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The Controversy Of Silent Films During The Silent Film Era

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During the silent film era, people revolved around watching motion pictures. Films are similar to dreams, were one can escape for a while. Although, sometimes a film could relate to someone in the audience going through something for instance, divorce, immigration, women’s suffrage, poverty and political corruption to name a few. Today we think the silent era films were innocent only because people during that time were very conservative, but we are wrong because people enjoyed watching glamour, exoticism, and sex appeal. However, the majority disliked films that related to discrimination and racism. A film that started controversy was The Birth of a Nation that was directed and co-produced by D.W. Griffith in 1915. This film portrayed colored
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For instance, the 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation," which had a significant influence on Civil War films in later decades, portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as a noble and heroic organization, effectively rewriting history to show white southerners as the victims of Reconstruction rather than the perpetrators of oppression and violence. The Ku Klux Klan was praised in the movie as a vital force for maintaining law and order and defending white supremacy, while African Americans were portrayed as lazy, dangerous, and shiftless. The movie successfully reshaped history by making white southerners Reconstruction's victims rather than the oppressors and violent offenders. One could argue that, in terms of different interpretations, Civil War films from the 1950s and 1960s "went South" as opposed to "went West." This viewpoint highlights how important southern identity and experience are in many of these movies.

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Many films of the silent movie era are melodramas, which was a term used back then purely as a descriptive word to describe a movie and not a ‘negative’ term the way we use the term today. Chaplin’s film is a melodrama that invokes the emotions of his audience. Some elements of melodrama are present in Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush, the characteristics of a melodrama aid in analysing how melodramatic a silent movie is. An element of melodrama is, a situation - an occurring conflict in the film created by the screenwriter to evoke an intense emotional response from the viewers.

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The concentration is on comparing and finding the changes that history made to this movie genre, especially considering the gender roles. Results will clearly explain the psyche of society in two different periods, which confirms that people reflect the movies as movies have an impact on people. The Introduction It is often said that the element of surprise makes the movie more interesting and leads the plot. There are many masters of storytelling

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Various social issues were identifiable in the film in context of stereotypes and

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The purpose of Wright’s statement is to further prove how film is like a fascist government. Melanie Wright shares that Holocaust movies combine many words together just as the Nazis did with the Jews. As Omer Bartov said, “many Holocaust films are troubling because they share with the camps themselves the willingness to combine ‘detachment and brutality, distance and cruelty, pleasure and indifference’” (28). Wright makes this claim because many words are combined to define Life is Beautiful just as they did with concentration camps.

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“As major motion picture studios were elevating white manhood by contrasting it with an inferior, animalistic, slothful black man, African-American men were delivering the cinematic equivalent of an ebony hero, an African-American man who worked, was educated, took care of his wife and children, and worked for the betterment of society”. (Butters, 2002, p121). It is exactly what John W. Noble wanted to depict in his movie The Birth of a Race (1918) a response of the Griffith’s film. Anne Crémieux asserts that this movie is often considered as the most important “races movies”.

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People have alwaysed used art, music, literature, television and film to trace some issues in our society. Since the invention of moving images in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, film has been a particularly powerful medium in the United States. Films have served as escapist fantasies, allowing audiences to enter astonishing worlds inside the creators head and encounter wild and colorful characters and plots. Movies have also been used to convey truths about society that are more easily digested in a fictional format to the audience. Difficult topics such as the nature of humanity, love, and war have all been explored with film as the tool that disseminates these themes into the consciousness of the masses that the audience

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CHAPTER THREE AN ANALYSIS OF SELECTED CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD WAR MOVIES IN TERMS OF RACISM My goal of this chapter is to analyse selected Hollywood war movies in terms of racism and other racial prejudices. I will examine as follows: Glory (1989) which deals with African American Civil War troops, Windtalkers (2002) which centres around Pacific War and Navajo code talkers, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) which portrays British soldiers in Japanese captivity. The last two movies Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) were shot simultaneously, by the same director Clint Eastwood, and both tell the same story about the invasion of Iwo Jima through the eyes of an American and Japanese soldier. In all those movies, non-white characters are portrayed stereotypically, negatively and face various types of prejudice or racism despite being often equally important to the storyline.

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Birth of a Nation’s portrayal of lynching, though not shown on screen, was still a big deal. Lynching was synonomous with the Klan who would lynch “carpetbaggers” and African

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These movies can help educate people about the horrors that went on and impact society as a whole on the issue at hand. Based on true events, a popular movie that has helped shape our societal values is Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, a movie about a German businessman during the holocaust who becomes a hero when he opens his factory to be a Jewish refuge, ultimately saving about 1,000 jews. This movie became so popular and powerful due to its impactful presentation and use of black, white, and color. Even though the movie was released in 1993, the entire film is in black and white, deepening the impact and allowing audience members to evoke the feelings of the WWII era. The use of black and white also helps highlight the use of red in a little girls coat, the girl that the main character saw alone and helped catalyze his decision to save Jews.

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Many scholars can agree that the motion picture was far more destructive than the novel. The film caused more damage because people saw a visualization of what “African Americans” were rather than having to imagine from reading The Clansmen. Birth of a Nation was the first film to “color, influence, and constitute so large a part of the nation thinking about African Americans (Lawrence and Walker 2).” The film played a momentous role in developing popular misconception and perception of blacks. Griffith created a false representation of African American males by amplifying the “brutal buck” stereotype through characters such as Silas Lynch and

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For hundreds of years, stories have been passed on from one person to another through the oral tradition and the visual arts. In our society today, film is the dominant form of storytelling. Films shape and inform our opinions of the world. Many people’s only source of information is from films. This can be harmful when the information is false or misguided.

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The Marxist criticism and ideological messages confirm that there are hidden messages in the films and that society shapes our consciousness. Eventually the portrayal it had with each culture was what media already show us. We have had our conscious believe its normal without us noticing. What I

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Silent movies were almost always accompanied by music, from a multipieced pit orchestra to a single piano or even a guitar. This is why silent film audiences seemed perfectly happy with silent movies. There was also technological difficulty of matching sound with visuals so that everyone in the audience could hear. The problems were synchronisation and amplification. A vitaphone was something that produced the first commercially viable sound system.

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Being a visual medium of presentation, a film creates an instant, direct and more convincing impression on its audience fulfilling its dual purpose of entertaining as well as sensitizing the audience. A lot of movies based on social issues are now being made to create awareness among people about the issues besides entertaining the audience, which is perhaps the foremost purpose behind the making

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