Hollywood As Historian

American Film in a Cultural Context

Peter C. Rollins

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813109510
• eBook ISBN: 9780813160306
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Motion picture images have influenced the American mind since the earliest days of film, and many thoughtful people are becoming ever more concerned about that influence, as about the pervasive influence of television. In eras of economic instability and international conflict, the film industry has not hesitated to use motion pictures for definite propaganda purposes. During less troubled times, the American citizen's ability to deal with political and social issues has been enhanced or thwarted by images absorbed in the nation's theatres. Hollywood As Historian tracks the interaction of Americans with important motion picture productions. Considered are such topics as racial and sexual stereotyping, censorship of films, comedy as a tool for social criticism, the influence of great men and their screen images, and the use of film to interpret history. Opportunities for future study are suggested for those who wish to conduct their own examinations of American film in a cultural context.

Hollywood As Historian benefits from a variety of approaches. Literary and historical influences are carefully related to The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Apocalypse Now (1979), two highly tendentious epics of war and cultural change. How political beliefs of filmmakers affected cinematic styles is illuminated in a short survey of documentary films made during the Great Depression. Historical distance has helped analysts to decode messages unintended by filmmakers in the study of The Snake Pit (1948) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). While pluralism of approach has been encouraged, balance has also been a goal: a concern for institutional and thematic considerations never obscures matters of film aesthetics. In twelve chapters dealing with more than sixteen films, Hollywood As Historian offers a versatile text for classes in popular culture, American studies, film history, or film as history. The visual awareness promoted by this text has immediate application, in that students can begin to consider the impact of motion pictures (and television) on their own lives.

The films considered: The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1937), March of Time (1935-1953), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Native Land (1942), Wilson (1944), The Negro Soldier (1944), The Snake Pit (1948), On the Waterfront (1954), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Apocalypse Now (1979).

CHAPTER 1.

Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation (1915)

EVERETT CARTER

ON FEBRUARY 20, 1915, DAVID WARK GRIFFITH’S LONG FILM, The Clansman, was shown in New York City. One of the spectators was Thomas Dixon, the author of the novel from which it was taken, who was moved by the power of the motion picture to shout to the wildly applauding spectators that its title would have to be changed. To match the picture’s greatness, he suggested, its name should be The Birth of a Nation.¹ Only by a singular distortion of meaning could the film be interpreted as the story of a country’s genesis; the birth it did herald was of an American industry and an American art; any attempt to define the cinema and its impact upon American life must take into account this classic movie. For with the release of The Birth of a Nation “significant motion picture history begins.”² Its prestige became enormous. It was the first picture to be played at the White House, where Woodrow Wilson was reported to have said: “it is like writing history with lightning.”³ By January 1916 it had given 6,266 performances in the area of greater New York alone.⁴ If we conservatively estimate that five hundred patrons saw each performance, we arrive at the astounding total of over three million residents of and visitors to New York who saw the picture, and forever viewed themselves and their country’s history through its colorations. And not only does significant motion picture history begin, but most of the problems of the art’s place in our culture begin too. The picture projects one of the most persistent cultural illusions; it presents vividly and dramatically the ways in which a whole people have reacted to their history; its techniques in the narrowest sense are the fully realized techniques of the pictorial aspects of the motion picture; in the widest sense, its techniques are a blend of the epical and the symbolically realistic, and each part of this mixture has developed into a significant genre of cinematic art.

Griffith was a Kentuckian, a devout believer in Southern values, and these values, he was certain, were embodied in The Clansman, a sentimental novel of the Reconstruction which had appeared in 1905, had been widely read, had been seen in dramatic form throughout the South, and whose author had dedicated it “To the memory of a Scotch-Irish leader of the South, my Uncle, Colonel Leroy McAfee, Grand Titan of the Invisible Empire Ku Klux Klan.”⁵ In his introduction, Dixon went on to describe his theme: “How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon’s death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.”⁶ This strong suggestion that the South’s struggle is a racial epic, involving all the people of one blood in their defense against a common ancestral enemy, became, as we shall see, a major influence upon Griffith’s conception of his cinematic theme. And, in addition, the novel in so many ways served as what would later be called a “treatment” from which the story would be filmed, that we must examine the book closely before we can understand the significance of the film.

The Clansman told the story of “Thaddeus Stevens’ bold attempt to Africanize the ten great states of the American Union . . .” It interpreted the history of the Reconstruction as the great Commoner’s vengeance motivated partly by economics: the destruction of his Pennsylvania iron mills by Lee’s army;⁷ partly by religion: in his parlor there was “a picture of a nun . . . he had always given liberally to an orphanage conducted by a Roman Catholic sisterhood;”⁸ but mainly by lust: his housekeeper was “a mulatto, a woman of extraordinary animal beauty . . .” who became, through her power over Austin Stoneman (the fictional name for Stevens) “the presiding genius of National legislation.”⁹ Stoneman was shown in private conference with Lincoln, whose words in his Charleston debate with Douglas were directly quoted: “I believe there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will forever forbid their living together on terms of political and social equality.”¹⁰ Stoneman’s instruments in the South were all described as animals, demonstrating that the Civil War was fought to defend civilization against the barbaric and bestial. Silas Lynch, the carpet-bagger, “had evidently inherited the full physical characteristics of the Aryan race, while his dark yellowish eyes beneath his heavy brows glowed with the brightness of the African jungle.”¹¹ The Negro leader, Aleck, had a nose “broad and crushed flat against his face,” and jaws “strong and angular, mouth wide, and lips thick, curling back from rows of solid teeth set obliquely . . .”¹² The Cameron family of the Old South were the principal victims; Gus, a renegade Negro ravished Marion Cameron, the sixteen-year-old “. . . universal favourite . . .” who embodied “the grace, charm, and tender beauty of the Southern girl . . .;”¹³ Silas Lynch attempted to violate Elsie Stoneman, the betrothed of Ben Cameron. The actual rape was a climax of a series of figurative violations of the South by the North, one of which was the entry of Stoneman into the black legislature, carried by two Negroes who made “a curious symbolic frame for the chalk-white passion of the old Commoner’s face. No sculptor ever dreamed a more sinister emblem of the corruption of a race of empire-builders than this group. Its black figures, wrapped in the night of four thousand years of barbarism, squatted there the ‘equal’ of their master, grinning at his forms of Justice, the evolution of forty centuries of Aryan genius.”¹⁴ These figurative and literal ravishments provoked the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, whose like “. . . the world had not seen since the Knights of the Middle Ages rode on their Holy Crusades.”¹⁵ The Klan saved Elsie, revenged Marion, brought dismay to the Negro, the carpet-bagger and the scallawag and, in the final words of the book, “. . . Civilisation has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.”¹⁶

The picture followed the book faithfully in plot, character, motivation and theme, and became a visualization of the whole set of irrational cultural assumptions which may be termed the “Plantation Illusion.” The Illusion has many elements, but it is based primarly upon a belief in a golden age of the antebellum South, an age in which feudal agrarianism provided the good life for wealthy, leisured, kindly, aristocratic owner and loyal, happy, obedient slave. The enormous disparity between this conception and the reality has been the subject of Gaines’s The Southern Plantation¹⁷ and Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution.¹⁸ But our concern is not with the reality but with what people have thought and felt about that reality; this thinking and feeling is the Illusion, and the stuff of the history of sensibility. The Illusion was embodied in Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832), developed through Carruther’s The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834) and firmly fixed in the national consciousness by Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (1851), “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground” (1852), and “Old Black Joe,” songs which nostalgically describe a “longing for that old plantation . . .” In 1905 Dixon summarized it in the assertion that the South before the Civil War was ruled by an “aristocracy founded on brains, culture, and blood,” the “old fashioned dream of the South” which “but for the Black curse . . . could be today the garden of the world.”

This was the image realized almost immediately at the beginning of The Birth of a Nation. A scene of Southern life before the Civil War is preceded by the title: “In the Southland, life runs in a quaintly way that is no more.” A primitive cart is shown trundling up a village street, filled with laughing Negroes; there is further merriment as a few children fall from the cart and are pulled up into it; then appears a scene of a young aristocrat helping his sister into a carriage; she is in white crinoline and carries a parasol; the young Southerner helps her gallantly from the carriage, and the title reads: “Margaret Cameron, daughter of the old South, trained in manners of the old school.” With the two levels of feudal society established, the scene is then of the porch of the plantation house. Dr. and Mrs. Cameron are rocking; he has a kitten in his arms, and puppies are shown playing at his feet. A pickaninny runs happily in and out among the classic columns while the Camerons look indulgently on; a very fat and very black servant claps her hands with glee.

A corollary of this aspect of the Southern Illusion, one might even say a necessary part of it, is the corresponding vision of the North as the land of coldness, harshness, mechanical inhumanity; expressed most generously, it is the description of the North as “Head” and the South as the warm human “Heart” which was Sidney Lanier’s major metaphor in his Reconstruction poems. Although Lanier had called for the reunion of the heart and head, a modern Southerner, John Crowe Ransom, has scolded Lanier for preaching reconciliation when, Ransom said, what should have been preached was the “contumacious resistance” of the warm, agrarian South against the harsh industrialism and rationalism of the North.¹⁹ The Clansman had emphasized the contrast between warm South and cold North by rechristening Thaddeus Stevens, “Thaddeus Stoneman”—the man of stone; the radical republican who is the obdurate villain of the picture. He has a clubfoot and moves angularly and mechanically; his house, his dress, are gloomy, dark, cold, as opposed to the warmth and lightness of the Southern planation garments and scene. In the novel, Dixon had identified him as the owner of Pennsylvania iron mills, and Griffith took the hint, giving him clothes to wear and expressions to assume which, in their harshness and implacability, suggest the unyielding metal. The sense of commercialism, combined with rigidity and pious hypocrisy is identified with the North, too, by showing the presumed beginnings of slavery in America. We see a Puritan preacher sanctimoniously praying while two of the elect arrange the sale of a cringing slave; the following scene is of Abolitionists demanding the end of slavery; the grouping of the two scenes, the dress and features of the characters in both, make the point strongly that these are the same people; the montage is a dramatization of Ben Cameron’s assertion in the novel, that “our slaves were stolen from Africa by Yankee skippers . . . It was not until 1836 that Massachusetts led in Abolition—not until all her own slaves had been sold to us at a profit . . .²⁰

In these opening scenes, too, we have the complete cast of characters of the Plantation Ideal. The Camerons are shown as they go down to the fields to mingle with the happy and trusting slaves. A title tells us that “in the two hour interval for dinner given in their working day from six to six the slaves enjoy themselves;” then appears a view of slaves clapping hands and dancing. Ben Cameron places his hand paternally upon the shoulders of one, and shakes hands with another who bobs in a perfect frenzy of grateful loyalty: in several seconds a wonderful summary of a hundred years of romantic tradition in which “a beautiful felicity of racial contact has been presented, not as occasional but as constant; an imperious kindness on the part of the whites, matched by obsequious devotion on the part of the blacks.”²¹

The Plantation Ideal had to explain the obvious fact that during the war and Reconstruction, many Negroes fought with the Union and greeted Emancipation with joy. The Illusion protected itself by explaining that the true, southern, fullblooded Negro remained loyal throughout and after the war. It expanded the truth of individual instances of this kind into a general rule. In the Civil War sequences of The Birth of a Nation, the Camerons’ slaves are shown cheering the parade of the Confederate soldiers as they march off to defend them against their freedom. The fat Negro cook and the others of the household staff are described as “The Faithful Souls”; they weep at Southern defeat and Northern triumph; they rescue Dr. Cameron from his arrest by Reconstruction militia.

While the Illusion persistently maintained the loyalty of the true slave, it premised the disaffection of other Negroes upon several causes, all of them explicable within the framework of the Plantation Ideal. The major explanation was the corruption of the Negro by the North. The freed Negro, the Union soldier, is a monster of ingratitude, a renegade from the feudal code, and only evil can be expected of him. The picture shows The Faithful Soul deriding one such abomination; the title reads, “You northern black trash, don’t you try any of your airs on me.” And a little later, we see her lips saying, and then read on the screen, “Those free niggers from the north sho’ am crazy.” The second explanation was that the mulatto, the person of mixed blood, was the arch-villain in the tragedy of the South. Stoneman, the radical republican leader, is shown, as he was in the novel, under the spell of his mulatto housekeeper. A scene of Stoneman lasciviously fondling his mistress is preceded by the title: “The great leader’s weakness that is to blight a nation.” The mistress, in turn, has as a lover another mulatto, Silas Lynch, who is described as the principal agent in Stoneman’s plans to “Africanise” the South. This dark part of the Plantation Illusion is further represented in the twin climaxes of the picture, both of which are attempted sexual assaults on blonde white girls, one by a Northern Negro, and the other by the mulatto, Silas Lynch.

The sexual terms into which this picture translated the violation of the Souther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Chapter 2. Problems in Film History: How Fox Innovated Sound
• Chapter 3. Ideology and Film Rhetoric: Three Documentaries of the New Deal Era (1936-1941)
• Chapter 4. Fighting Words: City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940)
• Chapter 5. The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Thematic Emphasis through Visual Style
• Chapter 6. History with Lightning: The Forgotten Film Wilson (1944)
• Chapter 7. The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White
• Chapter 8. The Snake Pit (1948): The Sexist Nature of Sanity
• Chapter 9. Ambivalence as a Theme in On the Waterfront (1954): An Interdisciplinary Approach to Film Study
• Chapter 10. Dr. Strange/ave (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus
• Chapter 11. A Test of American Film Censorship: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
• Chapter 12. Apocalypse Now (1979): Joseph Conrad and the Television War
• Chapter 13. Film, Television, and American Studies: A 1998 Update
• Film Data and Purchase Sources
• Contributors
• Index