1.
Dylann Roof went to the Emmanuel Methodist Church in Charleston, an African-American congregation, and murdered nine people in a Bible study group. Roof is a White supremacist.
After this event, a petition was issued circulated to change the name of the David Wark Griffith Middle School at 4765 East Fourth Street in Los Angeles. The school, of course, is named after the film director, D. W. Griffith. Griffith’s most famous film, The Birth of a Nation (1914) is a historical epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction. The picture’s climax involves the rescue of a White family besieged by a Black mob in their cabin in the South – the Ku Klux Klan ride to the rescue and save the family from certain death at the hands of the African-American criminals. The Birth of a Nation is an effective film – from a cinematic perspective, this sequence remains thrilling and is clearly the progenitor of a thousand other last minute rescues featured in narrative movies. But the movie had a malign effect – it led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and its program of terrorism.
The David Wark Griffith Middle School is 100% minority. The LA School System web-site describes the school for 6 to 8th graders as a "magnet school". Notwithstanding this designation, the School has shown poor performance – only 17% of its students are proficient in math (compared to 35% elsewhere in the State); only 35% of its students are proficient in reading (the State-wide average is about 70%).
Petitioners noted that the school was named after a "famous racist" whose work was instrumental in fomenting the "murder of people of color." Reference was made to the murders in Charleston.
The Griffith School is in a poor neighborhood where education isn’t important to many people. Poverty makes people passive – the struggle for existence takes up all their time and poor people often have little energy for politics. The great majority of the students at the school had no idea who the place was named after. Presumably, the teachers and administrators had little interest in an old dead white man, someone who spent the last 15 years of his life mostly drunk, chasing girls at the old Knickerbocker Hotel – Griffith died in 1946. The Petition went nowhere. People had more pressing needs to address. As I write this note, the Griffith School is still named after David Wark Griffith, the pioneering film maker.
Griffith’s name didn’t fare so well with the Director’s Guild of America. In the late 1990's, the DGA determined that it’s highest honor, the Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement, should be renamed. The award is now simply called the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award. The first of these awards was given to Griffith himself in 1938 – in 2012, Milos Foreman, the Czech-American director received this award; in 2016, the award was bestowed upon Ridley Scott.
What about Griffith Park? The battle scenes from Birth of a Nation were shot in that hilly enclave north of the downtown skyscrapers. But Griffith Park is not named after the film maker. Rather, the park is named after Griffith T. Griffith, an entrepreneur who had an ostrich farm in that area, the former Rancho Los Feliz. Griffith T. Griffith was no saint – he savaged his wife in 1903 and almost killed her. So far as I know, no one has yet proposed renaming the Park because many people, I suppose, think that the park’s eponym is the notorious director. (Whatever if it turned out that there was a Minnesota guy named Calhoun after whom Calhoun Lake was really named? Would we spare the name in that circumstance even though most people, if they think about the question at all, would think the lake named after the racist Southern politician?)
Writing in July 2006 in the excellent Australian film journal, Sense of Cinema, John Steinle begins his survey of Griffith’s films and legacy with these words: "Is there anyone today – any historian, any student of film, anyone with the least political sensitivity – who will dare to praise D. W. Griffith today?" Steinle notes that Griffith’s name was taken off the DGA Lifetime Achievement award and, then, remarks that "Griffith remains the most reviled and detested film maker in history, with the possible exception of Leni Riefenstahl." This is a far-cry from the hagiographic treatment of Griffith that governed film studies when I first began to read about Griffith in the late sixties. At that time, Griffith was almost universally praised for this pioneering innovations, his invention of film grammar, and the powerful emotional effects that his picture’s achieved. Critics as politically disparate as Pauline Kael, William Everson, Kevin Brownlow, and Richard Schickel all regarded Griffith with awe. Even Steinle in his essay is obliged to admit that some of Griffith’s films achieve a stature that elevates them above all other movies: Intolerance (1916), Steinle calls, "the grandest, most ambitious failure in film history."
2.
Griffith was born in 1876, the son of a prominent Kentucky legislator, "Roaring Jake" Griffith. Griffith’s father had fought in the Civil War and was an unreconstructed Confederate. "Roaring Jake" died when his son, David Wark Griffith, was ten years old. Misery ensued – Griffith’s family lost the farm where they lived and moved to Louisville. In that city, Griffith’s mother opened a boarding house, the last resort for the genteel poor in the Victorian era. But the boarding house also failed. Griffith joined a traveling vaudeville company and acted in road-show theatrical productions. This experience with late 19th century theater proved to be decisive – despite his technical innovations, Griffith’s sensibility is that of a man of the theater: all of his cinematic inventions are designed to amplify and adorn the melodramatic effects expected by largely unsophisticated Victoran era theater-goers. Griffith applies his film wizardry to creating spectacles that are often maudlin and simple-minded. His camera-work and cunning with editing and other technical effects look forward to the Cubism – but the ideology implicit in his films is rooted in the specious moral verities underlying 19th century barn-burner melodramas.
Traveling theater companies come and go. Griffith was down on his luck in 1908 when he sought work at Edison’s Biograph Studios at Broadway and 13th Street in New York City. He appeared in a number of early one-reel films, but didn’t show much promise as an actor. He wrote some scripts, barely eking out a living. Late in 1908, Griffith was on-set at Biograph when the film’s director was too sick to continue the production. Griffith stepped in as the sick man’s substitute, working with Billy Bitzer, the cameraman with whom he made most of his famous films during the next 15 years. Griffith had a flair for directing and made 48 films in his first year at Biograph. In the next several years, Griffith invented modern film grammar, developing the close-up as an expressive tool and increasingly sophisticated narrative editing. Audiences responded to Griffith’s innovations and advertisements began to identify him as the director of the pictures that he made – he was the first auteur in film history.
In 1910, Griffith made Old California on-location – another of his film innovations. Old California is the first known picture made in Hollywood and the foundation for the industry in that place. Judith of Bethulia (1914), a biblical epic, is the first feature-length film and the first large-scale spectacle made in the United States. Griffith’s success concentrated the film industry in southern California – this was at the expense of several flourishing regional film industries most particularly Svensk films in Sweden (famous for directors Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom), the pre-Revolutionary cinema in St. Petersburg where Evgeny Bauer made his pioneering movies, and the Italian studios at Cinecitta south of Rome where the first actual epic spectacle films were made, most notably Cabiria in 1908 with a literal cast of thousands and an erupting volcano.
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first international blockbuster – no one knows how much money the movie made and no less than the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson commended the picture to the public saying that the film "was like writing history with thunderbolts." On the strength of Birth of a Nation, made for Mutual Studios, Griffith formed his own production company. His next picture, one of the most expensive ever made in Hollywood, Intolerance (1916) was self-funded. The movie was not a success at the box-office and Griffith lost money. He made several other notable pictures in the late ‘teens, Hearts of the World (1918), a rabble-rousing anti-German war film and the tragic and indelible Broken Blossoms (1919). By the early twenties, Griffith’s Victorian sensibility was out-of-date – it was the Jazz age with bathtub gin and flappers, cynicism prevailed and Griffith’s sententious moralizing was regarded as old-fashioned. Nonetheless, he was sufficiently successful to form United Artists, a partnership between Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Griffith. Under that aegis, he made a number of films including the tremendously effective Orphans of the Storm (1921), a huge epic about the French Revolution starring Griffith’s protegees, Lilian and Dorothy Gish, America (1924), another historical epic about the American Revolution, and Way Down East (1920) with its archetypal climax in which Lilian Gish leaps from ice-floe to ice-floe in a river rushing toward a waterfall, and several pastoral idylls True Heart Susie (1919), The Romance of Happy Valley (1919) and Sally of the Sawdust (1925). While participating in United Artists, Griffith also operated an independent studio, Griffith Productions, located Marmoraneck, New York – Isn’t Life Wonderful? was the last film that Griffith produced independently; the movie’s disappointing box office receipts, in part, led to the demise of his studio. Griffith’s smaller scale films made between 1919 and 1925, including Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1924) are now rated as among his best – these pictures, generally shot on location, have semi-documentary feel and are considered precursors to Neo-Realism. But these more modest movies, featuring complex characterizations, were unpopular at the box-office. Isn’t Life Wonderful? shot almost entirely on location in war-ravaged Europe, in particular, was a critical success (Variety characterized the film as one of his "best") – but American audiences weren’t interested in sympathizing with displaced persons in old Europe and would not invest their emotions in the suffering of Germans (or nominally Polish refugees, the identification given by Griffith to his protagonists in the film). Not surprisingly, Isn’t Life Wonderful? was best received in Germany where the picture inspired a generation of film makers like G. W. Pabst to make documentary-style movies about post-war poverty – the so-called Kammer ("Chamber") films produced in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") by the German film industry. Pabst’s picture The Joyless Street (1925), in particular, shows Griffith’s influence and, in turn, is regarded as progenitor to Italian neo-Realism.
Hollywood loves success and despises failure. Griffith soldiered on, but his budgets became smaller and smaller. United Artists collapsed and the shell of the enterprise was sold – the name persisted but the artists were gone. Griffith continued his pioneering work in developing technical innovations for sound film in his last two pictures, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931), a semi-documentary about alcoholism – both films that failed when they were released but are now highly regarded. By this time, Griffith was himself alcoholic and living in the Knickerbocker Hotel. Woody Van Dyke hired Griffith to shoot and edit the montage of the great San Francisco earthquake for his 1936 film San Francisco – Griffith’s eye had lost none of his cunning and the earthquake sequence is stunning. He continued working sporadically on scripts and set design – as late as 1940, Hal Roach hired him as a "consultant" on One Million Years B.C., a cave man movie. Griffith died alone in 1948 in his hotel suite at the Knickerbocker. He was a life-long Freemason and his funeral was held at the Los Angeles Freemason’s Hall. By this time, he was regarded as an embarrassing (if intimidating) relic of the past and very few Hollywood professionals attended his obsequies. There is a story that Griffith visited the set of David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun in 1946 – several of his alumni actors were cast in that film, specifically Harry Carey, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore. The cast and crew were awestruck at Griffith’s presence and began to make foolish errors – Griffith ultimately had to watch the proceedings from a concealed vantage point behind a set.
3.
Film histories and biographies of Griffith often invoke the notion of atonement. Griffith is said to have made films intended to atone for his earlier racially and politically incendiary movies. The notion seems a bit dubious but it has been put forth so frequently that the idea deserves consideration. Even a sophisticated film critic like Roger Ebert subscribed to this notion. He wrote: "As slavery is the great sin of America, so The Birth of a Nation is Griffith’s sin for which he tried to atone all the rest of his life. So instinctive were the prejudices he was raised with as a 19th century Southerner that the offenses in his film actually had to be explained to him."
This concept have given rise to much debate about the film Griffith made after his Civil War epic, Intolerance. Some film historians believe that Griffith’s picture, showing slavery in Babylon as vicious and cruel, as well as the movie’s general endorsement of politically liberal ideas, is intended to atone for The Birth of a Nation. Yet others argue that Griffith felt persecuted when the NAACP lobbied congress to ban showing of The Birth of a Nation and that Intolerance was made to denounce the "intolerance" implicit in political correctness – in other words, Griffith seizes the mantle of the oppressed and claims that he is the true victim of intolerant critics. (There is some justification for this theory in that the movie’s modern story shows so-called reformers as the source of intolerant attitudes that lead to disaster.) Probably, the film that Griffith made to intentionally display his liberal and progressive attitudes is Broken Blossoms. At a time when marriage between the races was illegal as miscegenation, Broken Blossoms celebrates the love between a Chinese cook and an abused Cockney waif.
Similarly, Griffith himself announced that Isn’t Life Wonderful? was intended as reparation for the jingoist anti-German "hun" imagery integral to his melodramatic World War One film, Hearts of the World.
In a letter written from Germany while Isn’t Life Wonderful? was being shot, Griffith wrote: "Germany must be restored or Europe is lost." Of course, he was right.
4.
Isn’t Life Wonderful? stars Carol Dempster. Dempster was born in 1901 in Duluth, Minnesota, the daughter of a Great Lakes sea captain. The family moved to Los Angeles when Dempster was ten and the young girl was enrolled in the influential dance school conducted by Ruth St. Denis. In 1915, Dempster played a dancing harem girl in the Babylon sequences of Intolerance. She went on to appear in a half-dozen of Griffith’s films made between 1918 and 1925. Griffith was unhappily married to the film star Linda Arvildson but had separated from her in 1912. Dempster became Griffith’s lover and remained with him throughout the entirety of her Hollywood career. In 1926, she ended the relationship with Griffith and married a wealthy banker – she dropped out of sight and died in 1989, making a sizeable bequest to the museum of fine arts in San Diego.
Dempster is often compared invidiously to Lillian Gish and the string of movies that Griffith made featuring his inamorata are, often, said to be flawed on the basis that the relatively plain actress lacks the star power of Griffith’s earlier protegees such the Gish sisters, Mae Marsh, and Mary Pickford. In the context of Isn’t Life Wonderful? the comparison is unfair to both Dempster. Carol Dempster was somewhat plain and appears haggard, even gaunt in Isn’t Life Wonderful? Of course, these aspects of her appearance are integral to the film – the movie is almost entirely about starvation.
5.
Like all of us, Griffith was a mixture of good and bad qualities. He was courtly, well-spoken, and, of course, immensely industrious. He was loyal to his friends and colleagues. He was capable of maintaining in his mind the general argument and scheme of a four hour movie such as Intolerance on the basis of handwritten notes scribbled on paper the size of a napkin. He was an inveterate skirt-chaser, booze-hound, and, most unforgivably (for modern audiences) a racist of the worst sort. Th question raised by Griffith’s work, and the work made by people like Ernst Juenger and Celine, is whether a right-wing reactionary can successfully create art of the highest order. At one time, Griffith’s intellectual and personal flaws were simply ignored: the man was his work and, with one notable exception, The Birth of a Nation, the work was thought to be luminous, extraordinary, and what is most important, intricately influential on those artists that followed him. We judge things today by a different rubric – the man is no longer redeemed by his art, rather, his art is subverted and denigrated by the man and his flaws.
So the question remains: does Griffith exemplify a man with evil tendencies who happened to be a great artist? (It will not do to answer this question by observing that racism was endemic in the United States in 1914 -1915 and that, probably, most White Americans shared his views. The fact is that the racism on display in Birth of a Nation went quite beyond what was socially acceptable in public discourse even at the time of its first release and that many protests were lodged against the movie by both Black and White critics.)
A first response to this question, the central issue arising in connection with D. W. Griffith, is to observe an element of bad faith or, at least, a disjunction between the man and his work with respect to the director’s principal, and, indeed, obsessive idee fix. Griffith’s most thoroughly realized films are about families facing attack by outside, hostile forces. For Griffith, the extended family was the fundamental unit of civilization. Griffith imagines this basic cultural institution as under attack by exterior agents – sometimes, the attack is literal; on other occasions, it is symbolic or figurative. It is curious that the man who makes films celebrating the family as a bulwark against barbarism was himself no "family man" – rather, Griffith was a serial philanderer, a drunk with whom it was impossible to live, who died alone in a rented room in downtown hotel. The man whose movies focus intensively on the joys of home was himself essentially homeless, estranged from his own family. (There is an echo of this situation in the disconnect between the films of Yasujiro Ozu and that great director’s personal life. Ozu is famous for his gentle, endearing, and profound movies about families. But he was himself solitary and, also, a drunkard. Perhaps, we are tempted to idealize what we can not enjoy ourselves.)
Griffith’s displays his obsessive concern with the family and those forces seeking to destroy it in the most literal, even vulgar, imagery. His pre-1914 Westerns, establishing central tropes in that genre, feature savage Indians besieging isolated pioneer cabins. The perimeter of defense is increasingly straitened; the murderers break through the fence and the stockade, batter down the outside door, and the last stand takes place inside the house itself with only a fragile lathe wall and door defending the hysterical women and children from assault – as the savages come ever closer to smashing apart this last bulwark, the men prepare to turn their pistols on their wives and children to spare them the dishonor of rape and torture. (Of course, the cavalry always arrives just in the nick of time.) The same scenario is enacted in Birth of a Nation, the little group of Southern gentry beleagured by a mob of villainous Negroes who progressively smash down defense after defense before being routed by the "white avalanche" of Ku Klux Klan horseman. What do the savages want? Griffith makes this crystal-clear: they want our women, they desire our wives, sisters, and daughters.
These paranoid visions affect Griffith’s construction of cinematic space. (A characteristic of great film making is the creation of an imaginary space in which the movie’s action takes place: consider Kiastorami’s zigzagging mountain roads, huge aerial vistas and tight car interiors in a film like The Taste of Cherries or Bergman’s spectral dreamscapes in The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.) For Griffith, the grounded center of all action is the home, typically defined as a threshold, several rooms always shot from the same camera angle, and, then, a picket fence or garden hedge defending the territory. Griffith uses establishing shots to designate the home, always filmed from a set, and unvarying vantage. People venture away from home at their peril. Home for Griffith implies home invaders and conflict always involves something like a siege. The space besieged is variable from film to film – in Broken Blossoms, Lillian Gish retreats into tiny closet that is battered down when her father, Battling Barrows, beats her to death: the film dramatizes this horrific sequence with harrowing shots of Gish spinning in circles inside her tiny, desperately imperilled refuge. In other films, the home territory is huge – in Intolerance, Babylon is surrounded by an immense wall, 22 miles in circuit, and tall as a skyscraper. (In fact, the Ishtar gate to Babylon, an astonishingly huge structure, is the first gargantuan set built for an American movie – the scope of the construction, made in 1915 by Italian craftsmen, remains unprecedented: in fact, the set was so immense, so disproportionately large, that it is ineffective in the film, dwarfing the humans forced to interact with it.) Of course, the breach of this wall and the destruction of the city enclosed within comprise the main action of the Babylonian sequences in the film.
In his smaller scale domestic films, the family is endangered by disruptive emotional or social forces. The Struggle, Griffith’s last film, involves a family half-destroyed by alcoholism. In Way Down East, and other films in the pastoral idyll cycle, Griffith shows families contending with out-of-wedlock births, erring children, and tyrannical parents. Sally of the Sawdust (1925) involves a young woman cast out of her family when pregnant – the girl joins the circus and her child is raised by a crooked, if kindly, con man, played by W. C. Fields (the role that first made him famous). After various adventures, Judge’s granddaughter, the titular character, proves her heritage and is reunited with her family of origin. A fat, happily married real estate tycoon falls for a vamp in Battle of the Sexes (1928). After his family is cast into disorder and a suicide attempt, the tycoon eschews his affair and rebuilds his broken family. Examples can be multiplied – the point is that Griffith’s interest in the travails of the family, either literally under attack or figurative ruptured by the conduct of its members, persists throughout his entire career.
In this context, Isn’t Life Wonderful? assumes a central significance in Griffith’s work. His World War I picture, a propaganda film called Hearts of the World (1918) shows Belgian families under siege by vicious inhuman huns. Isn’t Life Wonderful? overtly defined by Griffith as a sort of apology for the atrocities depicted in his earlier war movie, forces the director far beyond his ordinary "comfort zone". In the 1924 film, Griffith’s protagonists are not only threatened with homelessness – they are, in fact, literally without homes when the movie begins. The movie chronicles the family’s struggle to survive in the face of deadly poverty – the film shows people who are slowly starving to death. The films static compositions and, apparent, aimlessness in its early scenes mirror the plight of Griffith’s protagonist – hunger and despair paralyze. Furthermore, the outward conflict between family members and a roving band of thugs is unsettling for several reasons – first, the thugs are motivated by a desire to provide food for their own women and children; secondly, the bravura climax in the pine forest shows a battle over a cart-load of potatoes in which the hero and heroine are defeated – the cavalry never comes to their rescue: there is no group of mounted chevaliers like the Klan to ride to their assistance. After the film’s strange climax, at once dispiriting and inspiring, Griffith, of course, appends a happy ending – the family has a home now and a garden and seem to be precariously thriving. (One critic noted that Isn’t Life Wonderful? is refreshing because the violent conflict does not besiege the heroine’s virtue – there is no attempted rape – but, rather, her potatoes.) Some viewers note that in the film’s coda, a child tries to dance but seems too weak to do so convincingly – accordingly, even in the supposed happy ending there are discordant elements. Happiness doesn’t cancel or erase the earlier suffering endured by the characters. In many respects, Isn’t Life Wonderful? represents the most mature, and thoughtful, presentation of Griffith’s lifelong obsession with the family in his film career.
6.
Film makers and critics are continuously rediscovering Griffith. His percussive editing and cross-cutting for suspense was imitated by the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein who acknowledged Griffith’s influence on his films such as The Battleship Potemkin and October. German directors such as Pabst adopted Griffith’s sober, documentary-style realism for films made in the late twenties and early thirties. The Italian neo-realists were influenced by Broken Blossoms and, indeed, Fellini quotes passages from that film in his picture La Strada. After World War Two, Akira Kurosawa remade Isn’t Life Wonderful? in 1947 as One Wonderful Sunday. Two of the founders of the French New Wave, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette cited Griffith’s 1919 idyll True Heart Susie as central to their cinema. Whether Griffith will have any influence in the future, particularly in light of his irrefutable and reflexive racism, remains unclear?
QUIZ:
2. War harnesses human beings to carts. Paul and Inge pull a cart containing potatoes at the climax of Isn’t Life Wonderful? Perhaps influenced by Griffith’s film, very well-received in Germany, Bertolt Brecht has his heroine drag a cart full of food in his 1939 play (NAME) and her Children.
3. Potatoes are the perfect food: How many calories are in a medium sized russet potato: (a) 150 (b) 512 ( c ) 49 (d) 975 ?
4. A medium-sized russet potato contains 70% of recommended daily requirements for Vitamin (what vitamin); 30 % of recommended daily allowance for Vitamin B-6 and 25% recommended daily ration of potassium.
5. To punish German people, the Allies systematically reduced calorie intake in Germany between April 1945 and the "hunger winter of 1946 to 1947 on the basis of Joint Chief of Staff Order 1067 (JCS Directive 1067) to (a) 750 calories per day; (b) 1000 to 1250 calories per day; ( c ) 1600 calories per day; (d) 2500 calories per day.
6. During World War One, Germany suspended the "gold standard," imposed an income tax, and began copiously printing money to finance its war effort – the notion being that the acquisition of industrial areas in France and the Low Countries would shore up the economy. But Germany lost the war. During the hyperinflation that followed, a loaf of bread that cost 160 marks in January 1922 was priced at (a) 1000 marks; (b) 10,000 marks; ( c ) 750,000 marks; (d) 200,000,000,000 marks by December 1922.
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