Friday, 13 April 2007
Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 208, 6:30-8pm
Directions to TUCC
Paul McEwan
"Courts, Critics, and Censors: New Research on The Birth of a Nation Controversy"
Respondent: Jennifer Horne
This talk is a presentation of recent work toward a book on the reception of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic The Birth of a Nation. The reception of this film is one of the few stories in film history that everyone seems to know, but archival research greatly complicates the picture.
Part of this talk will focus on Griffith’s battles with the censor boards in Ohio, where the film was banned until the 1950s, the only place where censorship of the film managed to stick. The ongoing legal battles give us a sense of what the censorship of the film meant to Griffith and Epoch productions beyond Griffith’s high-minded statements about free speech and “witch burners.” This was a battle fought in courtrooms around the country by a company with significant financial resources. Among the interesting documents unearthed are an annotated bibliography of the film, new letters from prominent citizens defending it, and hints of Griffith’s correspondence with the Klan in the 1920s.
The second part will focus on recent research on the available prints in the collection of the Library of Congress, many of which have not been thoroughly catalogued. Recent finds have included censored material, alternate takes of some scenes, and heavily revised intertitles that suggest that Griffith may have been adapting his film to the criticism it received.
Still from rarely seen footage that shows Austin Stoneman touching and embracing his servant Lydia. This footage is missing from the versions of the film held at the Library of Congress
and demonstrates the difficulty of determing which is the "original" or complete version of the film.
Paul McEwan is Assistant Professor of Media & Communication and Associate Director of Film Studies at Muhlenberg College. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies and the collection Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture. He is currently editing an “In Focus” section for Cinema Journal on teaching “difficult” films that will include his essay on teaching The Birth of a Nation. His Ph.D. is from Northwestern University.
Jennifer Horne teaches in the English Department at Bryn Mawr College. She is currently writing a book called Exhibition and Inhibition, a study of the Better Films Movement and the cinema's early relationship to cultural institutions such as museums, schools, and public libraries. Her work has appeared in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Afterimage, and she has co-authored articles, with Jonathan Kahana, in Afterimage and Surfaces.
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