Evelyn Preer and Black female stardom in the silent film era

Frymus, Agata

doi:10.1080/14680777.2021.1879198

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…Moreover, Sylvia's dress and its contrast with that of her scheming cousin Alma (Floy Clements) suggests subtle interventions into the construction of a 'pure' and definitively white figure such as Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), though critics have suggested Sylvia's character still retains problematic aspects of 'patriarchal mores'. 69 In Birth, Elsie emerges as Griffith's fetishised 'Klan moll', while in Micheaux's film the Elsie character's vexing legacy is evoked through the striking resemblance to Gish of the reactionary white supremacist and antifeminist Geraldine Stratton (Bernice Ladd), who attempts to thwart Sylvia's efforts to raise funds to educate African American children. In Green's view, Sylvia has entered a 'liminal, intertextual world to struggle against the characters from Griffith's movie'.…”

Section: Deterritorialising the Screenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desegregating the screen

Geiger¹

2022

D.W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation

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Just after the release of Do the Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee was asked why he would make a film that left white viewers feeling 'uncomfortable'. His response turned the interviewer's question on its head:[H] ow do you think Black people have felt for 80 years watching stuff like The Birth of a Nation ... and we go on and on. Black people have had to live under this thing for 400 years ... We made [Do the Right Thing] so we could put the spotlight on racism and say that everything is not okay, that this [USA] is not the land of milk and honey and truth and justice. 1 Clyde Taylor has observed that cinema histories have tended to chart the trajectory of US film by using Griffith's film as a starting point: 'almost a myth of origin - [and] there is an inclination to unburden this grand originating moment from any discourse on race relations in the United States'. 2 Valerie Smith, in Representing Blackness, further argues that the problem is not just that The Birth of a Nation is 'considered by many to be the symbolic, although not literal, origin of US cinema', but that it 'is frequently offered up by film critics and historians as the inaugural moment of African American cinema as well'. 3 Bolstering the film's fabricated status as US cinema's (and African American cinema's) origin is its seemingly monolithic presence: a grandiose spectacle and 'media event of a type that complements the definition of mass culture'. 4 As Lee's comments suggest, The Birth of a Nation is not a singular event around which subsequent US filmmaking developed, but rather a text problematically enmeshed within mobile discourses and public debates about US history, national identity, race and representation. Indeed, Lee elsewhere stated that he had 'no problem' with The Birth of a Nation being screened, but that its 'social impact' and contexts need to be made clear, and its legacies recognised as painful, personal and heterogeneous. 5 Lee encapsulates these dynamics in his work by incorporating the film in the disruptive, self-reflexive montage of Bamboozled (2000) and BlacKkKlansman (2018), the latter showing Griffith's film screened as part of a ritualistic 4

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Section: Deterritorialising the Screenmentioning

confidence: 99%