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¶ … Right Thing" constitute a response to "Birth of a Nation," without belaboring the obvious?
Presumably by belaboring the obvious, one means that the landmark of silent cinema, D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" is a racist piece of cinema, while "Do the Right Thing" is constructed by the imagination of, Spike Lee an African-American filmmaker. True, it is not difficult to imagine a young Spike Lee as a film student, perhaps seeing such a film and being horrified by Griffith's black-faced, rapacious actors. These actors are shown chasing white women, acting in buffoonish ways, and ultimately being defeated by the false heroism of Griffith's white-shrouded clansman. Yet both the film "Do the Right Thing" as well as "Birth of a Nation" share a deeper concern, despite their ideological polarization in terms of race. Both films are epics of moral as well as cinematic and plot-propelled authority. Both films make moral dilemmas about American identity and how to speak for a more complete American identity their central concern.
Even the beginnings of the film are similar. Both films begin by setting the scene by showing the central...
In "Birth of a Nation," the main characters are shown in a peaceful plantation, with 'happy' slaves sitting nearby. "Do the Right Thing" begins in a similarly hot setting, during a Brooklyn summer, beginning with potentially dangerous insults shouted by the many different ethnicities that live in the area. Then, the focus of the Lee film shifts to an apparently happier Italian-American run pizza parlor in the local neighborhood, an eatery where there is something resembling a very tenuous state of racial harmony, as the character played by Lee works for the parlor's owner Danny for something like a fair wage, not a slave wage.
But from these sites of leisure, questions about American and racial identity become manifest. What people do for fun, what they watch and how they eat and live, are still central to how they make their living and how they define themselves as people and Americans. It does not matter whether they are living on cotton plantations or selling pizza. Thus, on an even more complex and profound level both films also ask -- who is…
Works Cited
"The Birth of a Nation." Directed by D.W. Griffith. 1915.
'Do the Right Thing." Directed by Spike Lee. 1989.
He later wrote that their tribute reminded him of the "nation-wide" support he had received in 1913 in his fight against the "reds." (Valkenier, 1978, p. 28). The Russian Revolution also introduced an entirely new art form. It is thought that the period following the Bolshevik Revolution until the middle 1920s was progressive and at the forefront of the European avant-garde. Artists believed in the profound influence they could have
Politics, literature and the arts -- Transformation, Totalitarianism, and Modern Capitalist life in Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and Albert Camus' Caligula At first, the towering heights of the German director Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" may seem to have little to do with the cramped world of the Czech author Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Fritz Lang portrayed a humanity whereby seemingly sleek human beings were dwarfed by towering and modernist structures, where
Politics, Literature & the Arts: Modernism has been discussed as a reaction to modernity: from the following works, is this a fair description? Modernism is often defined as a chaotic, pastiche-style of rendering the difficulties of modern, industrialized life. The attempted regimentation of modernity becomes, in modernism, exposed for the absurdity that it is through the surrealist and other modernist aesthetics, such as the improvised jazz riff. For example, in the
However, Mohr, once again became defensive and proposed that this flask was a way that brothers help the world to visualize the different occupations found at that time. In short, the pottery by Kirkpatrick brothers conveyed many messages. It held a lot of importance during that time. In fact, the pottery acted as a political messenger and conveyed many messages which would have otherwise would have remained untapped. For Mohr,
jazz and the culture industry? Is Adorno simply an elitist or is there something useful you can appropriate from his argument? What connections can you draw from Benjamin and the "Andalusia Dog?" Theodor Adorno was clearly inspired by Walter Benjamin, from whom he founded his philosophy of modern art, versus fine or popular art. Adorno constructed a theory of the modern art movement, as embodied in such early surrealist films
public sphere and the culture industry: has the former been fundamentally corrupted through the latter? Are there new possibilities that the culture industry has to offer politics? The public sphere of artistic discourse is one in which, according to Theodor Adorno, the culture industry sells its commodity goods that masquerade as truth and art. Where the media and world of art should speak to a kind of anti-structured and individualistic