The not-entirely-pure evil of "The Birth of a Nation"

"The Little Colonel" (Henry B. Walthall) performs a stupid and futile but nevertheless rousing gesture in Griffith's film.

In his December 2012 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Quentin Tarantino notes of Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen, that it "really can only stand next to Mein Kampf when it comes to just its ugly imagery." To which Gates replies, "It's pure evil." As they continue to chat, Tarantino and Gates conflate The Clansmen with The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith's 1915 adaptation of Dixon's work, and Gates, after Tarantino avows that he doesn't use the word "evil" lightly, continues, apropos the film, "And a foundational moment in the history of cinema."

There indeed is the rub, and for as long as there is cinema, and cinephiles, and cinema historians, The Birth of a Nation will be maybe the greatest "problem picture" of all time, greater by far than The Triumph of the Will. While Riefenstahl's picture seems to us frozen in an unspeakable historical moment, its fascist aesthetics ever-ossifying into a species of malevolent kitsch, in the United States of America Griffith's vehemently racist vision is never not relevant, to use a word I'm not particularly fond of. A formulation I'm not particularly fond of either is the "what-we-talk-about-when" one; on the occasions it comes up, my reflexive response begins with "what do you mean 'we'?" Nevertheless, seeing how Gates and Tarantino talk about Nation reminds one that the movie's position as a film maudit is as singular as its position as a defining masterwork of epic American film. It is a film that literally cursed itself, by dint of the brutality of its racism; and the curse it put upon itself grows uglier year after year. 

Chatting with Gates, Tarantino extrapolates Griffith, the Kentucky-born-and-raised son of a Confederate colonel, as a man obsessed, and paints his obsession as an entirely malevolent one. "[I]t's one thing for the grandson [sic] of a bloody Confederate officer to bemoan how times have changed -- some old racist Southern old-timer bemoaning how life has changed, complaining that there was a day when you never saw a n--ger [sic] on Main Street, and now you do. Well, if he's just going to sit on his porch and sit in his rocking chair and pop off lies, who cares? That's not making The Birth of a Nation every day for a year, and financing it yourself." As if the entirety of the labor put into Nation was in the service of black subjugation. Tarantino has a vivid imagination, and a lot of general stuff going on in his head, but one might expect that, being a a filmmaker himself he could conceive that the day to day making of this film might not have been entirely a case of getting up every morning and saying "Time to get to subjugating the Negro!"

That said, I also don't expect Tarantino to be able to simulate a frame of mind in which The Birth of a Nation was actually NOT an effort driven wholly by malevolent intent, and I'm not sure it would be socially, spiritually, or intellectually useful for anybody to try to do same. Anyway, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, we have a historical record from which we can discover exactly what such a frame of mind was able to come up with in defense of Griffith's vision. As in: 

"Today, Birth of a Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; not can I be sure that the film won’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years."

I was thinking of doing an "anyone in class care to guess, put your hands down [names of critics X, Y, and Z]" joke here, but that would be too coy. Anyway: yes, that was James Agee, writing in The Nation, no less, in a 1948 obituary for Griffith. Too which one may respond, particularly if one has watched Birth of a Nation recently (I just did, on the splendid Kino Lorber Blu-ray disc presentation), define "fair." Because, man, oh man. Between the self-pitying resentment, the schizzy miscegenation paranoia, and all the other racial neuroses-to-psychoses filtered through overheated post-Victorian melodrmatic tropes (the building blocks from which Griffith constructed his new model of cinematic narrative), the prominent racial observation of The Birth of a Nation is "the only tolerable Negro is a subservient Negro," which, you know, doesn't strike me as "fair." And yet James Agee thought it was? How can this be? Note the care with which he chooses his words, and the note of ambiguity in the placement of one of them: that Griffith went to lengths to be fair "to the Negroes as he understood them" AND that Griffith understood them "as a good type of Southerner does." The ambiguous word for me there is "good." But inasmuch as these words offer us a window into not just Agee's head in 1948, but a sentiment that it was not entirely disagreeable to articulate in The Nation in 1948, so too do Tarantino's words offer a window into what "we" think, or may think, Griffith's attitude and intentions were. We see them only as hateful. We are literally incapable of extending the sympathy to observe that Griffith saw/understood blacks "as a good Southerner would." By the same token, as amazingly constructed as the Klan-to-the-rescue climax of Birth of a Nation is, we are all in a sense socially prohibited (scratch the: not "in a sense" or even "socially" prohibited; more like, prohibited by the strictures of human decency itself) from permitting it to manipulate our sympathies as it intends/demands. In his 1915 account of the movie, the poet and writer Vachel Lindsay says of Nation that is "a crowd picture in a triple sense." Discussing the climax, he rhapsodizes: "So, in Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over a cliff. Finallt the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann). The lady is brought forward as a typically helpless white maiden. The white leader, Col. Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara. He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed. The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes. As a result this rescue is a real climax, something that photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve."

Despite the eccentric undertones of his analysis, Lindsay, among other things, nailed why Nation was/is a "foundational moment in the history of cinema." "Real climax" is something greater than it sounds like, and it is not found even in the cinematic achievements one might be more comfortable with than Griffith's film. (As in, what if it was Feuillade's Fantomas? But it isn't/wasn't, and can't be.) Lindsay loves Griffith's storytelling, and his heart, so much that he seeks fo absolve him by trying to extract him from Dixon's vision: "Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors. Wheeever the scenario shows traces of The Clansmen, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good. The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree; in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character."

It's very kind of Lindsay, but one need only look at the film, an uncomfortable thing to do, to realize that every frame of Nation carries the same level of conviction. It is very sad. And often very peculiar. From the prologue with the title card saying "The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion" to the odd formulation of Abraham Lincoln as the "great heart" who pardons future Klan founder Ben "The Little Colonel" Cameron when he's slated to be hanged for guerilla warfare and who, before heading to the theater to be shot by Raoul Walsh,  promises to treat the South as if it had never seceded, the movie's first section has these little rueful sentimental touches, not to mention reasonably powerful pacifist pleading moments, to give one the impression of Griffith as a relatively gentle-souled epic maker. Then, an hour and a half into a three-hour-plus movie, up pops the title card "This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstuction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” And then, if you'll pardon the phrase, it's off to the races, with a couple of ugly citations from future fan of the film Woodrow Wilson, about "men who knew nothing of the uses of authority, except it insolences" and of "a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South." (By the way, did you know that Larry the Cable Guy is actually from Nebraska?) 

Here is what I wrote in my notes while watching it the other night: "Hey, remember that title card about five minutes ago? The immediacy of the images and the broadness of the performances pretty much wipes out THAT disclaimer. There’s really no getting round it: whatver the narrative necessity of setting these characters up as villains might have been, the execution of this can only be characterized as VEHEMENT." The film's quiet, sincere depictions of the privations the South suffered during the war, mentions of meals of "parched corn and sweet potato coffee," the description of raw cotton's use as "Southern ermine;" these now seem setups to rationalize the unrelentingly hateful portrayals of the likes of Thadeus-Stevens-pastiche Stoneman, smugly strutting Silas Lynch, "mulatto leader of the blacks[...]traitor to his white patron and a greater traitor to his own people," and whoever that black soldier is who chases poor Flora Cameron off that cliff. The dignified smiles of the blacks in the rafters of the House at the climax of Spielberg's Lincoln can, on some level, be understood as an answer scene to the repellent burlesque of the celebration of the racial intermarriage legislation in Griffith's film. But this, as we'll see, is maybe too genteel a reparation to the contemporary audience. The founding inspiration for the Klan is presaged by a lyrical picture practically out of Wordsworth, and followed by the proud intertitle statement "Over four hundred thousand Ku Klux costumes made by the women of the South and not one trust betrayed." Which may move an observant viewer to yell at the screen "Where did you crackers get the damn MATERIAL if you were so bad off?"

It's all terribly appalling, and yet you'd have to be an entire cinematic illiterate not to see and, yes, maybe feel the skill with which Griffith pulls off his to-the-rescue "real climax" with barely minutes to spare in the film's running time. A few years ago, the critic Terry Teachout wrote about Nation as a film that "has served its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently," and avowed, prior to making that pronouncment, that it was also pretty boring, which was one reason WHY it could be swept aside: "Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d’art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don’t speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film—not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it—is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities."

This notion that the mean of "modern sensibility" as circumscribed by the critic is all that counts from said critical perspective is going to have to wait, and probably for a long time (see also Stephen Metcalf's immortal bit about The Searchers being "off-putting to the contemporary sensibility," oh dearie dear). But here's the thing: let's say that you are not Terry Teachout, and you do not process the film as bring "slow" but rather you apprehend both its pace and its overall cinematic language differently and as part of a continuum that continues to this day: in that case, whatever the fuck you think about early Renaissance music or what have you, the climax of The Birth of a Nation is going to "play" for you; that's the extent to which it is, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., rightly put it, a "foundational moment." But what, now, is its proper place in "our" construction of cinematic history/heritage. And while the fashion has it that Birth of a Nation is some form of evil, what is the place of Django Unchained as an "answer film" to Griffith? (Tarantino has talked of his ur-Klan comedic fillip in the film as his "fuck you" to the earlier director, who died a near-penniless alcoholic forgotten by the industry he helped create, so even if he were able to receive Quentin's flip-off, it is not likely he'd be overly impressed.) And also, why isn't anyone talking about the Klan as it's represented in Gone With The Wind? So many questions.

In any event, a film in which the protagonist dryly exults "I get to kill white people and get paid for it?" is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office in these United States. Interesting payback for a nearly hundred-year-old insult, for sure. And a reminder that whoever "we" are talking about, "Give Peace A Chance" is not and never will be "our" new jam.

Comments

[David Ehrenstein]

Which is of course something you're not guilty of at all.

[Petey]

"So David Ehrenstein calls Tarantino a "racist asshole." It takes one to know one. They're both indulging in hysterical, over-the-top rhetoric, for the purpose of calling attention to themselves."

Only minor difference is that Tarantino is a gifted filmmaker who has provided pleasure to millions of viewers and Ehrenstein is just Ehrenstein...

[george]

OK, let's forget about Ehrenstein, if we can. Trolls sometimes go away if you ignore him.

As Andrew O'Heir pointed out, the most unsettling thing about Tarantino's televised meltdown was how aggrieved he was that a reported dared ask him real questions, and how unprepared he was for them. He behaved the same way (though not as insulting) when Terri Gross asked them on NPR a few weeks ago.

QT has been making violent movies for more than 20 years. He's had plenty of time to think about these questions, and come up with a coherent answer. He should have known the questions would come up at this time; he's out promoting an ultra-violent revenge movie right after a horrific massacre.

Maybe he needs to spend more time in the real world, talking to real people instead of worshipful fanboys.

[Petey]

"As Andrew O'Heir pointed out, the most unsettling thing about Tarantino's televised meltdown..."

I apologize on Quentin's behalf for unsettling your delicate sensibilities.

I fully understand how his departure for his normal mild-mannered persona could cause such unsettlement in a viewer, but that's no excuse.

[David Ehrenstein]

"Maybe he needs to spend more time in the real world, talking to real people instead of worshipful fanboys."

Indeed. But that's not likely to happen in a filmmaking atmosphere dominated by fanboys.

[BobSolo]

"I actually don't see the problem with Tarantino refusing to answer the interviewer's question"

I normally wouldn't but the fact that he's a prominent part of that Demand A Plan campaign and is sometimes lazily reliant on violence (and, for that matter, racism) as a punchline makes the question a pertinent one.

[Petey]

"I normally wouldn't but the fact that he's a prominent part of that Demand A Plan campaign and is sometimes lazily reliant on violence (and, for that matter, racism) as a punchline makes the question a pertinent one."

In other words, Tarantino's handling of the interviewer's question makes him a worse version of D.W. Griffith.

[Jonah]

I'm afraid all these grand pronouncements about BOAN's singularity and it being "the feature film that laid the groundwork for the 'formula' for all future feature films," whatever that means, are a few decades out of date. The robust study of cinema's first decades, undertaken by scholars for the last 35+ years, has revealed that Griffith was but one--important--person contributing to the development of what Tom Gunning calls a "cinema of narrative integration." As formally perfect as some sequences in BOAN are (and to me the most commanding sequence is the one at Ford's Theater, a model of action-scene construction that today's directors could do worse than studying closely), they are equalled by sequences in many of Griffith's two-reel Biograph films.

And there are other American feature films of the year 1915, notably Walsh's REGENERATION and DeMille's THE CHEAT (not to mention several films by William S. Hart) that are equally impressive--and many of these are closer than BOAN, in their film grammar, to what we now think of as the "classical style." Indeed, Griffith's late shorts and feature films begin to look idiosyncratic, even old-fashioned, in some ways (his "dollbox"-like portrayal of interior spaces, for example) though this hardly diminishes their poetry or force.

This is not to deny BOAN's social (or indeed economic--it was an enormous success) significance. But some of the claims made for it here are way off-base. I'm not sure what folks mean when they write that BOAN introduced some new model of film narrative. Are they referring to its use of parallel editing? This is, of course, one of Griffith's preferred techniques, but his use of it dates back to nearly the beginning of his work in film and he was by no means the only American filmmaker to make use of it (hell, there's parallel editing in FANTOMAS, albeit of a more attentuated sort).

FWIW the young NAACP published a pamphlet, "Fighting a Vicious Film," to protest the race-hatred and bad history (which was nonetheless accepted history by many historians of the period!) in BOAN. So there were major social actors who saw the film for exactly what it was at the time. And frankly Vachel Lindsay seems to be biting his tongue quite severely in the excerpt you quote above.

It was the censorship of BOAN, often justified by a need to avert race riots (or even because the film was simply deemed offensive) that seems to have inspired Griffith to make INTOLERANCE. Although many read INTOLERANCE as an apology for BOAN, it's more like Griffith standing his ground, identifying his critics via cross-cutting with a variety of historical villains. Frankly, the governing concept of INTOLERANCE always seemed completely nonsensical to me (and to some of the critics of its day), and its triumph is almost wholly formal.

[Jonah]

erratum: When I wrote "two-reel," I meant to write "one- and two-reel."

[george]

Along with "The Cheat," the 1915-16 serial "Les Vampires" impresses me more than "Birth of a Nation" or "Intolerance." Not to mention Chaplin's Mutual shorts.

[David Ehrenstein]

Glad you brought that up, George. "les Vampires and "The Birth of A Nation " came out the same year. Feuillade's a far more inventive filmmaker than Griffith

[Thomas]

While we're on the subject of underappreciated films from the 1910s, I feel like mentioning that I've been really impressed by some of the films that came out of Sweden at the time (particularly from Sjostrom and Stiller.) "Ingeborg Holm," "Sir Arne's Treasure," and "A Man There Was" are up there with "Regeneration," "L'enfant de Paris," and the Feuillade serials as my favorite things to come out of the decade.

They're dramatically compelling and they feel a lot less "stagy" than the films of most of their contemporaries - which probably has a lot to do with their pioneering (?) use of location shooting and wide vistas.

[george]

I've been watching restored Chaplin Keystones on YouTube, and I can finally see why audiences responded to Chaplin so immediately in 1914. You can finally SEE Chaplin's facial expressions in the restored films. I grew up watching the duped-a-million-times prints that were available in the '70s and '80s, where Chaplin's face was just a white blob.

Being able to see these films, in a condition close to what people originally saw, has forced me to upgrade my opinion of them. I wonder if Walter Kerr was watching shoddy, duped prints when he panned Keystone in "The Silent Clowns."

[george]

David E., there's probably more we agree on than disagree. I know from your posts at the Siren's blog and your various writing that you're a smart guy. I just don't dislike Tarantino as much as you seem to. But I do have mixed feelings about him.

I think most of us loved QT when he emerged in the early '90s. He was a movie geek, like us. He had seen the same obscure B films we had seen. And his tastes were more down-to-earth than Scorsese's (Sergio Corbucci instead of Michael Powell).

That said, Tarantino is not above criticism. As Glenn said, he's a "grown-ass man." He'll be 50 in March, and he needs to do a more adult job of handling criticism and tough questions.

Tarantino is regarded as the screen's current maestro of violence, the Sam Peckinpah of our time. He should know people are going to ask these questions about "links" between movies and real life violence. He may think the questions are stupid (and some of them are), but he should respond in a grown-up manner.

[MDL]

So this is the thread where we claim Tarantino is a racist but DW Griffith was not? Funny the way that works. We nudge DW up a bit and forgive him and then push QE down a bit and claim what he really means to say - curiously making them equals! Odd film world.

[BobSolo]

Yes MDL! That's exactly what this is! Thank you for breaking it down in such simplistic, reductive terms for all of us! A great contribution! You're work here is done!

[Petey]

"Yes MDL! That's exactly what this is!"

No. It seems to be a way to excuse Birth of a Nation's racist politics by randomly bringing up an utterly unrelated Quentin Tarantino INTERVIEW question.

Thank you for aggressively participating in said effort, BobSolo. I'd say you've got all the skills necessary to participate on cable TV news shows. As you seem well aware, the first rule is to to obfuscate via irrelevant lines of attack.

[BobSolo]

I'd like to know where I excused BOAN's racist politics, Petey. Please purify my obfuscated mind.

[Petey]

"I'd like to know where I excused BOAN's racist politics, Petey."

It seems as if there are SEVERAL recent comment threads where your bizarre little hobbyhorse of the Tarantino interview on filmic violence would not be epically off-topic. This is not one of them. Why choose this particular thread to ramble epically off-topic when you could choose between several other recent threads and ramble only moderately off-topic?

"Please purify my obfuscated mind."

I'm not claiming your mind to be obfuscated. (Although that is certainly one possible explanation. Never totally ignore the possibility that the commenter is simply nescient.) I'm claiming you are obfuscating. There is an important distinction between the active and passive voice that seems to elude you here.

[Tom Block]

Flame wars sure aren't what they used to be.

[george]

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/tarantino_drops_the_n_bomb_backstage_at_the_globes/

It never ends, does it?

[DB]

"And there are other American feature films of the year 1915, notably Walsh's REGENERATION and DeMille's THE CHEAT (not to mention several films by William S. Hart"

DeMille, Walsh, Hart (etc) were building on what Griffith had already done in short form - and no feature length film up to BOAN juggled such dramatic changes of pace with such fluid mastery as BOAN. Someone can sniff that "Les Vampires" was more 'impressive' - but that's because the cinematic syntax that Griffith 'perfected' has become so much the 'standard' form that it's completely taken for granted - whereas there is a certain 'exotic' quality to the rather static Les Vampires because it's impact on the developing cinematic language was minimal. I actually really like "A Child in Paris" but again, the series of grand tableaux are not nearly as innovative as what Griffith was doing. Maybe one way of putting it is that most filmmakers were primarily standing outside the action looking at it like a painting or a stage, whereas Griffith got us INSIDE the action as if we were participants.

It's all fine and good to look back at Griffith films from a modern perspective, but another to see a lot of the mostly-forgotten films of his contemporaries and trace things leading up to BOAN. I'd say, 'good luck' finding a quote from Raoul Walsh, William S. Hart of Cecil B. DeMille putting Griffith down for not being 'all that in terms of technical innovation. The people working at the time UNDERSTOOD what it was he brought to the table.

[David Ehrenstein]

No it never ends.

[Jonah]

DB: I pointedly did _not_ say Griffith wasn't a master or an innovator! My post wasn't intended to disparage Griffith, just to throw some cold water on some of the outsized claims made for BOAN in particular.

But I stand by my assertion that Griffith wasn't the only master or the only innovator in American cinema of the 1900s and 1910s, and that you can't reduce/simplify his contribution to establishing a template for all other feature films to come! That's a claim no single film, or no single director, can bear; it relies on the assumption that BOAN arrived in a kind of vacuum, an assumption one can make only if they're not familiar with other American films of the era.

While there are undoubtedly elements of Griffith's techniques that were among those that coalesced into what we think of as a stable, "classical" style, there are other elements that, while forceful and often beautiful, were not really absorbed in the same way. BOAN is not simply "the first important film" or "the film that introduced film grammar" or "the model for feature film narrative" or whatever other silly claims are made for it; its achievement is more idiosyncratic and specific than that.

I didn't use Feuillade as a means of bashing Griffith (that came after my post), and I don't see any reason to do so now. Film history would be much poorer if we lost films by either one. FWIW my favorite director of the era remains Victor Sjöström, who bridges the gulf between the editing-based and tableau styles of Griffith and Feuillade. If I meet someone skeptical about silent film, I tell them to seek out THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE.

[Gordon Cameron]

>But I stand by my assertion that Griffith wasn't the only master or the only innovator in American cinema of the 1900s and 1910s, and that you can't reduce/simplify his contribution to establishing a template for all other feature films to come!

I hope nobody claims he was the only innovator in that time period -- even a simplistic rendering of film history (such as I received in a college survey course) makes plentiful allowance for Porter pre-1910.

[DB]

Let me be clear about one thing, I wish Birth of a Nation had NOT been so groundbreaking and so effective - it pushed an abhorrent message which contributed to a great deal of misery of so many Americans and that is a real tragedy.

However.

I do think that if not for Birth of a Nation, 'classical cinema' would not look the way it does now.

It is the overwhelming success of Griffith's vision that makes it almost impossible to see what a genius he was. But if you step back and regard what the initial technology of motion pictures were - there were few or no precedents in other art forms for say, reverse angles, for point of view shots, for cross cutting. For the 'flow' of a scene going from a master shot to a two shot to matching over the shoulder shots to a close up.

I would not doubt that other filmmakers may have come up with some or all these isolated innovations before Griffith did - but he's the one who put everything together as a fluid, coherent mirror to human perception that was almost INSTANTLY recognizable by the average person.

To say I said he was the 'only' master or innovator is ridiculous. There is no reason why standard 'commercial' filmmaking could not have taken a hundred different equally viable paths than the one it did - although its impossible to say what it would have looked like (as I said previously, maybe Satantango offers one possible alternate vision).

The fact remains though - I have read a lot of interviews with directors of the early days and of those who mentioned Griffith, I have not seen one that said he was not profoundly influential.

And these were people who had nothing to gain (at least by the 20's) by kissing Griffith's ass, as his career was in freefall by then. But they ARE the people who really were in the position to understand his contributions.

If we could magically turn all the racist, sexist elements of BOAN into something non-repellent, I still would not be arguing that it 'holds up' nearly as well as some other great films of its era. That is not my point here. My point is that it is the most influential film ever made and that ever since, most filmmakers have either internalized its vision or specifically reacted AGAINST it.

[Jonah]

" he's the one who put everything together as a fluid, coherent mirror to human perception that was almost INSTANTLY recognizable by the average person."

This is, simply put, nonsense.

I do not think you know very much about early cinema and the development of stylistic and narrative conventions in American cinema. You are making a case for Griffith that is outmoded and supported by little but conjecture.

I would recommend reading work on early American cinema by Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Ben Brewster, and others.

[rcocean]

"So David Ehrenstein calls Tarantino a "racist asshole." It takes one to know one."

David won the "Nobody hates racism more than me" award years ago. Of course, David will think this post is "racist".

[David Ehrenstein]

http://www.laweekly.com/2004-09-30/art-books/breathing-while-black/

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ehrenstein19mar19,0,5335087.story?coll=la-opinion-center

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Wow, David Ehrenstein really, really dislikes black people when they have lives, hunh? Makes sense---Ehrenstein's desperate need to arbitrate his own identity could easily find succor in attacking anyone who doesn't correspond to his narrow definitions of race. A shame for him that his writing is rendered instantly irrelevant by the constant reveals of his own blinkered parochialism. Definitions that come entirely from media tend to be narrow, after all, since they never get complicated by other's lived experience, and Ehrenstein is quite determined not to let anyone else's experience challenge the validity of movies he remembers. Like Franz Fanon, he's so guilty about never showing up to the revolution he insists on telling everyone exactly what the revolution is like, hoping that if he's just loud enough, no one will notice that his description is wrong.