Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Whether they are behind the camera or in front of it, this is the place to discuss all filmmakers regardless of their role in the filmmaking process.
User avatar
Precious Doll
Emeritus
Posts: 4453
Joined: Mon Jan 13, 2003 2:20 am
Location: Sydney
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Precious Doll »

Due to all the publicity that The Birth of a Nation has recently received I decided to revisit the film.

I hadn't seen it since 1984 and really didn't recall the content only that it was a somewhat laborious viewing experience.

Having seen it again and being 35 years older and knowing its history I noted that the film reeks of racism in part 2. Its completely understandable why this film more than 100 years later stirs up so many people as some of it is outright offensive, though I do not think it was Griffiths intention. I did find the film more interesting the second time round given all the historical context but it was a troubling viewing. Having said that it is an important part of film history and for anybody interested in cinema history a must-see, warts and all.
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19312
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Big Magilla »

Put simply, Griffith was a racist without realizing he was a racist. He was a product of his Southern heritage. Once he came to the realization that Birth of a Nation was racist, he spent the rest of his life trying to make amends.

It wasn't just the DGA award that was named after him. There's at least one school in the South largely attended by African-American students that is still named after him. I suspect it won't be long before that changes.
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10740
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Sabin »

Big Magilla wrote
Roger Ebert in his 2003 four-star review of the film had this to say in conclusion:

"As slavery is the great sin of America, so "The Birth of a Nation" is Griffith's sin, for which he tried to atone all the rest of his life. So instinctive were the prejudices he was raised with as a 19th century Southerner that the offenses in his film actually had to be explained to him. To his credit, his next film, "Intolerance," was an attempt at apology. He also once edited a version of the film that cut out all of the Klan material, but that is not the answer. If we are to see this film, we must see it all, and deal with it all."
Has there been in history a movie more regarded as pieces rather than a whole? There's the groundbreaking stuff, then there's the racist stuff. Even Griffith appears to hold that view to some degree if he's willing to cut out the Klan version.

I don't understand why there's this weird line when it comes to D.W. Griffith. Is it truly too much of a leap to suggest that yes, he might be a racist? I know, he filmed Intolerance as an apology. He filmed the first interracial love story. Is it possible that the guy is a racist?

Let me put it a different way. Let's say he's not a racist. Then he was a powerfully myopic, apolitical person. A Slate article posits that:
Griffith believed that a passage from The Clansman where Klansmen ride "to the rescue of persecuted white Southerners" could be adapted into a great cinematic sequence
Fun thought process.
Mister Tee wrote
Is there some universe in which this is supposed to make me feel better about the guy?
Thank you for chiming in. I thought I was on crazy pills for a second.
"How's the despair?"
Mister Tee
Tenured Laureate
Posts: 8636
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 2:57 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Mister Tee »

Big Magilla wrote: Dixon saw the original Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the South but denounced the second iteration of the Klan that arose in response to the film.
Is there some universe in which this is supposed to make me feel better about the guy?

A lot of disparate issues are floating around this thread by now, but, a few comments:

1) Context or not, Birth of a Nation is a shockingly racist movie. I watched it in my late 20s, on PBS, with my then-roommate, knowing only that it was viewed as the first real landmark of silent cinema. When a title card appeared that read (roughly) "The two men unite to defend their Aryan heritage", Brian and I looked at each other with mouths agape. (I'm Irish Catholic, he's Jewish, for whatever "context" that provides.) Both of us were truly shocked by the primitive racial views. It made Gone with the Wind look progressive.

2) Though Gone with the Wind is no kiss for Christmas, either. It's shocking to think that the two films that were viewed as the pinnacle of popular cinema for much of the 20th century both seemed wedded to the nobility of the Confederate cause.

3) I'm with Sabin on Griffith: no, don't wipe him from history, but sure as hell don't keep giving out awards in his name. The fact that it was done for some stretch of time is no excuse to keep doing it. St. John's University (my parents' alma mater) for years called their basketball team the Redmen. Finally persuaded that was racist, they changed it to Red Storm. A lot of old alums grumbled, but it's decades on now, and no one has any problem using the new name. (Maybe some day the Washington Redskins will come to realize they should follow suit.)

4) Deleting Lillian Gish is another matter. I frankly don't even remember her being that significant a part of Birth of a Nation -- not like I remember her in Way Down East, The Wind or Night of the Hunter. Actors for hire in a bygone era shouldn't be held responsible for every piece of material they were associated with.

Though I'm not sure "a lifelong Republican and close friend of Ronald Reagan" is an especially good rebuttal to accusations of racism. Reagan famously opened his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia MS, site of the infamous Mississippi murder of civil rights workers, and built the current GOP coalition that's infested with bigotry.
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10740
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Sabin »

OscarGuy wrote
Griffith was a great figure in cinema history. Intolerance was his apology for Birth of a Nation. While perhaps naming things after him isn't the best option, he shouldn't be forbidden from being seen or discussed.
Yes, this is literally my point. I'm not talking about erasing him. I'm just saying some awards shouldn't be named after him. Not even all. I'm just saying some. I don't want his films to be forbidden from being seen or discussed. That's what we're doing now and it's great.

That being said, I think it's okay to say "Yeah, that guy was probably a racist."
"How's the despair?"
User avatar
OscarGuy
Site Admin
Posts: 13668
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 12:22 am
Location: Springfield, MO
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by OscarGuy »

Griffith was a great figure in cinema history. Intolerance was his apology for Birth of a Nation. While perhaps naming things after him isn't the best option, he shouldn't be forbidden from being seen or discussed.

Lillian Gish on the other hand, made one racist film, but her career is not defined by that film. I do not have a problem with things being named after Gish in the slightest. We wouldn't stop something from being named after Clark Gable or Vivien Leigh because of Gone With the Wind, a far more popular and familiar film today, so we shouldn't punish Gish for a film that's notorious, but is barely discussed outside of Academia.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19312
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Big Magilla »

It would be nice if we could find a contemporaneous review of the film instead of the audience but we can't because film reviews apparently did yet exist. Even the New York Times ignored it except for the ads which appeared on the paper's last page with the theatre ads.

Who was the first night audience comprised of anyway? The cost of a ticket during the run of the film was that of a Broadway play. $2/40 in 1915 was equivalent to $54.00 today. That was more than a month's salary for the average worker who earned an average of $13.21 per week.

Dixon saw the original Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the South but denounced the second iteration of the Klan that arose in response to the film.

Gish quoted Griffith as saying in her book The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, that Griffith famously answered when he was accused of being anti-Negro: "To say that is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives." That was apparently the prevailing attitude of the day in the South.

Roger Ebert in his 2003 four-star review of the film had this to say in conclusion:

"As slavery is the great sin of America, so "The Birth of a Nation" is Griffith's sin, for which he tried to atone all the rest of his life. So instinctive were the prejudices he was raised with as a 19th century Southerner that the offenses in his film actually had to be explained to him. To his credit, his next film, "Intolerance," was an attempt at apology. He also once edited a version of the film that cut out all of the Klan material, but that is not the answer. If we are to see this film, we must see it all, and deal with it all."
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10740
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Sabin »

Big Magilla wrote
The film needs to be taken in context. When it was made, the KKK was a thing of the past. It flourished in the 1860s, was extinguished in 1871. Putting it in the film was controversial but considered at the time it was made no more threatening than depictions of Nazis in films after World War II would be in later years. However, the film spurred new interest in the Klan which rose again and lasted through the mid-1920s. The current iteration was re-ignited in 1950 and has lasted longer than either previous iteration. So, yes, the film is racist in retrospect because of what it inspired but that was not intentional.
This is a review of The Birth of a Nation in The Evening Post, Thursday, March 4, 1915.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/254695322/Fr ... =affiliate
"An appeal to race prejudice as subtle and malicious as any that has been made in New York, a thrilling historic spectacle of the battles and life of the days of the Civil War, and an explanation of Southern feeling in the reconstruction days in defence of the Ku Klux Klan which terrorized negroes during that period--these were the things that presented to the spectators who filled the Liberty Theater last evening for the first presentation of the motion-picture drama, "The Birth of a Nation." As an achievement in motion-picture photography upon a tremendous scale, surprisingly effective in artistic realization, the film is as remarkable as it is audacious in its characterization of the negro as a primitive brute, either vicious or childlike, only to be controlled by violence.

People were moved to cheers, hisses, laughter, and tears, apparently unconscious, and subdued by tense interest in the play, they clapped when the masked riders took vengeance on negroes, and they clapped when the hero refused to shake the hand of a mulatto who has risen by political intrigue to become lieutenant-governor. This remark, made by a typical New Yorker leaving the theater, characterizes the sentiment whcih was expressed in much of the comment: "That show certainly does make you hate those blacks. And if it gets that effect on me when I don't care anything about it, imagine what it would be in the South, with a man whose family was mixed up in it. It makes you feel as if you'd do the same thing.

...SKIPPING TO THE END...

Thomas Dixon, author of "The Clansman," upon which the picture-drama is based, was called before the curtain last evening and made a short speech. In introducing D.W. Griffith, the producer of the pictures, he declared that none but the son of a Confederate soldier could have reproduced the spirit of the his book."
When it comes to the question of whether or not D.W. Griffith made an intentionally racist film, I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!
"How's the despair?"
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19312
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Big Magilla »

Gish and Nathan dated "for many years". If she had wanted to marry, she probably would have long before the big reveal.

I don't know if it would classify as anti-Semitic, but intermarriage was frowned upon by large pockets of society almost as much between religions as it was between races until after World War II in the U.S. and is still frowned upon in some very conservative communities today.
Uri
Adjunct
Posts: 1230
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 11:37 pm
Location: Israel

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Uri »

I LOVE Lillian Gish. As I said on many occasions, the highlight of my life as a movie goer was seeing her in the flesh back in 1984. Yet, as much as I want her to be beyond reproach, I do acknowledge that she was a product of her time.
There was a second reason Gish supposedly would not marry Nathan: because he was Jewish. Although Nathan was a non-practicing Jew, he never told Gish of his descent. When she found out, she soured on the relationship. Was Lillian Gish anti-Semitic or just upset at Nathan for never telling her of his background?

No one will ever know her reasons for sure.


But then again - so what? I guess most non-jewish people in America back then were at least partial toward Jews, if not fully anti-semitic. It's a given.

A pure world means a sterile one. So yes, the decision made in that school in Ohio is really a dumb one. They may have earned their sainthood yet lost, as an academic institution, their right to exist.

http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2017/1 ... lian-gish/
User avatar
Precious Doll
Emeritus
Posts: 4453
Joined: Mon Jan 13, 2003 2:20 am
Location: Sydney
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Precious Doll »

Big Magilla wrote: Lillian Gish was hardly a racist. I might disagree with her politics. She was, after all, a lifelong Republican and close friend of Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, she was also an early and tireless advocate for film preservation.
Lots of the Hollywood legends were lifelong Republicans (and friends of Ronald Reagan) but the Republicans of the 20th century (certainly pre-Nixon) are vastly different from what's in the White House today.

I watched Lillian Gish's speech when she accepted her Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFI on YouTube and it was great. I wish the whole program was available to view but that doesn't appear to be the case :cry: . The only article of note I found on the internet about Gish's AFI presentation was from The Washington Post and it really did sound a hoot - particularly Robert Mitchum's tribute.
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19312
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Big Magilla »

Sabin wrote:
Big Magilla wrote
Sabin - If you don't have access or time to watch the movie at least read the excellent Wikipedia synopsis of the film and its historical context before jumping to conclusions.
I’ve seen the film. What conclusions am i jumping to?
That Griffith was a racist.

The film needs to be taken in context. When it was made, the KKK was a thing of the past. It flourished in the 1860s, was extinguished in 1871. Putting it in the film was controversial but considered at the time it was made no more threatening than depictions of Nazis in films after World War II would be in later years. However, the film spurred new interest in the Klan which rose again and lasted through the mid-1920s. The current iteration was re-ignited in 1950 and has lasted longer than either previous iteration. So, yes, the film is racist in retrospect because of what it inspired but that was not intentional.

Lillian Gish was hardly a racist. I might disagree with her politics. She was, after all, a lifelong Republican and close friend of Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, she was also an early and tireless advocate for film preservation.
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10740
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Sabin »

Big Magilla wrote
Sabin - If you don't have access or time to watch the movie at least read the excellent Wikipedia synopsis of the film and its historical context before jumping to conclusions.
I’ve seen the film. What conclusions am i jumping to?
"How's the despair?"
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19312
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Big Magilla »

Sabin - If you don't have access or time to watch the movie at least read the excellent Wikipedia synopsis of the film and its historical context before jumping to conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation

Let's not forget that Griffith was also the director of the first inter-racial romance in film history, 1919's Broken Blossoms starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess as her Chinese lover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Blossoms
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10740
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Re: Lillian Gish: should a great actor be judged by a racist film?

Post by Sabin »

Reza wrote
Yes. Things were done and said with a lot of people believing it was right - sadly a lot of people in your country even today don't think there is anything wrong with what was depicted in Griffith's film. But banning books and films today because we dont like what was said and done is absurd. It's history. Cannot be changed. We can hope not to do it today but banning something wont make it go away. Watch things in the context of that time. Condemn it but don't ban it.

What's next? Trying to erase Hitler from every old newsreel, film or book?
I'm honestly confused by the purpose of the point you made in bold, but...

Nobody's talking about banning 'The Birth of a Nation' or D.W. Griffith. Just putting it into a modern context. And why not? Isn't that literally all that we've been doing on this message board for twenty years? Revisiting films and engaging in thoughtful dialogue about them? He made a dangerously racist film and doesn't deserve to have a Lifetime Achievement Award named after him for his sins.

Nobody's talking about banning 'The Birth of a Nation.' Just not naming shit after the filmmaker. Back in 1999, the D.W. Griffith award was renamed? Why? Because it would be pretty shitty for a black filmmaker to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award named after D.W. Griffith. Sure, he invented the close-up, but he also revitalized the Klan, made a film that was used as a recruiting tool, and he never apologized for it. We love to talk about how he bankrupted himself making 'Intolerance,' which feels a little bit like "Great Man History." What if instead of making a movie that nobody saw he... I don't know... apologized? Or tried to do something about the fact that he made a Klan-propaganda tool? The best you can say is that he was naive. The worst you can say is he didn't care and just didn't like the idea of his name being attached to racist propaganda and wanted to improve his image. I probably have an easier time believing the latter because, let's be real, he probably wasn't sorry. His family owned slaves. He screened 'The Birth of a Nation' for Woodrow Wilson who was quoted as saying "It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The second sentence is something that's never quoted because the first sentence talks about the medium of film in empowering terms. The second sentence talks about the medium in a more frightening way and speaks to its messaging power. The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the country as well as a racist, could watch the film in awe and nod in solidarity.

Brilliant filmmaker. Fuck him.

That being said, I would need more information about Lilian Gish's participation in 'The Birth of a Nation' to assess whether or not I support her removal. I don't necessarily think an actor should be judged by a racist film. It's a different method of artistic participation. But I also don't know enough about her.
"How's the despair?"
Post Reply

Return to “The People”