It eventually was censored in several cities, and Griffith agreed to change or cut out some of the film’s especially offensive scenes. Riots and protests broke out at screenings of Birth of a Nation in a number of Northern cities, and the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) embarked on a major campaign to have the film banned.

In the film’s climax, the Ku Klux Klan rises up to save the South from the Reconstruction Era-prominence of African Americans in Southern public life. Throughout its three hours, African Americans are portrayed as brutish, lazy, morally degenerate and dangerous. Two years later, he released his 10-reel film, Birth of a Nation, for Mutual Films.īirth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, tells the turbulent story of American history in the 1860s, as it followed the fictional lives of two families from the North and the South. Taking his cue from the longer spectacle films produced in Italy, in 1913 Griffith produced Judith of Bethulia, a biblical adaptation that, at four reels, was close to an hour long. Many of these actors, including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, and Lionel Barrymore, went on to become some of Hollywood’s first movie stars. He also raised the standard on movie acting, initiating scene rehearsals before shooting and assembling a stock company of film professionals. His contributions to the art of editing during this period include the flashback and parallel editing, in which two or more separate scenes are intermixed to give the impression that the separate actions are happening simultaneously. “Billy” Bitzer, he invented or refined such important cinematic techniques as the close-up, the scenic long shot, the moving-camera shot, and the fade-in and fade-out. With the assistance of his talented cinematographer, G W.

READ MORE: How 'The Birth of a Nation' Revived the Ku Klux Klanīetween 19, Griffith made more than 400 short films for Biograph.

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