will always reserve for him a place among the great ones of the silent screen.

Yet the film has a certain, unsavoury significance which cannot be forgotten when its subject, racial intolerance, is still as urgent today as it was when Griffith directed The Birth of a Nation. It was, indeed, the first important movie to devote much of its length to an attack on Negroes, and the monumental achievement of this film was, in the opinion of many critics, marred by its vicious distortion and strongly partisan attitude. Griffith was himself a Southerner, brought up with the conventional Southern States attitude to the coloured man and steeped in an atmosphere of racial hatred. In the majestic sweep of Thomas Dickson's novel The Clansman he probably envisaged perfect material for a large-scale epic, and certainly the resultant production was technically and artistically far ahead of any other motion picture of that period. It must be acknowledged that Griffith was a genius, but however great the workmanship, however inspired the direction and however remarkable the acting and production of the film, the fact remains that for sheer vicious distortion The Birth of a Nation heads the considerable list of American motion pictures which have consciously maligned the Negro race.

OBSESSIONS

The great theme of The Clansman covered the eventful period of the American Civil War, tracing the history of two families, one from the North and another from the South, who are estranged by the struggle. We see the happy home in Piedmont of the Southern Colonel with the inevitable stereotypes, the obsequious black Mammy and the faithful Negro retainer. But after we come to the defeat of the South and the period of Reconstruction Griffith allows his imagination to run riot. The Northern politician, Stoneman, a liberal who is in favour of complete emancipation for the Southern Negroes, is depicted as an egotistic and scheming rascal, while his associate, Silas Lynch the mulatto, is shown in a most unfavourable light. When Stoneman becomes the Lieutenant Governor of Piedmont the Negroes, the former slaves, begin to run riot under the new regime; while the Yankee politician, nothing more than a villainous careerist, and the "renegade" Negro leader Lynch plot together to enforce a "black stranglehold" (Griffith's own description) on the defeated South. Also Lynch's lust it seems extends not only to power but to the daughter of Stoneman, and in the final reel the inevitable rape attempt occurs. Villainy and rape—the two main attributes of the coloured man (according to Griffith).

This pathological obsession of some Americans with the Negro rape of white women is remarkable and appears to have occurred with astonishing frequency in American literature of the past hundred years. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation made history in that it marked its first appearance on the screen, not once but twice! In addition to Silas Lynch's attempted rape of Elsie Stoneman, there is also the scene where the Negro Gus, a villainous, frothy-mouthed, pop-eyed caricature (played, incidentally, by a white actor in black-face), drives the Little Colonel's sister to her death in an attempt to outrage her.

In all the sequences dealing with the South the coloured people are shown as swaggering black toughs, elbowing white women off the pavements and indulging in all kinds of brutalities to their former white masters. For example, we see the Negro Parliament in session. Here "the new tyrants of the South" (to quote Griffith again), hold sway, lounge back in their chairs, their bare feet up on their desks, a bottle of whisky in one hand and a leg of chicken in the other. These black monsters are not interested in affairs of State; they desire only revenge on the whites, and content themselves with planning retaliation and intimidating white girls with nods, winks and lewd suggestions. This then is the manner in which Griffith handles the first historical attempt by the American Negroes to govern themselves in that tragic post-war period. The monstrous caricatures of coloured politicians, officials, army officers, soldiers and servants in this film rival anything seen on the screen since that time, with the possible exception of So Red the Rose and Gone With the Wind (both based on novels by Southerners).

The final reel of The Birth of a Nation shows that "heroic" organization, the Klu Klux Klan, sweeping the rebellious blacks out of town. A group of coloured soldiers are besieging a hut where the proud and heroic Cameron family is fighting for its very life; as the murdering Negroes, with bulging eyes and fanatical cries, are breaking down the door for the final kill the white-hooded Klu Klux Klan ride to the rescue. To a burst of Wagnerian music the hooded saviours of the South sweep magnificently over the hill, saving the white family from the black terror. Such a distortion has indeed to be seen to be believed, remembering that the Klan invented that fine old Southern custom of lynching! Many younger filmgoers who have been told about The Birth of a Nation are by no means aware of its almost unbelievable viciousness.

As Lewis Jacobs writes in The Rise of the American Film: "The film was a passionate and persuasive avowal of the inferiority of the Negro. Its viewpoint was narrow and prejudiced.… The social implication of this celebrated picture aroused a storm of protest in the North".

Indeed it did; in California the film was banned and it was also refused a licence for exhibition in a dozen other states. Such prominent American leaders as Oswald Garrison Villard, Jane Addams and Charles Elliot spoke bitterly and often against the showing of the film. The Liberal magazine The Nation described it as "improper, immoral and injurious, a deliberate attempt to humiliate ten million American citizens and to portray them as nothing but beasts".

Historians were quick to point out the many inaccuracies in the film, and generally the effect of Griffith's film upon intelligent people was that of antagonism and indignation. Griffith himself was greatly incensed by the attack on his beloved film and for many years referred to the public protest as deliberately unfair, even going so far as to write and distribute a pamphlet entitled "The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America", which included quotations from magazines and newspapers which had endorsed his film and an impassioned defence by the director. Protests apart, however, The Birth of a Nation caused a sensation and was successfully shown for the next fifteen years, an admitted landmark in film history. But Griffith, who had poured all his spirit into the film, was greatly influenced by the storm which followed its showing. It is said that he relented somewhat and three years later, in 1918, in Hearts of the World he inserted a sequence showing a dying Negro soldier crying for his mother, and a white comrade kissing him as he died. It was a shamelessly sentimental scene, and as Richard Watts, Jr., film critic of New Theatre, remarked "It was a pretty shoddy and futile effort to make up for what he had done in The Birth of a Nation". In Britain the latter film was received with enthusiasm, but many critics attacked it for its unfair handling of a great theme. Oswald Blakeston remarked in Close Up, August 1929: "As a spectacle Griffith's production was awe-inspiring and stupendous; but as a picture of Negro life it was not only false but it has done the Negro irreparable harm. And no wonder since it was taken from a purile novel, The Clansman, a book written to arouse racial hate by appealing to the basest passions of the semi-literate".

THIRTY YEAR CONTROVERSY

The film has caused controversy for thirty years; as late as 1931 it was banned in Philadelphia, after the Mayor had declared it "prejudicial to peace between the black and white races". It is surely ironic that a film which was an enormous financial success and which established Griffith as one of the greatest film directors of all time should have this blot upon its name, and it is indeed a pity that a film which occupies a place of honour among the memorable achievements of the cinema could still bear such responsibility for a great and incalculable harm. Thirty years ago it constituted a direct incitement to race riot, and seeing it today still tends to leave a nasty taste in the mouth.

In 1922 Griffith directed One Exciting Night, perhaps the first, certainly the most striking, example of the use of the Negro as the contemptible comic relief. It provides an interesting sidelight on how a director steeped in anti-Negro prejudice can influence his audience. The coloured character in this film, played incidentally by a white actor in black-face—since Griffith apparently would never employ a Negro actor in any role of prominence—commenced the long line of those well-known screen puppets, the cowardly black men whose hair turns white or stands on end when they meet danger in any form. They are afraid of the dark, of thunderstorms, of fire-arms, of animals, of police, and so on. In this film, Griffith showed how to portray the coloured man as a figure of contempt, and for his treatment of the Negro character in One Exciting Night he must be accorded the dubious honour of having commenced the long, long trail of celluloid depicting the Negro as a frightened, shivering wretch, lily-livered, weak-kneed, stupid and almost bestial. In The Birth of a Nation Griffith portrayed the coloured man with hatred, and nine years later, in One Exciting Night, with contempt. He had made some "progress". (And yet he had the presumption to make a film called Intolerance])

At a time when a spate of lynchings in the Southern States and the race-proud and fascist outpourings of such American politicians as the notorious Senator Bilbo it is well to reflect what harm can be wrought by films. It is now a truism to remark, as Thomas Edison once did, "Whoever controls the motion picture industry controls the most powerful medium of influence over the people", for this is well-known and accepted; but it is not perhaps realised to what extent Hollywood has contributed towards the existence of renewed racial prejudice. Today, in these turbulent post-war years, thirteen million Negroes in the United States are waiting anxiously. They want to know whether they are to become full citizens of the U. S. A., or return to those dark days before the war, times of persecution and injustice. And it is as well at this time to take stock of Griffith's contribution to past prejudice. Their artistic merit apart, his two films The Birth of a Nation and One Exciting Night form the feet of clay of this idol of the cinema, and his shortcomings must never be forgotten whenever his genius is referred to.