Nancy Zappia
{Slide 2} Gone with the Wind is my all-time favorite movie and I have watched it over and over again. It is an epic romantic melodrama, the passionate saga of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, played out against the backdrop of the Civil War is what makes it my favorite. It generates enough romance, historic drama and deep emotion to fuel a dozen great films. I think Gone with the wind’s story is similar to Birth of a Nation because both of them are talking about romance, war and racial issue. While both of them are long movies, over three hours each Gone with the Wind tends to lean toward the romance plot more and The Birth of a Nation tends to lean toward the war part.
{Slide 7} In the beginning scene of Gone with the Wind, you see two black children pushing the wheel to ring the bell and this scene is telling me the whites treat the blacks as the black instrumentality and I can’t see the two black children’s face clearly which means they are not important. The other scene in Gone with the wind is also showing the whites treat the black as a fan to make them comfortable and this is the other example of black Instrumentality.
{Slide 8} In Birth of a Nation, some of the plots are showing me that the whites treated the blacks like servants. These two films are telling us the historic event about how the white treated the blacks un- equally and this is the common point of Gone with the wind and Birth of a Nation.
{Slide 9}Even though Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation have the common point about the racial issue we can see Gone with the Wind shows more humanity than Birth of a Nation. For example, Scarlett eats her breakfast when mammy tells he too (of course after some arguing) and Rhett brought a gift to Mammy (a red petty coat) after his and Scarlet’s honeymoon. The mammy’s opinion in Gone with the Wind was taken seriously and respected, she also spoke with intelligence where the mammy in Birth of a Nation’s speech was very uneducated and that her place was to be seen and not heard. Birth of a Nation is extremely discriminatory against the blacks; the whites treated them violently and lynched them which was very inhumane.
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