The Birth of a Nation

D.W. Griffith, 1915, from Thomas Dixon's The Clansman. The Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons pass through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lillian Gish is Elsie Stoneman. The last reels present the Ku Klux Klan as the restorer of white order. The NAACP protested in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, where William Monroe Trotter led the campaign. Griffith and Billy Bitzer's parallel editing, irises, and battle staging became a working grammar for later features. The racism is in the plot and the images.