“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision”: D. W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation

Representations

Volumn 9, Issue , 1985, Pages 150-195

  Rogin, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84968188504     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3043769     Document Type: Article

References (186)

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2. Addams, Spirit of Youth, 6, 75-100.
3. Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage (New York, 1970).
4. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, N.J., 1956), 253.
5. Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 7, 1915, in Fred Silva, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 35.
6. Bloomfield, The Leopard’s Spots, 395-396.
7. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 196, 216-223.
8. Brown, Adventures with Griffith, 177-178.
9. Brownlow, Parade’s Gone, 50-53.
10. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 208-280.
11. Cf. Catherine Gallagher, “The Politics of Culture and the Debate over Representation,” Representations 5 (Winter 1984), 115-47.
12. cf. Mary Odein, “Wilson and the Immigrants,” unpublished seminar paper, U. C. Berkeley, 1984.
13. Cf. Neil Hertz, “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” and Catherine Gallagher,” More about ‘Medusa’s Head Representations 4 (Fall 1983), 27-57.
14. Cf. Raymond Allen Cook, Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Career of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, N.C., 1968), 51-52, 72, 163-173.
15. Cf. Russell L. Merritt, “Mr. Griffith, The Painted Lady, and the Distractive Frame,” in Deutelbaum, “Image” 47.
16. Seymour Stern, “Griffith and Poe,” Films in Review 2 (November 1951), 23.
17. Cf. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in James Strachey, ed., The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1955) 21: 152-157.
18. Cf. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 56.
19. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 184-185.
20. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 71.
21. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 78.
22. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 79-112.
23. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 26-27.
24. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 56-62.
25. D. W. Griffith, “Five Dollar ‘Movies’ Prophecied,” The Editor, April 24, 1915, in Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 25.
26. D. W. Griffith, “My Early Life,” Photoplay (1916), in Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 13-14, 39-40.
27. D. W. Griffith, “The Future of the Two-Dollar Movie,” in Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 100.
28. D. W. Griffith, “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America” (Los Angeles, 1916), 1, 5.
29. Davenport, “Dixon’s Mythology,” 341.
30. David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America (New Haven, 1970), 42-52.
31. Debora L. Silverman, “Nature, Nobility, and Neurology: The Ideological Origins of’Art Nouveau’ in France, 1899-1900,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1983.
32. Dixon, Clansman, 127, 149, 163-164, 333.
33. Dixon, Clansman, 39, 132, 143.
34. Dixon, Clansman, 39. Paul Thomas first perceived the Klan sheets as shrouds.
35. Dixon, in Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 79, 94-95.
36. Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 152, 161, 244.
37. Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 336.
38. Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 447, 468.
39. Dixon, Leopard’s Spots, 9-13.
40. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks (New York, 1973), 16.
41. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film (New York, 1983), 31-52, 202.
42. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South (Knoxville, Tenn., 1981), 47.
43. Eisenstein, Film Form, 205, 223, 227-230, 234-237, 243-245, 253.
44. Ezra Goodman, The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (New York, 1961), 4-5.
45. F. Garvin Davenport, Jr., “Thomas Dixon’s Mythology of Southern History” Journal of Southern History 36 (August 1970), 361.
46. Faulkner, Light in August, 437-440.
47. Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (New York, 1959), 86-91.
48. Francis Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” New Republic 2 (March 20, 1915), 185.
49. Fred Weinstein and Gerald Piatt, The Wish to Be Free (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969).
50. Friedman, White Savage, 57-68.
51. G. Charles Niemeyer, “David Wark Griffith: In Retrospect, 1965,” in Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 129.
52. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 11.
53. Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 13-14.
54. George C. Pratt, “In the Nick of Time: D. W. Griffith and the ‘Last-Minute Rescue,’” in Marshall Deutelbaum, ed., “Image” on the Art and Evolution of the Film (New York, 1979), 74-75.
55. George Frederickson, White Supremacy (New York, 1981), 188-191.
56. Griffith, in Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 15.
57. Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative,” 12-25.
58. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 123.
59. Harry M. Geduld, ed., Focus on D. W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 8.
60. Hart, Man Who Invented Hollywood, 26.
61. Hart, Man Who Invented Hollywood, 26-28.
62. Hart, Man Who Invented Hollywood, 33.
63. Henderson, Griffith, 280-284.
64. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1973), 379-390, 428-435.
65. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York, 1956), 140-141.
66. “Films and Births and Censorships,” The Survey 24 (April 3, 1915), 4.
67. Jacobs, Rise of American Film, 14, 118-119.
68. Jacobs, Rise of American Film, 98.
69. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Ann Snitow, et al., eds., Powers of Desire (New York, 1983), 331-333, 337.
70. James Hart, ed., The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith (Louisville, Ky., 1972), 28-29.
71. James Shelley Hamilton, “Putting a New Move in the Movies,” Everybody’s Magazine 32 (June 1915), 680.
72. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York, 1909), 75-103.
73. Jay Leyda, “The Art and Death of D. W. Griffith,” in Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 161-167.
74. John Hope Franklin, “’Birth of a Nation’—Propaganda as History,” The Massachusetts Review 20 (Autumn 1979), 417-433.
75. Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (New York, 1973), 57.
76. Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 29-30, 38-39.
77. Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York, 1965), 19-67.
78. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, eds., Women and the Cinema (New York, 1977), 412-428.
79. Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), 133.
80. Link, Wilson, 246-247.
81. Link, Wilson, 467.
82. Lawrence J. Friedman, The White Savage (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 157-163.
83. Louis Jacobs, The Rise of American Film (New York, 1967), 98-110.
84. Mackaye, “The Birth of a Nation” 45-46.
85. Martin Green, The von Richtofen Sisters (New York, 1974).
86. Maxwell Bloomfield, “The Leopard’s Spots: A Study in Popular Racism,” American Quarterly 16 (Fall 1964), 387-392.
87. May, Screening Out the Past, 218.
88. May, Screening Out the Past, 36-37.
89. May, Screening Out the Past, 52-53, 59.
90. May, Screening Out the Past, 60.
91. May, Screening Out the Past, 60.
92. May, Screening Out the Past, 60-61.
93. May, Screening Out the Past, 71. The interpretation in these paragraphs draws heavily from May.
94. May, Screening Out the Past, 73.
95. May, Screening Out the Past, 80-86.
96. May, Screening Out the Past, 92.
97. May, Screening Out the Past, 73.
98. Merritt, “Griffith Directs the Great War,” 47-57.
99. Merritt, “Griffith Directs the Great War,” 51, 58-59.
100. Merritt, “Griffith Directs the Great War,” 57.
101. Merritt, “Griffith Directs,” 63-65, 75-79.
102. Michael Rogin, “Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson: The Iron Cage in Germany and America,” Polity 3 (Summer 1971), 557-575.
103. Michael Rogin, “The King’s Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon and Presidential Self-Sacrifice,” in J. David Greenstone, ed., Public Values and Private Power in American Politics (Chicago, 1982), 80-81.
104. Milton Mackaye, “The Birth of a Nation,” Scribner’s 102 (November 1937), 45-46.
105. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (Boston, 1957).
106. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
107. Odem, “Wilson and the Immigrants,” 1-16.
108. On dependence and autonomy cf. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984).
109. “On the Jewish Question,” democracy 3 (Spring 1983), 101-114.
110. Quotes are from Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York, 1984), 299, 279.
111. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, Md., 1978), 4-22, 48-49, 56-64, 79-83, 203, 236, 307.
112. Richard Slotkin, The Crater (New York, 1980).
113. Agee, Agee on Film, 313.
114. Robert M. Henderson, D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (Oxford, 1972), 54.
115. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York, 1975), 105-106.
116. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974), 3-57, 202.
117. Robert Welsh, “David Griffith Speaks,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Jan. 14, 1914, 48-49, 54.
118. Rogin, “The King’s Two Bodies,” 83-87.
119. Rogin, in Greenstone, Public Values and Private Power, 86-87.
120. Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents (London, 1983).
121. Russell Merritt, “D. W. Griffith Directs the Great War: The Making of Hearts of the World” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6 (Winter 1981), 47.
122. Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith and the Southern Legend,” Cinema Journal 3 (1972), 28.
123. Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters 1905-1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison, Wise., 1976), 57-57.
124. Scene numbers are from Theodore Huff, The Birth of a Nation Shot Analysis (New York, 1961).
125. Schickel, Griffith, 15, 555.
126. Schickel, Griffith, 15.
127. Hart, Man Who Invented Hollywood, 73.
128. Schickel, Griffith, 217-219.
129. Schickel, Griffith, 224.
130. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 171-172.
131. Merritt, “Griffith Directs the Great War,” 47.
132. Schickel, Griffith, 227.
133. Schickel, Griffith, 233-234, 578.
134. 62.Schickel, Griffith, 277.
135. Schickel, Griffith, 290.
136. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 103-108.
137. Schickel, Griffith, 294.
138. Schickel, Griffith, 294.
139. Lindsay, Art of the Moving Picture, 74.
140. Schickel, Griffith, 301.
141. Brownlow, Parade’s Gone, 628-629.
142. Schickel, Griffith, 30-31.
143. Schickel, Griffith, 353.
144. Schickel, Griffith, 353-354.
145. Schickel, Griffith, 354-355.
146. Schickel, Griffith, 400-403.
147. Schickel, Griffith, 416-419, 560-564.
148. Schickel, Griffith, 483.
149. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (New York, 1949), 197.
150. Seymour Stern, “Griffith: The Birth of a Nation, Part I,” Film Culture 36 (Spring-Summer 1965), 34-36.
151. Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 35.
152. Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 9.
153. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 48-54.
154. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 123.
155. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 170.
156. Silva, Focus on The Birth a Nation, 102.
157. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 3-4.
158. Gish, Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 139.
159. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York, 1968), 54.
160. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 5, 14.
161. Griffith, in Geduld, Focus on Griffith, 41.
162. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 66, 123, 164.
163. Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 67, 79-80.
164. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York, 1977), 62.
165. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 342.
166. Thomas Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (Ridgewood, N.J., 1967), 334-335, 408, 439.
167. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1944), 256-262.
168. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Lynching of Negroes— Its Cause and Prevention,” North American Review 178 (1904), 36-39, 45.
169. Tom Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6 (Winter 1981), 12-25.
170. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, rev. ed. (New York, 1970), 152-53, 207.
171. Edward Wagenknecht, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (Norman, Okla., 1962), 98-99.
172. Wagenknecht, Movies in the Age of Innocence, 78-79.
173. Wagenknecht, Movies in the Age of Innocence, 98-99.
174. Welsh, “Griffith Speaks,” 49, 54.
175. Welsh, “Griffith Speaks,” 49, 54.
176. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York, 1968), 147.
177. Cf. Frederickson, White Supremacy, 104.
178. Williams, Griffith, 4.
179. May, Screening Out the Past, 68.
180. Williams, Griffith, 62.
181. May, Screening Out the Past, 61.
182. Wilson, “Ideals of America,” 721-734.
183. Wilson, Reunion, 60.
184. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Baltimore, Md., 1969), 429-481.
185. Woodrow Wilson, “The Ideals of America,” Atlantic Monthly 90 (December 1902), 721-734.
186. Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, vol. 5, Reunion and Nationalization (New York, 1901), 19-20, 49-50.