THE BIRTH OF A NATION

Two families of friends, the Stonemans living in Pennsylvania and the Camerons living in South Carolina, are separated by the Civil War, during which they are bereaved. The return of peace does not calm the spirits. Lincoln was assassinated. The defeated South was left to the unscrupulous businessmen of the North and to violent and ignorant blacks. In reaction, the Ku Klux Klan was formed. It avenges the victims, restores order and saves the Cameron and the Stonemans who were besieged by the black soldiery. A Christian humanist, a powerful storyteller spiritually belonging to the 19th century, closer to Dickens than to Whitman because of his taste for melodrama, reactionary on the racial question (he was the son of a racist colonel), but liberal on other issues, Griffiths (1875-1949) makes here an undeniably racist, apologetic and non-historical film. But, as Eisenstein said, ‘nothing can take him away the glory of having been one of the true masters of American cinema’.