Sour Grapes Post Election 2012

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Learning about Thomas DIxon!

Quinton Tarentino said . . .  THE BIRTH OF A NATION ......it gave rebirth to the Klan and all the blood that that was spilled throughout -- until the early '60s, practically. I think that both Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr. and D.W. Griffith, if they were held by Nuremberg Laws, they would be guilty of war crimes for making that movie because of what they created there.

American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon [Hardcover]

Born: in Shelby, North Carolina, USA

Thomas Dixon has a notorious reputation as the writer of the source material for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking and controversial 1915 feature film The Birth of a Nation. Perhaps unfairly, Dixon has been branded an arch-conservative and a racist obsessed with what he viewed as "the Negro problem." As American Racist makes clear, however, Dixon was a complex, multitalented individual who, as well as writing some of the most popular novels of the early twentieth century, was involved in the production of some eighteen films.

Dixon used the motion picture as a propaganda tool for his often outrageous opinions on race, communism, socialism, and feminism. His most spectacular production, The Fall of a Nation (1916), argues for American preparedness in the face of war and boasts a musical score by Victor Herbert, making it the first American feature film to have an original score by a major composer. Like the majority of Dixon's films, The Fall of a Nation has been lost, but had it survived, it might well have taken its place alongside The Birth of a Nation as a masterwork of silent film. Anthony Slide examines each of Dixon's films and discusses the novels from which they were adapted. Slide chronicles Dixon's transformation from a major supporter of the original Ku Klux Klan in his early novels to an ardent critic of the modern Klan in his last film, Nation Aflame. American Racist is the first book to discuss Dixon's work outside of literature and provide a wide overview of the life and career of this highly controversial twentieth-century southern populist.

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