Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2006 Sommario / Contents

prebellico, mentre il malvagio mulatto vice-governatore Silas Lynch
parla con la stessa voce priva d’accento e lo stesso vocabolario
espressivo dei personaggi bianchi di Dixon e di Griffith. Così il
dialetto è, in una certa misura, una funzione ed un significante di
classe e, in misura maggiore, un’eredità del melodramma teatrale in
lingua inglese, in cui i personaggi delle classi inferiori parlano in
dialetto e quelli al centro del dramma parlano un inglese privo di
accenti. – DAVID MAYER
Griffith, evasive about his early encounters with Louisville theatrical
entertainments, claims in his unfinished autobiography that he was
inspired to become a dramatist “…on seeing my first theatrical
performance; it was Pete Baker who sang ‘America’s National Game’”.
The date for this event is not specified, but Baker appeared in Louisville
on three occasions when Griffith may have been in the audience: once at
Harris’Theater in January 1894, when Baker starred in his own musical
revue, Chris and Lena, and twice at Macauley’s Theatre, in September
1894 as a member of Al G. Fields’ Minstrel troupe, and in September
1896 when Baker had joined Primrose and West’s Minstrels. Griffith
would then have been 19 or 21 years old.
Pete Baker was a “burnt-cork” minstrel who,“blacked-up”, specialized in
“Dutch” (i.e., German-dialect) comic material. In minstrel shows Baker
was continually in blackface makeup, and he was predominantly in
blackface in Chris and Lena singing comic songs and acting in comedy
sketches. Griffith’s memory of Baker raises questions based on Baker’s
appearance. The illustrated sheet-music cover of “America’s National
Game”, written and dedicated to Pete Baker in 1889, depicted the singer
in baseball togs:
I am a representative of America’s National Game;
The pride of all the ladies, I am well known to fame.
They all do shout as I turn out,
And to the plate I stride
Admired by all, both great and small,
I am the people’s pride …
In 1889, the year of the song’s debut, an African-American ballplayer was
unremarkable. By 1894, only five years later,African-Americans had been
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entirely excluded from the White-only Major Leagues. Baker, appearing
as a blacked-up ballplayer who claimed to be “representative” of the
sport and the object of female adulation, might have seemed either an
ironic figure or an anomaly, but he was neither. Griffith, who had frequent
access to minstrel shows arriving for two-night engagements at
Macauley’s, is likely to have ignored Baker’s blackface makeup.
Blackface, originally a novelty of the 1830s, became, after the Civil War,
little more than a familiar stage convention. Stage-Negro dialect was the
usual indicator that minstrels were depicting low-comedy African-
Americans. Burnt-cork minstrels who sang without dialect might
therefore sing of their white sweethearts without transgressing American
racial taboos. Similarly, blacked-up minstrels could sing in German or
Irish dialect, and thus satirize other immigrant groups. The lyrics of
“America’s National Game” are not in dialect, so when Baker sang it he
was not performing the song in black persona. The lack of dialect
bleached him white, and he could sing as the all-American sportsman the
lyrics claimed him to be.
Nevertheless, the fact that Griffith’s first-ever experience of American
professional theatre should be a minstrel show in a Southern theatre in
which many of the participants were blacked-up necessarily invites
further questions about how he perceived theatrical blackness and the
degree to which he found it normal practice. How, in the light of Griffith’s
subsequent 11 films on the subject of the Civil War and the
Reconstruction period, did stage traditions regarding racial stereotypes
guide Griffith’s hand? A partial answer is to be found both in Thomas
Dixon’s dialogue for The Clansman and in Griffith’s intertitles in The
Birth of a Nation. In both dramas, stage-Negro dialect is attached to
characters of low station, both to newly-enfranchised African-Americans
(e.g., Gus) and to old retainers who cling to their antebellum
subservience, whereas the villainous Mulatto Lieutenant-Governor Silas
Lynch speaks with the same unaccented voice and expressive vocabulary
as Dixon’s and Griffith’s White characters. Thus dialect is, to some
degree, a function and signifier of class, and, to a further degree, a legacy
from English-language stage melodrama, in which characters of the lower
orders speak dialect and those at the drama’s centre speak unaccented
English. – DAVID MAYER
EVENTI MUSICALI
MUSICAL EVENTS