The Birth of a Nation (1915)

I have always given Griffith his due as an outstanding master of the bourgeois film, [but] this can in no way be applied to The Birth of a Nation. [The] disgraceful propaganda of racial hatred toward the coloured people which permeates this film cannot be redeemed by the purely cinematographic effects of this production.

— Sergei Eistenstein (1940)

Imagine an unholy combination of The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie as violent and sentimental as Saving Private Ryan and as tricksy as Forrest Gump, landing with the force of Titanic in the nickelodeon universe of 1915, where the typical attraction was 20 minutes long.

[…]

[The] founding work of American cinema is at once vile slander and thrilling narrative, a stunning technical achievement and a moral catastrophe.

[…]

Throughout the [2008 presendential] campaign, supplementary narratives, footnotes and rumours were regularly posted on YouTube. The comedy show Saturday Night Live unexpectedly asserted its relevance and intervened several times: first to suggest that Obama was benefiting from an overly deferential press, later to present a hyperreal caricature of Palin that captivated the nation as much as the original. The Birth of a Nation is part epic pageant, part minstrel show, inhabited by a mixture of stock types and quasi-historical figures, and similar, half-imaginary beings haunted cyberspace and the cable news channels throughout the campaign: Hockey Moms, Domestic Terrorists, Black Nationalist Preachers, Tina Fey’s Palin. And just as The Birth of a Nation manages to reduce the Civil War and Reconstruction to a tale of two families, so the candidates consistently grounded their positions in the stories of ordinary Americans.

— J. Hoberman (London Review of Books)