Word: birth
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...storytelling technique lent plausibility and poignancy to images of crude Negroes in the Reconstruction Senate, and of a black man pursuing a white woman until, to save her virginity, she throws herself off a cliff. Viewers could believe that what they saw was not only historically but emotionally true. "Birth" not only taught moviegoers how to react to film narrative but what to think about blacks - and, in the climactic ride of hooded horsemen to avenge their honor, what to do to them. The movie stoked black riots in Northern cities, and by stirring bitter memories in the white South...
...Birth of a Nation" provoked another movement: the birth of an African American cinema. Educated blacks, enraged by the film's message and influence, wanted to refute "Birth" in its own medium. (The NAACP also wanted to suppress it.) Within a year of Griffith's film, the Chicago-based brothers George and Noble Johnson had set up the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and released "The Realization of a Negro's Ambition." Soon entrepreneurs, black and white, were making black-cast pictures in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Fla. - virtually everywhere but Hollywood. Eventually some 500 race films were made...
...white woman as his lover. In his late 20s he began writing novels; to finance their printing, he went door-to-door, raising funds from his white neighbors. His first self-published, semi-autobiographical novel, "The Homesteader," appeared in 1913. When black film outfits sprang up after "The Birth of a Nation," Micheaux offered his novel to the Lincoln Motion Picture Company on the condition that he also direct. Lincoln declined, Micheaux bolted and began raising money for his film as he had for his books. "The Homesteader" premiered...
...black woman but is afraid to propose to her for fear of rejection, as she was afraid to cozy up to him for fear she was too light for him. The original film climaxed in a sequence advertised as "the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan." Alas, those anti-"Birth of a Nation" scenes have not survived. But the film shows what Micheaux learned from Griffith: melodrama, at full throttle...
...Within Our Gates" is even better (stranger). Another garbled answer to "Birth," "Gates" bastes a murder plot together with both white and black villains. A white woman rails against the education of black girls ("Thinking will give them a headache") and worries that it will give them the notion to vote. One Negro layabout, who has lyingly implicated a fellow black in a murder case so as to ingratiate himself with his white boss, preens in a dialogue intertitle: "Here I is 'mong da whi' fo'ks, while dem other niggahs hide in the woods." He is surrounded by white...