Attending a couple of performances of Prokofiev's magnificent opera, War and Peace, at the Metropolitan recently, and thinking of all the plot lines he did <i>not</i> choose to set (the piece is nearly five hours long as it is, and doesn't include three-quarters of Tolstoy's characters), I began to think of Tolstoy's masterful construction: the two or three aristocratic families (Bolkonskys, Rostovs, Kuragins-and-Bezukhovs), the pettiness of their romantic and other involvements when the great tidal wave of national disaster rolls over them, the way the characters show their mettle in meeting it, the way their personal destinies work themselves out in a more peaceable aftermath -- and the resemblance to another work in an entirely different medium occurred to me.
Can it be that no one has noticed this?
Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation." Like Tolstoy, he examines a couple of aristocratic families, their loyal underlings, their intertwining romances, and then hits them in the head with a shattering cataclysm that kills quite a few of them and transforms the lives and social circumstances of the rest. His very neutrality on the Civil War (and his determination to see blacks who attempt to break out of their class as contrary to the "natural") seem to grow also from Tolstoy's belief in the Russian-ness that links the class system of pre-Revolutionary Russia to a proper devotion to the Russian earth. (His racism could almost be a dreadful parody of Tolstoy's religion.) Even to the happy endings tacked on in both works after the upheavals, the story told in the American work seems to be an attempt to create the effect -- in a transAtlantic milieu -- of national epic in the manner and on the level of Tolstoy's.
For the fledgling film industry, it was an important attempt, and he chose (I believe) a significant model. But Griffith's own blindness to the evils of racism and the reality of American culture (not that Tolstoy was seeing Russia 20/20) make us uncomfortable with this relationship.
Reply With Quote
