Thursday, 7 March 2013

Birth of cinema


Birth of a Nation (1915)

Directed by D. W. Griffith this film based on the novel “The Clansman” stars Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall. Two families are divided by the US civil war and the reconstruction of the South.

To get the obvious out of the way this film is massively racist and throws a lot of history out of the window in an attempt to promote it's racist revisions. A lot of the first hour of the film is superfluous to the plot and could probably have been cut as the film is a real slog to get through. Technically there are a lot of innovations in the film and a lot of the action sequences are really impressive for the period but this does little to mitigate the content.

1/5

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