Birth of a Nation is a silent film epic which made by D. W. Griffith in 1915. Basically, this 3 hours racial melodrama brilliantly chronicles the story between the Northern Stoneman family and the Southern Cameron family who both experienced the Civil War and Reconstruction. However, this film still remains highly controversial ever since it made. Once people mention this film today, the primary concern automatically ignores everything and focuses on how extremely Racial this film has been. In this film, Griffith simply depicts the world into two parts. He sets these two groups into opposition with one another in almost every detail, as the film depicts the black are violent and harmful animal – like being; therefore, the white and the Ku …show more content…
In this instance, parallel altering is utilized to demonstrate the narrative by increment sensational pressure, as opposed to muddle it. The camera cuts between shots of the stage, the President 's viewing box, and close-up shots of the attended Stonemans’s viewing box. While the all of the subjects occupy the same theater, Griffith utilizes parallel editing to delineate the different spaces. The accentuated relationship between these spaces is utilized to expand the pressure inside of the scene. The different areas inside the theater are intercut with shots of John Wilkes Booth preparing to murder the President, namely permitting audiences to associate and relate the characters and their locations to the possible, savage peak. Multiple match-on-activity cuts are made to give viewers a chance to assume associations between discrete shots in light of the sequence which courses through them: Boothe strolling through the doorway, entering the gallery, bouncing to the stage, and so forth. In this way, audiences can easily see through the whole process how Lincoln is assassinated. These are all important and basic shots used to describe the sequence of events by asking the audience to infer the connections that Griffith is trying to show. Griffith also focuses on the gun to set it firmly in the viewer 's mind of just what Boothe 's intentions are, and in some ways, this shot could be considered foreshadowing, giving the audience a clue as
Birth of a Nation uses its histrionic plot to show how tangled destinies of a southern and northern family before and after the Civil War. It willingly portrays southern blacks as spiteful and uncivil, the northern whites as crafty, dishonest, and conceited, and the film’s southern whites as anguish recurrent radical and erotic mortifications at the hands of white northerners and black southerners before factually being saved by the thoughtful, Ku Klux Klan. The film is divided to show the different aspects of those two sides during this historical time. During this time Africans were coming to America and it started the reconstruction on our country. D.W. Griffith made this film to show us the reality of racism at this point in time.
On March 3, 1915 the movie The Birth of a Nation was released at the Liberty Theatre in New York City. This film was financed, filmed, and released by the Epoch Producing Corporation of D.W. Griffith and Harry T. Aitken. It was one of the first films to ever use deep-focus shots, night photography, and to be explicitly controversial with the derogatory view of blacks.
The Birth of a Nation, arguably one of the most ambiguous names in the history of cinema, is only about to get more complex and chaotic. The Birth of a Nation was originally the title of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist propaganda film about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan who “saved” the South from being dictated by blacks during the Reconstruction era when the North tried to rebuild the South after the Civil War. Now, that title poises a new movie written, directed, produced, and starring actor Nate Parker that dramatizes the 1831 slave rebellion led by enslaved African-American Nat Turner.
The film Birth of a Nation was released. The Ku Klux Klan was reborn. In January 1923, Fannie Taylor accused a black man of coming to her home and viciously beating her. A fugitive was originally accused. Aunt Sarah worked for Fannie & James Taylor. On New Year’s morning Aunt Sarah & her granddaughter witnessed a white man visiting Fannie. He visited a lot while James Taylor worked. People gossiped that they were having an affair. A posse gathered to find the black man who hurt Fannie. Jesse Hunter, a fugitive from another town was under suspicion. Aaron Carrier was arrested. Fannie’s white
The history of African Americans in early Hollywood films originated with blacks representing preconceived stereotypes. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, stirred many controversial issues within the black community. The fact that Griffith used white actors in blackface to portray black people showed how little he knew about African Americans. Bosley Crowther’s article “The Birth of Birth of a Nation” emphasizes that the film was a “highly pro-South drama of the American Civil War and the Period of Reconstruction, and it glorified the role of the Ku Klux Klan” (76). While viewing this film, one would assert that the Ku Klux Klan members are heroic forces that rescue white women from sexually abusive black men. Griffith
American whiteness as articulated by Birth of a Nation is built on stereotypes, and this is precisely why minstrelsy might have the power to resist racism. Minstrel performances relied on stereotypes to evoke their opposites. It is possible to assume that the discourse of mass entertainment from its minstrel days to current film and possibly beyond, recognizing and accepting blackface conventions and stereotypes were key, almost necessary conditions of American whiteness. "Minstrelsy took the productive ambivalence inherent to the stereotype and magnified it to increase the stereotype's inevitable undoing of itself" (4). But in Birth of a Nation, the determining concept of the stereotype that makes sense is disrupted by the inevitable context provided by narrative: in the film's narrative, African-Americans are seen gently working and playing for their master's benefit prior to the Civil War. This stereotypical representation draws on myths that blackface minstrelsy seemed to ally to the politics of white supremacy; it worked to promote propaganda. Prior to the Civil War, the film explains African-Americans were docile and happy on the plantation because of slave laws imposed by
In early African American Cinema, filmmakers had a mission to move away from white perspectives on what it meant to be black (Stewart 225). Oftentimes, we would see black actors being portrayed in scenes as the antagonist committing crimes, as in the case of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Soon after Griffith released the film, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux forever changed American Independent Cinema with his “response” film Within Our Gates, which helped start the advent of race films (NAACP 1). Some of the most notable race films were: The Homesteader, Body and Soul, and The Blood of Jesus. Such films were produced for all-black audiences that featured black casts. But that did not necessarily mean that they were directed and written by
I watched Birth of a Nation this past Friday and cried from the beginning to the end. I will be honest and say that growing up a never read anything about Nate Turner, his name was mentioned but I never knew his story or what he stood for. This movie was different from any other "slave movie" and the reason why is because nothing went untouched and nothing was "buttered" up. A lot of directors and writers like to make movies about slavery digestible but the crazy thing is, Absolutely nothing about slavery was digestible. Watching your mother, father and even children being lynch, burned alive and whipped wasn't digestible. They were hung from a freaking tree like Christmas ornaments, items with no value, but my ancestors had to live and fight
professor of law, and civil rights advocate argues that African Americans were arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering or vagrancy. While incarcerated, the prisoners, African Americans, had to provide labor to help aid in rebuilding the economy of the South after the Civil War. Jelani Cobb, also an American writer, educator, and professor of journalism, states that after the mass incarceration was a rapid transition of a kind of mythology of black criminality. The Birth of a Nation, a film directed by D. W. Griffith, was successful yet controversial. It portrayed black men as sexually aggressive towards white women, animal-like and unintelligent. The movie helped in demeaning the African American, it also credited as being one of
Racism has been around since the beginning of time. Basically if you had a skin tone darker than the shade of white, you were inferior. Times have now changed, but there are remnants of this subject everywhere, even in film. The movie Birth of a Nation is considered one of the greatest films of all time, even with these themes. AMC’s Filmsite even has it listed within the 100 Greatest Films of All Time. Another movie with the some of the same themes is Blazing Saddles. Blazing Saddles does not have the same stature as Birth of a Nation, but it does deserve to be higher in the canon. I do believe that Blazing Saddles does not have the same stature because it is a comedy with crude humor and because it has a black sheriff as the protagonist.
“D.W. Griffith was the first American director to be as well-known as the films he directed, and he was among the very first to insist that filmmaking was an art form” (Lewis 53). This statement is very true. However, the inherent discriminating content in some of his movies also made him one of the hardest to appreciate. One of the most famous examples was The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was in favor of the Ku Klux Klan. After a few more controversial movies, he finally tried to redeem his reputation with Broken Blossoms (1919). Broken Blossoms is Griffith’s attempt at an apology in the portrayal of minorities and the idea of miscegenation within The Birth of a Nation in the midst of a troubling society heading towards the anti-miscegenation law.
D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation follows the story of the Stoneman and Cameron families. The Stoneman’s are headed by patriarch Austin Stoneman, an abolitionist politician in Washington, D.C. He has three children, Phil, Tod and Elsie. The Cameron family are headed by the main protagonist of the film, Ben Cameron. Joining him are the rest of his family including his mother and father, and all his siblings. He has two brothers, Wade and Duke, as well as two sisters, Margaret and Flora.
"[Griffith] portrayed the emancipated slaves as heathens, as unworthy of being free, as uncivilized, as primarily concerned with passing laws so they could marry white women and prey on them," says Dick Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War. The film portrays black men as savages threatening white women and unworthy of government participation. The other element conveyed in Griffith’s film was a summation proposing the one and only solution to America’s dispute: to deport all black Americans back to Africa. The blatantly distorted views of reconstruction are made evident by the portrayal of the KKK as heroes. The film shows the white cloth covered members “saving” white families from the barbaric blacks as they attempt to burglarize the white homes. In fact, the males of the household are shown protecting their ever so fragile wives from the atrocity that is the black man, even though many women sought to redefine their roles within their
Art has been used throughout history as a tool of oppression just as much as it has been used as a tool of expression. It is important to dissect and critique art on every level, it does not get a free pass to perpetuate whatever potentially harmful messages it wants just out of its nature of being art. “Birth of a Nation” by DW Griffith drastically challenged the film industry with is controversial and explicitly racist narration.
Hollywood and the media continues to promote social stereotypes as the white male is portrayed as upper-middle-class professional who is family-oriented while African Americans are depicted as thugs, funny, maids, best friends, and servants. The media sacrifices objective depiction of races to gain better ratings and earnings. Further, in most movies, blacks are depicted as foolish, lazy, submissive, violent, animal-like, and irresponsible. The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was one of the first films to feature a strong stereotype by portraying blacks as subhuman.