Hit silent film, The Birth of a Nation arrives, inspiring rave reviews and protests

   It took almost a year for D.W. Griffith's silent movie classic The Birth of a Nation to reach Vancouver. But finally the Avenue Theatre on Main Street obtained it for a three-week run, starting Christmas Day, 1915, and running to Jan.15,1916.

   The hype was incredible. “Eighth Wonder of the World,” trumpeted the opening ad. “The Greatest Art Conquest Since the Beginning of Civilization!”

   The Avenue could run ads like this without shame, because Griffith had put together a startling, innovative film.

   At three hours long, Birth of a Nation was one of the first feature-length films - previously, most movies were about half an hour, or less. According to the History.com website, Griffith also came up

with many innovations that became standard film making techniques: “The close-up, the scenic long shot, the moving-camera shot, and the fade-in and fade-out.”

   The Vancouver World thought Griffith brought film into the realm of art.

   “It has been charged against the screen that it can never be a truly artistic medium, because it leaves nothing to the imagination,” said the World. “In order to overcome the absence of speech it must go into every minute detail, and exaggerate every slightest gesture beyond its true proportion.”

   “The criticism has been just as a criticism of fact against about nine-tenths of the film drama to date. But as a prediction it has been destroyed by Mr. D.W. Griffith, the master artist who directed 'The Birth of a Nation.'”

   Griffith's mastery of film technique failed to quiet critics who said the film was racist.

   Birth of a Nation was based on the play The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, which depicted the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the U.S. Civil War. In fact, the movie itself was originally titled The Clansman.

   Today, many people think of the Ku Klux Klan as white thugs in white hoods who terrorized and 'killed black people' in the Deep South. But in Dixon's story, it was a group of courageous patriots who rose up to fight white carpetbaggers (businessmen) from the North and their black allies in the South who oppressed white men and raped their women.

   Defenders of Birth of a Nation argued it was a "historic portrayal" of southern life after the

Civil War.

   But critics like James W. Johnson of the “coloured” newspaper The New York Age thought it was “perverted history!”

   “The majority of the incidents portrayed in Dixon's play that relate to coloured people never happened,” Johnson wrote.

   “When did any Negro lieutenant-governor of a Southern state ever try by force to make a white woman marry him?

   When did Negro troops, led by Northern officers, ever loot and pillage the homes of the Southern whites and maltreat and murder the occupants of these homes?"

   The movie stirred up controversy wherever it went, and was banned in some states (Ohio, Minnesota) and cities (Tacoma, Memphis, Ottawa). In Vancouver, the Negro Christian Alliances sent a protest letter to council arguing the film was “offensive to all the coloured people throughout the earth,” and bred “race antagonism.”

   “Canada does not desire to see her citizens lynched, shot and burned by low-browed, half-witted individuals defying all law and order,” said the protest letter, which was printed in the World.

   “Yet this shameful outrage will become a matter of history in Canadian' national life if the picture-play called The Birth of a Nation is allowed to be exhibited throughout Britain's most promising overseas dominion.”

   But the movie went ahead as scheduled. After the initial controversy, the World chose to focus on the epic elements of the film.

   “Five thousand scenes, 18,000 characters, 3,000 horses, approximate cost of production S500,000,” the World noted. "Cities built up, then destroyed by fire. The biggest battle of the Civil War reenacted. Ford's Theatre, Washington, reproduced to the smallest detail for the Lincoln tragedy. A series of wild 'Klu-Klux' rides that commandeered a county for a day and cost $10,000. Wonderful artillery duels in which real shells -- costing $80 a Piece -- were€ used. Miles of trenches, thousands of fighters --'War as it actually is.'”

   The latter statement seems in poor taste, given that men were being slaughtered at the time.

   During the First World War. Still, The Birth of a Nation was a huge hit, and cemented Griffith's reputation as a movie legend.

From the JOHN MACKIE article in the 9 January 2016 issue of the Vancouver Sun.