Research Paper on:
Racism in Cinema

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
themes displayed, it can be stated. However, unlike literature, which has the luxury of expounding on the topic for a great length of time, film must get to the point  quickly and do so in a way that does not overwhelm the viewer. The portrayal of African-Americans in film has a long and sullied history, just as the actual  life and civil rights history have. In D.W. Griffiths movie, The Birth of a Nation, the implied and overt references to commonly held stereotypes can be found. Filmed in 1915,  the film opened to mixed reviews. In the film, two families, the Stonemans and the Camerons are chronicled as they survive and endure the Civil War from different sides of  the Confederate/Union coin. The Stonemans were part of the Union movement, and the Camerons had experienced the devastation of the South as supporters of the Confederacy. Many have said that  this film was a revenge piece that Griffith put out because his family had been so devastated, as had the Camerons, by the Civil War. This movie seems to blame  two specific groups for all of the social, political and economic problems that occurred after the war: uppity Southern Blacks and Republicans(Birth of a Nation, 2002). When Birth of a  Nation first came out, the NAACP protested the film. W.E.B. Dubois, a leading black activist, published highly negative reviews of the film that got the attention of the Censorship Board  which governed film at the time. For a short while it looked as if the whole film would be banned from various states, but then the president at the time,  Woodrow Wilson stated that the film was fine(Birth of a Nation, 2002). This proclamation seemed to pump new life into the organization known as the Ku Klux Klan and as