Early Civil War Films Of The Silent Screen
During the 1900s and 1910s there was one genre of American film that skyrocketed in popularity, becoming more prevalent than at any other time since. No, it wasn’t the western, or even the slapstick comedy–although those aren’t bad guesses–but the Civil War film.
This is profound when we consider that the conflict of North versus South had taken place only a few decades before the motion picture cameras started rolling. More than a few of the white-haired theater patrons had personal memories of the war, while their children and grandchildren had grown up with exciting stories of gunfire and cannons from days gone by. And since cinema was such a young art form, those exciting battle stories from the pages of history could finally, for the first time, be portrayed at full scale.
Historically, the timing was right for such a genre. Nowadays it’s easy to forget not just the terrible bloodshed of the Civil War, but the lingering bitterness and sorrow that lasted years after it had ended. While the United States did stay united, it wasn’t until the 1880s that both Union and Confederate soldiers were agreeing to march together in commemorative parades. Key anniversaries were often observed by praising the sacrifices of both North and South, and the “Lost Cause” mythos slowly became commonplace. While it’s an obscure event today, it seems that the Spanish-American war was a big turning point. It was the first time the one-time “boys in blue and the boys in grey,” so to speak, were fighting side by side in a common cause.
The late 1900s saw the rise of the Civil War film right around the time of two other popular genres, the Western and the “Indian film” (which often portrayed American Indians more sympathetically than we’d assume). 1908 seemed to have been a turning point. In the book The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915, historian Eileen Bowser noted that there were around a dozen copyrighted Civil War films in 1908 (these would’ve been quite short, ten minutes or less on average). 1909 recorded twice as many, 1910 thirty-two, and 1911 had around seventy-five. This isn’t surprising when we learn that 1911 was the first year Americans started observing the 50th anniversary of the Civil War. Interest in that era of history was at a peak from 1911-1915, complete with large celebrations and new monuments.
Selig, Vitagraph, Biograph, Kalem and Ince were some of the prominent motion picture companies who recognized the draw to Civil War films early on. They capitalized on the 50th anniversary celebrations, the exciting spectacle of battle reenactments (Thomas Ince‘s studio especially was well-equipped with vast amounts of land for these scenes) and the plentiful opportunities for drama. Directors often focused on real historical events, “family honor” tales or bittersweet stories of brothers being pitted against one another. Biograph’s The House With Closed Shutters (1910) was a Poe-like tale of a mother who locks her son away in her house after he refuses to go to war. Pathé’s Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency (1910) showed the Great Emancipator granting a pardon to a young sentry who falls asleep while on duty. Kalem would release a number of short spectacles like The Drummer Girl of Vicksburg (1911) and “Fighting Dan” McCool (1912) using actual cannons and plenty of gunfire smoke. It wasn’t uncommon for actual Civil War cannons to show up in these early films, as they were still plentiful at the time. And since many studios were on the East coast, they sometimes filmed right on the actual historic battlegrounds.
Both Union and Confederate points of view were represented in various films, although initially Union-based stories were more common. This was partly due to practicality–the South had fewer film exchanges and distributors in the nickelodeon era, so filmmakers were more focussed on pleasing northern audiences. It was also partly due to the war still being a sensitive subject. In 1909 an exhibitor wrote to the magazine Moving Picture World about the Kalem film The Escape from Andersonville (1909), which centered its story around a Confederate prison camp: “It is attracting attention and will continue to do so as long as exhibited in the South, as it touches too close to old sores not yet entirely healed.” In its review of the Biograph drama Swords and Hearts (1911), the World commented: “One of the scenario problems of the day is to write a Civil War story that will not offend that considerable population south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”
After Southern exhibitors started commenting about the lack of exciting Confederate stories, studios started focusing more on the Confederate point of view and quickly found they had broad appeal. From about 1911 onwards, there were more stories with Southern protagonists than vice versa, often told from a “Lost Cause” type of framework.
Studios also started competing to create bigger and bigger spectacles. Ince’s The Battle of Gettysburg (1913) was five reels long and released to coincide with Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary. Francis Ford’s The Battle of Bull Run (1913) ran about 40 minutes long and reportedly spent a then-whopping $19,000 on its battle scenes. This trend would peak with D.W. Griffith’s multi-hour blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915), the scale of which no one had ever seen before. Controversial today for its depiction of African-Americans and the KKK (it even roused some controversy at the time), at the time it was the ultimate depiction of the Civil War and took audiences by storm.
The Civil War would continue to be fertile ground for film stories in the years to come, most famously in Buster Keaton’s milestone comedy feature The General (1926). When we study these many early films, especially from the years leading up to 1915, it’s easy to theorize that they served more than just spectacle or romanticization. In a sense, they very well may have helped America come to terms with the conflict and its lingering wounds.
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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.
Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.
