D. W Griffith's Film The Birth Of A Nation

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D.W Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is often considered a landmark film the first blockbuster in cinematic history. The content of the film has gone down in history for being incredibly inaccurate by showing a brutally racist depiction of a South Carolina town during the civil war. D.W Griffith’s film was initially critically praised on a national scale upon it’s release in 1915 and even praised to be historically accurate in the eyes of many people including Woodrow Wilson who had a quotation featured in the film: The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern county. (The Birth of a Nation 1915) …show more content…

According to Donald Bogle’s book, Toms, coons, mullatoes, mammies, and bucks, films that had proceeded D.W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had only been made up of two to three reels of films which amounts to short films with a running duration of fifteen to twenty minutes. The Birth of a Nation was a largely rehearsed and prepared film that had been rehearsed for a total of six weeks, later to be filmed in nine, and edited in three months. The total amount of film reels it took to make up The Birth of a Nation were twelve reels. The films duration ran over three hours and changed the way films were made

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