D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation

Author: Melvyn Stokes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-01-15

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0198044364

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In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film. This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.

The Griffith Project, Volume 8
The Griffith Project, Volume 8

Author: Paolo Cherchi Usai

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1839020164

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No other silent film director has been as extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than five hundred films has been the subject of a systematic analysis, and the vast majority of his other works still await proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from 'Professional Jealousy '(1907) to 'The' 'Struggle '(1931) - will be explored in this multivolume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field. Created as a companion to the ongoing retrospective held by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the Griffith Project is an indispensable guide to the work of a crucial figure in the arts of the nineteenth century. The latest volume assesses Griffith's work in 1914-15. It includes an extensive, multi-authored evaluation of 'The Birth of' 'a Nation.'

Inventing the Dream
Inventing the Dream

Author: Kevin Starr

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0195042344

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Examines the elements whose confluence defined Southern California including Spanish/Mexican influences, climate, and the rise of Hollywood.

Slow Fade to Black
Slow Fade to Black

Author: Thomas Cripps

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1977-02-03

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0199878455

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Set against the backdrop of the black struggle in society, Slow Fade to Black is the definitive history of African-American accomplishment in film--both before and behind the camera--from the earliest movies through World War II. As he records the changing attitudes toward African-Americans both in Hollywood and the nation at large, Cripps explores the growth of discrimination as filmmakers became more and more intrigued with myths of the Old South: the "lost cause" aspect of the Civil War, the stately mansions and gracious ladies of the antebellum South, the "happy" slaves singing in the fields. Cripps shows how these characterizations culminated in the blatantly racist attitudes of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and how this film inspired the N.A.A.C.P. to campaign vigorously--and successfully--for change. While the period of the 1920s to 1940s was one replete with Hollywood stereotypes (blacks most often appeared as domestics or "natives," or were portrayed in shiftless, cowardly "Stepin Fetchit" roles), there was also an attempt at independent black production--on the whole unsuccessful. But with the coming of World War II, increasing pressures for a wider use of blacks in films, and calls for more equitable treatment, African-Americans did begin to receive more sympathetic roles, such as that of Sam, the piano player in the 1942 classic Casablanca. A lively, thorough history of African-Americans in the movies, Slow Fade to Black is also a perceptive social commentary on evolving racial attitudes in this country during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Before, In, and After Hollywood
Before, In, and After Hollywood

Author: Joseph Henabery

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 9780810832008

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In 1914, a young midwesterner quit his railroad job to crack the Hollywood motion picture boom. Impressed by his energy and honesty in his role as Lincoln, D.W. Griffith made him his assistant for Intolerance. Griffith then made Joe a director. He swiftly progressed to a preeminent position in the industry, directing some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1920's including Douglas Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, and Rudolph Valentino. Versatility played an important role in Joe's rich creative life inside the studios. His understanding of the mechanics of motion-picture film led him to develop and be granted a patent for teaching speech to the deaf by visualizing sound. He pioneered sound short-subjects for the Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn and later directed WWII training films for the Army Signal Corps in Astoria. Henabery contributed, not only as a director, but also as a researcher, writer, make-up artist/actor, architect, scenic designer, and special-effects innovator. His autobiography, Before, In and After Hollywood was completed in 1975 shortly before his death. Contains 24 black and white photographs.

A Hidden History of Film Style
A Hidden History of Film Style

Author: Christopher Beach

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-04-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0520959922

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The image that appears on the movie screen is the direct and tangible result of the joint efforts of the director and the cinematographer. A Hidden History of Film Style is the first study to focus on the collaborations between directors and cinematographers, a partnership that has played a crucial role in American cinema since the early years of the silent era. Christopher Beach argues that an understanding of the complex director-cinematographer collaboration offers an important model that challenges the pervasive conventional concept of director as auteur. Drawing upon oral histories, early industry trade journals, and other primary materials, Beach examines key innovations like deep focus, color, and digital cinematography, and in doing so produces an exceptionally clear history of the craft. Through analysis of several key collaborations in American cinema from the silent era to the late twentieth century—such as those of D. W. Griffith and Billy Bitzer, William Wyler and Gregg Toland, and Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Burks—this pivotal book underlines the importance of cinematographers to both the development of cinematic technique and the expression of visual style in film.

Shadows of Doubt
Shadows of Doubt

Author: Barry Keith Grant

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780814334577

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In 'Shadows of Doubt', Barry Keith Grant questions the idea that Hollywood movies reflect moments of crisis in the dominant image of masculinity. Arguing instead that part of the mythic function of genre movies is to offer audiences an ongoing dialogue on issues of gender, Grant explores a wide diversity of films.

Cinemas of the World
Cinemas of the World

Author: James Chapman

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2004-06-03

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 1861895747

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The cinema has been the pre-eminent popular art form of the 20th century. In Cinemas of the World, James Chapman examines the relationship between film and society in the modern world: film as entertainment medium, film as a reflection of national cultures and preoccupations, film as an instrument of propaganda. He also explores two interrelated issues that have recurred throughout the history of cinema: the economic and cultural hegemony of Hollywood on the one hand, and, on the other, the attempts of film-makers elsewhere to establish indigenous national cinemas drawing on their own cultures and societies. Chapman examines the rise to dominance of Hollywood cinema in the silent and early sound periods. He discusses the characteristic themes of American movies from the Depression to the end of the Cold War especially those found in the western and film noir – genres that are often used as vehicles for exploring issues central to us society and politics. He looks at national cinemas in various European countries in the period between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, which all exhibit the formal and aesthetic properties of modernism. The emergence of the so-called "new cinemas" of Europe and the wider world since 1960 are also explored. "Chapman is a tough-thinking, original writer . . . an engaging, excellent piece of work."—David Lancaster, Film and History

Babel and Babylon
Babel and Babylon

Author: Miriam Hansen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0674038290

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Although cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more before the concept of a “film spectator” emerged. As the cinema began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in whose context films initially had been shown—vaudeville, dime museums, fairgrounds—a particular concept of its spectator was developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. Hansen builds a critical framework for understanding the cultural formation of spectatorship, drawing on the Frankfurt School’s debates on mass culture and the public sphere. Focusing on exemplary moments in the American silent era, she explains how the concept of the spectator evolved as a crucial part of the classical Hollywood paradigm—as one of the new industry’s strategies to integrate ethnically, socially, and sexually differentiated audiences into a modern culture of consumption. In this process, Hansen argues, the cinema might also have provided the conditions of an alternative public sphere for particular social groups, such as recent immigrants and women, by furnishing an intersubjective context in which they could recognize fragments of their own experience. After tracing the emergence of spectatorship as an institution, Hansen pursues the question of reception through detailed readings of a single film, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), and of the cult surrounding a single star, Rudolph Valentino. In each case the classical construction of spectatorship is complicated by factors of gender and sexuality, crystallizing around the fear and desire of the female consumer. Babel and Babylon recasts the debate on early American cinema—and by implication on American film as a whole. It is a model study in the field of cinema studies, mediating the concerns of recent film theory with those of recent film history.