Letter: To My Old Master

Just in time for our screening of Griffith's Birth of a Nation, this extraordinary letter shows up on the "Letters of Note" blog from an ex-slave to an ex-master, in response to an offer of work back on the old farm. Jourdon Anderson wrote from Ohio to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, with an incisive irony that Jonathan Swift or George Orwell might envy. Among other remarks:

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.

D. W. Griffith - Intolerance 1916

The success of The Birth of a Nation inaugurated the age of Films as Art--and brought on the first great controversies about the political dimensions of film. Successful efforts to suppress Birth of a Nation because of its appalling interpretation of American history and its offensive treatment of African-American characters motivated Griffith only to a kind of reflexive self-pity: His intentions were so obviously good, who could possibly want to prevent audiences from free access to the beneficial effects of his art?
The great director found himself inspired to tell the story of Intolerance (of the kind that he felt he suffered from). A contemporary melodrama is intercut with tales of ancient Babylon, the suppression of Protestants in 16th-century France, and Griffith's own spin on the story of Jesus Christ. Some of the most elaborate sets in film history were constructed for this spectacle; some were tourist attractions in Los Angeles for years afterward. But compared to his less grandiose melodramas such as Broken Blossoms and Way Down East--which still convey great emotional power--the story-telling in Intolerance seems flaccid and uninspired. Over the decades, however, it has provided generations of film students with lessons in editing.

D. W. Griffith - Broken Blossoms 1919

Another true masterpiece of over-the-top melodrama, cross-cut narratives, amazing performances--and sentimentalized racism. (The story from which the film was adapted was called "The Chink and the Child.")

D. W. Griffith - The Birth of a Nation 1915

The entire film -- all three hours. Get comfortable.

D. W. Griffith - One is Business, the Other Crime

Griffith's racism and nostalgia for the pre-Civil War South make him appear to us as an extreme reactionary. But like many conservatives, he was also a populist. In this film, he takes the radical stance of comparing the activities of bankers and investment houses to theft. Significantly, he uses the essential language of cinema to cut back and forth between two opposed scenes, making the audience confront the comparison in ways that may cause them to change their view of society. This technique was later employed crucially by leftist filmmakers in Germany and the Soviet Union, and became the essential element in political filmmaking. But they were borrowing from Griffith.

D. W. Griffith - His Trust Fulfilled - Part Two 1911

Like many white Southerners (even now), Griffith romanticized the ante-bellum period as a social system that embodied conservative social values. Setting aside the brutality and constant debasement of slavery, Griffith emphasized self-sacrifice, loyalty, the "nobility" of labor . . .
In this popular short (you can find part on on Youtube here), a faithful former slave suffers terribly to fulfill a promise made to a master and see that his little charge makes a good marriage.

Significantly, Griffith uses inter-cutting to tell a story about the good old days of slavery--as he later did on a much grander scale in Birth of a Nation.

D. W. Griffith - What Drink Did 1909

Many of the early two-reelers -- 10-15 minutes each -- told a simple story derived from the stock situations of 19th-century stage melodrama, with an obvious moral lesson.
They were also often intended to encourage the "improvement" of the lower classes who attended cinemas in large number. The temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition was stimulated by films like this one, and Women's Suffrage was helped along by images of intelligent, determined women in the movies

D. W. Griffith - Corner in Wheat 1909

Onesime Horloger

Winsor McCay - Gertie the Dinosaur - 1914

Winsr McCay and His Animated Pictures 1911

An Interesting Story - G. A. Smith 1905

The Kiss

Sandow the Strongman

The Sick Kitten (1903)

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Boxing Cats

The General - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926 - Scene for Shot-by-shot Analysis

Film Before Film - Phenakistoscopes

Film Before Film - Thamatropes

Daily Show + Gingrich = Melies

Last night's Daily Show featured this image as part of a satirical report on Newt Gingrich's plans to put an American base on the moon "by the end of [his] second term as President."
Jon Stewart had a pretty good line. He said that the twice-divorced candidate for the Republican presidential nomination "has realized that the Earth is very sick and now he wants to leave it for a younger planet."

Aren't you glad you get the visual reference, though?

Happy 114th Birthday, Sergei Eisenstein!

Eisensein will be an important presence in our course. This excerpt from the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin represents one of the greatest examples of his montage aesthetic.

The General - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926

AS3440A History of World Cinema

AS3440A HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA TO 1960 (3 cr) SP 2012
THE CORCORAN COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
DEPT. OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, moving pictures evolved from a children’s diversion to a force that transformed life at all levels, contributing significantly to American economic and cultural domination of a new world--as seen onscreen. The key issues we examine in this course remain just as relevant now as one hundred years ago: the double nature of cinema as both a capital-intensive, technologically complex medium and a collective art form; the development of conventions, genres, and narrative strategies; the dynamic between mimetic and expressionist tendencies in film art; the social and economic dimensions of film culture; and the role of national cinemas in world culture and politics. Serious consideration of how these material, social, and aesthetic issues affect cinema's status as art has formed the pattern for redefining art in all media and contexts in the past century.
Other issues that arose in the first two decades of cinema have remained central: the conventions of story-telling in narrative film; the establishment of the movies as a cheap, popular art form, defined in opposition to "high art" and the culture of the rich; the star system and its transformation of celebrity into a central, almost spiritual value; conservative and religious (and sometimes liberal/radical) opposition to the forms and subject matter of cinema as popular art; the economic and political power of Hollywood; and the identification of the film industry with the United States' international standing.

OBJECTIVES
Our study will focus on appreciating classic films both as artworks and as historical documents, emphasizing:
• The development of cinema as both a technological and a collective art form--involving social and economic practices, narrative styles and codes, genres and popular tastes.
• The production of narrative films in the tension between pseudo-documentary and fiction—between "reality" and "imagination," or mimetic and expressionistic aims
• The rise of the Hollywood production system and of national cinemas as a distinctive modern phenomenon in society and art.
• The role of cinema in creating the form and social dimensions of the modern mass audience, including the tendencies to both homogenization and the establishment of niche markets.
• The creation of history, especially national histories, through the medium of film:
How does cinema recreate and reinterpret national history?
How does cinema respond to and portray the historical forces that affect our lives?
How does cinema tell its own history, as celebration and satire?
• The relation of the rise of cinema to American cultural and economic domination of the twentieth century
• The codes of signification in cinema: how we learn to "read" films and how their conventions develop
• The artistic aims and sensibilities of major figures and movements in cinema around the world, with special emphasis on Hollywood cinema.
• The audience's creative reinterpretation of cinematic artworks outside their original historical and cultural contexts.