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Birth of a Nation 1915

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Title: Birth of a Nation 1915


1
Birth of a Nation 1915
2
The Social Construction of Categories Race
  • Racial Formation- refers to the process by which
    social, economic, and political forces determine
    the content and importance of racial categories,
    and by which they are in turn shaped by racial
    meanings. Race is a central axis of social
    relations which cannot be subsumed under or
    reduced to some broader category or conception.
    (Omi and Winant p.21)
  • Racial subjection is quintessentially
    ideological. (Omi and Winant p. 22)
  • Defines the boundaries of race

3
The Social Construction of Categories Race
  • Racialization- signifies the extension of racial
    meaning to a previously racially unclassified
    relationship, social practice, or group.
  • Racialization is a historically specific
    ideological process.
  • Racial ideology is constructed from pre-existing
    conceptual elements. It emerges from the
    struggles of competing political projects.
  • -By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans
    whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani,
    etc. were rendered black by an ideology of
    exploitation based on racial logic - the
    establishment and maintenance of a color line.
    (Omi and Winant P.23)

4
The Social Construction of Categories Race
  • The seemingly obvious natural and common
    sense qualities which the existing racial order
    exhibits themselves testify to the effectiveness
    of the racial formation process in constructing
    racial meanings and racial identities. Omi and
    Winant p. 21

5
The History of Racial Formation
  • As Winthrop Jordan has observed From the
    initially common term Christian, at mid-century
    there was a marked shift toward the terms English
    and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies
    as a whole, a new term of self-identification
    appeared- white.

6
  • Race is a social construct.
  • Racial groups are defined in relation to one
    another. They and we
  • The effects of privilege are generally conflated
    with justifications for continuing inequitable
    systems.

7
Birth of a Nation- 1915
  • Originally premiered with the title The Clansman
    in January, 1915 in California.
  • Three months later was re-titled at its world
    premiere in New York.
  • The film was based on former North Carolina
    Baptist minister Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s
    anti-black, 1905 bigoted play, The Clansman, the
    second volume in a trilogy

8
1915 Race Relations
  • Race relations are in a state of flux.
    Immigration is further exacerbating racial fears
    and tensions.
  • Ku Klux Klan membership reached its zenith with
    over a million members.
  • During the Wilson (1913-1921) and Harding
    (1921-23) presidential administrations over 100
    race riots occurred.

9
Two Key Moral Panics
  • 1) Inter-racial sex and marriage
  • 2) European Supremacy
  • Both fears are assuaged by this film

10
  • How are these panics related to the processes of
    racial formation and racialization?

11
D.W. Griffith (1875-1948)
  • Born in Crestwood, Oldham County, KY to Jacob
    "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a Confederate Army
    colonel and Civil War hero.
  • Recognized throughout the world as the single
    most important individual in the development of
    film as an art.
  • David Ward Griffith has been called the father of
    film grammar.
  • Scholars no longer dispute that few or any of his
    "innovations" actually began with him
  • Griffith contributed Mise en scene and various
    film editing techniques to film grammar.

12
  • The boy's Southern identity as one of a conquered
    people likely contributed to the anti-imperialist
    sentiments that he would later express in his
    films. 
  • David was raised on the farm and received his
    early education in a one-room country school and
    from his older sister, Mattie, a school teacher. 
  • When he was ten years old, his father died,
    plunging the Griffith family into debt-ridden
    poverty. 
  • By the time he was fourteen, his family was
    forced to abandon their unproductive farm for a
    new life in Louisville where his mother opened a
    boarding house, that soon failed. 
  • With the family still besieged by debts, David
    left high school to help with the finances,
    taking a job first in a dry goods store, and,
    later, in a bookstore, which became his
    "university."

13
  • Griffith began working on the stage in Louisville
    at the age of 20 and was soon touring the country
    in stock companies.
  • For a decade he alternated work on the stage with
    manual labor, holding a variety of
    jobs--everything from shoveling ore to picking
    hops between theatrical engagements.

14
  • Griffith and his young actress wife, Linda
    Arvidson, whom he had married in 1906, then
    turned to the new motion picture industry for
    their livelihood.
  • Griffith began his work in motion pictures near
    the end of 1907 by playing the lead in Rescued
    from an Eagles Nest, directed by Edwin S. Porter
    for the Edison Company and released in early
    1908.
  • Griffith soon moved to the Biograph Company in
    New York City, where he both acted in films and
    provided stories. 

15
  • Griffith demonstrated a singular genius in
    developing previous experiments in camera effects
    and movement, lighting, close-ups, and editing
    into a coordinated cinematic technique that gave
    motion pictures their basic grammar and
    transformed film into an art form.
  • Mise-en-scene- His use of close-ups and medium
    shots enabled the spectator to empathize with the
    emotions expressed by the characters his
    rhythmic editing style intensified the drama his
    panoramic long shots created an impression of
    epic grandeur and his innovations in lighting
    added mood and aesthetic quality to the images.
    Placing great value on the use of locations for
    the realism he sought to heighten the drama,
    Griffith laid the foundations of Hollywood when
    in 1910 he began annually taking his company from
    New York to California for seasonal filming. 

16
  • Worked with Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks to
    form United Artists.

17
Progressive in Some ways
  • In many of his films, his actresses, for example,
    projected new, more assertive heroines in keeping
    with the aspirations of the suffragette era. 

18
  • Griffith also began to deal with many subjects in
    his films that expressed his progressive social
    vision. In such films as The Redmans View (1909)
    and Ramona (1910), he denounced the white mans
    oppression of the American Indian.
  • He excoriated capitalisms injustice toward the
    poor in films like A Corner in Wheat (1909) and
    focused his camera on scenes of urban poverty in
    The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and many other
    works. Griffith climaxed his years at Biograph
    with his first feature, Judith of Bethulia
    (1913), an epic dramatization of the Apocryphal
    story of the ancient Jewish heroine who saved her
    community from the invading Assyrians. Like many
    of his subsequent works, Judith of Bethulia
    demonstrates his abhorrence of imperialism
    through its depiction of the ravages of war and
    its effect on civilians.

19
  • The Clansman, a best-selling melodramatic novel
    about the Reconstruction era by Thomas Dixon,
    expanding the story and its staged dramatization
    into a large-scale depiction of the Civil War and
    its aftermath that alternates spectacular scenes
    with poignant, intimate scenes of families caught
    up in the vortex of great events. 

20
The Myth of the Plantation South
  • Promotes idyllic view of South during slavery.
  • Fails to understand this as myth.
  • Fails to explore the economic and social causes
    of the decline of the South.
  • Its easier to blame a group of people than
    social structures.

21
Here Lies the Danger
  • Myth as fact.
  • Racial formation and racialization.

22
  • Can you draw parallels to media today?
  • In what ways are complex social issues reduced to
    mythic stories?
  • How does this obscure the complexity of social
    issues?
  • How are representative characters used to
    represent groups and identities? Can you think
    of any current examples?
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