birth of a nation Week 5

birth of a nation:

The movie is based of the novel "The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan" written by Thomas Dixon Jr. The film portrays the KKK as the hero's who come to the rescue of southerners being attacked African American soldiers as they ride across the south in vengeance of a mans sister who dies at the hands of a rouge solider. The film became a recruitment tool of the KKK as it portrays them is a good light and portrays African Americans as these rouge villains attacking the innocent.

Oscar Micheaux made a film called Within our gates as a response to to Birth of a Nation to show the war and the south in a more realistic light showing the hard ships that African Americans went through during that period.

D.W. Griffith's follwed Birth of a Nation with the film Intolerance which was an epic, intercuts between four separate stories about man's inhumanity to man. In Babylon, pacifist Prince Belshazzar is brought down by warring religious factions