week 6

Film:  Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

The Birth of a Nation. (D.W. Griffith, 1915)

Breaking Home Ties (Frank N. Seltzer, 1922)

Reading Due:

1. “Feature Films and Cinema Programs: Introduction” (pages 187-196 in The Silent Cinema Reader )

2. Linda Williams. “Race, Melodrama, and The Birth of a Nation” (pages 242-253 in The Silent Cinema Reader )

This week we were introduced to films created by a more diverse group of filmmakers. With the film for this week, Within Our Gates, it was created by an independent African American studio but we see other inspirations to films such as from Asian and Yiddish influence. While this added to the diversity in the film industry, Hollywood still had a long way to go in terms of being inclusive. Coincidentally, while I was doing the readings for this week, I was also watching this new Netflix show called Hollywood. The events of the show take place post WW2 and incorporate some true events from history regarding actors whose careers were affected by racism like actress Anna May Wong. The show's premise is around shooting the first film that stars a black lead and written by a black writer. The studio faces a lot of backlash for trying to produce this film and even more hate since the studio was now being run by a woman. I felt like this show, although mostly fiction, really tied together with the two major issues of sexism and racism in the film industry and rewrote many events in film history. It's worth a watch!

In our first reading, we are also being introduced to when films starting becoming longer in length. The longer the films were, the more the theater could charge. It was shocking to me how much the price rose from being 10 to 25 cents to getting up to $2 for admission. I would've thought that that would've been too expensive since most cinema viewers were immigrants and blue-collar workers. The increased length of films isn't necessarily a bad thing though, because this allowed for more thorough stories and plot lines to be introduced. I personally prefer watching longer films as it provides more plot and character development.