Is Anyone Else Watching "The Birth Of A Nation" ?

It's a bit much to just sit and watch a silent film for three hours straight. So I watched the first hour or so and now I'm looking back and forth while listening to the impressive score.

I gotta say...it's sickeningly racist and all that jazz, but it has got to be the most groundbreaking film of all time. Griffith was the first man to actually DIRECT a movie, rather than point the camera at his subjects and say "OK, go" . He invented the use of parallel edits in this film...intercutting during a chase scene! It does not seem that much now, but 90 years ago, this must have been like turning on the lightbulb for the average moviegoer. He was also the first director to use the close-up. Epic battle scenes, an intricate plot...it is really too bad that the film's content is so controversial and wrong, otherwise it would be remembered throughout filmdom as the pioneer of modern cinema.

 

Remembered by some...just the fact that this movie hasn't been on TV in something like 8 years is more than enough testament to the fact that his blackened reputation for making BOAN has also stained what should be his legacy as the father of modern filmmaking.