Historical context for the films
The minorities throughout the 20th century made significant strides towards getting their autonomy as well as equality, especially in American society. From the right to vote to the right to own land, the black Americans struggled through the liberation process amidst segregation rules such as the Jim Crow laws that delineated the people. The advancement in the lives of the black community seems to be yet to fully infiltrate the whole of American society despite the political improvements in law that empowers African Americans. The supremacist ideologies persist in society as supremacists propagate racists’ beliefs and influence it into the American psyche. The filming industry is one aspect of the American culture that is as seen to portray the struggles that the black people went through during the time of slavery as well as the struggles they still endure to date (Mascaro and Jannette 56). Today, it is no longer a practice to uphold the law and celebrates the achievements of black people. Still, instead it has become a practice, and a crown jewel in the filming industry as people of colour are portrayed as second class citizens in America. This analysis aims to identify the contribution of contemporaneous attitudes to the black peoples at the time of the production of the movies ‘ Birth of a Nation’, ‘Roots’, and ‘Django Unchained’.
The positions of roles assigned to the actors
Actors in the movies play different roles that portray the theme ad plot of the film. In Birth of a nation, Griffith, who is an actor and a play writer brings put an epic narrative of the relationship between American families, the confederate, the civil war, and the time of the reconstruction. Through its actors, the film introduced the aspect of racism in the movie industry through the use of cinematic techniques such as night photography. Still, it was also condemned for its inherent racism in its scripts and a positive portrayal of the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) (Narissra and Punyanunt-Carter 247). On the other hand ‘Django Unchained’ is a flashy and crude historical fantasy that blends history and with the social life of the black people. The actors’ roles place a free black man in a social and yet a no man’s land where he is the only black man and hence cannot afford the full social standing that is granted to the whites even though he is free and not a slave. The actor named Django is a portrayal of the modern-day segregation and discrimination of the black people in total disregard of the law as the white man continues to enjoy the social privileges. However, black people are no longer slaves but free to make their own choices.
Further, in the movie, Jamie Fox, who acts as ‘Django’ and Christopher Waltz working as Dr King Schultz came into conflict with a group of Ku Klux Klan members. According to Mascaro and Jannette, the KKK members come about after the civil war in the 1850s, and they brutally raided the people, especially the black homes (58). The KKK was an American white supremacist group whose target was the African Americans, and they existed in three eras in US history. Additionally, they advocated for reactionary positions, anti-immigration laws, ad white nationalism, and they used terrorism acts to scare the black people and murdered politically active black people, especially in the southern states. However, the film ‘Django Unmasked’ portrays the KKK group as hilarious through there raids and quibbling about their subpar white hoods and eyeholes. Through Django’s acts in the movie which takes place in Texas, a state that has many African Americans, is assuredly funny. Django was purchased as a slave by Dr Shultz to help him catch and kill the Brittle brothers for a reward after the job is done. Django was among the few people who knew the brothers, and in exchange, the employer who was a white would give him freedom.
The attitudes portrayed about race.
The representation of race in the film industry in America traced back to the early days of the ‘Birth of the Nation’ which was later adopted as a novel that was seen to promote white supremacists, race separation, and terror against the black people. The film created a spark in the US white population, gave them the reason to attack the blacks, and led to increased incidences of murder and lynching by the Ku Klux Klan members that have left a lasting blemish in the conscious of the Americans to date (Mascaro and Jannette 59). Although the film succeeded in some ways, it backfired on the aspect of bringing cohesion as it brought more segregation and discriminatory acts resulting in nationwide protests and boycotts with famous writers such as W.E.B Du Bois writing about the messaging that films portray to society. One of the unintended results of the film ‘Birth of a Nation’ was the Birth of the black film industry which led to the Oscar awards in the 1920s. However, the attitudes of some of the actors as well as the reaction from the general audience about the film were its troubling leaps of racism on the screens that made the film one of the most racist films ever to get produced during the ancient times.
Like the film ‘Roots’, ‘Birth of a Nation’ depicts a series of lynching as a good practice in scenes that portray the politics of the day as an essential way of saying that individual black people were worthy of being murdered in an extremely racist sense. Besides, many people find the movie ‘Roots’ as well as ‘Birth of a Nation’ as enhancing stereotyping of black men, especially those who seemed to be in relationships with white women as the film is credited for reviving the KKK racist extremists. The latter was regarded as a dead organization by the year 1915 when the film was first aired. The KKK becomes a large organization by the year 1920. Additionally, the racism in the movie was also heightened by the critics of the film who judged the brilliance in the use of cinematic techniques (Narissra and Punyanunt-Carter 248). In Django Unchained, the movie is a narrative of vengeance and redemption through the eyes of the main protagonist, a freed slave named Django and a German bounty hunter called Shultz, and together they embark on a journey to free Django’s wife. Therefore, from the movie, there is the portrayal of the atrocities brought about by the KKK. On the bright side, there is the collaboration between a black and a white man which portrays the possibility of the two groups living in harmony.
The message represented by the films about the position of the black people
The overall message presented by the films about the position of the black people is that they are delineated and seen as second class citizens who do not deserve anything but to be murdered. In Birth of a nation, the film sates the tome of morals and values through images of culture of the American people. Many people in America, some of which had never encountered black people have the belief of degrading the lack of people through black stereotyping based on the films (Narissra and Punyanunt-Carter 249). Besides, the message presented by the film Birth of a New Nation is that of white supremacist and murders depicted by the white supremacist KKK as the justify the blatted killings of the black people. In this regard, everything that believed about the black people was dependent on what they saw on television and in movies s8ch as the British of a new Nation and the Root. After a century of film production, the horrible stereotyping of the blacks as well as discrimination persists today with images of black people being extinguished from the media and they are regarded as second class citizens. Since the 1900s, when the first black, Sam Lucas, was shown in a movie, there has been a significant improvement on how the blacks treated that has moved from real violence like that of the Klux Klan to modern-day discrimination.
Further, after Griffith released the Birth of the nation which was seen to support radical practices against the blacks, it becomes the first anti-blacks movie ever produced and ever since there has been a series of other black depicting movies such as The Roots which has received as much criticism about how it portrays the black people and the message being passed across. The national association for the advancement of people of colour (NAACP) was the lead organization in opposing the anti-black messaging as portrayed by the films and it worked hard to ensure that the films were banned from the public scenes (Narissra and Punyanunt-Carter 246). The glorification of the where Supremes group Ku Klux Klan was one of the issues raised by the group which at the end led to the rise of a new group of film making that involved the blacks as the race films shunned. Besides, the latest movies portray the black in a positive light, and the process addresses the social concerns that have been there in society all along. Before in the race films such as The Roots and the Django unmasked, the black people were nothing more than underrated individuals with bugged-out eyes that leaned on the brooms and spoke poor English.
The influence of the medium on the depiction of race in the films
The influence of the film as a medium of depicting race is seen in all three films. In Django Unmasked, the film demonstrates a secure membership in the slave community is not that easy to attain status as one could not get out of the town by choice but by the favour of a white person. The slaves were seen to have a different mindset from the rest of the people, and hence they were poorly treated by their white masters since they were slaves (Mascaro and Jannette 58). As life in slavery was hard for the slaves, Django distinguished himself as a witty person with knowledge of the street and its people, and in this regard, he was hired by a German bounty hunter to help him trace and kill the Brittle brothers in exchange for his freedom. In this case, the film shows that the black people were used for all manner of errands, including killing people for them to gain independence. The freedom meant that they would be free to move around not like slaves but as free men, although they still encountered anti-black extremist such as the Klux Klan as the case of Django. Besides, the film also influences the thinking among the people as it portrays that freedom from slavery is not freedom from discrimination as it is seen today.
Moreover, the films focus on the characters that are outside of the community space makes it hard to speculate what benefits the community were getting from such a system of torture and abuse since most of the black people had families to feed and shelter. However, it would seem plausible that every sense of the community that allowed such inhuman system also found time to engage in social practices such as the provision of food and shelter to the black slaves as seen in the film Django Unmasked (Narissra and Punyanunt-Carter 241). In the Birth of a New Nation, the actors amped racism, and how the blacks are treated is worse than the slaves in the film Roots and Django Unmasked. The film, as a racist accomplishment, surpasses the vicious cartoonist role in other racial films such as Gone with the wind and takes its own unique space alongside the German Nazis and other propaganda pictures of racism of all time. To some, the racial films were a recruiting as well as a political tool that was used by the political class to fuel hatred among the people and stereotype black men as a way of preventing them from rising and becoming influential in the country.