Hollywood Gives Racism a Big Boost FEBRUARY 8 IS THE 110TH ANNIVERSARY OF the premiere showing of The Birth of a Nation, an infamously racist film, which was, not coincidentally, the first film to be screened inside the White House, at the behest of the famously racist President Woodrow Wilson.
The 1915 film used never-before-seen cinematic techniques, invented by its director, D.W. Griffith, to appear as accurate depictions of real events. It purports to show the development of the slave trade in Africa, followed by the growth of plantations in the South. It vividly depicts the fighting in the Civil War, and the following years of Reconstruction, during which the Ku Klux Klan mounted a campaign of murderous terror to destroy the multi-racial governments that existed briefly in the South. Griffith presents the Reconstruction governments to have been corrupt to the point of depravity and the Klan as performing a heroic service by destroying them. The combination of Griffith’s unprecedented ability to produce the impression of reality and the audiences’ unfamiliarity with such artful camera-work gave many people the impression they were seeing events as they actually occurred. It left millions of people convinced that slavery had been benign, that Reconstruction failed because of Freedmens’ corruption, and that the Klan’s intervention was an act of heroism. It is almost certainly the most explicitly racist feature film ever made in the U.S. https://time.com/3699084/100-years-birth-of-a-nation/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34974): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34974 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110995438/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
