This collection brings together many of the world’s leading scholars on race and film to re-consider the legacy and impact of D.W. Griffith’s deeply racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. While this film is often cited, there is a considerable dearth of substantial research on its initial impact and global reach. These essays fill important gaps in the history of the film, including essential work on its sources, international reception, and African American responses. This book is a key text in the history of the most infamous and controversial film ever made and offers crucial new insights to scholars and students working in film history, African American history and the history of race relations.
Author(s): Melvyn Stokes, Paul McEwan
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 312
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction
Notes
Part I Creating a Racial Imaginary
2 The Architects of The Birth of a Nation: Thomas Dixon, Jr. and David Wark Griffith
Elsie Stoneman in The Clansman—Contradictory Marking as White and Black
Gus in The Clansman—Contradictory Marking as Human and Inhuman
Lydia Brown—The Clansman—Contradictory Racial and Moral Markings
Conclusion
Notes
3 Blackface, Disguise and Invisibility in the Reception of The Birth of a Nation
Notes
4 The Birth of a Nation’s “Melodrama of Pathos and Action”: A Tale of “National Rebirth”?
“Moving” Pictures
Engineering New Equations
Theatrical Reunions
Notes
5 The Battle of Petersburg: Griffith’s “Big Scenes”
Notes
Part II Missing Texts
6 The Birth of a Nation Footage We Do Not Want to Find
Epilogue
Notes
7 Fixing The Birth of a Nation?: Hampton Institute and The New Era
The Birth of a Nation in Boston
The Hampton Epilogue: The New Era
African American Responses to The New Era
Notes
Part III Resistance and Protest
8 “A Most Serious Loss in Business”: Race, Citizenship and Protest in New Haven, Connecticut
Notes
9 Resisting The Birth of a Nation in Virginia
Norfolk and Richmond
The Tuskegee Defense/The Hampton Fix
Conclusion
Notes
10 “At This Time in This City”: Black Atlanta and the Première of The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation’s White Atlanta Premiere
The Atlanta Quiet
Notes
11 The Meaning of Emancipation: African American Memory as a Challenge to The Birth of a Nation
Notes
Part IV Reception Abroad
12 Transatlantic “Structural Amnesia”: The Birth of a Nation in Britain 1915–16
See the Development of a New Art—An Epoch in Dramatic History
See the Regeneration of a Nation, as England Will be Reborn When the War is Over
A Vivid, Graphic Story of Anglo-Celt Achievement Which Will Make Every Englishman, Woman and Child Glow with Pride, Gasp with Astonishment and Thrill with Marvellous Realism!
Conclusion
Notes
13 “Black Horror on the Rhine”: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and the French-occupied Rhineland after World War I
Coda
Notes
14 The Influence of The Birth of a Nation on South Africa: Film Culture and Race
Sol T. Plaatje and Film
De Voortrekkers and Visions of a White South Africa
Notes
15 “Should It Not Therefore Be Banned?”: Screening and Broadcasting The Birth of a Nation in Britain
Notes
Part V Epilogue
16 “Still a North and a South”: The Birth of a Nation and National Trauma
“Why the Dogmatism? Why the Rage?”
Ressentiment and the Lost Cause
“Disorganizing Heresies” and Secessionist Fantasies
“The Spirit of the South” and Melodrama
Red States and Blue States
Keeping Faith with Trauma
Notes
Index
