America's first major feature is Griffith's folly

Rating: Null/10 (28 July 1999)

Whether or not one buys into the long-standing suggestion that D.W. Griffith virtually invented much of the "film grammar" (the close-up and the cross-cut, for example) and the American feature length film used by narrative moviemakers to this day, The Birth of a Nation remains a simple-minded, horrifyingly racist piece of garbage unworthy of its misguided praise. Griffith's pathetic Victorian sensibility -- already on the verge of being old-fashioned at the time of The Birth of a Nation's release in 1915 -- undermines the epic's value as the genesis of film as art, even if its lavish release and exorbitant ticket prices gave cinema its first taste of respectability. Cases in point: the god-awful leap off of a cliff by Mae Marsh to avoid being raped by an emancipated slave and the idiotic, preposterous plotline in which Lillian Gish is to be enthroned alongside a black leader who plans to start a "Negro" nation. So much for Griffith's attitudes about Reconstruction.