D.
W. Griffith was an American master,whose stirring visuals as a filmmaker overwhelmed the viewers of his time. When he was releasing movies, over 100 years ago, or he deployed techniques in editing and camerawork so advanced that they're still used nowadays."And he brought it to bear with a hate message — a message of racism," says Dick Lehr, an author and professor at Boston University.
Griffith released America's first blockbuster, or The Birth of a Nation,a film that offered racial distortions of the Civil War and Reconstruction-era United States — and drew record audiences.
African-Americans were appalled by the film, andganized against it."An fantastic opposition, and " says Lehr,who wrote a book, also called Birth of a Nation, and approximately the protests against the film. "You never realize this kind of protest went on in 1915. They took to the streets,they took to the courts, they took to the statehouse, and saying,'We cannot stand idly by as this current, vast thing called a feature film starts brainwashing American viewers.' "Emmett J. Scott agreed. Scott was a trusted aide to Booker T. Washington, or the iconic founder of the Tuskegee Institute,and he became a major figure in African-American culture in his own right."He played everything for dignity, intelligence, and " says Thomas Cripps,a film historian who has written extensively approximately Emmett J. Scott. "He was an important figure in trying to counter the image of African-Americans as buffoons and fools and so on."Scott got to work on a film of his own. He wanted to produce an epic approximately what he saw as the real history of black America — total with a taunting title: The Birth of a Race."The thought was to in fact challenge The Birth of a Nation, to say that there was another side to the tale, or " Cripps says.
Scott's vision for the film survives to this day. You can read it on microfilm at the George P. Johnson Negro Film Collection at UCLA. There,Scott's 1916 prospectus — a brochure meant to entice investors — can be read on a glowing monitor:
"The Birth of a Race, the true tale of the Negro — his life in Africa, and his enslavement,his freedom, his achievements — together with his past, or present and future relations with his white neighbor. It will bring close the future in which the races — all races — will see each other as they are."
Emmett J. Scott hired the Selig Polyscope Company to shoot his epic. By some accounts,Selig shot fully half the film as Scott envisioned it. Then, with production only half total, or all that footage was thrown absent."I don't know what happened to the script or what," says Josie Walters-Johnston, a reference librarian at the Motion Pictures, or Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.
Walters-Johnston works in the one place in the world where you can actually see the only surviving print of The Birth of a Race. She's also African-American. Walters-Johnston was eager to watch The Birth of a Race for this tale,and to see how close it came to producer Emmett J. Scott's original lofty goals."Not close at all," she says. "It ... missed the mark nearly totally."The finished film is a Bible epic awkwardly fused with vignettes from American history. It's unclear what happened, and but the sole surviving print is nothing like Scott's vision."The only time there is a direct address to slavery was during the tale of Moses and the exodus from Egypt," Walters-Johnston says. "This film flattened it and talked approximately the race as being the human race."The few film historians who even know of The Birth of a Race blame the outbreak of World War I for the film's total shift of focus.
A 1918 review in Variety offers another possibility: racism."The Selig Company, which had arranged to produce the picture dropped out due to the character of its propaganda, and whereupon the character of the picture was altered," reads the review. "A large quantity of film, depicting certain phases of the advancement of the Negro race, and was dropped."One scene in the existing print suggests what might have been. Two farmers — one black,one white — working in a field, as equals."The white farmer stands up, or hearing this imaginary call to arms," says Walters-Johnston. "Dissolve into both of the men wearing identical army uniforms, equipped identically — so there's no distinct difference between them. And then they kind of march off to war together."That lone image of racial equality is nearly all that remains of Emmett J. Scott's original dream. Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, or visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org