The first true American blockbuster was without any doubt the DW Griffith film ‘Birth of a Nation.’ Released in May 1915, it was the first multi-reel epic film that broke every previous convention, going beyond the usual length and breadth of the 15-minute short films and tackling one of the greatest blood baths in American history, the Civil War. But Griffith also created a picture that would do great harm to our society for decades. The second half of the picture retells the story of Reconstruction as a debacle, featuring black men as imbeciles, mixed-ethnicity ‘mulattoes’ as sexual beasts, and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of Southern female virtue. As a result of the film’s release, the Klan saw its ranks explode and the civil rights movement’s gains were set back decades.
Several months ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with MIT linguist Dr. Noam Chomsky. Based off the work of Warren Buckland, Michel Colin, and others, there is now a veritable sub-branch of cinema studies that has taken prior work dealing with the semiotics of cinema and re-written the genre using the Chomskyan theories of transformative generative grammar. The resulting conversation is quite instructive to our own dialogue about race and racism in America as well as our thought process regarding what we would now call the summer blockbuster.
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