Fifty Before '50: THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)
by JBFilm critic Dave Kehr labeled it, “the film you cannot show without apology,” and it sometimes seems that modern film history just wants us to forget all about it. For the first few years of my teaching career in the mid-1980s, I screened D.W. Griffith’s seminal tale of the Deep South and the Confederacy, The Birth of a Nation, in my Film Studies class because I wanted my students to see firsthand where most film grammar had come from. I remember screening The Birth of a Nation one August day when the temperature in my unairconditioned classroom rose to 102 degrees. Clearly, this…
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