{"id":15404,"date":"2013-07-23T01:44:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=15404"},"modified":"2013-07-23T01:59:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T00:59:17","slug":"the-birth-of-a-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2013\/07\/23\/the-birth-of-a-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth of a Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the landmark films in cinema history is D.W. Griffith’s controversial Civil War<\/a> epic, which still has the power to startle and shock nearly 100 years since it was made.<\/p>\n

As cinema crawled out of the era of novelty and nickelodeons<\/a> at the turn of the 20th century, it gradually began to embrace more sophisticated visual techniques.<\/p>\n

One of the foremost pioneers of these new techniques such as the close-up and the pan, was D.W Griffith, whose film Judith of Bethulia (1914) was one of the earliest features ever to be produced in America.<\/p>\n

But it was with his next film, an adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s play and novel The Clansmen<\/a> and the result was a three hour epic set during the US Civil War.<\/p>\n

Depicting the relationship between two families, the Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South, it explores the bitter divides that opened up during the abolition of slavery and the subsequent era of Reconstruction.<\/p>\n

The film itself has continued to generate controversy: the use of white actors in blackface<\/a>, the presentation of the Ku Klux Klan<\/a> as heroic and the Northern armies as villains (remember they were the ones against<\/em> slavery) looked appalling then and now.<\/p>\n