GRIFFITH, D. W.

GRIFFITH, D. W.: translation

(1875–1948)

Griffith is often seen as the inventor of cinema mythographic narrative with his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Prior to 1915, however, Griffith made numerous one- and two-reel Westerns: “The scores of one- and two-reel films Griffith produced between 1908 and 1914 (including several Westerns) were technically inventive and increasingly sophisticated in form, but as narratives they were little more than kinetic dime novels” (Slotkin 1992, 238). The Birth of a Nation, while not a Western, was the first great cinema epic and as such showed how cinema could be used for portraying the grand myths of the nation. Unfortunately, Griffith’s film is nearly unwatchable today due to its extreme racist content. Equally unfortunate is the fact that the film was instrumental in establishing a theme that would be foundational to the developing myth of the West—the idea that in one sense the struggle between whites and African Americans is a struggle to save the body of a white woman from the inevitable sexual depredations of black men, a struggle against “a fate worse than death.” In The Birthof a Nation, when a white woman is raped by a black man, her only recourse is to commit suicide. Westerns after the silent era often substitute the black-white struggle with the Indian–white man struggle.