A Film Canon

America is both the most explicitly patriotic and ideologically consistent of Griffith's films, suggesting that his characteristic contrariness stems from a confusion of both ethics and religion with patriotism, and clarifying his perennial enemy as the patriot who betrays his origins - in this case Walter Butler, against whom the entire scourge of the War of Independence is ultimately directed. At the same time, it exhibits a radically different aesthetic vision from most of his other films - especially Birth Of A Nation - not only neglecting elaborate cross-editing, but replacing the whole vestibular space upon which it hangs with an obsession with wide, grand, even Romantic outdoor vistas. Even the battle scenes have a heroic grandeur diametrically opposed to the WWI-inflected chaos of Birth - and this difference seems to be more than mere nostalgia for a more dignified, ceremonial form of warfare. Instead, taken within the context of Griffith's oeuvre, America clarifies the latter as so many variations on an idiosyncratic historical narrative, according to which the Americans, in the early stages of their existence, were an outdoors, pre-melodramatic people, but for whom the violation engendered by the Civil War was so great - if only because it reiterated the gesture of the War of Independence, but unsuccessfully (made particularly clear in the closing sequences, which could be read as a prequel for Birth) - as to require the language of melodrama to contain it, as well as, in more specifically cinematic terms, the language of cross-editing to convey all those barriers around which melodramatic violation hangs.  For this reason, America is content to translate history into a merely personal, rather than melodramatic register; or, alternatively, to replace the conflation of personal and private with a nuanced spectrum between the two, culminating at those moments at which characters are integrated into the recurrent parliamentary and diplomatic backdrops. That said, Griffith's ingenuity lies precisely in making melodramatic history plausible, with the result that America is more compelling as an ur-text than as anything else, although this in itself can achieve a certain hallucinatory brilliance, most notably in the designation of the war as the collective crucifixion that haunts Griffith's work.