D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: a History of 'The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time'
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjn063
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoWhat more can one say about The Birth of a Nation? Melvyn Stokes's D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: a History of ‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ labours heroically, and successfully, in the face of a crowded scholarly field. In his meticulously and comprehensively researched account, Stokes seems to have unearthed and sifted virtually anything one might want to know about this film. While the book is ultimately more interested in context than in text, the detail and range of contexts offered here for understanding this film are dazzling. Stokes offers an unusual amount of detail about major figures behind the film usually mentioned only in passing, particularly Thomas Dixon, the protean lawyer, preacher, dramatist, novelist and filmmaker whose two plays, The Leopard's Spots and The Klansman, supplied the armature for the screenplay and who here receives a chapter to himself that offers a remarkably full treatment of his literary output. In many respects, however, the chapters most likely to impress readers who think that they already command the cultural matrix behind the manufacture and consumption of this film are those (such as ‘Griffith's view of history’ and the unfortunately named ‘After Birth’) that assemble a variety of reception contexts. For example, Stokes presents the 1912 and 1913 Mann Act prosecutions of Jack Johnson, the then reigning black heavyweight boxer charged with transporting white women across state lines for immoral purposes, as an important frame of reference for white viewers of Birth two years later. As Stokes notes, given the strictures of the Sims Act, which prevented the transport of fight films across state lines in deference to white sensibilities wounded by fight films depicting Johnson vanquishing all white comers, ‘the only white man fighting African Americans with his fists to be depicted in a major film in 1915 was the blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation’ (p. 220), suggesting why, among other reasons, this role should have proved a springboard to stardom for Wallace Reid. Stokes fascinatingly also suggests a temperance context for Birth that appears not to have been previously emphasized by scholars, a phenomenon that united Griffith's rather pathological devotion to his heavy-drinking father Roaring Jake with an important ‘justification’ for racist attitudes in as much as drink was viewed at the time as the great accelerant for black bestiality (p. 218).
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