Word: griffith
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...acclaim of Griffith's masterwork made his virulent, derisive depiction of blacks all the more toxic - indeed, potentially epidemic. This was not simply a racist film; it was one whose brilliant 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...
...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...
...there was only one black man with the drive and doggedness to write, produce, direct, finance and distribute his own films. That was Oscar Micheaux, the first black to direct a silent feature, and the first to direct a talkie feature. In so many ways, Micheaux was the D.W. Griffith of race cinema. And also its Edward D. Wood...
...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...
...over he filmed the scenario of a light-skinned women passing as white, and a dark-skinned man ignoring a women of his own shade to aspire to that wan princess. Her lightness put her atop the hierarchy of virtue or, at least, of perceived romantic appeal. Like Griffith, Micheaux's feminine ideal seemed to be prim, virginal Lillian Gish; he insisted that his actresses wear chalk makeup to make them seem whiter, lighter - Gishier. "The first offense of the new film is its persistent vaunting of intra-racial color fetishism, "wrote the black critic Theophilus Lewis, reviewing...