American Valkyries: Richard Wagner, D. W. Griffith, and the Birth of Classical Cinema

Abstract

With Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces. American film music continues to be deeply indebted to Wagner's techniques of composition and orchestration, particularly his conception of the total work of art (or Gesamtkunstwerk), his technique of composing with leitmotifs, and his idea that an opera score should comprise a single, unending melody.1 Contemporary American film composers such as John Williams, with his pulsing, neoromantic scores, his readily identifiable motifs marking both characters and themes within the film, and his attempt to make the film score a symphonic whole, are simply unimaginable without Wagner-and that is to say nothing of the subject matter of many of the films Williams scores, such as the six-part Star Wars epic, with its narrative of galactic salvation by an order of mystic, pure-blooded knights.

On 21 June, 2003, Reuters issued the following report:

BAGHDAD-U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film "Apocalypse Now" before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

With Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.

The reference, of course, is to the famous sequence from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), the aerial charge on a Vietnamese village where Colonel Kilgore "psyches up" his troops by blaring "Ride of the Valkyries" out of his approaching attack helicopters. Coppola's scene, in turn, satirizes the "Ride of the Valkyries" accompaniment to the climactic charge of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Colonel Cameron, at the end of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Throughout the Apocalypse Now sequence, Coppola plants clues-the horse-head "cavalry" emblem on the nose of the copters; the similar names of the charging officers (Colonel Cameron, Colonel Kilgore); the racist invective of Colonel Kilgore ("Yeah, I use Wagner-scares the hell out of the slopes!")-to make his satire of Birth explicit. Flying with Kilgore's cavalry, we are returned to a primal site of American film, and simultaneously to a source of modern performance technology: to Birth and to Bayreuth. Fast-forwarding back to twenty-first-century Baghdad, with seven generations of Valkyries at our back, the motif refuses to die. But the motif is repeated, this time, with cynical rather than satiric intent, as Coppola's critique of Griffith's use of Wagner becomes just another soundtrack to war.

American film music continues to be deeply indebted to Wagner's techniques of composition and orchestration, particularly his conception of the total work of art (or Gesamtkunstwerk), his technique of composing with leitmotifs, and his idea that an opera score should comprise a single, unending melody.1 Contemporary American film composers such as John Williams, with his pulsing, neoromantic scores, his readily identifiable motifs marking both characters and themes within the film, and his attempt to make the film score a symphonic whole, are simply unimaginable without Wagner-and that is to say nothing of the subject matter of many of the films Williams scores, such as the six-part Star Wars epic, with its narrative of galactic salvation by an order of mystic, pure-blooded knights. Moreover, the "Ride of the Valkyries" motif in particular has a complex history in American film, beginning with its use in Birth and passing, after American entry into the Second World War, into satire and parody. In works such as Disney's anti-Nazi short "Education for Death" (1943), Chuck Jones's Bugs Bunny short "What's Opera Doc?" (1957), and the Dan Aykroyd/John Belushi vehicle The Blues Brothers (1980), the motif's associations with stereotypically Germanic bloodlust are put to comic effect.

The Birth of a Nation, however, is the first and most famous of these Wagnerian references. Griffith's film is of course seminal in film history; it is also, more specifically, the most important work in the history of Wagner and American cinema.2 But Birth was not sui generis. Indeed, the discussion of Wagner's importance for the transformation of American film-and, more broadly, for the transformation of American culture-predated Birth by at least five years. Understanding the discourse of Wagner and film in the years before 1915 helps us make sense of Griffith's use of Wagner in Birth, as well as Griffith's indebtedness to a larger process of film reform. But it also makes clear the startling originality of Griffith's contribution to American Wagner reception. "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true," was Woodrow Wilson's famous (if possibly apocryphal) reaction to Birth. Wilson's description had it half-right: Birth was anything but "terribly true," but it was spectacular, blinding, electrical. Griffith's masterpiece marked a new chapter not only in the integration of film elements with one another, but in the integration of Northern and Southern whites, two totalizing projects produced under the sign of Wagner.

The Wagnerites of Moving Picture World

"Write music like Wagner, only louder"

-Samuel Goldwyn3

For a sense of Wagner's influence on early American film we should first turn to a weekly entitled The Moving Picture World (henceforth abbreviated MPW), an influential advocate in the 1910s for fundamental reforms in the way films were produced, exhibited, and received.4 In the five years prior to the release of The Birth of a Nation, regular contributors to MPW regularly advocated Wagner as a model for the transformation of film into a high art. In the pages of the periodical, Wagner was made to play both symbolic and practical roles in this process of transition from a cinema of attractions to a cinema of narrative integration. Symbolically, Wagner was held up as an icon of the aesthetic unity toward which film reformers were striving in the early twentieth century. More practically, Wagner's composition techniques were urged on film composers as useful tools for the construction of the film scores that might complement the longed for art-film of the future.

The earliest advocate of Wagner in MPW was a practicing accompanist named Clarence E. Sinn. His column "Music for the Picture," which appeared regularly from 1910 to 1916, ran beneath a banner associating "the 'Cue Music Man'" with the church organist and concert pianist, thus implying the column's mission of raising the lowly film accompanist to loftier artistic status. (Fig. 1) While the regular column began on 26 November, 1910, Sinn's first essay for the journal was a four-paragraph piece that appeared on 16 April, 1910. Sinn took the occasion of his first essay to point to Wagner as an inspiration for the future of film music. After complaining about the "anachronisms and absurdities" that disturb film exhibition (he was particularly upset by one pianist who played the mock-chivalric music-hall ballad "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls" as accompaniment to a Biblical film), Sinn wrote: "Just as Wagner fitted his music to the emotions, expressed by words in his operas, so in the course of time, no doubt, the same thing will be done with regard to the moving picture" (MPW, 590). The reformation of the art of film accompaniment-indeed, the understanding of film accompaniment as an art-implied much broader reformations in the industry. Sinn singled out the first tentative moves by some film companies to print bulletins describing what sort of music to play alongside their pictures. It was a promising development, but "only one step, and that a preliminary step, towards the provision of proper music." In subsequent columns Sinn continued to applaud the issuing of cue sheets with films, and began, on 17 December, 1910, to offer his own musical settings for particular pictures. Similarly, he encouraged exhibitors to complement their "display of moving pictures by good music, both vocal and instrumental" (25 June, 1910; MPW, 1092). One New York theatre furnished a "good example" of this by combining "High-grade Motion Pictures" with "selections from Rigoletto and Lucia" by the Grand Opera Quartette in a "clean, cool, airy, home-like Auditorium" (25 June, 1910; MPW, 1092). Opera selections, even when not by Wagner, tended to raise the grade of film exhibition, and, at least in principle, the class of film audiences.

Nine months later, Sinn's column included a letter from G. H. Hummel of Chicago, a fellow film accompanist and Wagner enthusiast. After complaining that "nine out of ten piano players don't know how to play for a picture," Hummel described his own technique:

First of all I read all the stories of moving pictures, and make it my business to see them before they are shown at the theatre where I am employed. But there, when playing the pictures myself, I follow the rules laid down by the great R. Wagner in his splendid music dramas, by using the leading motives of the "Nibelungen Ring," "Tristan and Isolde," etc. I attach a certain theme to each person in the picture and work them out, in whatever form the occasion may call for, not forgetting to use popular strains if necessary. (14 January, 1911; MPW, 76)

After excerpting Hummel's endorsement of Wagner, Sinn returned to his old, related theme of the need for film cue sheets. Here again he supplied accompaniment suggestions of his own, this time remarking that a film entitled "The Wise Druggist" should end with the "Bridal chorus from 'Lohengrin'."

The following week, Sinn was once more exploring the issue "of working up dramatic pictures in accordance with the thematic principles as laid down by Wagner" (21 January, 1911; MPW, 135). Sinn examined Wagner's importance in greater detail than before, focusing on the leitmotif in particular. After directing his readers to "Wagner's theoretical writings, 'Art and Revolution,' 'The Art-Work of the Future,' and 'Opera and the Drama,'" Sinn boiled down Wagner's methods to what he considered their essence.

To each important character, to each important action, motive, and idea, and to each important object (Siegmund's sword, for example), was attached a suggestive musical theme. Whenever the action brought into prominence, any of the characters, motives, or objects, its theme or motif was sung or played. . . . Such a method of applying music to the pictures is the ideally perfect one, and if it could be universally carried out, would leave nothing to be desired.

While leitmotifs may prove the ideal form of film music, Wagner had more to teach the film accompanist than motif structure. "In addition to his leitmotifs," wrote Sinn, "Wagner employed scenic, or descriptive music, and this idea, too, comes well within the lines of moving picture music."

And yet, for all of his enthusiasm, Sinn initially had trouble distinguishing Wagner's compositional style from that of melodrama. "I have touched on this thematic idea several times in previous articles," Sinn noted, "although I was merely following the old melodramatic form of attaching a certain easily-remembered melody to each of the principal characters. The germ of the idea is much the same, though of a simple and primitive form" (21 January, 1911; MPW, 135). While the Wagnerian method is essentially an "elaborate" form of the "old melodramatic" technique, Sinn saw it as a useful system for accompanists, who must learn not only to attach themes to specific characters but to fit their themes into the larger mood of the picture: "The principal theme of the story centers around the principal character, or characters, of course, and any musical themes given to these characters must be in harmony with the general tendency of the picture."

Sinn's appeals to musical and thematic unity were characteristic of the larger project of film reform pressed for by MPW. A good example of this project may be found in the same issue as the column just quoted. Alongside such typical features as an essay urging that screenwriting be treated as an art form and a column on film's potential for mass education and improvement, we find a screed against so-called "Jackass Music" by Louis Reeves Harrison, a regular columnist for the journal.5 (Fig. 2) Harrison's target was the supposedly slipshod and attention-grabbing musical accompaniment that marred film exhibition. Harrison personified the problem in the character of "Lily Limpwrist":

O, what a noise when the lights are turned low and Lily Limpwrist takes her place at the usual instrument of torture! With a self-conscious smirk she gives a poke to her back switch, dabs her side teasers with both patties, rolls up her sleeves and tears off "That Yiddisher Rag." She bestows a calm smile on the box-of-candy young man in the first row, but the presentation on the screen fails to divert her "I-seen-you" glances any more than if it was the point of the joke. (MPW, 124)

Harrison's gendering of the bad accompanist recalls Kathy Peiss's point that "movies altered women's participation in the world of public, commercial amusements." Comprising 40 percent of the working-class movie audience in 1910, women found in nickelodeons a public space that "transcended generational lines and marital status." As a result, "many middle-class reformers and writers expressed a concern that the nickelodeons, like the dance halls, would quickly become public spaces for undue familiarity between the sexes."6

There are racial and ethnic implications to the attack as well. Harrison's reference to "That Yiddisher Rag" recalls the frequent association of "bad" working-class urban culture with Jewishness, and suggests the threat of a Jewess on frivolous young dandies. But Jewishness is only one of several ethnic codes here. In the accompanying illustration, Lily is pictured singing the popular mock-Irish music-hall ballad, "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?", the chorus of which ran, "Sure his hair is red, his eyes are blue, / And he's Irish through and through, / Has anybody here seen Kelly? / Kelly from the Emerald Isle." (Fig. 3) Finally, Lily's flared bottom in the illustration recalls a stereotype of another sort: the racist grotesques of black female physiognomy, with their pendulous thighs and bulbous buttocks. Lily, then, is presented as a hybrid of threatening racial codes-Jewish, Irish, and black-all of which, in combination, suggest the danger of urban mongrelization. As such, Lily personifies the (troubling) heterogeneity of early cinema spectatorship.7 Moreover, Lily's gender and race(s) are inextricably linked to her aesthetic crime: the fact that she destroys any hope for a unified artwork at the nickelodeon. In the illustration, while Lily makes eyes at her "gentleman friend" and bangs out her Irish tune, she ignores the film above her, which shows a "DEATH SCENE" of what is apparently a small child mourned by its parents. In a manner characteristic of the journal, Harrison depicted the heterogeneity of the nickelodeon as threatening cacophony. "All other parts of the theatrical working force move in harmony, like the wheels of a clock, but these fatheads against the stage apron are like the clock alarm that goes off when you don't need it and never when you do" (MPW, 125).

For film reformers such as Sinn and Harrison, what film performance desperately needed was a systematic unification of its component parts. The period when these essays appeared (1910-11) was a transitional one in American film history. Coming between what Tom Gunning has called the "cinema of attractions" (roughly pre-1907) and the "cinema of narrative integration" (roughly post-1913), the issues of MPW that first discussed Wagner's importance for film were part of a general transformation.8 In many ways closer to the performance practices of circuses, exhibitions, lectures, and vaudeville than to those of subsequent cinema, the "cinema of attractions" emphasized heterogeneous performance, audience agency, and explicit demands for spectatorial attention. According to Gunning, "the cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle-a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself. . . . It is the direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman, that defines this approach to filmmaking."9 The emergent "cinema of narrative integration," by contrast, placed greater emphasis on suspense, depth of character, moral judgment, and unity of performance, and it sought to create an audience that would be "absorbed in a coherent fictional world, attentive to character cues and immersed in following a story."10 The transition is also one of steady bourgeoisification of the cinema, transforming it from the entertainment of the nickelodeons, frequently identified with the working class, to the entertainment of "respectable" theatres and, eventually, movie palaces, identified with the middle class. This liminal period culminated in the appearance of feature films and, ultimately, what has come to be known as "classical Hollywood cinema."

More specifically, writers such as Sinn and Harrison remind us that an important aspect of the transformation from a cinema of attractions to a cinema of narration was a fundamental change in the musical accompaniment of film. The cinema of attractions called for musical accompaniment that was frequently improvised, often to films that were being viewed for the first time by the accompanists themselves; it was a style of accompaniment that owed much to the practices of working-class musical halls and vaudeville, and many film accompanists also found work in such venues. The result was a relatively fragmentary and free-form interaction between picture and music, with some pictures, or some sections of pictures, being displayed to no accompaniment whatsoever, and others displayed to accompaniment that might be regarded as inappropriate.11 On occasion, this lack of unity between music and picture was a deliberate choice on the part of the accompanist. While it is difficult to tell just how often accompanists intentionally played against the grain of the picture, such deliberate disturbances occurred often enough to excite the ire of film reformers. Harrison, for example, lamented the accompanist whose "star act, the one that gets a laugh, is his imitation of a baby crying, no matter whether the one on the screen is nursing or merely dying" (21 January, 1911; MPW, 124). And Sinn described a similar instance: "A picture was shown some time ago containing a scene wherein Pharaoh's daughter discovers the infant Moses in the bulrushes. The pianist played 'Oh, You Kid.' He got a laugh which is probably what he wanted, but at what a sacrifice. The whole picture was dignified and serious, and the music should have sustained that character throughout." Against accompanists both slipshod and subversive, Sinn, like Harrison, pleaded that "unities be preserved" in film exhibition (26 November, 1910; MPW, 1227).

This plea for unity led Sinn back to Wagner. In a later issue, Sinn's broad-brush understanding of Wagnerian technique was refined by another contribution from Hummel, whose second lengthy letter on Wagner's musical innovations Sinn excerpted in his column. After stressing Wagner's style of "bold chromatics and enharmonic progressions," Hummel went on to offer a two-paragraph account of Wagner's leitmotif technique (4 February, 1911; MPW, 235). He noted that Wagner "made of these leading motives the very framework of his music drama," demonstrating the point by leading his readers through the intertwining motifs of "Siegfried's Funeral March." The distinction between Wagnerian and melodramatic techniques of accompaniment was becoming clearer both to Sinn and to his readers: Wagnerian music-drama, unlike melodrama, is a complex and unified system of integrated leitmotifs.

But if the distinction was being asserted more strongly, then so, too, was the fact that such a sophisticated musical setting would require better pictures, better accompanists, and better conditions for musical preparation and film exhibition than the old melodramatic technique of simply playing a character's musical "calling card" upon entry. Thus, after introducing Wagner's method on 21 January, Sinn lamented that, "there are films which do not so readily work out in this manner. Some of the more active ones are just one piece of 'business' after another, without developing anything in particular, until the thousand feet are up. All you can do is follow the action and not bother about motives and themes. Why should you, when the originators don't?" (MPW, 135). A Wagnerian mode of film accompaniment, in short, demanded a cinema of narration rather than a cinema of attractions. The transformation entailed fundamental reforms in the production and exhibition of films. In an era of enormous turnover in single-reel pictures, when many accompanists were viewing the film for the first time along with the audience, Sinn noted the necessity of having the "opportunity to study the pictures beforehand" in order "to be able to get good results." In a subsequent column, Sinn turned his attention to screenwriting, which must also be reformed if films are to become unified artworks.

It is not impossible that a day may come when the best of dramatists will write the film stories, and the best of composers supply the music thereto. Should that time ever come, we might reasonably expect to see (or hear) the thematic method worked out to its logical development. Music for the pictures is still in the formative period, and we are all working, each in his own way, to give it some definite shape. (4 February, 1911; MPW, 235)

As usual in the pages of MPW, reform in one branch of film implied reform everywhere.

Sinn's advocacy of Wagner, then, must be set within the context of a much broader project of film reform-and indeed of social reform. It was this broader project that was subsequently taken up by another writer for MPW, W. Stephen Bush. Bush was a regular contributor to the journal, publishing essays there from 1908 to 1916. Like other film reformers, Bush championed the arts of screenwriting, film-music composition, and musical accompaniment, and advocated mass aesthetic and moral improvement through film. Lamenting the persecution of film by the press and the courts, Bush wrote with the hope that

our friends of the quill and the ermine will yet realize that the moving picture of to-day is one of the most potent forces for the progress of the race, for the dissemination of useful knowledge and for the promotion of all those things at which the good theatre aims. The moving picture reaches thousands where the theatre reaches not even hundreds. (26 March, 1910; MPW, 462)

He was particularly enthusiastic about adaptations of classics, and often reminded his readers that "the motion picture has taken its inspiration from Shakespeare, from Tennyson, from Robert Browning, from Longfellow, from Balzac, from Hawthorne, from Victor Hugo, from Goethe, from Cervantes, from Zola, from the two Dumas, from Mark Twain and a galaxy of other names, illustrious in the annals of mankind" (26 March, 1910; MPW, 462). Appropriately enough, Bush coupled his work as a film critic with appearances in New York and Philadelphia as a film lecturer. In this capacity he presented edifying films with suitable music and his own commentary, by which means he hoped to do his own part in raising the level of the masses.12

Bush, like Sinn, saw Wagner's music and methods as essential to the progressive reform of film. "Every man or woman in charge of the music of a moving picture is, consciously or unconsciously, a disciple or follower of Richard Wagner," Bush wrote in the 12 August, 1911 issue, under the heading "Giving Musical Expression to the Drama" (MPW, 354). Bush followed this dramatic pronouncement with a short lesson in the history of opera for the readers of MPW. His lesson is clear: before Wagner, drama was utterly subordinated to music, with librettos serving as shoddy vehicles for great composition:

Strictly speaking, the modern school before Wagner (to distinguish it from the music of the ancient Greeks) did not as its primary object seek to give "musical expression to the drama," but subordinated the drama to the music and the libretto became more or less of an excuse for clever orchestration. . . . As a result we have some of the finest operas, supported by librettos that border on the idiotic.

Pre-Wagnerian opera, in Bush's view, was more an occasion for the exhibition of musical virtuosity than of great art. As though writing a capsule version of Wagner's own Opera and Drama, Bush described the halting attempts by "pre-Wagnerian masters" to break free from sorts of "narrow and technical rules" personified by "Hans Sachs in the 'Meistersinger'" (presumably Bush meant Beckmesser). At last salvation arrived, as "Wagner with the boldness of genius cracked the old molds and once more gave back to music its noblest function, which must always be that of 'giving musical expression to the drama'." Quoting at length from Bernard Shaw's argument in The Perfect Wagnerite that Wagner's Ring perfectly integrated music and drama, Bush at last brought his thesis to bear on film practices. Like Sinn and Hummel, Bush stressed Wagner's leitmotif technique, emphasizing that these motifs (unlike, implicitly, the use of musical themes in nineteenth-century melodrama) are "susceptible of variation and adaptation," offering "new and wonderful opportunities for splendid moving picture music" (MPW, 355). More than this, Wagner's suitability for film suggested that "Wagner's music-dramas could be adapted for the moving picture theatre." Such an adaptation would be possible even "without synchronization in the strictest sense of the word"; that is, film technology would not need to wait for the arrival of synchronized sound (which might, after all, prove impossible) before attempting a film adaptation of a Wagner opera.

Indeed, as Bush pointed out in a subsequent article, such a film had already been attempted and had proven at least a partial success. Parsifal (1904), directed by Edwin S. Porter (responsible, just the year previously, for The Great Train Robbery), was cinematically daring in that it was produced with the initial intent of synchronizing the picture with music prerecorded on Edison cylinders, and was heavily advertised by Edison. While this early experiment in synchronized sound soon proved a failure and was dropped before the film's release-the film was an eventual box-office disappointment-Porter's Parsifal nevertheless suggested possibilities for the integrated film of the future.13 The film was, according to Bush, "done very creditably indeed" despite the fact that, in the end, "there was no attempt even at musical synchronizing," and that "moving picture audiences at that time were not ready for productions of this kind" (2 September, 1911; MPW, 608). Bush predicted that such enterprises would only improve with time, both in quality and popularity, and was especially enthusiastic about the possibilities of a film version of Tristan and Isolde, which, if produced, would not only advance film towards its highest ideal, but advance, too, the arts of screenwriting and film music:

Here the possibilities for moving picture adaptation with a number of strongly developed central themes from the opera as musical accompaniment lie on the surface. Just how the adaptation is to be made, the arrangement of all technical details, the necessary abbreviations in the text without loss of the musical "motifs," are matters for the expert playwright and the skilled musician. If the two last-named work together intelligently and both are possessed of some understanding of Wagner, theoretical as well as practical, the production of a great and attractive novelty in the moving picture field seems reasonably certain. (MPW, 608)

Screenwriting and musical accompaniment for film-barely considered art forms at all in the period-were now elevated to "sister-arts" along Wagnerian lines. To make the point clearer, Bush proceeded to quote at length from Wagner's theorization of the sister-arts in Artwork of the Future, and ended his column by throwing down the gauntlet to film producers: "What manufacturer, in alliance with musical skill and genius, will give us the first example of instrumental synchronization of Wagnerian opera?"

A fully synchronized Wagner film was not on the immediate horizon, but Wagner's operas and music were nevertheless increasingly present in American moviehouses.14 Indeed, the very next year, 1912, saw the international release of two new film versions of Wagner operas, Parsifal and Siegfried, by the Italian company Ambrosio Films.15 More broadly, musical motifs and selections from Wagner operas were becoming frequent features of film-accompaniment cue sheets and collections. When Erno Rapée's popular Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures was published in New York in 1925, for example, it told film accompanists that Wagner was "the greatest dramatic Composer of all ages," and that the long history of opera from its origins to Wagner is "a transitory period which we may neglect because it was Richard Wagner who established the fundamental principles of the music drama of today." Moreover, Wagner's technique of the "'Leit Motiv'" "is the one which can best be applied in scoring pictures." Rapée further noted that, in the previous few years, "excerpts from the Wagnerian Operas such as the Valkyries Ride, Wotan's Farewell, etc." had entered the "repertoire of every fair size movie orchestra."16 The main function of Rapée's Encyclopedia was to provide recommendations of musical selections to match different moods or scenarios, and selections from Wagner feature prominently throughout the volume. While the volume came a decade after The Birth of the Nation, it indicates how widespread the use of Wagner had become by the mid-1920s.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Wagnerian fragments and motifs were rapidly becoming a staple of American film music. Simultaneously, the advocacy of cinema as high art, of narrative cinema, of film music composition as an art form, of a more seamless integration of music and film, of the use of film for mass improvement were all linked to Wagner's music, his drama, and his method. All these elements of film reform would be sharply advanced by The Birth of a Nation. Birth featured, not incidentally, the most fully integrated score of its time, and climaxed in the repeated strains of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."

The Birth of a Nation and Wagner

When The Birth of a Nation was released, many saw in it not only the depiction of a nation reborn but the birth of a whole new aesthetic form: the motion picture masterpiece. "Few who have seen The Birth of a Nation would deny the birth of a new art-and a new artist," read Sir Herbert Tree's New York Times article of 30 January, 1916. The response was entirely typical. "If there is to be a greater picture than The Birth of a Nation, may we live to see it" (Dramatic Mirror [New York]); "Griffith is the present day Homer of the motion picture" (Motion Picture News); "[Birth] goes to prove that when Americans are willing to take time and pains they can produce artistic results as remarkable as those attained in any other country" (The Globe); and so on.17 Such enthusiasm was not limited to critics. According to Epoch Producing Organization and D. W. Griffith, Inc., the film had shown to over 100 million people by 1924; by 1955 that number had roughly doubled.18 This unprecedented popularity-countered by expressions of outrage also unprecedented in American film history-made Birth far and away the most profitable film of its time, a mark that would not be surpassed until the release, more than two decades later, of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.19

The composer of Birth's score, Joseph Carl Breil, was a film reformer at the forefront of the nascent art of film-music "compilation" and composition. Breil had earlier conducted as well as shaped the score to the Italian epic Cabiria (1914) in its performances in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.20 Widely celebrated as the most professionally produced and most musically integrated film prior to Birth, Cabiria was met with acclamation by American film reformers. In Sinn's words, Cabiria was "perfectly standardized and can be set to music once and for all, as perfectly as a glove fits a hand" (19 December, 1914: MPW, 1690). For Sinn, Cabiria marked the first great step toward "a combination of music and drama [that] will be established as a permanent form of art"; it suggested that the long predicted "wedding" of music and film "must come." Breil's pioneering work on Cabiria and a 1912 Sarah Bernhardt vehicle, Queen Elizabeth, led the San Francisco Chronicle to dub him, in 1914, a "Future Wagner" of the "New Art Form" of "Music and 'Movies'."21

If Cabiria was the engagement ceremony of music and moving picture, then Birth was the marriage. Accompanied by orchestras ranging up to fifty pieces in size (and, after the post-First World War revival of the film, up to ninety pieces), Birth introduced many audiences not only to a new sort of film, but to conventions of grand opera and symphonic music (the latter of which was largely unheard on the West Coast before 1915).22 The Chicago Examiner, like numerous publications from the period, marveled over the film's integration of music and picture:

Of importance is the music. It consists of an elaborate symphony score arranged after Griffith's suggestions of the musical motifs of the leading characters. Now grave, now gay; now sounding the loud diapason of war; again sweetly harmonizing love's sighs and rhapsodies; anon bringing back the old plantation melodies, or the crash of riot and rapine. . . . It fits the changing scenes like a flowing, beautiful garment.23

In a 1916 essay in Metronome, Breil discussed the development of his compositional style from Queen Elizabeth through Birth. Echoing the aspirations of the film reformers of MPW, Breil wrote that, with Queen Elizabeth, he "suddenly awoke to the possibilities of the 'Moving Picture.' Here was a real drama played by the greatest of artists. I realized at once that trivial musical work would not do, and set to work to write a score that would portray human emotions from a truly dignified point of view." The demand for a more "dignified" picture led Breil, as it had Sinn and Bush, straight back to Wagner. "With the limited means of a small orchestra put at my disposal then, I set to work and wrote a dramatic score built very much upon the motif lines set down by Richard Wagner. That was about six years ago, and the score to Queen Elizabeth was the first original score ever composed (in the world) for a 'Movie'." Describing the development of his composition style after Queen Elizabeth, Breil wrote that "the seed sown at that time has borne fruit" in Birth and Intolerance-but hoped, also, that some day the film score would be "entirely original in composition and construction."24

It was contact with Griffith that enabled Breil's style to "bear fruit." For Griffith too placed great importance on the thorough integration of film and music, an integration he placed at the heart of his work on Birth. He had "decided notions on the arranging of music for pictures," according to Grace Kingsley's column in the Los Angeles Times on 8 February, 1915. The article, one of the first to mention Breil in connection to the film, emphasized not only Griffith's "grand-opera" aspirations, but more specifically the use of leitmotifs to capture both characters and moods.

Carl Biel (sic), well-known as the author of "The Climax," is composing music and adapting certain compositions. Mr. Griffith has also written two compositions to be used in displaying the pictures.

A tremendous idea that of Mr. Griffith, no less than the adapting of grand-opera methods to motion pictures! Each character has a distinct type of music, a distinct theme as in opera. A more difficult matter in pictures than opera, however, inasmuch as any one character 233 seldom holds the screen long at a time. In cases where there are many characters, the music is adapted to the dominant note or character in the scene.

From now on special music is to be written in this manner for all the big Griffith productions. 25

This reconception of film along operatic lines, and especially in ways that recalled Wagner, was a very conscious decision on the part of both Griffith and Breil. The ambition marked a fundamental transformation in film scoring. Griffith was one of the first, if not the first, to list his composer in the film credits, and, to a degree unprecedented in film history, the score to Birth was a complex creation closely integrated into the larger organic unity of the moving picture.

Indeed, so heavily involved was Griffith in the scoring of the film that it remains debatable just how much of the score was contributed by Breil and how much by Griffith himself. The composer and the director spent two months working on the score together, and Lillian Gish recalled them collaborating closely. In Gish's account, they particularly fought over the use of Wagner, and, even more particularly, over the use of the "Valkyries" motif.

Mr. Breil would play bits and pieces, and he and Mr. Griffith would then decide on how they were to be used. . . .

The two men had many disagreements over the scoring of the film. "If I ever kill anyone," Mr. Griffith once said, "it won't be an actor but a musician." The greatest dispute was over the Klan call, which was taken from "The Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner. Mr. Griffith wanted a slight change in the notes. Mr. Breil fought against making it.

"You can't tamper with Wagner!" he protested. "It's never been done!"

This music wasn't primarily music, Mr. Griffith explained. It was music for motion pictures. Even Giulio Gatta-Casazza, General Director of the Metropolitan Opera, agreed that the change was fine. Finally Mr. Breil agreed to it.26

On the surface, it was a predictable debate between a Wagner purist and a director hoping to use Wagner's music for his own ends. But to frame the debate in this way would be to obscure the fact that Griffith, in insisting that the "Valkyries" motif be altered to better serve the aesthetic whole, may have been truer to the spirit of the total work of art.

Praising the film as a remarkably successful "marriage of music and spectacle," Harlow Hare, writing for the Boston American, enthused that,

one of the most effective features of The Birth of a Nation production is its really brilliant musical setting. During the two hours and a half which the big film requires, the orchestra plays an arrangement which perfectly fits the unfolding story and which includes many of the finest bits of melody extant. The library of the old masters and the collections of songs and ballads of the 60's have alike been rifled to make up the score of The Birth of a Nation. (my italics)27

For Hare as for other period reviewers, the "perfect fit" between music and image was a noteworthy element of the production. But there is a telling juxtaposition in this description as well. On one hand, in the manner of a film reformer, Hare celebrated the Birth score as a symphonic synthesis-not only of "music and spectacle" but of "the finest bits of music" with one another. On the other hand, in the manner of a "cinema-of-attractions" accompanist, he wrote enthusiastically of the musical libraries and collections having "been rifled to make up the score." And, indeed, the mélange of popular tunes and "great works" excerpts mentioned by Hare startles with its disparateness. In his account of the standards that Breil incorporated into his score, Hare provided a remarkably detailed, and largely accurate, list: "Comin' Thro' the Rye," "Bonnie Blue Flag," "Dixie," "My Maryland," "Marching through Georgia," "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp! the Boys are Marching," "Kingdom Coming," "Girl I Left Behind Me," "Home, Sweet Home," "Taps," "The Star Spangled Banner," "America," "In the Gloaming," Suppe's "Light Cavalry Overture," Weber's "Freischutz Overture," Grieg's "In the Halls of the Mountain King," Breil's own "Perfect Song," Tscaikowsky's "1812 Overture," the "'Gloria' from Haydn's Mass in C," Hermann's "Cocoanut Dance," the "Zampa Overture," Wagner's "Rienzi Overture," the "Fire Music from 'Die Walkure' and 'The Ride of the Valkyries,'" plus assorted "Wagnerian operatic crashes" that "accompany the cannonading and infantry charging at Petersburg." (Intriguingly, the only piece Hare lists that does not actually appear in the score is the "Fire Music" from Die Walküre.) While intended to suggest something like grand totality, such a list comes dangerously close to mere concatenation.

Synthesis or pastiche: this is the dilemma that The Birth of a Nation never fully resolves. All the more so since the musical fragments of Birth's score were generally, according to Martin Miller Marks, "inserted into the score by means of scissors and paste."28 Ironically, this musical collage technique may have been especially true of the film's climactic use of Wagner. As Marks has shown, Breil's score linked together two distinct passages from the beginning of Act III of Die Walküre, and compressed two of Wagner's measures into one. The whole excerpt was meant to be inserted into the film at two points: during the first Klan rescue at Piedmont, and the second at the cabin.29 Most tellingly, the second playing of the "Valkyries" motif was meant to be repeated until the accompanist saw the title screen "Disarming the blacks," whereupon the accompanist was immediately to cease playing the "Valkyries" motif and proceed to "Dixie," which would be played through a scene of blacks dropping their weapons and running away. (Fig. 4) As a result, the "Valkyries" motif would very likely have been, in performance, abruptly broken off mid-phrase. Cutting away from "Ride of the Valkyries" and starting "Dixie," the accompanist not only reinforced the film's analogy between Valkyries and Klansmen, but also unwittingly drew attention to the underlying pastiche form of the supposedly integrated whole of the film.

The danger of disintegration into pastiche threatened the score, but it was also a narrative concern. Griffith's audacious film techniques-in particular, what he called his "switchbacks," or cross-cuts, which allowed for narrative multiplotting-could be pushed too far and confuse viewers still unfamiliar with the style. Indeed, in the eyes of many contemporary audience members, and many critics since, Griffith's 1916 epic Intolerance failed largely for this reason.30 A solution to the problem of narrative fragmentation exacerbated by Griffith's cross-cuts and multiplotting was another technique mastered by Griffith: the ride-to-the-rescue sequence. One of Griffith's most famous narrative devices, cross-cutting rapidly between villain, victim, and rescuer, it often served to bring parallel storylines together in a climactic release that was also a reunion of the film's multiple parts. The ride-to-the-rescue, its tension heightened by Griffith's groundbreaking mastery of cross-cutting, sped toward the resolution of the very cinematic technique that enabled it. It exacerbated the tension of Griffith's crosscut multiplotting to an almost unbearable point, and, ultimately, resolved the matter by emphatically reunifying the narrative.

From his earliest conception of the film, Griffith understood that its highpoint would come with the final ride-to-the-rescue of the Ku Klux Klan. In Griffith's account, when he first read Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, he

skipped quickly through the book until I got to the part about the Klansmen, who according to no less than Woodrow Wilson, ran to the rescue of the downtrodden South after the Civil War. I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white robes flying.

We had all sorts of runs-to-the-rescue in pictures and horse operas. . . .

Now I could see a chance to do this ride-to-the-rescue on a grand scale.31

The climactic Ride involves repeated cross-cutting between two parallel episodes. The first episode shows a horde of black soldiers fighting their way into a hut desperately defended by (both Northern and Southern) white heroes and their loyal black servants; a baby-clutching maiden-in-distress heightens the terror. In the second episode, the KKK (led by the film's hero, Col. Ben Cameron), is charging to the aid of the besieged band. Accompanying this charge are the whipping rhythms of the Valkyrie cry, which, after a series of modulations, is bombastically restated in B major as the Klansmen sweep the black soldiers aside. By Griffith's own account, the ride-to-the-rescue would be far grander than any he had ever filmed before. "Instead of saving one little Nell of the Plains," Griffith wrote, "this ride would be to save a nation."32

It is a section that, as Michael Rogin has argued, straightens and resolves many of the troubled images of the Civil War episodes of the film: where the fraternal soldiers of the War had been tragically indistinguishable, the white-clad KKK riders and the black mob are a study in opposites; where the Civil War images had lingered on suffering, the Ride images exalt in glory; where the "Little Colonel" had been alone in reaching enemy lines, he is joined in the end by "a massed, invincible Klan"; where the Civil War battle lines had been curved and chaotic, the lines of KKK riders are straight and ordered; and where Civil War panoramas had reduced the size of the soldiers, the Klansmen are depicted as giants. The impression gained from all of these juxtapositions is clear: "The dead soldiers of the Civil War battlefields rise up, an 'Invisible Empire,' and ride to regenerative victory."33 To Rogin's reading we can add that the message of regeneration was combined with an assertion of cinematic unity. The Ride addressed the threat of "jackass music" through repeated evocations of Wagner, for film reformers such as Breil the ultimate emblem of aesthetic unity. And it addressed the potential fragmentation of the cross-cut multiplotting though a grand unification of narrative strands in a final, redemptive resolution. The Ride was the section that insisted most forcefully on synthesis, rather than pastiche, as the aesthetic principle of the film.

This aesthetic strategy had a political analogue, since social synthesis of the right sort was precisely what the film advocates. Through both narrative and imagery, Griffith makes it clear throughout the film that social synthesis of the wrong sort results in such grotesque hybrids as black soldiers and mulattos. This bad hybridity is juxtaposed, particularly at the film's end, with "images of white Northerners and white Southerners unifying as blood brothers against a common racial enemy." The film, like Harrison's "Jackass Music," presents its audience with a choice between reunification and mongrelization. The climactic scene, of white Union veterans fighting alongside Klansmen and goodly black servants, defending white women and children against an invading horde of black Union soldiers, neatly encapsulates the film's lesson in good and bad forms of American mixing. The fact that this scene is performed to the almost incessant accompaniment of the "Ride of the Valkyries" underscores the point that signs of aesthetic and political synthesis are most tightly interwoven in the film's climax.

The world premiere of the film in New York, following a nearly successful ban on its exhibition, was marked by protests that verged on violence. Outraged by the film's racist characterizations, its falsification of Civil War and Reconstruction history, and its valorization of the Klan, many New Yorkers were vocal in their opposition. As Griffith described the scene:

The opposition was there in full force at the premiere. A riot was brewing. Over the boos, catcalls, and hisses were the whistles and applause. It became a contest. The booers tried to drown out the applauders and vice versa. We were frightened out of our wits for fear of a riot-and that would have been the end of The Birth of a Nation.34

While such protests continued, in New York and elsewhere, after the film's premiere- and attempts to ban the film gained force in some regions-paying audiences became far more univocal in their expressions of enthusiasm. Reports of overpacked and rapturous audiences for Birth are widespread from the period, but at no point was their Dionysian transport so pronounced as during the section dominated by "Ride of the Valkyries." W. Stephen Bush described the New York response for MPW: "When these 'crusaders of the South' are seen mounted on superb horses, dashing furiously through field and forest and river to rescue innocent maidens from brutal assault or to punish 'wicked Africans,' the audience never fails to respond, but applauds while the spectacle lasts" (13 March, 1915; MPW, 1586). In Boston, too, positive audience response seems to have reached its peak with the ride. "Just a flash of the ghostly horsemen, the big Ku-Klux call, and the spectators become almost frenzied in their applause," reported The Boston American.35

If such "frenzied" responses were common in northern theatres, then they were at least as typical of southern exhibitions of the film. Once again, the emotional apogee was the Ride of the Klan. The Atlanta Journal, for instance, described the audience reaction to the sequence thus:

Then the KKK gathers. The scenes which follow defy description. In the little town of Piedmont the blacks are celebrating, far away across the hills the Klan assembles. Back and forth the scene changes-one moment a street in Piedmont swirling with mad negroes, the next a bugle blast from the orchestra and out in the distance the riders of the Klan sweeping on and on. Back to the street and a house where a white girl trembles in fear before the black horde without, back with the bugle blast to the onrush of the Klan. They are coming, they are coming!

GALLERY GOES WILD

You know it and your spine prickles and in the gallery the yells cut loose with every bugle note. The negro mob grows wilder and wilder, the white-shrouded riders are tearing nearer and nearer. Then, with a last mighty blast from the bugle, they sweep into the town and with a shattering volley hammer into the crowd. They fire back, they break, they flee. The Klan beats on them and over them, here a rider knocked off his horse and there another whizzing clean out of the window to the back of his steed-on them and over them to rescue and retribution and final triumph.36

In the Ride of the Klan above all, the Wagnerism of Birth was brought to the fore in an outburst of communal ecstasy, or, more precisely, in a marriage of the integrative techniques of the Gesamtkunstwerk with the full-throated audience-response conventions of American melodrama. In this marriage of aesthetic integration with melodramatic audience response, the climactic section of Birth countered central threats, both aesthetic and political. As such, the Ride became the guarantee of synthesis on which the film as a whole relied. Aesthetically, the Ride countered the threat of musical pastiche through an urgent repetition of Wagner as symbol of unity, and countered the threat of narrative dissolution through a climactic reunification and redemption. Politically, it countered regional conflict through an assertion of racial unity, and fears of mongrelization through an alternate form of synthesis.37

To a remarkable degree, The Birth of a Nation realized the dreams of reformers such as Sinn and Bush. But it did something more as well. One of Griffith's fundamental contributions with Birth was that he recovered a darker Wagnerism, one that recovered certain aspects of his oeuvre only intermittently present in the pages of MPW. What he resuscitated and Americanized was a certain Wagner-the Wagner of essays such as "German Art and German Politics" and "Judaism in Music"-the Wagner whose hopes of artistic and national rebirth were inextricably linked to a project of racial purification.38 Foreshadowed by essays such as Harrison's "Jackass Music," Griffith's use of Wagner married some of the most reactionary energies of Bayreuth to groundbreaking techniques of filmic integration that proved crucial to the development of classical Hollywood cinema. Griffith's attempt to synthesize music, moving image, and redemptive violence was a significant development in the history of mass culture that realized some of the most audacious as well as most troubling aspirations of early film reformers. And Griffith's attempted synthesis, inevitably, entailed another: that between cinema and life.

The Unending Melody

Can [the motion picture] not be made to bring all degrees of men together into a co-ordinated organism, working in harmony for the greater things of the world? For we believe the world is going to be saved for democracy-Herman Francis Sherwood (1918)39

Early in Proust's Le temps retrouvé, we are given a conversation with Robert, Marquis de Saint-Loup, in which he describes a German zeppelin raid he had witnessed on a Paris rooftop the previous evening. He speaks of the ensuing battle "as he would formerly have spoken of some spectacle of great aesthetic beauty." The air raid sirens are "Wagnerian," the whole performance a gorgeous "show" of "constellations," a magnificent "'apocalypse' in the sky." "He seemed to take pleasure in this comparison of aviators to Valkyries," observes the narrator, "and explained it, moreover, with purely musical reasoning. 'By Jove, the music of the sirens certainly was like a "Ride of the Valkyries"'."40

The year of this conversation, 1915, is the same as the year of Birth's release. The coincidence of these two bands of Valkyries, as the "long nineteenth century" crashes into the twentieth, marks the emergence of a constellation that has come to define a significant aspect of modern culture: a constellation of Wagner, spectacle, and war. But the constellation looks very different through Saint-Loup's eyes than through Griffith's, and the distance between their appreciations of the theater of war is the difference between autonomous art and melodrama. The flaneur of depersonalized violence hears a very different "Ride," and sees different deaths, than the melodramatist. Taken together, Saint-Loup and Griffith stand as two poles of the spectatorship of catastrophe. At one pole, a spectacle of violence is enjoyed, with a knowing wink, for its sublimity. At the other, a spectacle of violence is enjoyed, without irony, as redemptive triumph of the forces of good over the forces of evil.

In 1915 these two poles stood in opposition, but does this opposition still stand? Has the connoisseurship of catastrophe been reconciled, in recent decades, to the melodramatic imagination? Have we learned, over the course of the twentieth century, to appreciate war simultaneously as l'art-pour-l'art and as black-versus-white? If so, then the Reuters report referred to at the beginning of this paper may prove prescient. When American troops re-enact "for real" Coppola's cinematic satire of Griffith, are we witnessing melodramatic fervor, or the coolest of cool ironies? Playing "Ride" on their nightly raids, are they closer to Griffith or Saint-Loup?

Immediately after their conversation on Wagnerian bombardment, Proust's narrator proceeds to discuss the use of dissimulation in battle strategy. It is the narrator's position that "imitation battles" and "sham attacks," such as the strategic feint, have been rendered obsolete by innovations in artillery bombardment and aerial reconnaissance. But Saint-Loup, who is wiser in such matters, disagrees: "those ruses will be used again and they will succeed, for a trick is never fully exposed for all time; it worked once because it was effective and it will always work."41 We have traveled far from the world of the film reformers and farther still from Bayreuth, and today most Americans, if they recognize Wagner's music at all, would be unable to identify its author. And yet Wagner, like Griffith, still exerts a subterranean pull on American culture, and the old ruses continue to beguile.

Footnote

Notes

1. While the influence of Wagner on film scoring has long been recognized, several recent scholars have deepened our understanding of the phenomenon. See, for example, Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Scott Paulin, "Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity," in James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, eds., Music and Cinema (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 58-84.

2. Largely because of enthusiastic overstatements of earlier film scholars, it has recently become fashionable to question the importance of Birth in the history of film. While much of this critical corrective has been valuable, there is now a danger of the pendulum swinging too far in the direction of diminution. Miriam Hansen has put the matter well: "Although the status of Birth as a mythical watershed has rightly been challenged by economic and social historians of the cinema, we should not underrate its impact as a catalyst of institutional change, nor its paradigmatic function for the cultural self-definition of classical cinema. Besides establishing Griffith's reputation as an artistic 'genius' of the industry, the film marks a point of no return both in economic terms and in terms of public discourse on the cinema." Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Film (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 163. With Birth, Griffith also pioneered and popularized, even if he did not invent, many techniques of the classical cinema.

3. Quoted in Roy Pickard, The Hollywood Studios (London: Muller, 1978), 140.

4. Based in New York and published by the World Photographic Publishing Company beginning in 1907, MPW was principally intended for film exhibitors and manufacturers, but also provided articles on a wide variety of general-interest film topics. By 1911 it had bought out its main rival, Views and Films Index, and by 1914 its circulation reportedly reached 15,000. Its influence declined in the 1920s, and the journal ceased publication in the 1930s. See Richard Abel, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 451. MPW was not the only American periodical at the time to discuss film accompaniment; articles on the subject also appeared in Metronome, Melody Magazine, Dramatic Mirror, and other periodicals. See Charles Merrell Berg, An Investigation of the Motives for and Realization of Music to Accompany the American Silent Film, 1896-1927 (New York: Arno, 1976), 112-23.

5. For more on this column, and the early music accompaniment generally, see Tim Anderson, "Reforming 'Jackass Music': The Problematic Aesthetics of Early American Film Music Accompaniment," in Cinema Journal 37:1 (Fall 1997), 3-22. See also Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Cinema (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001).

6. Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Twentieth-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), 148 and 151.

7. See Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 148: "The movies attracted recently arrived immigrants of all nationalities, in contrast to the stage, which was most frequently visited by native-born workingmen. 'The audiences are composite in the highest degree,' a report by the People's Institute found. 'On the Bowery we have seen Chinamen, Italians and Yiddish people, the young and old, often entire families, crowded side by side'."

8. See Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), 56-62. For more on the transition in cinema practices in early cinema, see Eric de Juyper, "Le cinéma de la seconde époque. Le muet des années dix," in Cinémathèque 1 (May 1991), 28-35; Jean Châteauvert and André Gaudreault, "The Noises of Spectators, or the Spectator as Additive to the Spectacle," in Abel and Altman, The Sounds of Early Cinema, 183-97; and David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially 157.

9. Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," in Early Cinema, eds. Elsaesser and Barker, 58-59.

10. Tom Gunning, "Early American Film," in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 257.

11. For the use of silence in early American film, see Rick Altman, "The Silence of the Silents," in Musical Quarterly 80 (Winter 1996), 648-718.

12. Bush's lectures would occasionally be endorsed and publicized by MPW. A notice in the 26 February, 1910 issue of MPW, for example, reads: "AN EXCELLENT SUGGESTION TO EXHIBITORS is made by The MOVING PICTURE WORLD when it advises exhibitors to show as a specially fitting LENTEN ENTERTAINMENT the brilliant series of Biblical pictures known as 'The Life of Moses.' Do NOT attempt to feature this great show without music and lecture and expert guidance. These three needful requisites are supplied by W. STEPHEN BUSH, the well-known lecturer, who, if you wish, will take charge of this production for you" (MPW, 304).

13. The 1904 Parsifal, directed by Porter and produced by the Edison Film Company, was a twenty-five minute short based on a New York stage production of the work. The film, shot entirely from a fixed-camera position from the rear of the auditorium, is filmed theater at its stagiest. Robert Whittier, the film's Parsifal, subsequently found a way to capitalize on his performance, using the film in a lecture circuit entitled Wagner from Within and Without. See Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 288-89; Kevin J. Harty, "Cinema Arthuriana: An Overview," in Harty, ed., Cinema Arthuriana (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2002, rev. ed.), 7-8. A half-page advertisement for the 1904 Parsifal appeared in the New York Clipper (12 November, 1904), 895.

14. Wagner's operas enjoyed tremendous popularity in turn-of-the-century America; Joseph Horowitz offers an excellent survey of this history in Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994).

15. The 1912 Parsifal was the work of director Mario Caeserini, who also directed the Siegfried film the same year (the two were originally packaged together, as Parsifal e Sigrido). The three-reel film arrived in the U.S. soon after its Italian release, with the MPW notice appearing on 28 December, 1912. Dispensing with the static camerawork of Porter's Parsifal, the Ambrosio production sharply altered the plot of Wagner's opera by, oddly enough, expanding it (MPW, 1307-8). The plot changes are too numerous to mention, but the film spends a good deal of time with the "backstory" of Amfortas's battle with Klingsor and Kundry (who are, in this version, allied magicians), as well as Parsifal's upbringing by his saintly parents. One of the few structural similarities with Wagner's opera is the use of the Eucharistic ritual as a framing device, which the film emphasizes even more strongly than the opera: the film ends, as it begins, with the celebration of the Grail. For American and British reviews of the 1912 Parsifal, see MPW (9 November, 1912), 545, Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal 1 (1905), 52, and Bioscope (30 October, 1913), 427.

16. Erno Rapée, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1970 [1925]), 8.

17. Selections from these and other reviews appear in Seymour Stern, "Griffith: 1-The Birth of a Nation: Part 1," in Film Culture 36 (Spring-Summer 1965), 85-147.

18. See Stern, "Griffith: 1," 147.

19. Largely on account of its virulent racism, the film was met by protests, lawsuits, and riots, and some form of dissent was found in almost every major city in which it was shown. Actions against the film were launched in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, among other cities and towns. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, to have the film banned. The editors of official NAACP magazine The Crisis came out strongly against the film, writing that "the whole second half of the play ought to be suppressed." "The Birth of a Nation: An Editorial" in The Crisis 10 (May-June 1915), 33. Also sharply opposed was Francis Hackett, who, writing for The New Republic, called the film "aggressively vicious and defamatory" and a "spiritual assassination." Francis Hackett, "Brotherly Love," in The New Republic 7 (20 March, 1915), 185.

20. The primary composer of Cabiria's score (if there was one) is unclear, but Ildebrando Pizzetti and Manlio Mazza are the names most frequently mentioned. Just how much Breil shaped the score in its American production is also unknown. For more on these issues, see Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 104-105.

21. "Music and 'Movies' Offer New Art Form: Future Wagners Will Develop Dual Appeal to Sense of Sight and Sound," San Francisco Chronicle (12 July, 1914), 30.

22. See Stern, "Griffith: 1," 105.

23. Quoted in Stern, "Griffith: 1," 106.

24. Jospeh Carl Breil, "Moving Pictures of the Past and Present and the Music Provided for Same," Metronome 32:11 (November 1916), 42. For more on Breil and Wagner, see Dorothy Teal's portrait of him for Musical America, which features, among other relevant material, Breil's comments on Tristan and Isolde: Dorothy J. Teal, "Mr. Briel's 'Legend' Embodies His Theories of Practical Democracy," in Musical America (28 September, 1918).

25. Grace Kingsley, "At the Stage Door," in the Los Angeles Times (8 February, 1915), III.4.

26. Lillian Gish, with Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 152-53.

27. Harlow Hare, review of The Birth of a Nation in The Boston American (18 July, 1915), reprinted in Fred Silva, ed., Focus on the Birth of Nation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 36-40.

28. Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 147.

29. Ibid.

30. Alexander Woollcott's New York Times review of Intolerance is representative: "This scheme of interweaving stories is promising, but of a value as yet undemonstrated, so complete, in this instance, is the confusion of the skein in which are tangled such utterly unrelated threads." Alexander Woollcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights," in The New York Times 10 (September 1916), X.5. Woollcott's evaluation continues to be echoed by some critics, for example, David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 3rd Edition, 1996), 92-94.

31. D. W. Griffith, The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith, ed. James Hart (Louisville, KY: Touchstone, 1972), 88-89.

32. Griffith, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 89.

33. Michael Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," in Representations 9 (Winter 1985), 179.

34. Griffith, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 95.

35. Hare, review of The Birth of a Nation, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 39.

36. Ward Greene, review of The Birth of a Nation, in The Atlanta Journal (7 December, 1915), reprinted in Silva, Focus, 30-33.

37. In his review of Birth of a Nation for MPW, Bush found himself predictably torn between the film's aesthetics and its politics. "It would be difficult to overpraise the spectacular part of these reels," Bush wrote, while also singling out Griffith's mastery "in creating and prolonging suspense to the agonizing point," his use of close-up, the acting of his cast, and the realism of his sets. At the same time, Bush worried that "[t]he tendency of the second part [of the film] is to inflame race hatred. The negroes are shown as horrible brutes, given over to beastly excesses, defiant and criminal in their attitude toward the whites and lusting after white women. Some of the details are horrid and repulsive" (13 March, 1915; MPW, 1586-87). Already in 1915, in other words, Bush had staked out what would become a standard liberal response to the film: celebration of its mastery of film spectacle coupled with condemnation of its racist politics. Bush's division between aesthetics and politics reminds us that Bush was at once a social progressive and an unambiguous Wagner enthusiast.

38. For more on Wagner's connections to racist and anti-Semitic ideologies, see especially Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Tradition (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

39. Herbert Francis Sherwood, "Democracy and the Movies," in The Bookman (May 1918), 238.

40. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, transl. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Frederick A. Blossom (New York: Random House, 1932), Volume 2, 914.

41. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 916.