The Birth of a Nation

Plot

Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

About The Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The screenplay is adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1905 novel and play The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith co-wrote the screenplay with Frank E. Woods and produced the film with Harry Aitken. The Birth of a Nation is a landmark of film history, lauded for its technical virtuosity. It was the first non-serial American 12-reel film ever made. Its plot, part fiction and part history, chronicles the relationship of two families in the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras over the course of several years—the pro-Union (Northern) Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy (Southern) Camerons, and also depicts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. It was originally shown in two parts separated by an intermission, and it was the first American-made film to have a musical score for an orchestra. It helped to pioneer closeups and fadeouts, and it includes a carefully staged battle sequence with hundreds of extras made to look like thousands. It came with a 13-page Souvenir Program. It was screened inside the White House, where it was watched by President Woodrow Wilson. The film was controversial even before its release and has remained so since. It has been called "the most controversial film ever made in the United States"…

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