Birth Of A Nation And Within Our Gates: Film Analysis

The film not only gives audiences a chance to find the similar experience, but also gives a way for audiences to see how certain condition impacted the society. Both the films The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates emerged with the controversial issues at that time; lynching, rape, discrimination, violence. By applying the film as a social and political force, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation proposes a controversial for the negative depiction of African Americans and the positive portrayal of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith noted that the black is the evil force, and Negroes usually behave poorly, takes off the shoes and eats chicken even in the meeting. They are unable to integrate into the white society and get along well with …show more content…
In Micheaux’s view, lynching and rape were evidence of the white’s barbarism rather than the black. In contrast to Gus, the stereotypical black rapist in Birth of a Nation, Micheaux’s rapist is a privileged and apparently respectable white. Subverting the scene that the black man tries to rape the white woman in The Birth of a nation, the similar scenes in Within Our Gates is that the white man tries to rape the black woman. By putting a specific white man on the screen, and carrying out a rape, Micheaux Concreted the abstract accusation, in a manner that many whites would surely have found problems. In other words, Within Our Gates was an attempt to explain the reality and response to Griffith's transposed view of his glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Sylvia's story is built on a pair of events, the paired traumas of her young adulthood: the lynching of her adoptive parents is followed by her own sexual assault. In this way, Sylvia's story is within the story about racial violence, in the context of a larger story about black citizenship and