What matters here is Griffith the Film-maker not Griffith the Bigot

Rating: 10/10 (15 February 1999)

Sure, D.W.Griffith was a bigot and a racist, but his (in my mind) sick political beliefs is not what's in question here. It's D.W.Griffith the Film-maker. The innovater, the first man to truly show the world what power the cinema can have. The scenes portraying the Ku Klux Klan would shock any person in his right mind today. Then again this is not a product of our time, and that is what makes this motion picture even more fascinating. More than any other film "The Birth of a Nation" is a piece of history itself. We're talking about a film produced during the first World War, three years after the Titanic went down, more than EIGHTY YEARS ago! And that in mind; Griffith's staging of the many epic scenes is breathtaking, the cinematography is groundbreaking, and sure: it's racist, but that too has to be looked upon as another product of that time and era. We're talking about a movie so old several of the extras probably fought in the original civil war, and that in mind should make any true movie buff go "WOW!" over this impressive piece of celluloid masterpiece. It's like Leni Riefenstahl's legendary documentary "Triumph of the Will"; the propaganda in it can scare you, but it's too much a brilliant, groundbreaking work of art to be overlooked.