My topic, D.W Griffith, was a man that very few people know about. He was one of the founding fathers of modern film making and one of the first people to add camera effects to his work. However, he had humble beginnings because he was born on a farm in Kentucky on January 22, 1875. His full name was David Llewelyn Wark Griffith. His parents were Jacob and Mary Griffith, they met each other after the Civil War, but during the war his father fought on the side of the Confederates as a Colonel. This being said, David got to hear many romanticized tales of battle, which would later show itself in some of his films. When he was growing up, he lived onthe farm for a short time until his father died, and after his father’s passing his
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However, the racist ideas that he displayed in the film gained him wide spread criticism in the film making community and from other specialized groups such as the NAACP. As he was making the film, he compared making movies to grinding out sausage in this quote “I had read the book and figured out that a negro chasing white girl was just another sausage”, basically what he was saying was that he did not think of this film as anything out of the ordinary and therefore was not worried at first, about the public’s reaction to it. In short this movie depicted the KKK as the hero’s that were eradicating the quote on quote evil Negros from the land. In reaction to this, there were wide spread African American protest against the playing of the film and the NAACP actually started a campaign to ban the film from theaters everywhere, which was not surprising given that the short film portrayed, African American men, particularly as undiligent and sexually aggressive towards white women, but the ban was unsuccessful. The odd thing was that even with all of the racism in the movie, Griffith did not use any African American actors. Instead, he implored the use of black face, which essentially was a white actor or actress with black paint or some other black substance on their
However, the racist ideas that he displayed in the film gained him wide spread criticism in the film making community and from other specialized groups such as the NAACP. As he was making the film, he compared making movies to grinding out sausage in this quote “I had read the book and figured out that a negro chasing white girl was just another sausage”, basically what he was saying was that he did not think of this film as anything out of the ordinary and therefore was not worried at first, about the public’s reaction to it. In short this movie depicted the KKK as the hero’s that were eradicating the quote on quote evil Negros from the land. In reaction to this, there were wide spread African American protest against the playing of the film and the NAACP actually started a campaign to ban the film from theaters everywhere, which was not surprising given that the short film portrayed, African American men, particularly as undiligent and sexually aggressive towards white women, but the ban was unsuccessful. The odd thing was that even with all of the racism in the movie, Griffith did not use any African American actors. Instead, he implored the use of black face, which essentially was a white actor or actress with black paint or some other black substance on their