Black Nativity opened last week to much praise and favorable reviews. The holiday movie based on the famed Langston Hughes play of the same title follows a Baltimore teen's quest to find spirituality and faith while spending time with his estranged relatives in New York. Discussing his scene with Jacob Latimore, Nas opens up and gets personal about the way Latimore's character dealt with not having his mother around and draws comparisons to his real life experience of loosing his mother. Nas goes on in this exclusive interview about his experience working on the film, the cast, and the importance of the holiday musical that's in theaters everywhere this season.…
Back in the 1960s, was when the movie was taking place. Durring that time era, it is known to us that there was lots of racism and discrminination against "coloured" people. This true story speaks to us about how an elderly black woman fights versus the white lawyers and judges to serve justice to the man who killed her husband. In class we studied how the law is blind to some in the legal system, one of the lessons that we studied that includes blindness in the law was the "whites vs. blacks", where the whites would stand a higher ground than the blacks and could get away with something terrible such as murder. This is what happens in the movie and even though fighting for it took 27 years Miss.Evers finally got some peace at mind knowning she put the bad man in jail. Without this blindness, there shouldnt have been 27 years of fighting an countless amounts of hours could have been placed in other cases much needed help. To conclude, the "white vs. blacks" issue was a key concept in unit 1 that was represented durring the movie.…
The film by D.W. Griffith—“Birth of a Nation” is merely propaganda used to brainwash the young white population of 1915 into denying blacks further freedoms. The film shows blacks in a state superiority over Southern whites which is quite ironic because if up to Southern Whites blacks would still have been their property, so technically no white would have allowed that situation to even come close.…
“A Raisin in the Sun” and “Black Like Me” are the definitely one of the most thought-provoking films I have watched recently. The first movie, starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, being a picture of the young African American man’s struggle to reach for his dreams and to provide his family with an affluent life. Watching the motion picture I sympathized with the main character’s distresses and dilemmas and hoped that everything would work out well for him in the end, however the reality proved to be quite brutal . The other film tells the story of a white American journalist who artificially darkens his skin color and travels throughout the deep south to experience what is it like to be black. The story is based on facts, which is very impressive and courageous considering the period which the story takes place in. John Horton, shows how important it is to put yourself in the shoes of another person, and try to understand them and how they feel, especially in the rough situation of the African Americans at that time. It’s clear that the writer did not mange in the end to understand how is it like to be born with dark skin, mainly because – as one of the characters pointed out to him – he can return to being white, he did not grow up having to deal with the “hate stare”. I believe the same thing can be found in A Raisin in the Sun, the creator of the play it was based on tried to present the story in such a way as to make the audience (white people) feel the pain of the main character to look at his situation from the being-black point of view.…
Lack of Diversity is largely due to lack of accurate representation. The roles commonly given to black actors and actresses are stereotypical roles. The stereotypical roles first emerged in D.W Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The film is revered as the first film to use groundbreaking cinematic techniques. However the film is incredibly racist displaying african americans in a negative light. It was one of the first films to use blackface. This film paved a way for other films in regards to stereotypical representation of blacks.…
In order to understand the ramifications of an event such as the sinking of the Essex one needs too understand the community that produces the crew. Nantucket was an island community much more than the literal sense of word. The islanders of Nantucket saw themselves differently than the rest of the word. They learned the skills of whaling from the original Wampanoag tribe. They were Quakers with a stoic sense of standards and community. The whale men from Nantucket saw themselves as superior to most other sailors of that time period. Hardship and perseverance were virtues held by the whale men and the women. The women ran the town while the whale men were at sea for years at a time. This type of work ethic and fortitude, and the worlds desire for oil, combined to make “the village of Nantucket one of the richest towns in America.” “In the Heart of the Sea” It also created a close-knit community with a few very successful and influential families that married with each other maintaining a strong central hierarchy.…
In Hurtado’s Intimate Frontiers, the author argues that, by the late 1800s, an Anglo-American presence in California had dominated the region, and Anglos in that territory had risen to the top of the social hierarchy. There were many draws to California for the migrating Anglos, and numerous reasons for braving the often dangerous journey, just as the means of establishing an “Anglo hegemony” were numerous as well. Hurtado analyzes the period through the lens of gender-relations and sex, and through this lens the reader is able to better understand the unifying conditions of settlers and citizens in 19th century California.…
Do what is right no matter what circumstances. The novel Lyddie by Katherine Patterson is about a thirteen-year-old girl name Lyddie. Lyddie must take responsibility and be the adult of her family. Lyddie goes to the mills in hopes of earning enough money to pay off the farm debt. The plan was that once the farm debt was paid off, Lyddie would be able to reunite her family back on the farm. However, working conditions at the mills was not favorable by many of the factory girls. As a result, radicals were circulating a petition where workers can sign it in order to improve working conditions in the mills. Lyddie should sign the petition because workers were treated poorly by their overseer’s and the working environment was unsafe, which jeopardized…
secretly displaying. The movie and the issues with the civil rights movement, racism in the USA,…
Analyze Stranger Inside as an allegory of gender as both/either a prison-industrial-complex and/or a site of queer cultural expression and interpersonal connection. Your paper must focus on racism. Use detailed examples, and make a clear argument based on close analysis of the film’s formal construction.…
Birth of a Nation was a silent film that premiered in 1925 that was directed by D.W. Griffith. Griffith went to Johns Hopkins University where he met Woodrow Wilson and became good friends. Wilson was a supporter of the Klan. One of the slides in Birth of a Nation has a quote by Wilson that said,"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." Dixon's was a legislator, baptist preacher, lecturer, novelist,playwright, and an actor. The movie is based on the 1905 book The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon (Chalmer 28).…
The bitter struggle for representation and control of black images has been almost as consistent as the profit driven system in Hollywood. From 1915 to 1950, the American film industry produced only a small number of films that transcended clichés and stereotypes about African American life. Race films such as The Scar of Shame (1926) and Within Our Gates (1920) highlighted recurring themes of black self-improvement and black literacy (Guerrero 147). Similar to Oscar Micheaux and many other black filmmakers, Spike Lee mesmerized audiences by giving them glimpses at social landscapes and material culture –dance, music, and sports – that is often unexplored in American cinema (Todd 15). By including these distinct choices of dance, music, and…
Nate Parker's Birth of Nation follows the journey of an enslaved Baptist preacher who resides on a plantation in Virginia owned by Samuel Turner. With talks of insurrection going around, a cleric persuades Samuel that Nate should preach to other slaves, to quell any rumors of an uprising. Therefore, as Nat goes around preaching he witnesses the horrific treatment of African-Americans he then realizes that he can no longer just stand by. As a result, Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion which spreads terror throughout the white south. I really enjoyed the movie because with it being rated R it allowed the movie to show some of the true horrors of slavery. Also, the acting was really good as well as how the story played out. Furthermore, the slow…
Breen, By Patrick H. "‘Birth Of A Nation,’ The Historian’s Review." Deadline. Deadline, 07 Oct. 2016. Web. 18 Oct. 2016.…
The films, ‘The Butler’ and ‘The Intouchables’ are representations of the ordeals that African American’s were forced to go through in the past years and the implications of such experiences to the current production of films. It is without any doubt that because of the inferior status that was given to African Americans, most films that are produced today exhibit African Americans to be of a lesser status (Toledano and Olivier 5; Ager and Aubyn 1). For example, in both of the aforementioned films, black people are conveyed as servants (Toledano and Olivier 5; Ager and Aubyn 1). To add onto this, in the film, ‘The Intouchables,’ readers are told of the actuality that Driss served a jail time for a crime that he had committed thus showing that African Americans were stereotyped as criminals by nature.…