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Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

Feuillade wrote:

Matt Barry · Guest

"Lloyd Fonvielle" <navigareNOSPAM@cox.net> wrote in message
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Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

Matt Barry wrote:

Matt Barry · Guest

"Lloyd Fonvielle" <navigareNOSPAM@cox.net> wrote in message
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ReelDrew@aol.com · Guest

I very much appreciate many of the comments in this thread and Matt
Barry's statement about film artists being more harshly treated than
those in older arts because of a lingering disdain for the lowly
"flickers" by some is right on target, as far as I'm concerned. But
as for Lloyd Fonvielle, I see he's right back to the Hitler analogy.
Since no one argues that Hitler acted alone, why does Mr. Fonvielle
continually rail against Griffith as though he made "The Birth of a
Nation" all by his ownsome? Other than some passing references to
Thomas Dixon, I don't recall his ever even mentioning once the
responsibility of Griffith's associates in bringing about what Mr.
Fonvielle apparently sincerely believes was one of the greatest crimes
of the 20th century. For however brilliant Griffith was as a
director, he needed the active, intelligent cooperation of others to
realize his artistic vision (or, according to Fonvielle, to commit his
evil atrocity). Indeed, as suprised as Fonvielle may be to learn
this, it wasn't even Ol' Hook-Nose Dave's idea to film "The Clansman"
in the first place. It was screenwriter Frank E. Woods, described by
Anita Loos as "a wonderful man" who "kept Griffith up to date and in
pace with the times," who, convinced on his own that "The Clansman"
would make a great film, developed a screen treatment of the story and
then persuaded DWG that he ought to film it. Fonvielle, however, has
never posted here claiming that Woods wanted to film it because he had
some "sick pathology" about blacks. Nor has Fonvielle ever commented
on the shared responsibility in the realization of this film of
cameraman Billy Bitzer, co-producer Harry Aitken, and the many actors
and assistants, including Lillian Gish, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh,
Miriam Cooper, Joseph Henabery, Raoul Walsh, Donald Crisp, George
Siegmann, Walter Long, Elmer Clifton, to mention some of the more
prominent names. Will Mr. Fonvielle argue that these people are, to
put it bluntly, co-conspirators in the commission of what he honestly,
sincerely believes was a genuine crime against humanity? Or is he
going to maintain that they were "just following orders?" If he does
believe, however, that they share responsibility, is he prepared to
state that there should be possible consequences here, too, analogous
to the DGA's dropping the Griffith award? In particular, should
Lillian Gish's name be stricken from the scholarships and awards given
in her honor? Just where will Mr. Fonvielle draw the line? And if he
doesn't want to go that far, then he has automatically undone his own
thesis that the production of "The Birth of a Nation" was a great
crime or even a misdemeanor. It is simply a film he doesn't care for
offering an historical interpretation with which he disagrees. Fair
enough--no one is obliged to like or appreciate everything. But that
hardly warrants the kind of emotional and frankly silly tirades
against the film with which Mr. Fonvielle constantly tries to
entertain us.

The plain and simple truth--and one that breast-beaters like Mr.
Fonvielle will apparently never realize--is that, however much moral
outrage has been expressed by Griffith's critics, the real driving
force in opposition to this film from 1915 to the present has been
primarily a political one. Contrary to what has been generally
assumed, though, the initial political opposition in 1915 stemmed
primarily not from liberals but from conservative Republicans. In
terms of American political parties, 1915 was a decidedly singular
time. The extraordinary division between the liberal Progressive
Republicans led by Theodore Roosevelt, Hiram Johnson, Robert M.
LaFollette et al. and the conservative or "regular" Republicans had,
in 1912, handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats.
For the only time in our nation's history since the Civil War, one of
the two traditional major parties, the Republican, had ended up in
third place behind T.R. and his Bull Moose Party. When Griffith's
film was released in 1915, the major schism between the Progressives
and the Republicans was still very apparent. In 1912, T.R. had not
made a really significant effort to woo black voters and, as is well
known, Wilson as president would demonstrate pro-Southern sentiments
that antagonized black leaders. Consequently, in the North in 1915,
conservative Republicans, besieged on two sides by the high tide of
Progressivism, considered blacks part of their traditional base and,
in a number of instances, made a conscious effort to appeal to them by
attacking "The Birth of a Nation." They were most successful in the
conservative Republican stronghold of Ohio where Governor Frank B.
Willis succeeded in enforcing a ban on the film until the 1916
election as governor of Democrat James M. Cox (the party's
presidential candidate in 1920) who promptly rescinded the ban upon
taking office. Unlike Republican conservatives, both Democrats and
Progressives were much more likely to have either endorsed the film or
(as in the case of Teddy Roosevelt and Bob LaFollette) refrained from
taking sides in the controversy. The quote so often attributed to
President Wilson is part of the record, along with those of many other
public figures such as T. R.'s running mate, California's Governor
Hiram Johnson, who also praised the film.

Aside from elected officials, other public figures of the time also
voiced their opinions on Griffith's film, pro and con. Here again,
despite what people like Mr. Fonvielle would like to believe, reality
did not unfold as neatly as has been imagined. By no means were all
of the film's critics the noble crusaders against racism as has been
claimed. Indeed, contrary to Fonvielle's lofty rhetoric about far-
seeing individuals expressing their moral outrage at this dreadful
film, consider the case of Dr. Charles W. Eliot, the former president
of Harvard. In 1915, Dr. Eliot placed himself at the forefront of
oppostion to "The Birth of a Nation," charging that the film
represented "a perversion of white ideals." And just what were those
white ideals that the good Dr. Eliot professed? In the March 15, 1909
"New York Times" he had made it abundantly clear. On a visit to
Atlanta, Georgia, he stated that "the South is handling the racial
problem in the right way and that the best interests of both whites
and blacks require that a racial dead line be established. Racial
intermingling, Dr. Eliot declared, would be fatal to both white and
black." Dr. Eliot then went on to say: "The negro cannot be expected
to be ready for all phases of civilization, when he is as far removed
from the time when he first began to enjoy civilization as a free
man. After 500 or 1,000 years, we may expect more substantial
growth." (!) Dr. Eliot thought that blacks might be effective in
certain professions, noting that "negro women, properly trained, make
good nurses." He asserted that to "maintain racial integrity" was a
good thing. "For that reason, he opposed the intermingling of racial
stocks, even of the Aryan branch."

Completely ignoring the reality of Dr. Eliot's blatant anti-black
racism, a number of later accounts of the controversy over "The Birth
of a Nation" have persistently referred to him as a noble-hearted
progressive genuinely devoted to the well-being of African-Americans
who reacted to Griffith's inflammatory film with exemplary outrage.
Apparently, they never bothered to check the record of his actual
views, whether on race or other major social issues. Some examples:
as reported in the October 27, 1909 "New York Times," he attacked
labor unions as a form of monopoly that should be done away with; and
in the December 6, 1909 "NY Times," he said that home-making should be
the crowning desire of women, not professional or public life, and
that Christian nations are superior to all the others because "they
have a higher climate of the intellectual and moral capacities of
woman and of the dignity and inspiring quality of her normal
occupation" (woman's "normal occupation" being, of course, to him her
domestic duty as a wife and mother).

The fact that commentators, in continually citing Dr. Eliot as an
example of the supposedly high-minded "liberal" opposition to "The
Birth of a Nation," have failed to examine the appalling record of his
own views speaks volumes for their short-sighted approach to research
and analysis. To add to the irony, one might compare Dr. Eliot's view
that maybe, just maybe, in say, about 500 or a thousand years, blacks
will be "ready" for civilization to Griffith's observation to Lillian
Gish that "the white man had taken centuries to attain the
intellectual and spiritual powers that many Negro citizens had
achieved in a few decades. He believed that no other race in the
history of mankind had advanced so far so quickly." Dr. Eliot's
denunciation of a film he never bothered to even see may have
ultimately been part of his general conservatism in which the leading
example of the new medium of cinema represented in his mind a threat
to the traditional cultural values he upheld. As with other instances
in the original controversy, later writers have confused liberalism
with conservatism in such a manner as to defy historical and
intellectual accuracy.

The kind of moral superiority in which Fonvielle revels--the "we-in-
America-today-are-so-much- more-enlightened-than-back-then" of his
latest post--has wider connotations to the world that I will likely
address in a follow-up. But to give an example of the kind of smug
thinking (with far more horrible consequences) that this can lead to
in the real world, I will cite a long-forgotten example from April of
1937. There was a horrific lynching of two black men by a white mob
in Mississippi. The news immediately flashed around the world and in
one country, the front pages of every newspaper were filled with what
they called the "horrible details" of these killings. And what
country was this whose press erupted with such moral outrage to these
crimes? Nazi Germany which emphasized the difference between the
barbarities perpetrated in the American South and the "humane German
racial laws." The following year, those "humane German racial laws"
led to Kristellnacht and after that---! No, a motion picture cannot
in the least be compared to the murder of even one human being,
whether by a frenzied mob or a calculating government. But the kind
of holier-than-thou moralism being constantly spouted by Mr. Fonvielle
does uncomfortably remind me of the kind of superior rhetoric that,
for example, the Nazis used to distinguish themselves from those they
regarded as less civilized and humane.

In any case, while I definitely have other priorities, I will likely
continue to respond to Mr. Fonvielle's misstatements and exaggerations
as long as he persists in making them.

William M. Drew

George Shelps · Guest

Matt Barry wrote:

Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

Matt Barry wrote:

Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

George Shelps wrote:

George Shelps · Guest

navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote

Matt Barry · Guest

"Lloyd Fonvielle" <navigareNOSPAM@cox.net> wrote in message
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ReelDrew@aol.com · Guest

To update what I called the basically political nature of the
opposition to "The Birth of a Nation," in addition to conservative
Republican politicians and the NAACP, there were also many people
still alive from the Civil War and Reconstruction period. And while
those who were either pro-Southern or who were not especially partisan
to the North who favored the film, there was also quite a bit of pro-
Union sentiment, notably from veterans of the Grand Army of the
Republic who opposed the film because of their own bitterness toward
the South in a conflict that was far from being remote history. As
time went on, as Terry Ramsaye wrote in the mid-1920s, the passage of
a decade had "cooled the heat of controversy"--at least as far as the
American political and cultural mainstream was concerned. The two
years that began with the film's release and culminated in the US
entry into World War I can be seen as a period in which the motion
picture itself was emerging to become a major force in American life.
In a broader sense, therefore, the debate over "The Birth of a Nation"
involved the wider issue of whether this strange newcomer, the movies,
should be allowed to become central to thought and culture. While the
establishment of the feature-length motion picture by the late 1910s
by no means ended the fight over films and film artists--as obviously
apparent in the moralists' reaction to the tabloidized movie scandal
stories that led to the Hays Office--still, the 1920s found Hollywood
an American institution. And whatever the American film industry's
view of Griffith in other respects, including his subsequent films,
they quickly enshrined "The Birth of a Nation" as the first great
landmark of the film art. For decades, right up through the 1950s, it
seemed that a major selling point by Hollywood was to declare in
advertisements that every ambitious new film was praised as "the
greatest since 'The Birth of a Nation,'" "greater than 'The Birth of a
Nation," "in the illustrious tradition of 'The Birth of a Nation.'"

From the standpoint of the controversy, although, of course, it never
went away entirely, the new central position enjoyed by Hollywood in
American life had the effect of tending to marginalize the effect of
"The Birth" dispute on the broader movie-going public for a number of
years. At no time have I found any effort by Griffith's peers in the
directorial community to condemn or even question the specific point
of view in "The Birth of a Nation." Given how the "Birth" issue has
now come to outweigh everything else with Griffith, I've been
decidedly intrigued by the fact that the controversy seems never to
have been addressed by any of the directors for all these decades. I
asked Kevin Brownlow not long ago if he had ever brought up the
controversy to great filmmakers like King Vidor, Frank Capra, John
Ford and others, and he said no, he had not. Even Raoul Walsh, who
both acted in the film and was one of its assistants, never to my mind
commented on the controversy. The point here is that the later
"outrage" of the '90s, used to justify dropping the award by the DGA,
is a purely manufactured one having to do with matters of political
image and control. In all the decades before, such socially committed
filmmakers as Chaplin, Ford, Vidor, Capra, Walsh, von Stroheim, Jean
Renoir, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian, George Stevens, William Wyler,
Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, on and on, had
consistently praised Griffith as the father of their art without even
once modifying their regard by saying that this was in spite of his
being a racist or having made a racist film. Just yesterday, I
finally was able to come across a newspaper article by George Stevens
in 1956 in which he said the greatest films were those inspiring
controversy with their passionate views. He cited as outstanding
examples "The Birth of a Nation," "Gone With the Wind," "The Best
Years of Our Lives," "The Caine Mutiny." Nowhere, however, did
Stevens, an ardent liberal who had been one of the first, I believe,
to film the Nazi death-camps after they had been liberated--not once
did Stevens state that there was anything objectionable in "The
Birth"'s controversial material. In truth, the decision by the DGA to
drop the Griffith award was in some ways more of a judgment on the
past leaders of the organization than on DWG himself since it
suggested that its earlier members had demonstrated moral and social
blindness in naming their highest honor after him.

How this came to be such a major issue in the late 1990s is, I think,
a kind of internal and perhaps even unconscious power struggle with
wider political implications in American society and early Hollywood.
By the '90s, most of the directors who had begun their careers were
either dead or dying. Griffith's most visible champion in the
industry was, of course, Lillian Gish who passed away in 1993. By the
late '90s, Kazan, Billy Wilder and Robert Wise, all of whom were
familiar with Griffith's work in their youth and had started directing
in Hollywood in the '40s when DWG was still around, were, on the
whole, simply too elderly or frail to have much input on the DGA's
1999 decision. (Parenthetically, however, I should note that Wise
subsequently did express the view that the DGA's decision was a
mistaken one resulting from external pressures.)

The void in the disappearance of directors who had learned their craft
from directly experiencing DWG's films was naturally filled by later
generations. Among them are those like Martin Scorsese who genuinely
honor Griffith and his achievements. Then there are others who, in my
opinion, are more into their own egos and images like Francis Ford
Coppola who has succeeded in suppressing the most complete version of
Abel Gance's "Napoleon" and was all too ready to assent to the DGA's
removal of Griffith's name from the award.

The real power dynamics in this denouement, though, is what I see as
the perhaps unconscious rivalry between Steven Spielberg, the
directorial king of Hollywood in the 1990s, both from the standpoint
of the box office and political influence, and Spike Lee, who rose to
power as the directorial king of modern black directors. As part of a
strategy to topple what they saw as the traditional white power
structure in Hollywood and enhance their own dominance, the new black
filmmakers like Lee and John Singleton began constantly denouncing
Griffith as the symbol of all that was "racist" in Hollywood, with
Singleton indeed likening "The Birth" to the Holocaust. Singleton,
who, I think, has had some problems of his own, has slipped a bit from
the limelight, but Lee, of course, remains a major figure. And
because of all the negative publicity he had generated toward
Griffith, he apparently had raised the specter that if the DGA should
some day honor him with their lifetime achievement award, he would
throw a fit if it bore the name of Griffith. Additionally, Spielberg,
sensing the pressure from Lee, with all the possible anti-Semitic
overtones and wishing to maintain his own leadership in Hollywood,
both morally and politically, clearly did not want to deal with the
embarrassment of his receiving the DGA's highest award bearing DWG's
name. So in the interest of political expediency and "image,"
Griffith was publicly swept into the dustbin and Spielberg became the
first director to receive a post-DWG award.

As for Spike Lee, he is now clearly trying to emulate the once-close
relationship Spielberg enjoyed with the White House during the Clinton
years. I suspect he thinks Spielberg's own power is starting to fade,
and Lee has hitched his own star to Barack Obama's wagon. In no way
should anything I say here be construed as criticism or commentary one
way or the other on Senator Obama, either his prospects, his beliefs,
or what kind of president he will make. Mr. Obama, as far as I'm
concerned, is hardly responsible for all the things that Spike Lee has
been saying for years. I merely wish to assert my very strong
conviction that Lee, whatever his abilities as a director, is very
much an opportunist and that it is his wish to be seen as the American
cinema's leader of the African-Americans and to gain even wider
influence, an ambition that led him to make Griffith an issue in the
first place. I do not think, however, that Lee has any genuine
dedication to the underprivileged, evident to me in his attack on
Jesse Jackson the other day for daring to criticize Obama. I doubt
that Lee cares any more for Obama than he does the blacks whose views
he claims to voice on film--I think Lee is just using Senator Obama
for his own political purposes, hoping as he does that an Obama
administration will enshrine him as the new king of Hollywood the way
Spielberg once was during the Clinton years.

Mr. Fonvielle is quick to repeat the wheezy canard that the DGA was
justified in dropping the Griffith award because a black filmmaker
would be offended at receiving such an award. Really? And should a
Jew be offended if he were given a drama award bearing Shakespeare's
name? After all, as Fonvielle just argued in a post, many people have
long asserted that "The Merchant of Venice" is anti-Semitic. Unlike
with Griffith, however, they have not used the controversy over that
one play to denigrate the author's entire work.

For the record, I believe the first black director in the history of
world cinema was a brilliant artist in Argentina, Jose Agustin
Ferreyra (1889-1943). Nicknamed "El Negro," he was the son of black
and white parents and grew up in poverty in Buenos Aires. His talent
as a designer led him to work in the Argentine cinema in 1915 and he
quickly became a director that same year. With his mastery of the
art, he dominated the Argentine cinema in both the silent and sound
eras as its most creative figure. There was nothing racial about his
films per se--they were very much reflective of the tango culture,
depicting the lives of the people he understood so well. His
recognition in the wider world is, needless to say, long overdue. In
respect to the present discussion, I think it should be mentioned that
one of the directors whom Ferreyra most admired was--D. W. Griffith.
He stated that Griffith, Thomas H. Ince, Cecil B. DeMille and Maurice
Tourneur were the filmmakers he held in the highest regard. A
completely spontaneous genius, after viewing their films and
assimilating their techniques, Ferreyra felt no need to watch other
films in order to continue making his own throughout the '20s and
'30s. He just drew on the world around him, working without a script
in an almost anarchical fashion but one that yielded outstanding
results. And if anyone had given him an award with Griffith's name on
it, I have no doubt that he would gladly have accepted it. Yes, I
realize he was an Afro-Argentinian, not an African-American. But
apologists for the DGA's decision like Fonvielle have practically
painted Griffith as the white racist supreme and the dedicated enemy
of black people everywhere in the world at all times, something which
is simply not true. As such, they have completely ignored the very
positive inspiration that Griffith provided to many pioneer filmmakers
of color in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. If cinema has
any hope of being taken seriously as an art, it is the narrow
political considerations of the ideological dogmatists that should be
cast aside, not the artists. Anyone with any love and respect for
cinema should be honored to be given awards bearing the names of
giants like Griffith and Ferreyra, great creators who helped liberate
the cinema from its swaddling clothes to become a true art.

William M. Drew

Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

George Shelps wrote:

George Shelps · Guest

navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote:

Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

Matt Barry wrote:

Lloyd Fonvielle · Guest

ReelDrew@aol.com wrote:


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