Book chapter
Races to the Rescue in an Ethnic Urban Milieu: D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Italian Dramas - Chapter 2
Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, pp.15-29
Italian and Italian American studies, Palgrave Macmillan
2023
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_2
Abstract
This chapter investigates the representation of non-Anglo-Saxon figures in Griffith’s Biograph shorts, examining how these characters are represented as posing a threat to the nation’s dominant culture and middle-class society. Starting from Griffith’s own description of the multi-ethnic environment of Lower East Side’s Rivington Street—seen as a place of competing, differentiated forces—the author discusses the characterization of the racially coded types populating the films he directed for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913. The infamous allegations of southern Italians’ inadaptability to lawful society popular at the time resonate especially in Griffith’s Biograph shorts. Following Joanne Ruvoli’s analysis of this director’s so-called revenge films, the author focuses on the 1909 one-reeler films The Cord of Life, At the Altar, and In Little Italy (which all portray Sicilians as antagonists), concluding that they present ethnicity as “incompatible with assimilation”. Although Griffith’s categorization of Italian immigrants becomes more articulated in the 1912 film The Inner Circle, the re-proposition of the divide between law-abiding and felonious Italians (at the core of the 1909 ‘revenge films’) here informs the disparity between ‘the happy family’ and ‘the ominous element’.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Races to the Rescue in an Ethnic Urban Milieu: D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Italian Dramas - Chapter 2
- Creators
- Irene Lottini - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, pp.15-29
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan; Basingstoke
- Series
- Italian and Italian American studies
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_2
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2023
- Academic Unit
- French and Italian
- Record Identifier
- 9984582460002771
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