Analyzing Micheaux's Film 'The For Griffith'

In Micheaux 's film the savage lynching of the innocent Landry family by a white mob is inter-cut with the brutal rape of Sylvia by the white plantation owner. Micheaux thus responds to Griffth 's fantasy with a far more accurate (if symbolic) portrayal of the reality of white justice in the South. It 's also worth pointing out the relatively explicit nature of Micheaux 's film. The lynching of the innocent Landry family is brutal and grossly unfair, the mob is even shown putting a noose around the neck of the child Emil, who then escapes after being shot. The mob 's bloodlust not being sated by the lynchings, they then set their dangling bodies on fire, a common finale to Southern lynchings, and one glossed over by Griffith. The

Griffith 's KKK night riders are avenging demigods, sweeping across the land to restore order and exact righteous retribution. Micheaux completely inverts Griffith 's cinematic message. Using a naturalistic style, he humanizes both the victims and the aggressors. The lynching takes place in daylight, and the crowd is made up of utterly ordinary white folk, of mixed economic backgrounds. There are white women in the crowd as well. Micheaux situates violence within a political and economic context. Micheaux shows that whites are threatened when blacks assert themselves, when they attempt to challenge the economic blackmail of sharecropping, the economic and political stranglehold of white power. It is Sylvia 's "schooling" that sets off the sequence of events leading to the lynchings. Philip Gridlestone, the white landowner, is threatened by the tenant farmer Landry, who tries to challenge the systematic cheating that keeps him in debt, and by Landry 's "uppity," educated daughter, Sylvia. Racial violence, for Micheaux, is part of a system of racial oppression from which many people benefit, including even some blacks (a fact which Micheaux highlights through some of his black characters). To summarize, Micheaux places lynching in a political-economic context while also creating sympathy for, identification with the so-called "victims" of lynching. And he does so in a way that draws a metaphoric and historic connection between social violence and