The Birth of a Nation, regarded as one of the greatest American films, premiered on February 8, 1915, in Los Angeles. The D W Griffith film was groundbreaking for its technical virtuosity. The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in this film, wrote critic James Agee. But the movie was controversial for its depiction of blacks
‘New art of the 20th century’
In filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s 1995 documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, Griffith is credited with “forging the new art of the 20th century”. He explored the “emotional impact of film”, and before World War I, had already delineated nearly every genre, even the gangster film with his short The Musketeers of Pig Alley
Mirror of racial prejudice in US
The pioneering masterpiece, however, was also an unwitting mirror of ingrained racial prejudices in America. The film represents how little racism and its toxic influence across generations were understood in the US in 1915
1st interracial love story
Stung by criticism that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith tried to make amends in Intolerance (1916) which criticised prejudice, wrote noted film critic Roger Ebert. And in Broken Blossoms (1919), he told the first interracial love story in film—though it's an idealised love with no touching, he adds
He (D W Griffith) achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realise that this is all the work of one man