Great techniques and a horrible message...

Rating: 8/10 (30 July 2016)

...yet I still give it an 8/10 for all of the ground that it broke.
When it was released in 1915, the Hollywood movie industry was still in its infancy as movie makers such as DeMille had only been there about a year or so. Most movies were made on the East coast and used artificial lighting which often gave the films a very flat look.
Most filmmakers would film outside until the late afternoon and then close up shop. Griffith however liked to use lighting just as the sun was going down as it gave everything a soft glow. These scenes looked better than anything you could have achieved in a set with artificial lighting in those days.
The battles scenes also looked very good, like a lot of care was taken to set them up and make them as realistic as possible. This kind of an epic was rare for the times and must have surprised most movie goes who were more used to short films that were often shot on sets with artificial lighting.
Some of the innovations of BOAN (it should be noted that while Griffith didn't originate all of the techniques used in BOAN, he was the first to integrate them all so seamlessly in a feature-length film) included night-time photography-Billy Bitzer achieved by firing magnesium flares into the night for the split-screen sequence of the sacking of Atlanta, being the first film to have an original score, the first film to employ hundreds of extras for the battle scenes, flashbacks and parallel editing, and extensive use of close-ups, long shots, dissolves, etc. to heighten the impact of the story.
It's not fair to other films and filmmakers to say this film and this film alone changed movie history but it's definitely on the short list of films that did along with DeMille's "Squaw Man" released the previous year which is remembered as Hollywood's first feature length film, even though it is not. That honor goes to Helen Gardner's "Cleopatra" made in 1912.
Then there are the features of the story that give this film a well-deserved bad rap for having revived the KKK. ' There is the Austin Stoneman character who is biracial and wants to rule the South with an iron fist. He sets himself up as some kind of alternate President during reconstruction. Where was the real president, Andrew Johnson? Locked in a broom closet? This character was supposed to be a thinly veiled caricature of Thaddeus Stevens.
Since white Confederates have their civil rights suspended during this time, the state houses of the south are shown packed with the absolutely worst stereotypes of black men, with them eating, drinking liquor, and taking their shoes off and putting their feet on their desks during the chaotic legislative sessions. They are also shown as sex-mad for Caucasian females, the biracial Austin Stoneman included. Let's just say that the story is as subtle as a sledge hammer, but when you realize that its contemporaries considered a guy in a cape with a long mustache tying virgins to railroad tracks to be high drama, the actual message of BOAN may be hogwash, but the complexity of the story telling and the sophistication of the acting is to be admired.
That's why I recommend it in spite of the point of view of the script. Sorry for the long review, but a long film often requires one.