Blog Archives

Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s starkly racist silent film, is released in the US on this day in 1915. The film follows the relationship of two white families in the American Civil War and Reconstruction era over the course of several years while portraying blacks as  lazy, stupid and dangerous.   The film also depicted the terrorist American militia, the Ku Klux Klan, as heroically defending embattled Southern women from the sexual predations of black Americans. Under President Woodrow Wilson, it was the first American motion picture to be screened at the White House. Wilson, an unapologetic racist, said:  “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The NAACP said it would lead to violence and protested at theaters around the country.  The NAACP had originally asked that the film be banned, or at least edited, and DW Griffith fought the idea on First Amendment grounds.  But in 1919, when black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux made “Within Our Gates,”  white authorities had no problem censoring it to prevent violence.  A PBS documentary about the controversy aired in 2017.

Thomas Edison finishes building the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria, at his labs in  West Orange, New Jersey. Today the labs are a national historic site operated by the National Park Service.

Marion Davies, American film star, born this day in 1897.  Davies was the  mistress of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Her portrayal in the film “Citizen Kane” by Orson Welles was the source of much of Hearst’s outrage over the film.

A Trip to the Moon — one of the first feature length films (at 18 minutes)  — is released on this day in 1902 by French film director Georges Méliès.  Based on  Jules Verne‘s novel From the Earth to the Moon, the film depicts a group of explorers who are  shot from the barrel of a long cannon in a  bullet-like spacecraft. The moment it lands in the eye of the Man in the Moon  is the most iconic image in the history of early cinema.

Cabient of Dr. Caligari, an influential German Expressionist film, first shown this day in Berlin in 1920.