CALL: Birth and Rebirth of a Nation, colloquium and film screening, September 26, 2009
Centered on D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, this day-long event reconsidered the notorious white supremacist manifesto in the context of the Obama call for change. The speakers, among them Douglas A. Blackmon, David W. Blight, Bill Gaskins, Margo Jefferson, Michelle Materre, Paul D. Miller (a k a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), Miriam J. Petty, and Michele Wallace considered questions of race and representation and asked whether today’s racial imagination can be reconciled with that of nearly a century ago when Griffith’s film became the first blockbuster in American cinema.

Watch Birth and Rebirth of a Nation on YouTube: Parts 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

RESPONSE: Chris Johnson, Ways of Seeing
Chris Johnson is a musical anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. Johnson has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar, in Germany for one year, and a Fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is also an Apple Computer Distinguished Educator and a graduate of New York University’s American Studies Doctoral Program.

His interests include African American culture, as related to Jazz as a black art form specifically, and performance practices generally, and the role of images in the shaping of ideas in society, historically and in our time. Johnson teaches using images, film, and sound and promotes digital technology as a teaching tool.

As an alternative to seeing The Birth of a Nation at the public screening on September 26, I viewed clips of it on YouTube to refresh my memory of the content of the film.

Watching it on my laptop, I wondered how Americans could ever have accepted the white actors in blackface as African American? Their makeup does not appear to be very well done at all. This observation leads to more questions and other observations. Since “Birth” was the first blockbuster in American film, many moviegoers had not seen blacks or blackface on screen before. Also, Americans were mainly familiar with minstrelsy, where makeup at best was sort of a simulation of blackness. In The Birth of a Nation, the performers in blackface were juxtaposed with African American actors which truly jilts the mind. Is it possible, I thought, that Americans were so racist as to buy into this poor theater? What does it mean that “Birth” operated within this visual charade?

In his introduction to African-American Performance and Theater History (2001), Harry Justin Elam presents race in theatrical terms. Race, according to him, is a “device” that is only one of a set of other props that are  “co-constructed” by actors as well audience members.  Belief is both created and suspended in performance. In the same book, in a chapter entitled “Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square,” Joseph Roach describes how white observers of live performances were habitually distracted by the actors’ skin color from the “cultural productions” that they observed. The authors take on the nature of observation suggests that the meaning of performance itself becomes “essentialized”—or condensed—by  the connotations of race. Art cannot be separated from social values, in fact, Roach goes so far as to propose that history and memory are rooted in performance.

If we apply this set of ideas to “Birth,” the theatrical device of the constructed character explains how audiences could have readily accepted blackface performers—alongside African Americans. Arguably, audiences knew the difference and reveled in the imitation, the racial lampoon. To the extent that certain performance is “essentialized,” the makeup serves as a prop to reinforce the actor’s role. The distraction of darkened skin is enough to propel a caricature. This thinking also explains the necessary segregation in the shooting of the film as audiences could only be comfortable with actors of the same race in intimate scenes. Thus “acting black” became a trope.

In his essay “Narrating Black Music’s Past,” (Radical History Review, 84, Fall 2002) Ronald Radano describes a dilemma in how black history has been presented. He writes of “the language of white supremacy in constituting ‘black music’” and asks the question “how might we engage simultaneously in black music’s deconstruction and its affirmative reconstruction?” Radano finds troubling the reality of African American culture’s mediated story. Our participation in the Vera List Center’s event “Birth and Rebirth” is of great importance as a means of articulating a new path for the construction of racial images while acknowledging the setting, ideology, and technical apparatus that created The Birth of a Nation in the first place. Such creative displays as “Rebirth of a Nation” challenge the force of the original piece by taking possession of the content, sampling it, and revaluing the film for our time. Through this process we take control of our destiny even in the face of continued bias.

“Birth” and “Rebirth” on the Web
If you search the phrase “Birth of a Nation” (in quotes) on YouTube, the top hit is for a trailer for the film with 140,825 views. The trailer was posted two years ago. It has 832 comments the first dozen of which were posted “2 days ago” and up to a week ago. One user has posted the entire film in twenty approximately nine minute segments. There are 2,890 results in total for this search on YouTube.

After viewing a few scenes from the film, I wondered about the fact that this controversial work can be viewed at any time and that we can all add our interpretation of the piece. The first page of comments vary in length and direction, ranging from one-liners such as “this movie is really disturbing” to responses that consist of full paragraphs. One response to a post ends with “attitudes like yours are not helping.” I am interested in the implications of having archival media at-the-ready in our time. I am concerned about the risks and dangers of misinterpretation of such work. Without context such items can be misread. In fact, isn’t YouTube racist for allowing such films to be posted? Well, no. But I do believe that context matters.

Searching “Rebirth of a Nation” on YouTube immediately brings up Paul D. Miller’s film with 24,143 views. There are five comments on the trailer posted one year ago with a total of 60 hits for the search phrase. Public Enemy’s 2006 rap album of the same name is second in prominence for listings on the first YouTube page for this search. On the first and on the following pages are many versions of Miller’s trailer and sections of the piece. It is interesting and ironic that “Rebirth” is so popular compared to “Birth.”

Jay David Bolter, in his essay “Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?” (Criticism, Winter 2007, Vol. 49, No. 1), speaks of media archaeology when considering the  broad assemblage of film online and its study. Karen Gracy, in “Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital” (Library Trends,Vol. 56, No. 1. Summer 2007), makes a series of arguments regarding the need to reimagine the moving image archive. She speaks of the moving image as a form of “objectified cultural capital” that on the Internet is both user appropriated and user created. Moving images are recycled into “new works” and as part of “creative acts.” The growing meta-archive is tagged and linked within and beyond particular video hosting sites. My interest in this topic begins with the global community’s attraction to African American culture and the dissemination of that cultural capital.

Tagging and linking suggests promotion, not unlike the way Digg.com works where often tagged items become identified as particularly significant. The manipulated versions of the original clips, their posting and viewing, have established a unique archive. Whether this leads to an anarchic Internet is debatable, but it certainly is available to a large and ever growing audience. It is fascinating how, through access and distribution, a discussion of old material has found new life.

Classic Film
Not long ago I purchased the DVD version of Stormy Weather, the Hollywood produced, all-black-cast music and dance film from 1943. It has only recently become available in digital form. In the film, the African American star Lena Horne sings the title song with full orchestra; the film also features dance interludes with the Katherine Dunham dancers. There are two dance scenes that set off Lena’s position from a window where she begins the song to a down-stage position where she performs the core of the piece. I was amazed to see that in a close-up mode Lena is shedding a tear as she sings. It wasn’t until I saw the digital version in full screen modus (I use this film in class), that I noted this moving expression of emotion. In the 1947 film New Orleans Billie Holiday sings the song “The Blues are a Brewin’.” She is with trumpeter Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. Holiday plays the role of both the maid of the white woman with whom the main protagonist has fallen in love and the girlfriend of real life jazz artist Louis Armstrong. She is young and beautiful as she sings in a sequined gown, wearing her trademark gardenia in her hair. This is a high-class setting with a white and well-dressed audience. In this clip Holiday also gets her close-up: her eyes and jewelry sparkle as her face fills the screen. In both these examples, the digital versions of the films show us more than viewers have ever seen in the original versions. We are arguably seeing more than was originally intended to be seen.

It seems to me, conventions of seeing are at play in both the film experience described above and my earlier observations regarding blackface. The concept of “how we see” has undergone a profound evolution since the last century. These changes are in equal parts a metaphor for the changes the values attached to our vision  have undergone as well as the changes in the technologies that advance it. Above I suggest a set of ideas that have been a part of that change.

Posted on December 2, 2009

Where do we stand on issues of race and representation? Can today’s racial imagination be reconciled with that of hardly a century ago, when D.W. Griffith’s notorious film, The Birth of a Nation, became the first blockbuster in American film? The Vera List Center presents a screening and colloquium around Griffith’s notorious white supremacist manifesto, reconsidered in the context of the Obama call for change.

The speakers hail from different backgrounds including history, film, music, journalism, and photography. Presenting analyses of some of the most recent scholarship on slavery and racism, particularly as manifested during the conception, production and distribution of The Birth of a Nation, they examine the film’s legacy and reverberations today.

PROGRAM

Screening I – 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915, silent, 180 minutes
Original sound score and live accompaniment by Michael Stein (Graduate of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music), introduced by faculty member Sonny Kompanek

Colloquium – 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Introduction
Bill Gaskins
Photographer, essayist and Professor of Photography and Art History, Parsons The New School for Design

Presentations
Douglas A. Blackmon
Atlanta Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal, Social historian of the Civil War, and Pulitzer-prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name

David W. Blight
Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University; author of Race and Reunion and numerous other studies and books

Michelle Materre
Assistant Professor, Media Studies and Film, The New School for General Studies

Miriam J. Petty
Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Rutgers University-Newark

Michele Wallace
Professor of English, City University of New York

Roundtable – 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
All participants, moderated by Margo Jefferson
Associate Professor of Writing, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

Screening II – 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
DJ Spooky, Rebirth of a Nation, 2008, color, sound, 90 minutes
Followed by Q & A with filmmaker Paul D. Miller (a k a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid)

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change,” with support of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and The Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts.

Posted on September 20, 2009

Photographer, essayist and Parsons faculty member Bill Gaskins introduces “Birth and Rebirth of a Nation,” a colloquium and screening event taking place at The New School on Saturday, September 26, 2009.

Posted on September 20, 2009

Colloquium participants submitted this list of suggested readings to create a context for the discussion:

Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery By Another Name. Anchor Books, 2008.

Blight, David. “Fifty Years of Freedom and Reunion” in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Wallace, Michele. “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal 43, No. 1, Fall 2003, 85-104.

Wallace, Michele. “Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates: The Possibilities for Alternative Visions,” in Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux and His Circle African American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2010, 53-66.

Wallace, Michele.”Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Before and after the Jim Crow Era,” Drama Review 44, no. 1 (spring 2000): 137-56.

Wallace, Michele. Two chapters on the score for “The Birth of a Nation” in Music and the Silent Film: Contexts & Case Studies, 1895-1924 by Martin Miller Marks, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Posted on September 20, 2009

Petty’s remarks provide some historical context for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in terms of its sweeping and enduring cultural significance. She will also explore the way in which the visual and ideological representation of Black/mulatto women in The Birth of a Nation is explicitly countered and revised by Oscar Micheaux in his 1920 film Within Our Gates.

In D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, mulatto domestic Lydia Brown (Mary Alden, in brownface makeup) cries crocodile tears to her white employer Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis). She tells him an inflammatory lie; that she has been violently assaulted or “outraged” by his white friend and fellow congressman, Charles Sumner. Brown ultimately uses the lie as a lure to seduce Stoneman; when we next see her, she has plainly ascended to new status as his mistress. Like the film’s blackface “Mammy” character (Jennie Lee), Lydia is a caricatured, grotesque version of real (read: white) womanhood. Her character testifies to the racist belief that Black women cannot be raped, that they lack the requisite honor and humanity to be sexually defiled.

Captured still from Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Five years after The Birth of a Nation’s blockbuster run, African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s released Within Our Gates, which many film scholars have cited as Micheaux’s response to Birth. Here, the film’s African American protagonist Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) tries to protect herself from a very real assault and attempted rape at the hands of white landowner Armand Gridlestone. Note the symmetrical reverse of the Birth scene with Brown and Stoneman, including the framed presidential portraits between the two figures; George Washington on the wall in the scene from Birth, and Abraham Lincoln on the wall in the scene from Within Our Gates. As a character, Sylvia directly refutes the assumptions carried by Birth of a Nation’s Lydia Brown on numerous levels. Moreover, Micheax’s jump cut editing of this scene with one in which Sylvia’s family is lynched establishes the rape of Black women by white men as having a comparable political and historical significance and function as lynching; that of terrorizing and repressing African American individuals and communities.

Posted on September 20, 2009