Paul Mcewan

Muhlenberg College · Media & Communication / Film Studies

Except for one brief period, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was banned in the state of Ohio from the time of its original release until the collapse of motion picture censorship in that state in 1954. Drawing on records in the collection of the Ohio State Archives, this paper examines several of the unsuccessful legal appeals undertaken by...

The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) is all too seldom taught in film studies classes, given its centrality to the development of narrative film and its usefulness as an extreme filmic example of racial misrepresentation. I teach the film in my introductory class, in film history, in film theory, and in a special topics class on historical...

For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith's profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and...

Traces the reception of Griffith's "other" famous film from its release until the present day, examining the ways in which it has often been compared to (and lived in the shadow of) Griffith's infamous The Birth of a Nation.

Portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic underdogs, silent epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) is widely considered to be the most controversial film of all time. At once one of US culture's greatest artistic achievements and one of its most abhorrently racist artefacts, it becomes more shocking with every passing year. Comprising a decade of archival...

Consistently ranked as one of the best Canadian movies of all time, punk-rock mockumentary Hard Core Logo (1996) documents the last-ditch reunion tour of an aging rock band led by vocalist Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon). Well received by critics at the time of its release, the film continues to enjoy a devoted international cult following. This entertainin...

Review of: Melvyn Stokes D.W. Griffith’s Th e Birth of a Nation: A History of ‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time.’ New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 413 pp. £61/$99 hardback, £13.99/$24.95 paperback Ellen Strain and Gregory VanHoosier- Carey with Patrick Ledwell and Patrick Quattlebaum. Griffith in Context: A Multimedia Explo...

Teaching is central to what almost all SCMS members do every day, yet we spend surprisingly little time talking about how we teach film. It is, of course, often secondary to research in the institutions where we work. But even those of us who work in teaching-focused liberal arts do not have much opportunity to exchange ideas about film pedagogy. I...

Social constructionism is the idea that all knowledge, including science and history, is deeply imbued with the biases and preconceptions of the person who holds the knowledge and the society in which that person lives, so that knowledge can be said to be created rather than discovered. This dissertation examines the influence of social constructio...

Social constructionism is the idea that all knowledge, including science and history, is deeply imbued with the biases and preconceptions of the person who holds the knowledge and the society in which that person lives, so that knowledge can be said to be created rather than discovered. This dissertation examines the influence of social constructio...

An examination of the complications of academic identity for graduate students.

_Close Up: Cinema and Modernism 1927-1933_ Edited by James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus London: Cassell, 1998 ISBN 0-304-33516-9 341pp.

• This article examines the issue of disciplinarity in cultural studies from the perspective of prospective students in the field. It argues that cultural studies as educational practice is a hidden discipline with little public profile outside the few universities where it is taught as a named subject area. The result of this lack of visibility is...