Oscar Micheaux and Black American Cinema

In early American subscribe to, African-Americans were portray in a real offensive and racist expression. An exemplification of this is in D.W. Griffiths 1915 sprout, The give birth of a democracy. This film is what helped dismission the beginning of Black American Cinema. An African-American director named Oscar Micheaux responded to Griffiths film and created globey films depicting African-Americans as being abruptly normal and realistic. This paper give discuss how Micheaux changed the way African-Americans were depicted in cinema and how he helped start Black American Cinema. This can be seen by studying some of Micheauxs earliest films including: The Homesteader (1919), in spite of appearance Our Gates (1920), and Veiled Aristocrats (1932).\nD.W. Griffiths 1915 film, The Birth of a earth was genuinely contentious because of the way pitch-dark men were portrayed. there is a scene in which a nasty man attempts to rape a face cloth woman. This scene tries to m ake blue men seem wrong and dangerous. Also all of the black men in the film are shown to be very unintelligent. Mainstream film companies portrayed black men largely as humorous objects dim witted, slow moving, shiftless caricatures who would not threaten mainstream audiences (Butters 5). Many of the actors were not up to now black. A lot of the actors were egg white men dressed in blackface. This film also shows the Ku Klux Klan as being the good guys of the write up and also being heroic. A deeply racist film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation was bitterly attacked on its retail store by the National tie-in for the Advancement of Colored slew (NAACP) and its allies (Stokes 20). This film caused many another(prenominal) African-Americans to protest the film. There were speed 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 lynching and act rape too seditious in the wake of the Chic...