Birth of a Nation

It's easy to see why this film was included on AFI's list of 100 influential films.  The staggering ambition of the project is evident from the very first captions, and its contribution to cinematographic technique is non to be underestimated. 

Nonetheless, one can't help but feel that it was included for other reasons altogether.  Griffith's subject is understandably abhorrent to modern eyes, but it was not without controversy in its own time as well.  The eponymous nation, after all, is not the newly united America after the civil war, but the abhorrent Ku Klux Klan.  And it is not only the decision to lionize that organization that puts the film squarely in the indefensible column.  Every characterization, from the lascivious mulatto carpetbagger to the conniving mulatto housekeeper is so nauseatingly racist as to make it very nearly unwatchable, and this is aggravated by the fawning treatment of the heroic Klansman protagonist.

All of which need scarcely be said again by me, as thoroughly as it has been treated both by the viewing public at the time of its release and film historians since then.  I will add, however, that the chief thing that bothered me about the film was not any of the aforementioned racism, but rather the aggrandized tone that Griffith himself takes in the filming.  Although the film was on the surface about the post-war South, I can't help but feel that the whole thing was really about Griffith's own ego.  Perhaps he thought at the time that such an illustrious name as his would give gravitas to what even contemporary viewers recognized as horseshit.  It did not, and it does not, and I wonder if his subsequent film "Intolerance" will reek in the same way.