Oscar Micheaux and Black American Cinema

In early American postulate, African-Americans were depicted in a precise offensive and racialist governwork forcet agency. An example of this is in D.W. Griffiths 1915 read, The Birth of a Nation. This film is what helped spark the beginning of gruesomeen American Cinema. An African-American director named Oscar Micheaux responded to Griffiths film and created whatsoever films portraying African-Americans as creation perfectly normal and realistic. This composition will discuss how Micheaux changed the way African-Americans were portrayed in movie theater and how he helped start sear American Cinema. This can be seen by studying some of Micheauxs earliest films including: The squatter (1919), Within Our Gates (1920), and veil Aristocrats (1932). \nD.W. Griffiths 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation was very disputable because of the way black men were portrayed. in that location is a scene in which a black man attempts to rape a white woman. This scene tries to work up black men await evil and dangerous. Also solely of the black men in the film are shown to be very unintelligent. Mainstream film companies portrayed black men mostly as humorous objects wispy witted, slow moving, shiftless caricatures who would non threaten mainstream audiences (Butters 5). Many of the actors were not even black. A give out of the actors were white men milled in blackface. This film to a fault shows the Ku Klux Klan as existence the devout guys of the story and also being heroic. A deeply antiblack film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation was bitterly attacked on its release by the interior(a) Association for the Advancement of washy People (NAACP) and its allies (Stokes 20). This film caused numerous 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 ki ll and attempted rape alike incendiary in the showing of the Chic...