The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

10. Europeans Interpret the American South of the Civil War Era: How British and French Critics Received The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone WIth the Wind (1939)

181 10 Europeans Interpret the American South of the Civil War Era How British and French Critics Received The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939) Melvyn Stokes Since World War I, the market for films in Europe has been dominated by films produced in the United States. This has often been seen as exemplifying a process of “Americanization” in which American ideas, culture, values, and lifestyle have spread across the globe. Yet “America” on film is very much a generalized construct on the part of non-Americans. American films have often foregrounded diverse cultural and ethnic differences and regional diversities. One of the most obvious expressions of the latter has been the ways in which the South has been represented in the movies as a very distinctive region. The South’s own history provided the basis for this representation. It resisted the American national narrative, first, by clinging to its “peculiar institution” of African American slavery for many years after it had been abolished in the North; second, by attempting to break up that national narrative completely by seceding from the United States; and third, by resisting the will of the federal government during the Reconstruction era that followed the war. Far from effectively being “reconstructed,” the South emerged from the war shorn of slavery but with its society, politics, and culture still for the most part very different from elsewhere in the United States. 182 Melvyn Stokes The Birth of a Nation (1915) (La naissance d’une nation) and Gone With the Wind (1939) (Autant en emporte le vent) were the two most commercially successful American films of their time and perhaps, if adjusted for inflation, of all time. This essay will analyze how British and French critics and commentators interpreted the ways in which both films represented the South in the Civil War era. British and French reviewers of The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind inevitably explored the two films—and especially their presentation of race in the South—through the perspective of their own societies and cultures. There were a number of reasons why the two films, with their representation of the American South, should have been of particular interest in France and Britain. Both countries were colonial powers with large empires. They governed millions of people from different races. Both were pioneers in the abolition of African slavery: France initially in 1789 and, following its restoration by Napoleon, definitively in 1848; Britain in 1833. Both had a traditional interest in the American South: many British and French writers—including Frances Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Charles Dickens, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Alexis de Tocqueville—had traveled in and written about the region. Both countries, moreover, had fought as allies in World War I and (more briefly) in World War II. This latter point is of considerable relevance because the manner in which British and French critics read the two films—and the different sensibilities this revealed—had much to do with the times when they were viewed. Both these films dealing with the American Civil War period were themselves made against a background of war. David W. Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation, began shooting his film on July 4, 1914, a week after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered the chain of events that led to World War I. Principal photography on Gone With the Wind began on January 26, 1939, and production ended on November 11, ten weeks after the start of World War II. The Birth of a Nation, which premièred in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915, was first shown in Britain seven and a half months later. It was not actually released in France until eight years later, in the summer of 1923. The French time lag in respect to Gone With the Wind was even greater. It had its Atlanta première on December 15, 1939, and opened in London on April 18, 1940. It was not released in France until May 1950, just over a decade later. The first point to make, therefore, is that each of these films—dealing with the Civil War and its aftermath—was shown in Britain during a war that heav- Europeans Interpret the American South 183 ily influenced the manner in which it was received and interpreted. Equally, each was released in France during a...