Northern Kentucky University's sculpture of D.W. Griffith ignites a simmering controversy

By Steve Ramos

It is the last place one would expect to find a significant piece of art. Inside a Northern Kentucky University (NKU) maintenance building, tucked away in a corner room, sits the sculpture "Way Down East" by artist Red Grooms. The work is a neon blast of reds, blues and yellows. Sitting under a sickly fluorescent glow, surrounded by a sea of gray shelving and assorted building supplies, "Way Down East" looks less lustrous.

In this somber habitat, "Way Down East" is difficult to miss, once you stumble its way. It's been disassembled into four main components. The Father of American cinema D.W. Griffith, a Kentucky native, straddles a director's chair, megaphone in hand. Cameraman G.W. "Billy" Bitzer dutifully works behind the camera. Actress Lillian Gish is splayed across an ice floe. And there's the frozen river itself.

Depicting the climactic rescue scene from Griffith's 1920 silent melodrama, Way Down East, a tale of matrimonial bliss and rural life, the sculpture is typical Grooms -- bold, comical and slightly self-effacing. Grooms meant the sculpture as a larger-than-life homage to the life-threatening perils faced by artists. It's a message told with a sense of humor, splashed across giant aluminum figures.

But Grooms' sculpture has faced its own set of perils on the NKU campus. Fierce debate over the sculpture's subject, D.W. Griffith, and more importantly Griffith's 1915 Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation, has forced Grooms' "Way Down East" into hiding. A more depressing environment for art can't be imagined.

There was a time when "Way Down East" enjoyed a prominent place on NKU's Highland Heights campus. For 19 years, after its installation in early 1979, "Way Down East" sat on NKU's main plaza, wedged between the Student Center and the Fine Arts Building. In a stark environment of concrete classroom buildings and asphalt parking lots, tucked away on a series of small hills, roughly 10 minutes from downtown Cincinnati, "Way Down East" was the only splash of color on a bleak modern campus.

There were often murmurs of dissent among NKU's 12,000-student-strong campus community. Griffith is well-known as one of the founders of American film. One doesn't have to be a film historian to know Birth of a Nation and its racist controversies. So, over the years, a student would question Grooms' sculpture's impact on the campus community. Faculty would discuss its political meaning in lectures. Then, at year's end, the debate would dissolve in apathy, only to be resurrected by a new student body the following school year.

It's an esoteric exercise in academic inquiry. Griffith shot his last film, a talkie titled The Struggle, 68 years ago. And although he is credited with helping to create the modern feature-length film, Griffith's silent movies -- sentimental melodramas such as Broken Blossoms, True Heart Suzie, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm, short, one-reel features or extravagant epics such as Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation -- have grown obscure, forgotten by audiences apathetic to silent films.

But Griffith and Birth of a Nation would gain new prominence at NKU as the hot topic of campus debate. The controversy reached a fevered pitch, resulting in the removal of "Way Down East" a few days before the start of classes last fall. Now it is hidden in a maintenance building on the fringe of campus.

A letter to the entire NKU community from President James C. Votruba explained his decision: "Some have argued that the sculpture should be removed from the campus because Griffith's other work offends deeply some members of our campus community who find it hurtful and alienating. Others have argued that the sculpture should remain where it is because to move it would be to compromise the intellectual and creative freedom that defines a university in its most fundamental sense."

A King Solomon-like compromise, Votruba always meant the removal of "Way Down East" to be temporary. It's scheduled to return to public display later this month, in a new location behind the art building, only a few yards down a sloping hillside from its original location. For many who took part in the debate, it's a conclusion that's surprisingly status quo. Of course, there's always the possibility that controversy might return.

The Sculpture
A current visitor to NKU might wonder: Why a sculpture of D.W. Griffith in the first place? The answers are surprisingly benign. NKU's board of regents wanted to honor a native Kentuckian. There was talk of a sculpture of Daniel Boone or boxer Muhammad Ali. But the focus shifted toward celebrating an artist, a modern artist at that. Born in Crestwood, Ky., Griffith met the criteria.

Choosing Grooms to create the sculpture was easy. There had been much negative response to a previous outdoor sculpture, a minimalist work of dark metal by Donald Judd. It was important, therefore, that this new addition of art to campus be bright and colorful. Grooms, known for his effervescent work, and a Southerner himself, born and raised in Nashville, was chosen.

With great fanfare and enthusiasm "Way Down East" was unveiled in 1979.

"The response was overwhelmingly positive," says Professor of Art Barry Andersen. "It was a sunny day. A Jazz band played. There were helium balloons. The sculpture was unveiled during the school's Rites of Spring event. It was a great success."

Grooms came for the unveiling. A series of Griffith's films were shown on campus. The Carnegie Art Center in Covington housed an exhibition of Grooms' work. The university was abuzz with activity. Response to "Way Down East," a centerpiece for NKU's campus, was positive. Nobody would have imagined that 20 years later, controversy would threaten to take "Way Down East" away.

A Debate Gains Strength
Race relations were seldom an issue for NKU's quiet commuter campus. A reflection of the surrounding community, NKU, for many years, attracted a predominantly white student body. But like Greater Cincinnati, NKU found its academic world slowly becoming more culturally diverse as more African-American, Asian and Latino students began to attend. This enriched campus diversity encouraged diverging points of view. Situated smack in the middle of campus, Grooms' "Way Down East" became a focal point.

There has always been grumbling about the Grooms sculpture, just as there has always been debate about Griffith and his films. His Birth of a Nation is credited with contributing to the culture of racism and violence toward African Americans. Still, it was a political debate relegated mostly to dusty film journals and half-empty classroom auditoriums. Few people had ever seen the film. No one really cared about Birth of a Nation anymore.

"I didn't know D.W Griffith and I didn't know what The Birth of a Nation was," says Michael Bowen, a member of NKU's student government. "But I went and rented a copy of it afterwards. I thought: How many people are not going to know about this man and this issue? But every time I walked by the statue, I thought it was sexist."

Film seldom creates controversy. Today's movies, even those that borrow their stories from newspaper headlines, emphasize entertainment over politics. When a movie becomes newsworthy, it often has more to do with publicity spin-doctoring than real social impact.

But people can feel passionately about film, whether it's a mindless actioner like Armageddon or patriotic tear-jerker like Saving Private Ryan. The stories may be illusion, but people still feel the pain.

"Birth of a Nation obviously is a very racist film," says Margie Wise, a 21-year-old NKU student from Louisville. "It depicts white women being raped and pillaged by black men and black men as monsters."

The debate became organized last spring. This time, NKU administration acted on student complaints.

"When word reached Votruba and students asked him, 'What are you going to do about this?' I think perhaps for the first time school administration took action," says Barbara Houghton, professor of art, who was completing her sixth year as chair of the department of art. "Votruba wanted to honor everybody's feelings."

Student and faculty task forces were formed. Votruba moderated a town hall meeting. Student groups such as Students Together Against Racism and Black United Students formed committees to address D.W. Griffith's racist overtones. And while the active members of the debate remained a vocal minority, there was little doubt that the NKU community was aware of the boiling "Way Down East" controversy.

Letters to the editor about the sculpture responded to articles and editorial cartoons filling the campus newspaper, The Northerner, as well as its sister publication, The Lost Cause Review. The debate split into two camps: pro-statue and anti-statue, although for aesthetic reasons, some students were reluctant to argue for taking "Way Down East" away.

"You can look at the campus," says student Forrest Berkshire. "It's all cement. I was sad that it was removed, because it was the only color that we had. The sculpture was pretty. But I don't have to think about what it means. If I wasn't white, I would think about what it means."

Still, there is irony that so much furor grew at all surrounding a forgotten filmmaker. Griffith is the most esoteric of early film artists. Now, 51 years after his death, memories of Griffith's work and achievements have faded. Only Birth of a Nation -- and more for its political controversy than its artistic achievement -- is a known commodity. While Griffith remains a topic of interest with film historians and his films a staple of college film survey courses, the typical NKU student entered the debate with little knowledge of the filmmaker himself. Only Griffith's politics took center stage.

"I'm not a film student, and I've never heard the name D.W. Griffith or Birth of a Nation before," says Berkshire. "But I know about him now."

Way Down East
Time has changed everything. When Way Down East was first shown in 1920, it played in opulent auditoriums, on massive screens before enthusiastic audiences. It was real movie magic. Now, watching grainy images from a worn-out videotape dance across the TV screen, rewinding and fast-forwarding in the early morning hours, it's easy to forget Way Down East's melodramatic spectacle.

Its soap opera story -- a "Simple Story of Plain People," as explained by film's opening title card -- seems comically overwrought by today's entertainment standards. The film is a love letter to family values: the sanctity of matrimony and rural life. Under the glow of the film's changing tints of color -- red, blue and yellow -- Lillian Gish survives hardship after hardship as the mistreated heroine, Anna Moore.

Her eyes are dark pools of expression magnified by Griffth's frequent close-ups. They make clear the richness of silent cinema, the power of film to tell a story using a purely visual language. It's something often forgotten with today's dialogue-driven stories: Movies were about sight before they merged with sound.

You watch Anna stumble into the New England winter storm, powered by the building drama of the scene itself. From a distance, as Griffith's camera scans the partly frozen river, its chunks of ice tumbling over a turbulent waterfall, Anna's peril is evident. Unconscious on an ice floe, speeding toward the waterfall, her life is in obvious jeopardy. If only her true love, running along the riverbank in pursuit, can reach her in time.

Without the benefit of cinemathèques and repertory movie houses, one is left to experience Griffith's Way Down East under threadbare conditions. The image might be worn and damaged, but the film is magical just the same: the frozen river, Anna's approaching doom and Griffith's climactic realism. Gish, young and innocent, frozen in time by the film itself, returns to the ice floe with every click of the videotape.

The images dance powerfully, now in your living room, far away from the long-ago cinema palaces where she first won the hearts of countless viewers. You sit on the edge of your sofa, desperate for Anna's safety, despite the fact you know she will be saved. Memory, not the fast-forward, tells you that. But in the darkness of your living room, the joyful anxieties first felt by long-departed movie audiences for Way Down East tug your heart just the same.

Absence of Color
A weekend afternoon at NKU. The campus is deadly quiet. Free of student activity, the university's spare architecture and gray concrete environment take command. There is little green space between its main cluster of classroom buildings, although the slow thaw of winter has yet to allow spring's natural color to emerge. Today, under an overcast sky, from the center of expansive cement plaza, NKU looks especially bleak.

Earlier in the week, filled with the buzz of students, NKU was alive, a small, self-contained city. Students gathered around the cement base that once held Grooms' "Way Down East." In earlier years, students used "Way Down East" as the unofficial focal point of campus, a natural stop on the way between classes, a place to talk, smoke, whatever.

The students might not have been aware of the 62-year-old Grooms' stature as an artist. Chances they've never seen his well-known three-dimensional works, such as "Woolworth Building" or "Wall Street," but they might appreciate the humor and the enthusiasm of his work just the same. Those comical elements of Grooms' other work are evident in the "ruckus style" of "Way Down East."

Little has occupied the concrete platform since the sculpture's August 1998 departure. A sign for the university's United Way campaign briefly stood there. A sculpture by an art student was displayed until protests over its subject (a person chained inside an opened cage) forced its temporary removal. Controversial art, it seems, gravitates to this volatile spot.

A plaque on the cement base is the only reminder of "Way Down East." Despite the controversy, most passers-by have not seen Way Down East, or any of Griffith's films for that matter. It's understandable: They haven't had the interest. Current Hollywood hits make up their cinema agenda. Who do they see as the great American filmmakers? Someone like Steven Spielberg, not Griffith, comes to mind.

As the debate raged on, polarizing each side, the line of argument was clear. "Way Down East" should be removed because it celebrated a racist individual, Griffith, and could draw attention to his racist work, Birth of a Nation. Opposing arguments, mostly from within the art department, were equally clear: Freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression demand keeping the sculpture.

"Way Down East" is not an intrinsically racist work of art. To remove the sculpture would be censorship. Ironically, little of the argument was based on an evaluation of Griffith himself as a significant artist. His contributions were lost in the maelstrom.

A Forgotten Fountainhead
Griffith's legacy is amazing. He is credited with helping to create nearly every modern film technique: the fade-out; iris in and iris out; double and multiple exposures; masking devices to alter the shape of the screen; back lighting and side lighting; tinting; and most importantly, the point-of-view shot. To watch any contemporary film is to watch a sliver of Griffith's artistic legacy.

But his technical achievements are not what people remember. Griffith's politics, or rather the politics surrounding Birth of a Nation, always take center stage. Everything else, it seems, is of less relevance. Most importantly, his life remains cloaked in mystery.

Born in 1875 in Crestwood, Ky., Griffith was raised amid genteel poverty, white Protestant beliefs and an agrarian Southern heritage. A brief journalism career in Louisville led him to pursue his real love, acting. He joined a second-rate troupe that performed tales of the old South.

Griffith later moved to New York City, where a lackluster stage career led to the less respectable arena of the flickers. When his work as an actor dwindled, Griffith became a writer and director for these emerging nickelodeon films.

He was already an adult with a life before he took part in the rise of cinema in 1908. In fact, Griffith was 40 when he began The Birth of a Nation (1915). 525 movies (most of them one-reelers) comprise his prolific career.

Griffith, except for the political debate surrounding Birth of a Nation, has faded from public memory. The sound era made his storytelling skills obsolete for more dialogue-driven dramas. Some may remember his name or Birth of a Nation. But few if any of Griffith's other films warrant recognition beyond a small clique of film scholars, cinephiles and the occasional film geek.

A Man Re-evaluated
Although public viability for Griffith has been long extinguished, we forget how popular Birth of Nation was on its initial release. Like Charlie Chaplin's films, Griffith's Birth of a Nation remains, from an artistic standpoint, one of those rare movies that are as acclaimed as they are popular. Before Birth of a Nation, film was primarily a dull way to record stage plays. Griffith created the idea of film as art.

A lot of film history has been written about Griffith, but it's mostly the controversy that remains. One wonders if 80 years from now the controversy will be remembered. Griffith's stature, despite being credited as a fountainhead of film, has been devalued. Today he has been reduced to a political embarrassment.

Not that Birth of a Nation is without peers. There has always been a history of scandal in narrative film: Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin; Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite; Orson Welles' Citizen Kane; Michelangelo Antonioni's LÉAvventura; Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; David Lynch's Blue Velvet and David Cronenberg's Crash.

Birth of a Nation opened at the Liberty Theatre in New York on March 3, 1915, while most of the world was at war. Its intended message of peace was lost in the tumult of race riots in Northern cities and protests from abolitionists such as Jane Addams and President Charles E. Eliot of Harvard. As with later films that depicted African Americans with a heavy hand -- Gone With the Wind and Song of the South -- Griffith's Birth of a Nation did nothing to improve race relations or restore dignity to African Americans. A taboo regarding relationships between black and white adults -- still evident in films from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? to Jungle Fever -- remains Birth of a Nation's tortured legacy. The liberal left long ago dismissed Birth of a Nation, choosing to revise Griffith's career by celebrating Intolerance, his intended epic response of repentance. Still, his legacy is controversy.

Artists are often flawed. So future generations often try to overlook Picasso's misogyny, Francis Bacon's sadistic cruelties and Martin Heidegger's Nazi past. But when the artistry fades from view -- as it has with Griffith -- only the controversy remains. Look at any college film course. Chances are Griffith is taught. He's an instant source for classroom debate. During a screening of Birth of a Nation last spring on the NKU campus, students had a rare opportunity for first-hand experience with the vilified film.

"D.W. Griffith had the point of view that's indicative of the time and place he grew up in," says Wise. "I have a hard time saying that he was an evil person. I didn't know him. Maybe the culture he grew up in was evil."

To defend Griffith as a film artist slides into a defense of the artistic worth of silent pictures. But Griffith's stature is on shaky ground. If his name is recognizable, unlike many of his silent era colleagues, it's not so much for his films as for political responses to them.

A few interested audiences still debate Birth of a Nation's harsh treatment of Reconstruction, its blackest-of-black African-American villains played by white actors in black face. The film's technical achievements fade behind the offensive nature of the story. Birth of a Nation appears like some far-away nightmare from another word, until you pick up the newspaper and read about hate crimes in Jasper, Texas. Then the film's political legacy doesn't seem so far-fetched.

Students continue to respond vehemently to the film, despite the fact that filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin acknowledged him as influential on their careers. By today's dramatic standards, Griffith's corny melodrama is outdated: Just watch the full mouthed kisses between the Gish sisters in Orphans of the Storm.

Sitting in an empty theater, rewatching Beloved, Jonathan Demme's post-Civil War story that addressed the hardships of African-American slaves in Cincinnati, one wonders -- as audiences stayed away -- if films can make any political impact at all, especially a mostly forgotten silent film from 1915.

A Troubled Revisit
The fact that Birth of a Nation's 12 reels of film, produced at an astronomical cost of $100,000, would earn a profit of $18 million in a few years has ceased to be relevant. Few remember that the film is about the relationship between Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. Woven within Griffith's action-melodrama and authentic spectacle are the racist themes so evident in its source material, a stage drama by the Rev. Thomas Dixon.

Of course, the look of the film hasn't changed. From college classrooms to cinemathèque to grainy videotapes, the spectacle of the Civil War battles, Lincoln's call for volunteers, the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appommatox and Griffith's use of the flashback, the close-up shot and simultaneous action is still powerfully clear. But other aspects of the film's story powerfully poke through.

On the precipice of a cliff, Flora (Mae Marsh) hovers in fear. In pursuit of her is Gus (Walter Long), an African American who insists he only wants to talk. But the video's jazzy music and Gus' lust-struck facial expression make it clear he has more on his mind. So Flora flings herself to her death in the ravine far below, as the title cards say: "Carrying her honor."

It doesn't matter that Griffith begins his film with a poignant title card: "We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities. But we do demand as a right the liberty to show the dark side of the wrong that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue."

Rewatching the film, struggling to see the worn images from an old videotape, it's evident that racist sexual drama is what diminishes Birth of a Nation's epic storytelling. In the ornate library of a prominent Southern statesman, Austin Stoneman, it only takes a brief glimpse of his mulatto mistress' shoulder to send him into a passionate frenzy. In Birth of a Nation's eyes, it was this one kiss that brought ruin to the South. In Griffith's epic, African Americans are either belligerent pre-Civil War slaves or lurid villains.

Through all the melodrama and battle spectacle, the film's white-robed heroes ride their steeds. This is Birth of a Nation's shameful heritage: treating the Ku Klux Klan as heroic cowboys who save the South, much as cowboys saved the frontier from Native Americans.

Although many initial reviews acclaimed the film's epic vision, one review, by Francis Hackett in The New Republic, stands out as singular voice of reason: "Whatever happened during Reconstruction, this film is aggressively vicious and defamatory. It is spiritual assassination. It degrades the censors that passed it and the white race that endures it."

In a title card at the beginning of the film, Griffith insisted that Birth of a Nation was "not meant to reflect in any way on any race or people of today." For its few contemporary audiences, that is not a convincing statement.

Debate as Action
A moral debate seldom becomes a real issue. But the furor over Grooms' "Way Down East," fueled by town meetings and campus committees demanded some type of conclusion. Arguments against censorship continued, full of easy references to past films: Last Tango in Paris, Triumph of the Will, State of Siege and The Last Temptation of Christ. Discussions about racism and art continued. The debate existed primarily within NKU's small confines.

Grooms himself refused an invitation to defend his work on campus, telling Houghton "he was too old to be yelled at." Students watched and listened: a faculty debate played out in the campus newspaper, committee forums, classroom discussions. Opinions were being formed.

"Have you seen Birth of a Nation?" asks Berkshire. "Birth of a Nation is given reasonable credit for the secular rise of the KKK. That's what Griffith stands for. He was a blatant racist. There's no two ways about that. But he was also a genius for modern movie-making."

For those proponents who advocated the sculpture's removal, their stand was unwavering.

"This guy was responsible for one of the darkest periods in this country's history," says Clinton Hewan, professor of political science . "And to tolerate its relocation to somewhere less central where people like myself and others won't see it reflects a lack of sensitivity from the so-called art aficionados who are willing to deny what Griffith stood for. This sculpture is a dagger in the heart of black people and decent white people who know the history of this man."

But quietly, just before fall classes began last August, "Way Down East" was moved to the maintenance building. President Votruba shared the thoughts behind his decision in a campus memo: "I have found few who would argue that Birth of a Nation did not contribute to a culture of racism and to the stereotyping and dehumanization of an entire class of people which made it easier to justify what, at times, were unspeakable acts of hatred and violence. However, I also found few who would argue that the Grooms sculpture is not a valued piece of art by a noted American artist and that it contributes to the instructional mission of the campus in significant ways."

Opinions diverged widely. Sides were polarized. For some members of the debate, while the campus is civil, bad feelings linger.

"This was not a wonderful experience," says Andersen. "Honest communication is always a good thing, but honest communication is sometimes painful."

Amid the normally quiet commuter atmosphere of NKU, it was a brief whiff of 1960s-like activism. A greater tragedy would have been apathy.

Return of a Prodigal Sculpture
The irony is not lost on those who advocated the permanent removal of "Way Down East": The sculpture returns to public display later this month, occupying a spot just down the hillside from its original location. That's it. No more debate. Near the back entrance of the art building, facing NKU's sliver of a manmade lake, "Way Down East" will resettle in a new home. Actually it's really not that new of a home, although it will be out of the direct path of most students. One can only speculate about the possibility of renewed controversy upon its arrival. While defacement might be a concern elsewhere, through all the heated discussions, there has been no vandalism at NKU.

Today, students mob the area where the Griffith statue once stood, now an empty cement platform. In the sculpture's absence, a new debate emerges: Is the decision to bring back "Way Down East" the right thing to do?

"There's not much you can do with it to make everyone happy." says Berkshire. "It's a tough call and I don't think that there is a good decision. You can't respect everyone's wishes."

"I think it was a really good debate," says Houghton. "The students asked a lot of questions and the students experienced a lot of soul searching. Some minds didn't change, but others did. Still, they talked about things and learned a great deal, and that's pretty good."

Debate and controversy are often indispensable elements in the learning process. The best education often occurs outside the classroom. And sometimes, that instructor might turn out to be a long-forgotten filmmaker.

"Before the sculpture, I didn't even know who D.W. Griffith was," says Berkshire. "So the good that came out of it was that it provided an education in and of itself." ©

E-mail Steve Ramos

Contact Star
Web Design by TSDigital