Los Angeles Film Industry Coverage of The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation Premiere, 1915

Birth Of A. Nation

Periodical

Los Angeles Herald. February 8, 1915 issue documenting the Los Angeles opening and local promotion of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, then advertised as The Clansman, a technically influential motion picture whose racist portrayal of African Americans and heroic treatment of the Ku Klux Klan made it a defining controversy in the history of American cinema. Adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman, the Civil War and Reconstruction epic helped establish feature-length film as a powerful form of mass entertainment while disseminating a white-supremacist account of Reconstruction that generated protests and sustained opposition from African American activists and the NAACP. The issue belongs to the history of early American film culture, racial representation, print advertising, and the use of popular media to shape public memory of slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction.

Los Angeles Herald. Los Angeles. February 8, 1915. One newspaper issue containing a substantial opening-day advertisement and a separate illustrated article devoted to Griffith’s production. The interior advertisement extends across two columns for the length of a full column and announces, “THE CLANSMAN—or—Birth Of A Nation . . . D.W. Griffith’s Picture . . . Starting Today.” Elsewhere in the issue, an article headed “LA Film Favorites In The Clansman . . . Practically Every Dollar Spent on Wonderful Picture Stays In This City” appears beneath a bold title enclosed by ornamental scrollwork. The article is illustrated with column-width images, including a battle scene from the film, and emphasizes the production’s economic relationship to Los Angeles by presenting its performers, expenditures, and local manufacture as matters of civic importance. Together, the advertisement and article record how a Los Angeles newspaper marketed the film simultaneously as spectacle, industrial achievement, and local cultural event.

Published on the date recorded by the Library of Congress for the film’s first copyright registration, the issue captures the production before its title became permanently established as The Birth of a Nation and before the full national extent of the controversy surrounding its racial ideology had developed. Its juxtaposition of promotional language, local-industry boosterism, and Civil War imagery provides evidence of how newspapers helped position motion pictures as major public events while giving commercial circulation to historically distorted representations of African American citizenship and Reconstruction. The Library of Congress identifies the film as both artistically advanced for its period and a source of protests, riots, and social division from its initial release. Light expected handling wear; the prominent advertisement, illustrated article, headlines, and battle-scene images remain present and legible. Very good. A closely dated record of the convergence of early Hollywood promotion, Los Angeles civic identity, and one of the most consequential racial controversies in American film history.

Item #6934

Price: $225.00