Griffith in Context: a Multimedia Exploration of The Birth of a Nation

Summary:

D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation has the distinction of being at once one of the most revered and most criticized films in cinema's history. This conflicted reputation stems from the film's combination of pioneering technical innovations and racial propaganda; the result was a visual epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction that had far-reaching cultural effects. The Birth of a Nation helped establish new cinematic conventions as well as cinema's reputation as a serious artistic medium; at the same time, the film incited race riots, helped rationalize legal segregation and rampant lynching, and added momentum to the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan.

Despite the significance of The Birth of a Nation as a cultural document, the film is under-utilized as a learning tool within academic areas to which it is directly relevant: film studies, American studies, African-American studies, and history. The factors responsible for the under-representation of Birth in undergraduate humanities classrooms include the film's length, its political volatility, and its unwieldiness in terms of contextualization. Our multimedia application Griffith in Context, sponsored by the [American] National Endowment for the Humanities and currently under development at the Georgia Institute of Technology, addresses these difficulties by delivering clips from the film and contextualizing corollary materials in an interactive format that makes the film's impact tangible. Griffith in Context, in fact, presents the film's cultural and cinematic impact as inseparable; it was the film's artistic and emotional power coupled with its racism that brought issues of race and American identity to the attention of the nation.

User-Centered Learning Through Multimedia:

Many of the instructors who have been most successful in conveying a sense of The Birth of a Nation's subtleties and significance typically use documents from the same era to historically situate the film. Lauren Rabinovitz at the University of Iowa uses Library of Congress materials and regional newspaper coverage to illustrate how the debate around the film got imbricated into local events such as Chicago's 1916 mayoral election. At Stanford University, Henry Breitrose uses a 1914 history textbook and the African-American press's critique of the film's historical portrait to demonstrate the collision of incredibly disparate notions of history that occurred with Birth's release. The challenge then is to build on the success of such strategies by making such materials available to all instructors while still developing an application that supports a diversity of learning goals and teaching methods.

The multimedia affordances of Griffith in Context allow us to meet these challenges by incorporating a diversity of materials pertinent to various undergraduate courses. The program handles the challenge of contextualizing the film by providing a means for students, outside of classtime, to develop their understanding of the film's cultural context. After viewing the film, students can to use Griffith in Context to review representative scenes and important issues, to investigate primary and secondary research material, and to experiment with editing techniques. Also, instructors can use modules of the program in class to help them illustrate lecture points about specific technical or contextual issues.

Organization And Interface:

The organization and interface of Griffith in Context differ in important ways from most other humanities-oriented multimedia programs - differences that we believe enhance student engagement with the program's humanities content. The primary goal of the program is to assist students in understanding that the "meaning" of this artifact is dependent on the cultural context in which it was produced and viewed and to explore specific discursive aspects of this context - the conversations, debates, representations, and responses - that surrounded the film's creation and early performance. To facilitate this process of understanding, we have organized the application around the material artifact in question - the film The Birth of a Nation - rather than allowing textual commentary about the subject to dictate the student's path through the application. Thus, instead of dividing the program into topic areas, we have mapped out nine sections, each corresponding with a three to four minute clip from the film. Within each of these sections, the student accesses the information and relevant documents through interaction with the film itself, using the following interface elements and accompanying modules:

1. The Annotated Filmstrip: This module allows a user to move back and forth through one of the nine selected filmclips and closely examine a particular sequence of frames; the filmstrip interface allows one to move the cursor to the right or left over the filmstrip, thereby controlling both the speed and direction of the filmstrip's movement. The user can stop the strip on any frame and begin playing the clip from that point. Surrounding the filmstrip are hypermedia links featuring a specific topic tied to the frames present on the screen at that moment; each of these links is associated with one of the program's four indices of analysis: filmic technique, historical re-creation, racial representation, and literary origins. When selected, each link brings up an expert interview on the stated topic which features primary documents, illustrations and photographs as well as scholarly commentary in audio form.

2. The Editing Room: Some of the hypermedia links associated with filmic technique bring up particular exercises that allow students to experience editing principles featured in the film and discussed in the expert interviews. Students will use this module's unique interface to re-edit Griffith's own footage and, in so doing, analyze differences in visual effect and cultural reaction that such re-editing might produce.

3. The Timeline: This module allows users to access historical information associated with the period depicted in a particular film clip. The timeline, like the annotated filmstrip, provides links to documents, historical accounts, and expert interviews pertaining to certain historical events depicted in the film. Students can use these divergent view of events to analyze Griffith's attempt to recreate history via film narrative and visual representation. Additionally, students can scroll through the timeline to access information about the film's production, its "road show" distribution, and the reaction it prompted as it moved from upscale symphony halls to smaller, inner-city segregated theaters.

4. The Document Server: This module is an archive of the documents, photographs, illustrations, and interviews presented throughout the program. It allows users to directly access these materials without going to the particular place in the program where they are presented. Students can quickly locate and review previously encountered contextual material. Each document or image referenced in the Timeline or presented within the Annotated Filmstrip module is marked with a document tag which may be used to relocate the artifact using the Document Server. The Document Server can be reorganized according to document name, document type, author, subject area, or date of publication/distribution. As a user moves the cursor over the name of a document, the cursor changes to a thumbnail image of the document, allowing users to confirm their selection by visual appearance.