Birth of a Nation 1915

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Birth of a Nation 1915
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The Social Construction of Categories Race

• Racial Formation- refers to the process by which
  social, economic, and political forces determine
  the content and importance of racial categories,
  and by which they are in turn shaped by racial
  meanings. Race is a central axis of social
  relations which cannot be subsumed under or
  reduced to some broader category or conception.
  (Omi and Winant p.21)
• Racial subjection is quintessentially
  ideological. (Omi and Winant p. 22)
• Defines the boundaries of race

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The Social Construction of Categories Race

• Racialization- signifies the extension of racial
  meaning to a previously racially unclassified
  relationship, social practice, or group.
• Racialization is a historically specific
  ideological process.
• Racial ideology is constructed from pre-existing
  conceptual elements. It emerges from the
  struggles of competing political projects.
• -By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans
  whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani,
  etc. were rendered black by an ideology of
  exploitation based on racial logic - the
  establishment and maintenance of a color line.
  (Omi and Winant P.23)

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The Social Construction of Categories Race

• The seemingly obvious natural and common
  sense qualities which the existing racial order
  exhibits themselves testify to the effectiveness
  of the racial formation process in constructing
  racial meanings and racial identities. Omi and
  Winant p. 21

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The History of Racial Formation

• As Winthrop Jordan has observed From the
  initially common term Christian, at mid-century
  there was a marked shift toward the terms English
  and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies
  as a whole, a new term of self-identification
  appeared- white.

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• Race is a social construct.
• Racial groups are defined in relation to one
  another. They and we
• The effects of privilege are generally conflated
  with justifications for continuing inequitable
  systems.

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Birth of a Nation- 1915

• Originally premiered with the title The Clansman
  in January, 1915 in California.
• Three months later was re-titled at its world
  premiere in New York.
• The film was based on former North Carolina
  Baptist minister Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s
  anti-black, 1905 bigoted play, The Clansman, the
  second volume in a trilogy

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1915 Race Relations

• Race relations are in a state of flux.
  Immigration is further exacerbating racial fears
  and tensions.
• Ku Klux Klan membership reached its zenith with
  over a million members.
• During the Wilson (1913-1921) and Harding
  (1921-23) presidential administrations over 100
  race riots occurred.

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Two Key Moral Panics

• 1) Inter-racial sex and marriage
• 2) European Supremacy
• Both fears are assuaged by this film

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• How are these panics related to the processes of
  racial formation and racialization?

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D.W. Griffith (1875-1948)

• Born in Crestwood, Oldham County, KY to Jacob
  "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a Confederate Army
  colonel and Civil War hero.
• Recognized throughout the world as the single
  most important individual in the development of
  film as an art.
• David Ward Griffith has been called the father of
  film grammar.
• Scholars no longer dispute that few or any of his
  "innovations" actually began with him
• Griffith contributed Mise en scene and various
  film editing techniques to film grammar.

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• The boy's Southern identity as one of a conquered
  people likely contributed to the anti-imperialist
  sentiments that he would later express in his
  films. 
• David was raised on the farm and received his
  early education in a one-room country school and
  from his older sister, Mattie, a school teacher. 
  
• When he was ten years old, his father died,
  plunging the Griffith family into debt-ridden
  poverty. 
• By the time he was fourteen, his family was
  forced to abandon their unproductive farm for a
  new life in Louisville where his mother opened a
  boarding house, that soon failed. 
• With the family still besieged by debts, David
  left high school to help with the finances,
  taking a job first in a dry goods store, and,
  later, in a bookstore, which became his
  "university."

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• Griffith began working on the stage in Louisville
  at the age of 20 and was soon touring the country
  in stock companies.
• For a decade he alternated work on the stage with
  manual labor, holding a variety of
  jobs--everything from shoveling ore to picking
  hops between theatrical engagements.

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• Griffith and his young actress wife, Linda
  Arvidson, whom he had married in 1906, then
  turned to the new motion picture industry for
  their livelihood.
• Griffith began his work in motion pictures near
  the end of 1907 by playing the lead in Rescued
  from an Eagles Nest, directed by Edwin S. Porter
  for the Edison Company and released in early
  1908.
• Griffith soon moved to the Biograph Company in
  New York City, where he both acted in films and
  provided stories. 

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• Griffith demonstrated a singular genius in
  developing previous experiments in camera effects
  and movement, lighting, close-ups, and editing
  into a coordinated cinematic technique that gave
  motion pictures their basic grammar and
  transformed film into an art form.
• Mise-en-scene- His use of close-ups and medium
  shots enabled the spectator to empathize with the
  emotions expressed by the characters his
  rhythmic editing style intensified the drama his
  panoramic long shots created an impression of
  epic grandeur and his innovations in lighting
  added mood and aesthetic quality to the images.
  Placing great value on the use of locations for
  the realism he sought to heighten the drama,
  Griffith laid the foundations of Hollywood when
  in 1910 he began annually taking his company from
  New York to California for seasonal filming. 

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• Worked with Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks to
  form United Artists.

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Progressive in Some ways

• In many of his films, his actresses, for example,
  projected new, more assertive heroines in keeping
  with the aspirations of the suffragette era. 

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• Griffith also began to deal with many subjects in
  his films that expressed his progressive social
  vision. In such films as The Redmans View (1909)
  and Ramona (1910), he denounced the white mans
  oppression of the American Indian.
• He excoriated capitalisms injustice toward the
  poor in films like A Corner in Wheat (1909) and
  focused his camera on scenes of urban poverty in
  The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and many other
  works. Griffith climaxed his years at Biograph
  with his first feature, Judith of Bethulia
  (1913), an epic dramatization of the Apocryphal
  story of the ancient Jewish heroine who saved her
  community from the invading Assyrians. Like many
  of his subsequent works, Judith of Bethulia
  demonstrates his abhorrence of imperialism
  through its depiction of the ravages of war and
  its effect on civilians.

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• The Clansman, a best-selling melodramatic novel
  about the Reconstruction era by Thomas Dixon,
  expanding the story and its staged dramatization
  into a large-scale depiction of the Civil War and
  its aftermath that alternates spectacular scenes
  with poignant, intimate scenes of families caught
  up in the vortex of great events. 

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The Myth of the Plantation South

• Promotes idyllic view of South during slavery.
• Fails to understand this as myth.
• Fails to explore the economic and social causes
  of the decline of the South.
• Its easier to blame a group of people than
  social structures.

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Here Lies the Danger

• Myth as fact.
• Racial formation and racialization.

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• Can you draw parallels to media today?
• In what ways are complex social issues reduced to
  mythic stories?
• How does this obscure the complexity of social
  issues?
• How are representative characters used to
  represent groups and identities? Can you think
  of any current examples?