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⡘ 27 The Celluloid War before The Birth Race and History in Early American Film Robert Jackson The Anxiety of Teleology By the time D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation arrived on the big screen in 1915, cinematic representations of the Civil War had been around for nearly two decades, virtually the entire lifetime of the young medium. The early twentieth-century America into which the film was released was marked not just by the memory of that war but also by complex forces of progressive reform, Jim Crow segregation, the woman suffrage movement, the maturation of popular culture and its realist critiques , and perhaps most importantly at mid-decade, the fiftieth anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox coupled with anxieties about possible American involvement in the Great War. Yet because of the blockbuster status of Griffith’s three-hour epic, because of the exceptionalism of its massive scales of production, promotion, and reception, and because of its claims to authority both as a historical document and as a definitive text from the entire three-decade silent film era, The Birth of a Nation has sometimes resisted such contextualizations. Instead, until recently it has functioned more commonly for film scholars and social historians alike as a generic reference point, a monument of sorts, with more limited connotations of technical inventiveness, economic success, and racism.1 The discussion of The Birth of a Nation in William K. Everson’s American Silent Film (1978), which stood as a standard text in film history for many years, reveals two simultaneous desires on the part of its author that were characteristic of much of the criticism surrounding the film. Everson seeks first to celebrate Griffith’s mastery of narrative and emotional effect and second to distance himself, as a right-thinking, post– civil rights egalitarian, from Griffith’s problematic racial politics. Everson settles on the Manichaean course of dismissing (or at the very least, bracketing) race from any critical consideration of Griffith’s achievement, 28 Robert Jackson while fetishizing his stylistic innovations to the effect that they hover in a kind of aesthetic vacuum.2 Both in his sense of the original contribution of Griffith’s film to the art of the motion picture and in his pedagogical impulse to transmit the brilliance of Griffith’s vision without the blurring lens of racism, Everson struggles to keep form and content separate. Everson’s approach represents an impasse that much film historiography, from Lewis Jacobs’s classic 1939 study The Rise of the American Film to work by many of Everson’s contemporaries, has faced.3 Everson’s enthusiastic appraisal of The Birth of a Nation leaves no doubt about his approval of the film’s aesthetic merit and long-term impact on the medium , nor about his resentment of what he called the “often artificially created and sustained” controversy over its portrayal of race that had tempered the film’s chorus of support for many decades.4 Only the most recent generation of scholarship has begun to challenge the very assumption that these two elements, form and content, are to the last separable; indeed, much recent work has offered substantial evidence of an earlycinema context in which form and content, particularly in racial matters, were mutually constitutive across a wide range of American film institutions and screen practices.5 Everson’s flawed teleology, like his aversion to discussing race, is representative in a historical narrative that regards 1915 as a starting point for American cinema, a foundational moment of inspired transcendence from “primitive” early silent film.6 But the tangled roots of early cinema —marked by two decades of extraordinary formal experimentation as well as social and historical change from its commercial debut in 1894 to its feature-length consolidation around 1914—tell another story, in which The Birth of a Nation is no beginning at all. In this story, which lacks the revisionist impulse of the post–civil rights era to save the triumphant “form” but jettison the “content” of racial oppression, the body of early American film in the years before The Birth of a Nation provides a diverse historical and aesthetic record that differs in important ways from the received wisdom of Griffith’s epic summation. Representations of race in some of the earliest motion pictures (along with Griffith’s own diverse and sensitive treatments of the Civil War in several of his earlier one...

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