Film Studies Daily Log

Monday, March 9

Students received three handouts: one with information about D.W. Griffith, one about the contemporary impact of Birth of a Nation, and one containing the Tim Dirks' treatment of the film from filmsite.org. Students were advised that there will be a quiz over these materials on Wednesday.

Using the second handout, we examined the way in which the supposedly objective and historially accurate nature of the images in Birth as photographs is advanced as proof that the film's pro-Confederate, racist interpretation of American history is true, that the audience of the film is "beholding what actually happened." In this connection, we began to look at the "historical facsimile" of Lincoln's assassination at the end of Part I of the film.