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Birth of a Nation
The Cinematic Past in the Present
Edited by Michael T. Martin
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Book Presentation:
Over one hundred years since it premiered on cinema screens, D. W. Griffith's controversial photoplay The Birth of a Nation continues to influence American film production and to have relevance for race relations in the United States. While lauded at the time of its release for its visual and narrative innovations and a box office hit with film audiences, it provoked African American protest in 1915 for racially offensive content. In this collection of essays, contributors explore Griffith's film as text, artifact, and cultural legacy and place it into both the historical and transnational contexts of the first half of the 1900s and its resonances with current events in America, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #HollywoodSoWhite, and #OscarsSoWhite movements. Through studies of the film's reception, formal innovations in visual storytelling, and comparisons with contemporary movies, this work challenges the idea the United States has moved beyond racial problems and highlights the role of film and representation in the continued struggle for equality. This title is also available as an Open Access edition online at https://iu.pressbooks.pub/thebirthofanation/
About the Author:
Michael T. Martin is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University and Editor-in-Chief of Black Camera: An International Film Journal. He is editor (with David C. Wall and Marilyn Yaquinto) of Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door and editor (with David C. Wall) of The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man.
Press Reviews:
"An extremely important contribution to scholarship with excellent essays across a range of views on the film's importance and historical, genre, and cultural resonances. . . . It distinguishes itself from other collections of essays on The Birth of a Nation by its discussion of the film in relation to current race relations, its transnational scope, and its multi-leveled discussion of the way the film was watched both by its supporters and its critics.
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-Alan Rice, author of Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic
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With this volume, Michael T. Martin offers a compelling reassessment of The Birth of a Nation that not only offers original scholarship on various aspects of its exhibition, reception, and formal properties, but pushes the inquiry into the present, looking at contemporary films through the long shadow of Griffith's epic of racism and national division.
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-Allyson Nadia Field, author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & The Possibility of Black Modernity
"It is beyond time that we recognize that any discussion of Birth as cinematic art must be grounded in an understanding of Birth as racist propaganda. This is the major contribution of Martin's collection." -H-Slavery
See the publisher website: Indiana University Press
See The Birth of a Nation (1915) on IMDB ...
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