Plot Of The Birth Of A Nation
Still credited as one of the most influential films ever made, director D.W. Griffith’s silent film The Birth of a Nation was first released in 1915. The film’s sweeping narrative follows events surrounding the American Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. The film was a huge success, but it immediately came under scrutiny for its historical inaccuracies and blatant racism. It was condemned by a number of organizations, including the NAACP, and several major cities banned its release. In the places it was released, including Boston and Philadelphia, riots often broke out, and at least one white man murdered a black teenager after seeing it.
According to one journalist, The Birth of a Nation contributed in large part to the reformation of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and it is said that the Klan used the film as a recruiting tool for a number of years. Despite its bigoted ideology, the film is regarded by a number of film scholars as one of the greatest movies ever made due to the number of technical breakthroughs it provided. Not only did it establish that films could be longer than an hour and still hold the audience’s attention, but Griffith’s direction is commonly regarded as having given rise to the “visual language” of modern film, and many of the editing and shooting techniques pioneered in the film are still utilized today.
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