Portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic underdogs, silent epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) is widely considered to be the most controversial film of all time. At once one of US culture's greatest artistic achievements and one of its most abhorrently racist artefacts, it becomes more shocking with every passing year. Comprising a decade of archival research and published on the 100th anniversary of the film's release, this richly detailed study considers both the film's afterlife and the artistic, industrial and moral surroundings in which it was created. Drawing on an unbroken century of production and reception history, Paul McEwan recounts the film's origins and development, Griffith's unique editing and cinematography and the construction of racial identity and fear in the film. Assessing its contribution as an art form, while directly grappling with the complexity of the art-or-racism debate, Paul McEwan shows how The Birth of a Nation has had a central role in the development of film and Film Studies worldwide.
Samuel Brody , writing in the Daily Worker , criticized Experimental Cinema for printing the tribute , since Experimental Cinema had disagreed with Potamkin's aesthetics . Brody wrote that in the previous three years divergent roads had ...
This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.
This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.
As Griffith's official biographer, Seymour Stern's main purpose of his book was to assemble, as extensively as possible, the rapidly vanishing record of what happened.
This work challenges the idea the U.S. has moved beyond racial problems and highlights the role of film and representation in the continued struggle for equality.
The birth of a nation follows the lives of two white families divided by, and enduring, the American Civil War, and includes elaborate camoes of historical events such as the...
London: Eureka Video, 2002. DVD. Harkins, E. F. “Griffith's Master Film has Made Rare Record: "The Birth of a Nation," which is returning to Boston, has been sent around the world - Miss Barrymore's engagement extended.” Boston Journal.
45 color line was erased: NAACP Papers, NAACP Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, May 1914; Second Session, Boston branch report by Butler R. Wilson, 18, 2–7. 46 “Oh! Susanna!”: Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts, ...
As they pertain to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through twelve powerful essays that have been written especially for this book by distinguished intellectuals--black and white, male and ...
D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: The Film that Transformed America