Abstract
This chapter serves as a parallel to Chap. 2 on James Baldwin by offering a close reading of James Agee’s film review of Birth of a Nation and his more general appreciation of D. W. Griffith’s life and work written shortly after Griffith’s death. It takes into consideration Agee’s role as a Southern intellectual as well what James A. Crank refers to as Agee’s “anatomy of guilt” concerning racial segregation and violence in America. The chapter also places Agee’s reviews of Griffith in the context of his commentaries on other films that broach issues or themes of American white supremacy.
The South seems to be the myth that both most consciously asserts whiteness and most devastatingly undermines it.
—Richard Dyer
Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
—Flannery O’Connor
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I had decided on a title of “But Now I See” for this chapter before I began writing it. The phrase seemed fitting for discussion of a conversion narrative. It was also the phrase that first came to mind when I began closely analyzing James Agee’s film criticism and his other works. Then I eventually made my way to Fred Hobson’s excellent study, But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1999). Though Hobson speaks of Agee only once in his book, his concept of the conversion narrative is invaluable in my reexamination of Agee’s reading of Birth of a Nation.
- 2.
Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, Issue 9, Special Issue: American Culture between the Civil War and World War I (Winter 1985): 150–195. 150.
- 3.
Daniel Bernardi, “The Birth of Whiteness: Integrating Race into the Narrator System,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 82–96.
- 4.
Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 238–249.
- 5.
Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 246.
- 6.
Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 111.
- 7.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial, 1976), 59.
- 8.
Again, a closer examination of the relationship among these three men as well as the fact that this was the first film to be shown in the White House to an enthusiastic President Wilson is succinctly summed up in Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 111. Other sections of the book look more closely at his writing A History of the American People (198–200) and its impact on Griffith in the making of the film. Stokes also provides information on the friendship of the three men in their youth, which reinforced their shared views about race as Southerners throughout their careers (32–32).
- 9.
James A. Crank, “Racial Violence”, 56.
- 10.
As previously noted, the definitive history of black film criticism on Birth of a Nation can be found in Anna Everett , Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
- 11.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Film Theory and Critcism, 7th Ed., Braudy and Cohen, 711–722; “Black Specatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance”, Braudy and Cohen, 767–776.
- 12.
Bernardi , “The Birth of Whiteness,” 84.
- 13.
Of particular interest here is Michael Rogin’s comment that there was a tendency to attribute the racist content of the film to Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, as source material and to suggest that “Griffith and its audience did not share Dixon’s propagandistic purposes; they were victims of “unconscious racism.” That unconscious is visible on the screen in Birth, and it invites us not to avert our eyes from the movie’s racism but to investigate its meaning (151). Rogin , “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision.
- 14.
One of the seminal texts with respect to a history of representations of blacks in Hollywood and the related casting issues is Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Viking Press, 1974).
- 15.
Bernardi , “The Birth of Whiteness,” 84.
- 16.
Auden’s remark is quoted from a letter to the Editors of the Nation from October 16, 1944, reprinted on the opening page of Agee on Film (New York: Penguin, 1958).
- 17.
Both pieces can be found in Agee on Film. The film review from The Nation is found on pages 313–315, and the tribute published in the Times is on pages 396–398.
- 18.
Agee on Film, 315.
- 19.
“The Makers of In the Street and the Quiet One” in Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee, ed. Michael Lofaro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 201–223. 204.
- 20.
Agee on Film, 315.
- 21.
Agee on Film, 314.
- 22.
Agee on Film, 396. One relative aspect of Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work here is that Baldwin, by following his own evolution as a filmgoer, implies that the spectator begins as a kind of blank slate but becomes “spoiled” by continual exposure to films which play upon the mythologies of the American Dream. These mythologies, as is argued throughout this book, are in turn tainted by white supremacist ideologies.
- 23.
Susan B. Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narrative of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50–103.
- 24.
Agee on Film, 314.
- 25.
Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 250.
- 26.
Agee on Film, 314.
- 27.
Davidson, “Preface to Decision,” Sewanee Review. The letters can be found in Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (Brooklyn: Melville House, 1962/2014). Kindle. James A. Crank, “Racial Violence, Receding Bodies: James Agee’s Anatomy of Guilt,” in Agee at 100, ed. Michael Lofaro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 53–74.
- 28.
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. Location 1782.
- 29.
“In the Summer of 1945…” Box 1, Folder 1, Harry Ransom Center, 1928–1968. Austin: University of Texas.
- 30.
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, Location 1802.
- 31.
Donald Davidson, “Preface to Decision,” Sewanee Review 53, no. 3 (Summer 1945): 394–412. www.jstor.org/stable/27537598. 404–405.
- 32.
Davidson, “Preface to Decision.”
- 33.
Agee’s unpublished response “In the Summer of 1945,” Box 1, Folder 1 Harry Ransom Center, 1928–68, University of Texas Austin. I am reliant upon Crank’s reading for this document.
- 34.
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, Location 1805.
- 35.
Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 179.
- 36.
Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 185.
- 37.
For further exploration of the myth of the Lost Cause and its propagandistic effects on American history, the reader may consult Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). The argument from Stokes is from pages 180–184 of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
- 38.
My point here is a basic overview of Cripp’s “Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, The Birth of a Nation,” Historian 25, no. 3 (May 1963): 344–362. This point is also observed in Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 180.
- 39.
The Collected Short Prose of James Agee (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 74.
- 40.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 56. My emphasis.
- 41.
Agee on Film, 397–398.
- 42.
James A. Crank, “Racial Violence, Receding Bodies,” 63.
- 43.
Crank , “Racial Violence, Receding Bodies,” 74.
- 44.
Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 125–156.
- 45.
Susan B. Courtney. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narrative of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50–103. 88.
- 46.
Courtney . Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 88.
- 47.
Courtney . Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 95–97.
- 48.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 51. In this passage, Baldwin is still focused on Michel Gast’s film I Shall Spit on Your Grave. However, the decision to speak about this European film focused on racial violence and revenge and then turn directly to a discussion of Birth of a Nation is strategic on Baldwin’s part. Europe’s conception of what constitutes racially inflected desires for vengeance is grotesque and obvious. But so equally are America’s homegrown representations of a similar obsession.
- 49.
Everett , Returning the Gaze, 60.
- 50.
Everett , Returning the Gaze, 71.
- 51.
Bernardi , “The Birth of Whiteness,” 95.
- 52.
Agee on Film, 80.
- 53.
Agee on Film, 108.
- 54.
Agee on Film, 284.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Craven, A.M. (2018). “A Monstrous Wrong”: James Agee and the Miraculous Birth of a Nation. In: Visible and Invisible Whiteness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76777-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76777-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76776-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76777-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)