[ecrea] cfp - In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation

The deadline for proposals for 'In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation: 
A Centennial Assessment of Griffith's Film' has been extended. Having 
received over 30 proposals from around the world, the organisers have 
extended the deadline to 3 November to enable others to take part in 
what promises to be a very successful conference. For further 
information, please see below or visit 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/birth-of-a-nation.



'In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation: A Centennial Assessment of 
Griffith's Film'

Commonwealth Fund Conference in American History

University College London

London, United Kingdom

June 25-27, 2015

2015 will see the centennial of the release of David W. Griffith's 
highly controversial film The Birth of a Nation. The time is ripe for a 
scholarly review of the movie and its after-effects - one of which has 
been the eclipse of Griffith's historical reputation because of the 
rampant racism of his film (in 1999 the Directors Guild of America 
abolished its D. W. Griffith award for lifetime achievement). The 
conference will assess what the film meant and still means in terms of 
race relations, American history, and film history. Keynote speakers 
will be Jane Gaines (Columbia University); Robert Lang (University of 
Hartford); Paul McEwan (Muhlenberg College); Cedric Robinson (University 
of California, Santa Barbara); Jacqueline Stewart (University of 
Chicago) and Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley). Thanks 
to the collaboration of the British Film Institute, it is hoped to 
screen The Birth of a Nation, perhaps in conjunction with Oscar 
Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920), at the National Film Theatre in 
London during the course of the conference.

The Birth of a Nation had a major impact on the early American movie 
industry. It broadened the audience for 'spectacular' motion pictures to 
include, for the first time, millions of members of the white middle 
class. It made it more or less inevitable that later films would include 
a musical score. Among its more baleful consequences almost certainly 
were the subsequent limitation, for several decades, of the range of 
African American characters shown on screen and the ban on 
'miscegenation' included in the Motion Picture Producers and 
Distributors of America's 'Don'ts and Be Carefuls' of 1927 and the 
Production Code of 1930.

Much of the work on the film's reception has so far focused on the 
political protests against it organized by the NAACP and other 
organizations. Even this part of the story is still incomplete and a 
number of scholars are researching such protests, shedding considerable 
light on local politics and race relations in the city, state or region 
concerned. There were also many contemporary protests at the film's 
racist representation of history (including letters to the press from, 
among others, former Mississippi congressman and black leader John R. 
Lynch). Much less work has been done so far on the reception of the film 
after its initial release in 1915-16 (it was playing in Little Rock, 
Arkansas, when the riots against integration occurred in 1957) and on 
the way it was received outside the United States. Yet The Birth of a 
Nation caused riots in the French-occupied part of the Rhineland in the 
early 1920s, was banned by the British Colonial Office for a time from 
South Africa, proved hugely popular in Latin America in 1915-16 and 
later inindividual countries such as Canada and Germany.

In recent years, the film has continued to be dogged by controversy. A 
screening of The Birth of a Nation at the Silent Movie Theater in Los 
Angeles was abandoned because of protests in 2004. In 2007, multi-media 
artist D J Spooky (Paul D. Miller) released a re-mixed version of the 
movie, linking it to modern American socio-political conflicts. There 
are persistent rumors on the internet of a reissue of the film, 
incorporating some of the scenes cut at the insistence of censors in 
1915. After a century, the film continues to excite both controversy and 
concern. The conference is intended as a landmark event bringing 
together scholars from all over the world working on The Birth of a 
Nation and the issues raised by the film.

Although suggestions on other subjects are welcome, paper proposals (300 
words plus 150 word bios) are invited on issues such as these:

• What light does the struggle against The Birth of a Nation, either at 
the time of its first release or later, shed on politics and race 
relations in particular communities or American states?

• How did African Americans express their opposition to the film in 
cultural terms? Papers on this might, for example, cover the work of 
Oscar Micheaux (in particular Within Our Gates); the Hampton Epilogue; 
screenplays, poetry and written fiction; performances of W. E. B. Du 
Bois's pageant The Star of Ethiopia.

• How did the reception of The Birth of a Nation outside the United 
States compare to that in the U.S.? In which other countries was it 
least/most commercially successful, and why? How did film critics in 
other countries attack or applaud it?

• What were the longer-term effects of The Birth of a Nation on the 
history of American cinema? (This might include, for example: aesthetic 
issues; the effect on movie industry self-regulation; limiting 
representations of race on film; the influence of Birth on later films 
and directors.)

• What was the film's relationship to other artistic forms, including 
literary and stage melodramas?

• How influential was the film's construction of gender and references 
to miscegenation?

• The Birth of a Nation offered controversial representations of 
slavery, the origins and course of the Civil War, Lincoln, and the era 
of Reconstruction. In terms of the last of these, it may have had a 
significant impact on the virtual disappearance of Reconstruction as a 
theme from Hollywood historical films. Who has contested the film's 
biased version of American 'history' and why?

• How has the movie been used by right-wing groups, especially the Klan, 
as a tool of propaganda? How important has it been in terms of the 
recruitment and ideology of such groups?

• In the light of Benedict Anderson's view of the nation as an 'imagined 
community,' how did the representation of white 'nationhood' in 
Griffith's film influence debates on American civil rights/citizenship?

• How did the film affect the development of film culture and reception 
in the United States or other countries?

Paper proposals should be sent by Monday, November 3, 2014 to both 
Melvyn Stokes ((M.Stokes /at/ ucl.ac.uk)) and Iwan Morgan ((I.Morgan /at/ ucl.ac.uk))



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