Elia Kazan & D.W. Griffith
Robert Sterling
The furor surrounding the choice of Elia Kazan for a Lifetime Achievement
Award by the Academy is quite deserved, and actually quite tame due to the
unrepentant depths of his treachery and lack of personal integrity. To call
him a snitch isn't an accurate smear: a snitch, at least, implies telling the
truth even though it means betraying someone, whereas Kazan's naming of names
before McCarthy's liberty-chilling crusade more precisely was a dishonest and
cowardly bowing to a dangerous and oppressive authority. However, say what
you will about Kazan's ignoble actions, his films were quite noble. Not the
same can be said about D.W. Griffith.
Griffith was a silent film director who is often considered cinema's first
auteur. He was also an unrepentant racist. His most famous film, "Birth of a
Nation," was originally titled as "The Clansmen," and was a disgusting
glorification of the KKK's terrorist activities in the post-Civil War era. As
it turns out, "Birth of a Nation" was also the most successful movie in film
history, until "Gone With the Wind" came out 24 years later.
Film historians often try to point to Griffith's other works, including his
other major spectacle "Intolerance," in no small part due to the major
embarrassment that such a big name was an avowed racist. Try they may, but
Griffith's bigotry was central to his finest success. "Triumph of the Will,"
Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 propaganda film for the Nazis, at least seemed to more
about a selling of National Socialism than celebrating Hitler's and his
cliques more sinister angles. But the inherently vile message of "Birth of a
Nation" was that the Civil War gave too much freedom to lazy, crooked and
inferior Negroes, and that the Klan was formed to protect the innocent,
oppressed white people from injustice.
Despite his soiled history, D.W. Griffith has a very special honor named after
him: the prestigious lifetime achievement award handed out by the Director's
Guild. While even his worst critic would admit Griffith is an important name
in the history of film, the continued naming after him of the highest honor
filmmakers can hand out to their own remains a bizarre anomaly in an age of
sometimes extreme and over-sensitive political correctness. To ignore
Griffith's role in the history of film would be unfair and a whitewash: yet
the continued naming of the Director Guild's prize after him seems more
offensive than a professional football team named Redskins. There are other
filmmakers worthy of the mantle: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra,
John Ford and the recently deceased Stanley Kubrick are just a few names that
pop into this writer's head. It seems that as we approach the 21st century,
now would be a time for the Directors Guild to change its prize titles to
better reflect what film should aspire to be.
