Film History, Reconstruction, and Southern Legendary History in The Birth of a Nation (1915)

D. W. Griffith's film is notorious for its racial stereotypes, a source of protest at the time of the film's release, and the source of continuing powerful scholarly criticism by Michael Rogin, Susan Courtney, and Melvyn Stokes. This paper will discuss two strands of historiography generated by the film -- its reception by film and cultural historians, but also its articulation of and impact upon histories of Reconstruction. "The Birth of a Nation" places textual history within its visual narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction, most obviously with the statements of Woodrow Wilson, which appear as intertitles and footnotes in the film's historical tableaux. Film scholars ignore the historiography of Reconstruction, or settle for a few generalizations. Students of Reconstruction note the existence of "Birth of a Nation" as a phenomenon, but ignore the extraordinary role of this film in shaping a national consensus about the dangers of Reconstruction. The South won on the screen what it lost on the field of battle, and this paper will contextualize the film within a broader landscape of southern historiography and memory. But Griffith's insidious construction of southern memory as national history does not emerge from purely American antecedents. The film owes much to nineteenth-century German ideals of cultural nationalism. In spite of all that has been written about "Birth of a Nation," little attention (save for the work of Martin Miller Marks) has been paid to the impact of Joseph Carl Breil's original musical score, a blend of classical excerpts—most famously, Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries.'' I will show excerpts from the Kino DVD edition of Griffith's film, which uses Breil's original score, as a means of linking the twin histories of race, nationalism, and protofascism.