Politics Goes to the Movies

Hollywood, Europe, and Beyond

Robert Kolker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351848046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Politics Goes to the Movies introduces the topic of political representation and ideology by analyzing some of the most important politically themed films across the history of cinema in a refreshing and concise volume. Offering a survey of political cinema from 1915 to present day, topics include: propaganda, Communism, Fascism, revolutionary cinema, and contemporary documentary. Using individual case studies that begin with The Birth of a Nation and end with O.J.: Made in America, the book introduces how various strands of international politics have been woven through the fabric of cinema by contextualizing each film in its particular historical moment. In addition, Robert Kolker offers formal analyses that explore not only overtly political themes but also how the structural properties of a film can themselves be political—how political films are made, politically.

Including films produced across Europe, North Africa, the US, and Latin America, this accessible and engaging book is an ideal introductory text for students of political cinema.

p.9

1 Populism, race, and The Birth of a Nation (1915)

We start with a film that encapsulates many of the issues discussed in the Introduction, but with an added burden: it is a silent film made in 1915, and it is racist to its very core. To understand the film, we need to put it in the context of when it was made, who made it, how it was received, and what we can do with it now. We need also to consider if we can solve a fundamental, indeed universal problem of what to do with a work of art whose politics are abhorrent.

Movies began as a novelty, one of the many technological inventions of the 19th century, though, at the time, not seen as important as the railroad, the telegraph, photography, or the electric light bulb. These inventions were all about time and space. The railroads allowed people to move relatively quickly across wide areas. Telephony, which included long-distance communication by Morse code and then voice, collapsed space; it also led to radio, which by the early 20th century brought news, entertainment, and music into the home. Electricity, which made radio and telephony possible, not only linked small and large areas, but the light bulb extended time itself. Photography froze time in visual space. Night was no longer the time of withdrawal and sleep, but of continued activity. Movies combined these phenomena of modernity, creating in effect a time and space machine where viewers—first in storefront peepshows and later in ornate picture palaces—could see versions of their worlds, see more of their worlds, become absorbed in the fictions of assent.

Early movies were very short, a few minutes of action: a strongman flexing his muscles, a woman dancing, workers leaving a factory, a train arriving at a station. These were transnational movies, some made in the U.S. by Thomas Edison, whose workshop, headed by W. K. L. Dickson, developed the process of putting a succession of images on a strip of film and running them through an illuminated viewer, creating the illusion of motion. Others came from France, where the Lumière Brothers photographed everyday events, making them unusual by the very act of isolating and privileging them on film. And this was the key to the immediate popularity of the movies: creating or recording events, isolating them from the immediate rush of everyday life, and then presenting them to viewers as concentrated, provoking, moving experiences.

p.10

Electoral politics entered almost immediately into the catalogue of early films. In 1896, William McKinley, soon to become the 25th President of the United States, was filmed in a very short (just over a minute) movie, walking with an aide across the lawn of his house to receive a piece of paper from another man (Figure 1.1). McKinley was also captured on film during his inauguration and posthumously during the funeral procession following his assassination. But there was more at stake than elections and mourning. Here was the first President to make use of mass media and thus marked movies, from their birth to their maturity and in their current decline, as a voice of politics, ideologies, and the cultures of both the filmmakers and viewers. Politics came to the screen.¹ The McKinley footage presaged newsreels of current events, but it was fiction films that made a lasting mark. One early film stands out as the most potent, politically charged film of the silent period: D. W. Griffith’s 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation.

Figure 1.1 The first campaign film: William McKinley takes a walk with an aide in front of his house in this brief film from 1896.

p.11

The McKinley film was made by W. K. L. Dickson, the former Edison employee, and shot by cameraman Billy Bitzer. The production company was the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, a rival to Edison and the beginning of what would become a large number of production and distribution companies competing with each other before the formation of the major studios early in the 20th century. The significance of Biograph (as it was popularly called) was that it became home to one of the most important directors of the silent period, D. W. Griffith. A would-be actor and playwright, Griffith, a son of the South, born in Kentucky to a father who was a Confederate soldier, joined Biograph in 1908. Instead of acting, Griffith became a director. Between 1908 and 1913, when he left to form his own company, he made, with the assistance of cameraman Billy Bitzer and a stock company of actors, some 450 short films.

In the course of this astonishing output, Griffith refined many filmic techniques and became especially adept at two stylistic practices: careful compositions that rendered a striking and eloquent image, and editing together sequences that were each happening at the same time but in different spaces. Griffith used this technique of parallel editing as a means of narrative contrast and tension. Scenes of someone, usually a woman, in a situation of distress or capture are intercut with scenes of a man rushing to her rescue. At the end of this alternation, the rescuer arrives at the person in distress and saves her.

In 1909, Griffith made a fourteen-minute film called Corner in Wheat. The story is simple: a capitalist wants to own all the grain produced by farmers. The film—as with all good films—is more interesting than its plot. There are lyrical shots of a farmer sowing his field along with a bakery where the price of bread keeps going up intercut with the capitalist, who schemes to buy up the wheat and the stock exchange where investors bid up the prices. At one point, the farmer returns to his family empty-handed—no money for his labors. In another, a mob comes to the bakery to protest the high prices. The capitalist visits his grain storage facility, falls into the pit, and is buried by his grain pouring down—the last we see of him are his fingers wiggling out of the mountain of grain that is suffocating him. The film ends with his body being pulled out and another shot of the poor farmer, sowing his fields (Figures 1.2 and 1.3).

The film represents a strain of populism that runs strongly through American and European politics, and it is worth examining before we get to The Birth of a Nation. Populism is a slippery term. At its base, it is an “us against them” ideology. The poor and the struggling pitted against the wealthy elite. This is different from class struggle, a more complex, left-wing ideology that addresses economic, cultural, and social differences and speaks to oppression and the means—often revolutionary—to overcome it. Populism is most often a right-wing ideology of resentment and fear, an ideology of nationalism, and too often of racism, a reaction to a world that seems to be in control of “elites” and spinning out of control from “ordinary people” who cannot control it. Populism is often darkly apocalyptic about the future while casting a foolish eye on an idealized past that never existed.²

p.12

Figure 1.2 The speculator in wheat is buried in his own product in D. W. Griffith’s Corner in Wheat.

Figure 1.3 Meanwhile, the farmer quietly goes about his business of sowing seed.

p.13

This is a bit too heavy a burden to place on Griffith’s little film. Corner in Wheat is populism writ small, a quiet voice contrasting the rural with the urban, the poor with the rich, the humble with the greedy. It would seem to indicate that Griffith’s ideology was soundly in tune with the Progressive Era, which sought an ideal world of equality and morality.³ But there was a competing ideology at work during the early part of the 20th century. Racism was raging; segregation and violence against African Americans was strong. And Griffith could not resist it. In his signature work, the “other,” the African American, became the target of a racist onslaught. In terms of a career move, The Birth of a Nation is innocent and compelling enough, the result of Griffith’s desire to break free of the length restraints imposed on him by the Biograph company and make longer films. As a result, he made, in The Birth of a Nation, the first long-form film in U.S. film history, and he uses its length to cover the period before, during, and after the Civil War. He attempts to contain this historical expanse by focusing on a few families and large battle sequences. The film is notable both for the delicacy with which Griffith portrays the domestic lives of the Southern Cameron family, whose activities provide an anchor for the diverse events of the film, and the large battle panoramas of the Civil War sequences. But the film takes its ugly turn after the war when it attempts to portray Reconstruction, the rebuilding of the South, as a historical disaster, causing the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Birth of a Nation is based on a 1905 novel and play by Thomas Dixon called The Clansman. It celebrates the Ku Klux Klan as protectors of white people after the Civil War and the freeing of enslaved people. Dixon’s racism was of a piece with, if perhaps a bit more heated than, the reigning ideology of the time, especially in the South. The brief ascendency of African Americans into some political power—they got the vote, they served as state legislators—came to a dismal end when the government withdrew its troops from the Confederate states in 1877. Jim Crow, slavery without actual ownership of people, oppressed African Americans with segregation, humiliation, terrorism, and lynching. The Klan became a potent agent of this terrorism and violence.

p.14

Why did Griffith follow suit? It seems that he was little more than an everyday racist of the time, exacerbated by his Southern heritage. Ideologically, this would indicate that he believed in the inferiority of African Americans and was probably sentimental about the “Old South” and its clichés of male honor and female gentility. Understanding this helps us understand why he did not make a film that he consciously thought would create the furor and backlash that it did. Yet he took his source material to heart and the racism of his film grows organically, almost obviously, from the narrative that Griffith creates. Slavery-Peace-War-Loss-Retribution seems to be the pattern of the film and the ideological narrative of the South itself.

The film begins innocently enough, depicting the friendship of the Camerons in the South and the Stonemans from the North. Ben Cameron, the “Little Colonel” (Henry Walthall), is in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish). But the Stonemans are not merely northerners but abolitionists as well—they want the end of sla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Politics Goes to the Movies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Populism, Race, and The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• 2 Revolution!: Battleship Potemkin (1925)
• 3 Leni Riefenstahl and “Fascinating Fascism”: Triumph of the Will (1935)
• 4 American Democracy and Frank Capra: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
• 5 Revolution in the 1960s: The Battle of Algiers (1966)
• 6 Revolutionary Cinema in Latin America: Lucía (1968)
• 7 Politics and the Apocalypse: Weekend (1967)
• 8 Reflections on Fascism: The Conformist (1970)
• 9 The Cold War, Part One: Science Fiction and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• 10 The Cold War, Part Two: Point of Order (1964) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
• 11 Hollywood and the Blacklist: Salt of the Earth (1954)
• 12 Paranoia and Political Assassination: JFK (1991)
• 13 Contemporary American Politics: Documentaries
• 14 Contemporary American Politics: New Channels
• Bibliography
• Index