Amazon.com Essentials:
A pivotal moment in film history. After The Birth of a
Nation, nothing was the same: not the way audiences watched
movies, not the way filmmakers created them. D.W. Griffith's
jumbo-size saga of the Civil War expanded the boundaries of
storytelling on the screen, conveying a richer, more complicated (and
certainly longer) tale than anyone had seen in a movie before. The
delicate relationships, the sad passage of time, the spectacular
battle scenes all look as fresh and innovative today as they did in
1915. So do Griffith's brilliant actors, most of them--including
favorite leading lady Lillian Gish--drawn from his regular stock
company. What has become increasingly problematic about The Birth
of a Nation is Griffith's condescending attitude toward black
slaves, and the ringing excitement surrounding the founding of the Ku
Klux Klan. Griffith, whose political ideas were naive at best, seemed
genuinely surprised by the criticism of his masterwork, and for his
next project he turned to the humanist preaching of the massive Intolerance. Despite
protests, Birth sold more tickets than any other movie, a
record that stood for decades, and President Woodrow Wilson famously
compared it to "history written in lightning." That judgment has
lasted. --Robert Horton
