Kino

[knives]

Well I think that's being a tad reductive. He freely and regularly had positive minority characters including black characters. The only racist thing he seemed consistent on was his anti-miscegenation which is very racist, but different from a lyncher.

[matrixschmatrix]

Racism isn't necessarily the same thing as race hatred, and I don't doubt that Griffith was capable of conceiving of black people that weren't slavering savages like those depicted in BoaN- but have you ever seen a Griffith work in which black people were depicted as fully conscious, fully adult, and fully human?

[knives]

I've only seen about twenty of his films so I can't fairly comment on that, but Barthelmess in Broken Blossoms is a fairly fully realized character. I'm not saying that he wasn't racist, but that he wasn't a simple minded racist.

[matrixschmatrix]

I'd agree with that, and I think it's worth remembering that even the most fucked up racial attitudes of that era were still complicated.

[knives]

Assuming racism of today is roughly equivalent to the racism of yesteryear, occasionally in my experience it's rather straightforward.

[Gregory]

DVDBeaver comparison of The Birth of a Nation. Look to the bottom flag of the third comparison for lowlights. Look to the rest for highlights (ok, most of the rest...and it depends on your view of Kino's tinting).

Or rather the tinting in the different original source materials they used for this release.

[John Edmond]

I'm not denying there are valid reasons for the tinting (I'm fine with it actually), but as far as I understand it is still digitally recreated tinting.

[triodelover]

I've only seen about twenty of his films so I can't fairly comment on that, but Barthelmess in Broken Blossoms is a fairly fully realized character. I'm not saying that he wasn't racist, but that he wasn't a simple minded racist.

He casts a white man as Chinese and that's your example of where "black people were depicted as fully conscious, fully adult, and fully human?". How's that work?

If Griffith truly recognized non-whites as fully functioning human beings, he could have cast Sessue Hayakawa in the role.

[swo17]

I take comfort in knowing that most of what passes for "art" or "entertainment" today will be considered repugnant to people 300 years from now, for reasons that if you explained them to us now we would just look up and go :-s

[Gregory]

I've long found much more enjoyment in the best of Griffith's Biograph shorts than in his more acclaimed features (which I also revisit once in a great while). You can see his techniques emerging with such beauty and, in a way, a feeling of spontaneity (the films were produced at breakneck speed). So Kino's decision to offer only the main feature in HD for this release is really disappointing. I wonder if there's any chance of a blu reissue of the Biograph Shorts collection. The DVD set was 6 hours, so it would need to be a 2-blu set, which may be too much of a financial risk for them. But then there might be more historical value in larger DVD set of the Biograph Shorts, only a small portion of which were in the Kino set. I'm not sure exactly how many have been preserved or if Kino could secure the distribution rights.

I'm not denying there are valid reasons for the tinting (I'm fine with it actually), but as far as I understand it is still digitally recreated tinting.

But it was made to match the different tinting of the original materials for this release... unless I've been totally misinformed here.

[RobertB]

I take comfort in knowing that most of what passes for "art" or "entertainment" today will be considered repugnant to people 300 years from now, for reasons that if you explained them to us now we would just look up and go

Are you implying Birth of a Nation wasn't considered racist when it was released? That it wasn't banned in Denver, Chicago and other cities? That NAACP didn't make a 47-page pamphlet titled "Fighting a Vicious Film: Protest Against The Birth of a Nation,"?

Looking at race issues in Griffith's films isn't a new thing. I expect this was one of the reasons for making Broken Blossoms. Ignore it if you must, but I think it's a fair subject for discussion.

[swo17]

I only meant to imply that we should be careful about applying modern standards to the past, and that we shouldn't assume that our place in history is inherently superior just because something like BOAN could never be made today. There is plenty to learn from the past, both positive and negative.

[knives]

Or an other way of phrasing things Will and Grace. I'm sure there's more than a fair amount of stuff coming out today that as Swo suggested would look as bad as the yellow face does to us in just sixty or so years.

[matrixschmatrix]

True enough, but there's a parallel trap of assuming that because a form of racism would not have been remarkable during its era, you should just "put on your 1920's glasses" or whatever and everything will be ok. It's still cruel and exclusionary and humiliating to the people of the group being targeted, just as it was then- but it's also a product of its times and needs to be contextualized as such to be understood.

And yeah, while Broken Blossoms is still the product of a racist outlook, it's obviously not Birth of a Nation, and I don't think anyone got lynched as a result of it. But just as I think it's worth having a discussion about whether the depiction of gay people in Will and Grace (or Community, for something more recent) is problematic, I think it's worth examining the ways in which the less overtly horrible Griffith work are still the products of a racist outlook and a racist society. Sealing off racism and bigotry as phenomenons of the past doesn't help anyone, but looking at how they worked then can sometimes illuminate both the work itself and how racism and bigotry still operate now.

[RobertB]

I never watched Will & Grace. I think I knew it would offend me. I'm a gay man. I spent my youth watching My Beautiful Laundrette and films by Derek Jarman.

I expect a chinese man at the time could easily have found "Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl" offensive. Yes, the yellow man is a good man, but he is still a stereotype. He is the peaceful yellow man (as depicted by a white man). But I never felt he was half as much a real person as Lucy. It's just too easy to defend a 100% pure good misunderstood peacemaker.

[triodelover]

After reading this thread this AM, I started thumbing through The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me by Lillian Gish and Ann Pinchot. In a section dealing with the racism of BoaN, I came across these rather revealing passages, both on page 169 of my copy.

Of all the criticisms, the one from which Mr. Griffith suffered the most was the accusation that he was against Negroes. "To say that is like saying that I'm against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all our lives." Mr.Griffith had grown up with Negroes on a farm, and as a baby he had had a Negro mammy. He always treated Negroes with great affection, and they in turn loved him. Being a Southerner, he could communicate with them, and they like to be around him because he was amusing. When some of them turned against him after the showing of The Birth, he was deeply wounded

I'm not even going to begin to unpack that paragraph or try to determine how much to attribute to Griffith or to Miss Gish. Two paragraphs later, we get the following.

If he were alive today, I feel certain that Mr. Griffith would have done a film of affirmation about the Negro. In fact, shortly before his death we talked about doing such a film. he believed that the negro has made great strides since the end of slavery, when a million white men had died to help set them free]. He said that the white man had taken centuries to attain the intellectual and spiritual powers that many Negro citizens had achieved in a few decades. he believed that no other race in the history of mankind had advanced so far so quickly.

David Wark Griffith died in 1948, less than two months before I was born. Miss Gish's memoirs were published in 1969. Offered in evidence merely to complete the mise en scene.

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, that's got just about everything- the paternalism (with an explicit comparison of black people to children), the sense that freedom was a gift given by whites and not an insufficient restoration for a monstrous crime, the implication that black people are essentially a different species, etc. Sadly, you come across a lot of the same things even in the work of someone like John Ford, who seemed genuinely to want to be a progressive, and hated the idea of being a racist. The tragedy is obviously that systematic and built-in racism of that kind isn't something you can get rid of just by being a nice person, and treating black people nicely on a personal basis.

[triodelover]

Yeah, that's got just about everything- the paternalism (with an explicit comparison of black people to children), the sense that freedom was a gift given by whites and not an insufficient restoration for a monstrous crime, the implication that black people are essentially a different species, etc. Sadly, you come across a lot of the same things even in the work of someone like John Ford, who seemed genuinely to want to be a progressive, and hated the idea of being a racist. The tragedy is obviously that systematic and built-in racism of that kind isn't something you can get rid of just by being a nice person, and treating black people nicely on a personal basis.

The truly sad part is all of this is offered as an argument that BoaN wasn't racist nor was it intended to be. These institutionalized attitudes are, in part, generational but don't completely disappear because the passing of a generation inculcated with these ideas is insufficient. There is always a subset of a succeeding generation that keeps this kind of thinking alive. One can only hope that eventually they will become so dilute that they will function much like a recessive genetic characteristic.

[matrixschmatrix]

And I think one of the key means by which to make that kind of progress is to examine the roots of the ideas- while there are still outright racists in the US at this point, I think our problem relates much more to people who do not believe themselves to be racist, but still hold a lot of the ideas Griffith evidently did. To mix your metaphor, we can use dead versions of the idea, obsolete conceptions of race that few people would consciously embrace at this point, like a dead virus- we can inoculate ourselves somewhat against the living versions, which infest the body politic like a plague.

Which is actually one of the reasons I find Broken Blossoms much more interesting than Birth, sociologically speaking- I have no fear that there's some part of me that secretly believes black people are monsters who want nothing more than to rape our wimmen, but I am probably still vulnerable to reducing people of other cultures to Noble Savages and Magical Black Men and the like.

[triodelover]

And I think one of the key means by which to make that kind of progress is to examine the roots of the ideas- while there are still outright racists in the US at this point, I think our problem relates much more to people who do not believe themselves to be racist, but still hold a lot of the ideas Griffith evidently did. To mix your metaphor, we can use dead versions of the idea, obsolete conceptions of race that few people would consciously embrace at this pint, like a dead virus- we can inoculate ourselves somewhat against the living versions, which infest the body politic like a plague.

Which is actually one of the reasons I find Broken Blossoms much more interesting than Birth, sociologically speaking- I have no fear that there's some part of me that secretly believes black people are monsters who want nothing more than to rape our wimmen, but I am probably still vulnerable to reducing people of other cultures to Noble Savages and Magical Black Men and the like.

Nothing has underscored this more than the current economic crisis. When people are fearful for their own-well being, they start looking for scapegoats. The old taboos that would serve to keep many of these thoughts safely walled away in some corner of the brain get tossed aside. This is one reason the Tea Party can't conceive of themselves as racist. They would say they weren't racist when times were good, so how can they be racist now? The answer is that the ideas were present, but there was no emotional need to entertain those ideas, so they stayed walled off.

[domino harvey]

As someone who taught Birth of a Nation in an all-black high school film studies class, I'm a little bewildered that the tired old chestnuts about the "racism" of the film are still being trotted out. None of my students were the least-bit offended by the film, especially since we contextualized the story and discussed Griffith's methodology and editing techniques.

[triodelover]

As someone who taught Birth of a Nation in an all-black high school film studies class, I'm a little bewildered that the tired old chestnuts about the "racism" of the film are still being trotted out. None of my students were the least-bit offended by the film, especially since we contextualized the story and discussed Griffith's methodology and editing techniques.

I think what matrix and I have been saying is that contextualizing doesn't reduce the racist nature of the film. Yes, Griffith was a product of his times and BoaN reflected a number of prevailing attitudes, but that doesn't mean those attitudes aren't at their core racist. It seems its possible to understand that and still not be offended by the film, or at the very least the film's existence. I'd say being able to do that is a sign of a mature intellect.

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, I'd be surprised if there were many people who were sufficiently viscerally impacted by BoaN to be offended by it at this point- it seems too alien, and too far removed from anything that would be potent to anyone watching it for the first time. I don't think how offended people are is a good measure of how problematic or racist or w/e a work is, though.

[scotty2]

Sure, Griffith and his inspiration, Thomas Dixon, weren't racist. They were, rather, white supremacists who viewed emancipation as premature and Reconstruction as a tragedy whites had to to overcome, not an era the ending of which was a tragedy for freed people or for American democracy. In this way, the white south lost the battle and won the war--placating the conservative south has been near the top of the nation's agenda ever since, even at the height of the civil rights movement.

The Clansman is certainly worth a read.

[knives]

We've got a runner showing on TCM right now for how those Rollins' will look. Their showing The Iron Rose (my first of his films) and the presentation is very clean. Some of the scenes have very light spreckles, but the image overall is pretty grand for this type of cinema. If this is representative it's an other ball out of the park.