All the displays in this gallery — which also includes a poster from a theater production of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that featured the Black actor Sam Lucas in the title role — create a fascinating circuitry of gazes: It’s as if Sojourner Truth, Kara Walker et al. were staring down Griffith, a towering, controversial figure in American cinema history who was noticeably marginalized when the museum originally opened. Although the inclusion of “Birth” here is rightly modest, the display does underline the film’s impact when it was first released, most grotesquely in the vitrine with an invitation to a 1915 screening at the White House.
The text accompanying the invitation characterizes “The Birth of a Nation” as propaganda and references Black protests against it, though doesn’t mention that the film also served as a recruitment tool for the Ku Klux Klan. The label also accurately asserts that the movie “has been hailed for its technical achievements,” though omits that for much of the 20th century and even into the 21st century, the film was also celebrated as a sublime artistic achievement by generations of scholars and critics, some of whom, I imagine, also waxed equally rhapsodic about the camerawork in “Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi panegyric.
The framing of Griffith in “Regeneration” cuts to a larger, trickier issue that runs throughout the exhibition and that the museum has grappled with since it opened given its twinned institutional role in serving both the general public and the academy. It’s a museum, yes, but of what, for whom and to what end? Most of its exhibition space, for instance, presents video clips and physical items (posters, stills, some famous ruby slippers), not actual movies, an imbalance that’s reflected in the modesty of this show’s initial film series and the brevity of the video clips in its rooms. There are wonderful snippets of the Nicholas Brothers and others, but the films are absent. These may not be rarities, but they’re nonetheless a critical part of this history.
The more complex question involves the museum’s consideration of American cinema as a whole but particularly in how it navigates Hollywood. It’s inspiring to see a wall filled with glossy, glamorous headshots of Black stars like Horne, Paul Robeson, Fredi Washington, Clarence Muse and others lesser known. Yet while some galleries expand on the uglier parts of what these actors and others faced, like the separate theater entrances for Black moviegoers, the exhibition tends to invoke racism in generalized terms and as a widely understood problem, leaving too many specifics of Hollywood’s foundational role in reproducing that racism to your imagination and the catalog. I can’t wait to read it.
