Lecture Three:
The Great Train Robbery and The Birth of a Nation
9/6/2005

On The Great Train Robbery

One of the milestones in film history was The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed and photographed by Edwin S. Porter

The plot was inspired by a true event that occurred on August 29, 1900, when four members of Butch Cassidy’s gang halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks toward Table Rock, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.

Only a little more than 10 minutes in total running time, the film used a number of innovative techniques, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement.

On Birth of a Nation

As the director of Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith is considered to be the “father of modern American cinema”—the director who recognized editing as the single most important factor for cinematic narrative

He began working in the movies as an actor then started making films at the Biograph company, where he made over 450 movies at Biograph.

In 1913, Griffith left Biograph, taking cinematographer Billy Bitzer and several actors with him; Biograph folded in 1915.  Shortly after leaving Biograph, he began work on Birth of a Nation. Its first public opening was March 3, 1915 at the Liberty Theater in New York, where it was retitled from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nation.

THE film ran for an unprecedented 48 weeks—and it was the first film ever to command the two-dollar admission price of the legitimate theater.

Budget for the film was 110,000: five times more than the next largest sum spent on a movie up to that time. Birth of a Nation was originally composed of over 1544 separate shots--in an era in which the most sophisticated of foreign spectacles contained fewer than 100. Other innovations include

• the introduction of night photography (using magnesium flares)
• the technique of the camera "iris" effect
• the frequent use of parallel action and editing in a sequence
• extensive use of tinting for dramatic or psychological effect in sequences
• moving, traveling or "panning" camera tracking shots
• the use of total-screen close-ups to reveal intimate expressions
• the use of vignettes seen in "balloons" or iris-shots in one portion of a darkened screen
• the use of fade-outs and cameo-profiles
• high-angle shots and the abundant use of panoramic long shots
• elaborately-staged battle scenes with hundreds of extras
• extensive cross-cutting between two scenes to create excitement and suspense dramatic climax

The NAACP proposed boycott of The Birth of a Nation. The organization’s ongoing national campaign to censor the film had decidedly mixed results. Despite successes in Boston and Chicago in getting sympathetic officials placed on newly formed film censorship boards, by year’s end distributors could show The Birth of a Nation almost anywhere in the country, though with several minor cuts in the film’s release print.

Riots broke out in major cities (Boston, Philadelphia, among others), and it was denied release in many other places (Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, eight states in total). Subsequent lawsuits and picketing tailed the film for years when it was re-released (in 1924, 1931, and 1938).

And the film stirred new controversy when it was voted into the National Film Registry in 1993, and when it was voted one of the "Top 100 American Films" (at # 44) by the American Film Institute in 1998.

**DJ Spooky, a dj and filmmaker, has remixed Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in a project called "Rebirth of a Nation." To see a clip of the project, click here.