Oscar Micheaux and Black American Cinema

In early American train, African-Americans were portray in a rattling offensive and racial demeanor. An example of this is in D.W. Griffiths 1915 picture, The Birth of a Nation. This film is what helped spark the beginning of inglorious American Cinema. An African-American music director named Oscar Micheaux responded to Griffiths film and created more films portraying African-Americans as universe perfectly normal and realistic. This composing will discuss how Micheaux changed the way African-Americans were portrayed in picture show and how he helped start sullen American Cinema. This can be seen by studying more or less of Micheauxs earliest films including: The nester (1919), Within Our Gates (1920), and hide Aristocrats (1932).\nD.W. Griffiths 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation was very disputed because of the way dark hands were portrayed. at that place is a photograph in which a black man attempts to rape a white woman. This scene tries to situate black men depend evil and dangerous. Also all(prenominal) of the black men in the film are shown to be very unintelligent. Mainstream film companies portrayed black men largely as humorous objects smutch witted, slow moving, shiftless caricatures who would non threaten mainstream audiences (Butters 5). Many of the actors were not even black. A spread of the actors were white men svelte in blackface. This film as well as shows the Ku Klux Klan as beingness the unattackable guys of the story and also being heroic. A deeply racialist film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation was bitterly attacked on its release by the bailiwick Association for the Advancement of drab People (NAACP) and its allies (Stokes 20). This film caused many African-Americans to protest the film. There were race riots and protests in many urban cities. The film was very controversial which caused it to be recut and censored. repeatedly recut by censors who deemed the harrowing sequences of kill and attempted rape in like manner incendiary in the bestir of the Chic...