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D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation": A History of 'The Most Controversial Film of All Time'. By Melvyn Stokes. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 432 pp. Paper: $24.95, ISBN: 978-019-533678-8.)
Melvyn Stokes's excellent new study of D.W. Griffith's abidingly controversial 1915 film Birth of a Nation situates insightful readings of the film in a brilliantly conceived and densely researched historical context. The book focuses on the shifting range of meanings found in the film by American movie authences from 1915 right up to the present and will be valuable to a wide range of readers in the humanities and among film buffs. It is comprehensive, with over 100 pages of notes and bibliography, yet the essay itself is of manageable length, 285 pages, and highly readable. Though Stokes references all major studies of the film, he happily avoids the jargon of cultural theory. His method is to intertwine narratives of the film's historical context, making, reception and aftermath, knotting them into what is truly a thick history of the film, its makers and authence(s). He is especially deft at creating a sense of the film's various reception communities. Despite the atrocious racism of Griffith's film, Stokes's book is historicist cultural scholarship at its best.
Stokes's introduction sketches the far reaching impact of Birth - perhaps 200 million viewers may have eventually seen the film - while reminding readers of the paradox the film poses as both a groundbreaking technical achievement and a profoundly disturbing piece of racist propaganda. Chapter 1 then begins in media res, so to speak, by detailing the February 8, 1915 premiere at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles. Stokes is primarily interested in what, after Stanley Fish, might be called the "communities of reception" of the film, so this approach fits perfectly. A synopsis of the film is interspersed with reminiscences by members of the original authence, and other accounts, to evoke a ground-zero portrait of the original reception. After he narrates the Los Angeles premiere, Stokes shifts to biographies of Thomas Dixon - whose revanchist popular novels and plays gave Griffith a literary framework upon which to build - and D.W. Griffith himself. I will to return to these chapters, below, in a more extensive treatment of the question...