Basic Terms:

AUTEUR – French for “author”

DIEGESIS – The diegesis includes objects, events, spaces and the characters that inhabit them, including things, actions, and attitudes not explicitly presented in the film but inferred by the audience.

EDITING – The joining together of clips of film into a single filmstrip.

FLASHBACK FLASHFORWARD – A jump backwards or forwards in diegetic time.

FOCUS – Focus refers to the degree to which light rays coming from any particular part of an object pass through the lens and reconverge at the same point on a frame of the film negative, creating sharp outlines and distinct textures that match the original object.

GENRES – Types of film recognized by audiences and/or producers, sometimes retrospectively. These types are distinguished by narrative or stylistic conventions, or merely by their discursive organization in influential criticism.

MISE-EN-SCENE – All the things that are “put in the scene”: the setting, the decor, the lighting, the costumes, the performance etc. Narrative films often manipulate the elements of mise-en-scene, such as decor, costume, and acting to intensify or undermine the ostensible significance of a particular scene.

STORY / PLOT – Perhaps more correctly labelled fabula and syuzhet, story refers to all the audience infers about the events that occur in the diegesis on the basis of what they are shown by the plot.

SCENE / SEQUENCE – A scene is a segment of a narrative film that usually takes place in a single time and place, often with the same characters. Sometimes a single scene may contain two lines of action, occurring in different spaces or even different times, that are related by means of crosscutting.

SHOT – A single stream of images, uninterrupted by editing.

Mise-en-scene:

• Decor – rear projection.
• Lighting – three point lighting, high- key lighting, low- key lighting.
• Space- Deep space, Frontality, Matte shot, offscreen space, shallow space,
• Costume
• Acting- Typage

I think after seeing and reading about all the stuff griffith wants people to understand the pain od the women and how she escaped the danger of soldiers fighting and shows the struddle of the mother during the civil war. Whereas, the other part where soldiers were fighting there was this red background depicting evil, violence or any sort of danger.

I think griffith wants people to understand that the blacks are equal to any other with and his cinematography urges the people seeing the film to think that Lynch and lydia are e to be supported and should be treated equal.

The first movie to have a musical score for an orchestra and required an intermission to switch reels.

It pioneered close-ups, fade-outs, and a carefully staged battle sequence with hundreds of extras (another first) made to look like thousands. It came with a 13-page “Souvenir Program”. It was the first American motion picture to be screened in the White House, viewed there by President Woodrow Wilson.

There were widespread protests even when the movie came out and the NAACP tried unsuccessfully to have the film banned.

Selected by The Library of Congress in 1992 for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The author Dixon claimed he would let none other than the son of a Confederate soldier direct an adaptation of The Clansman.

The film focuses on two families, one from the Union and one from the Confederacy. It frames the Southerners as good people fighting a losing battle and attempts to rewrite history. Although the South still loses, the second half of the movie focuses on the Reconstruction period.

“The Birth of a Nation” from 1915 is a very old fashion and I took it as very racist. It is very historical. This film is a great example of discourse and how it shapes worldviews for people and real life events. Overall, i feel it really showed how things actually were and to what extent racial discrimination and things like that were in the society and how it affected people.

Race Amalgation:

• Racial interbreeding
• Scientific racism. Africans were on the lower evolutionary scale and were outcasts from evolution that made them incapable of reaching full human capability.
• The children that come from a colored women and a white male were considered morally and physically inferiors of the pure black as well as the one possessed of the least vital force.
• Mr. Lillie Geoffroy a child off a Frenchman and a negro women was just as smart as a “white man”, but due to the fact that he wasn’t white created insignificance. If he was born white, “perhaps” he could have qualified to be more.

TMM 92-104

• Morton’s friend and fellow polygenist George Gliddon was United States consul for the city of Cairo. He dispatched to Phila-delphia more than one hundred skulls from tombs of ancient Egypt, and as a result Morton reacted with his second major treatise, the Crania Aegyptiaca of 1844.
• Many of the Egyptian skulls came with mummified remains of their possessors and morgan could determine their sex effortlessly.
• Among nonpolygenist, “scientific” defenses of slavery, no arguments ever matched in absurdity the doctrines of S. A. Cartwright.

Prompt one:
Both PvF and TMM has the same common discussion according to the Swale’s six characteristics of the discourse community who shares the common public goals which is to define the race discrimination, intercommunication from each member of the community. Both PvF and TMM discussed about the racial discrimination based on the appearance and the personal identity/status which should consider of having Civil rights.

Prompt two:

They spread the goal of their community, by analyzing and writing scientific journals, texts, theories, and doctrines. Furthermore, by utilizing these texts, they were ‘teaching’ other scientists, and those in the political hierarchy at the time that these certain things were true, and pushing the idea that there should be a ranking system, and that mixing races would halt the ‘white’ power. Specifically referring to Agassiz, he feared the marriage of a white person with a black person the most

Prompt three:

The racist ideals that the Jim Crow laws were founded on existed in the south before the civil war, but they were amplified afterwards. Many businesses lost their primary source of labor and the southern economy was turned is head. Others were resentful towards the north for winning the war and changing so much about their way of life. Targeting the newly freed black population became the easiest way of retaining control.

PVF- 20-38

Political and civil rights are very different.

Should government be allowed to control our opinions or feelings? how much of our rights that they protect can they restrain for others rights.

How many amendments should be made to protect one group over another? when should it become just basic rights for all and not just for some.

People who argued against congress having power to be allowed to enforce the civil rights act are hypocritical because they were all for the government enforcing the slave fugitive act.

Taney says Bradley sacrificed substance and spirit in the recent amendments. Harlan wanted a better defined amendment 

• Tourgee cheated the system by waiting for people to change to a more favorable crowd and by getting the public more vocal about it
• Black people accidentally hurt their own cause with the hand speech by giving a good metaphor for keeping separated.
• Tourgee knew that just using nurses as the example wouldn’t fully get the law fixed, but he had to go deeper to the full law as an example of being color blind to really get the law to change and no longer be “white’s happiness at blacks expense” 
• He really milks the fact that white’s are so much better, and to determine that plessy, a 1/8th black man, wasn’t white should’ve been illegal because it took away his property without due process. 

TMM 62-82

“inferior material (poor brains , bad genes , or whatever).”

Based on scientific argument in history of racial.

That’s crazy that black people were known as inferior and were not able to get education like whites based on their biological and cultural-roots. – unjustified.

In this chapter, includes the views of Benjamin Franklin over the African Americans (Black people).

This biological written chapter is extremely strong. Especially the illustration/pictures are strong.

Distinguished the human races and the ranked them.
Arguments (soft and hard).

Warrant: unspoken values a writer thinks he shares with his readers.

These warrants are steeped and cone out of the discourse of their specific discourse community. Argument style comes from the discourse community.

Knowledge: is made thru discourse and creates multiliteraces for individual members to use.

Rhetorical appeals: trust (ethos) Emotional (Pathos)

Issue: black people have to strive to reach a place of success, because they are not given the same opportunities.

Gap: Author thinks that readers do not understand how much African Americans have to do to reach what they want.

Readers: White Americans want to evoke change.

Claim: Black African Americans are not given enough opportunities.

Reason: They are not given same opportunities, because of racial biased.

Evidence: they suppress their votes. Author also gives his personal experience.

The race question is written by John Tyler Morgen and is a repercussion for the ballot boxes and equal rights legally and in the society. It is also a depiction of how the south thought about negros at that time. Morgen was six term US senator and a general in the Confederate State army. He was also an ex- slave holder. He wrote this essay to beat the two Reconstruction bills at that time called the Force Bill and the Blaire Bill. The Blair bill was helpful in dealing with the funds to tackle illiteracy in the states. The Force bill was a way to deny the blacks to vote by providing federal supervision in elections. In this essay Morgan argues to prove the point that the Negro race in the most inferior race to the whites and that they were meant to be the inferior race and act as slaves for the whites.

          Morgen claims that even if people did not claim the negros to be inferior because of their color there is also a mental difference in which they are inferior to the whites, “The mental difference and differing traits, including the faculty of governing, forecast, enterprise, and the wide field of achievement in arts and sciences”.  He also thought that this race difference is created by the god himself and it was the law of nature as god created for the negros to be inferior, “ The social and political questions connected to the African race, in the United States, all relate to and depend upon the essential differences between the negro and white man, as they have been arranged by the hand of the Creator”.

         After this Morgan shifts to some political viewpoints that he is against. He feels that if they are made and able to go and vote it would give them that social power and have more political influence and have that feeling of power and which would prevent the shutdown of the negro race completely. It is the central and vital point in the race question. “If the negroes, being our equals in political privileges, could be absorbed into our race, as equals, there would be no obstacle to our harmonious and beneficent association, in this free country, but neither laws, nor any form of constraint, can force the doors to our homes and seat them by our firesides. By this morgen wants to tell the readers that irrespective of their voting rights and their position in the society be it equal to us, still there will be a sense of inferiority when the white come across negros.

PvF 1-20

• incident reveals violent indtimidation experienced by African Americans in the south.
• AA subjected to laws that organized society by race
• Racial mixture played havoc in creating division based on race
• segregated facilities not equal in quality
• PvF – supreme court ruled on constitutionality of segregation laws on 18 May 1896
• arrest was part of plan to have laws challenged
• Tourgee- leading white spokesperson of ppl of color, served in union army then as a judge
• only solution to race problem was education according to Tourgee
• His aim was for supreme court to declare segregation laws unconstitutional

• The 15th Amendment – Right to vote cannot be denied by race, color, or previous servitude.

• 15th Amendment didn’t stop states from banning people from voting, just found ways around it using other criteria, such as “no woman, white or black, can vote”

• 13th Amendment – Slavery or involuntary servitude is now prohibited

TMM 51-62

• socrates- three classes rulers, auxiliaries, and craftsmen
• biological determinism
• it leans in the position of power so there is the thought is it rose in political interest
• this book is trying to point out scientific weakness and political contexts of determinist arguments
• i thought it was interesting that science was said to be a socially embedded activity just because I hadn’t really thought about it like that.