Chapter 9 summary- smalley

By Brian Smalley

For our communications course, our class was assigned to read a textbook article and summarize the piece. The article I chose to recapitulate was from chapter 9, by Michele Faith Wallace titled, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of A Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow.” The article proposes to main focuses. The first is an emphasis and examination on the movie “The Birth of A Nation,” by D. W. Griffith, which is known as a landmark in progress of feature film and in the history of American racial communication during the Jim Crow period. The second focus is the article’s proposal to correct our current perspective on The Birth of A Nation by thoroughly studying how the techniques used by feature film inscribe and underwrite overriding racial ideologies.

The beginning of the article discusses how scholars have ignored issues of race in silent films and how during the first decades of the twentieth century, the same period the U.S. film industry was being established, there was a problem with the integration of slaves and their children into mainstream society. However material related to the troubles of African Americans was rarely present in theater. Yet when it was, it was in the context of whites performing black roles with blackfaces, or blacks in demeaning scenarios.

The article then mentions The Birth of A Nation- released in 1915 when Lynching was a main topic in the U.S. news- for the first time, and how it is the most significant case of an exception when the U.S. cinema addresses race as a subject matter, which it rarely does, and invariably softens the historical bottom line; where “colorblindness is temporarily reversed”(246). The movie is considered a “masterpiece of the silent era yet widely viewed as anti-black propaganda.” Wallace then mentions that this film’s continued disrepute challenges our most adored notions of the intrinsically ethical character of aesthetic masterpieces. According to Wallace, The Birth of a Nation is the “only historical epic focused on the fear of so-called Negro domination in the Reconstruction Era; from its first appearance, Birth inspired controversy and violent feelings in both its adherents and its detractors, and continues to do so.” After its release, irregular lynchings and race riots occurred following the return of black soldiers who had fought abroad during World War I.

Wallace then goes into detail on the origin of the film, which is difficult to explain due the many strands of its genesis and history. Apparently, Griffith based the film on two rabidly racist novels by Thomas Dixon (a preacher novelist), The Clansmen and The Leopard Spots. Unlike Thomas, Griffith was a white supremacist who was more concerned with establishing himself as an innovative artist during a new revolutionary medium. His intention was partly to show the underserved and unearned affluence of blacks during reconstruction.

Wallace references the novel Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, on how after the Civil War, blacks became invisible as cognitive beings in the relatively new technologies of media, photography, and film through which knowledge was more and more dispersed. Wallace believes that being invisible meant their status paralleled and reflected their marginal status in the broader society. She then talks about how Birth is rarely shown in public because it presents an emotionally supported historical argument in an aesthetically dynamic package. Wallace claims Griffith accomplished this in three ways. The first is by using most lovely medium ever invented, black-and-white nitrate film and by emphasizing classical whiteness as a racial ideal. The next is Griffith’s manipulation of film grammar through editing and assortment. Then his deployment of the well-worn and popular generic capacities of melodrama. Griffith defined the basic components of the movie’s genre: “a light realistic touch combined with unfathomable pathos.” Yet Wallace believes that this film has always been, and always will be an important American film because of its aesthetic heritage.

This article is most compatible with Chapter 9 from the textbook. The first line of the chapter is a quote from Hannah Arendt: “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” I think this is true and that it relates to The Birth of a Nation, assuming partly why Griffith got away with this film. The chapter mentions that stories are “both the form and content of the media, and provide cultural links to the most ancient human traditions; media stories grab our attention, stimulate our thoughts and feelings, and occasionally impel us to action. These claims fit right in with the film. Finally, it talks about how media storytellers have many techniques to capture their audience and that storytelling is an essential media skill. Griffith easily is supported by these claims.

I really enjoyed reading Wallace’s article and am confident that I walked away with a lot of knowledge. She had a lot of supporting and persuading evidence in proving her point, and her writing maintained good flow. My only question would be, “If this has been such a big issue through out history, why are we just hearing about it now?” It can be concluded that Birth of a Nation has dominated social politics in the West and North and has not only been a dominant fictional account of Reconstruction but also an apologia for the almost one hundred year-reign of white supremacy and Jim Crow segmentation that followed in the South. It remains separated from most other cultural racism being that it continues to attract our interest and persists to be a source of fascination due to its formal vividness. Therefore, Birth is imperative in comprehending our country’s “other” history- the failure of Reconstruction, which is rarely taught or even recounted, and is a great spot to begin the long-overdue analysis of race in U.S. cinema studies.

DISCUSSION ON GRIFFITH ...