One of the Best Movies Ever.

When the AFI (The American Film Insititute) released the top 100 films of all time, I believe they left out a very important film, "The Birth of A Nation(1915)". This was left out because of political correctness.

For a movie to have a lasting effect of 93 years should have been enough to add it to the list. One thing the film did was nationalize the NAACP and make that organization what it is today. Another reason for adding it,is the film itself. Griffith used cutaways to great effect,along with inter-cutting between shots, and of course those close-ups and how emotional they were.

The negative part of the film is the Klu Klux Klan. But at the time of the civil war in 1865-66, it was a positive organization. The reason the KKK was born was because northerners were arriving in the south in droves, buying up plantations for back taxes. Abraham Lincoln had planned to forget the taxes during the war and let the south re-join the union as if nothing had happened.

To get back to the film itself, Griffith put his own money into the production because Biograph had pulled their backing. They thought the film would be too costly. So, he had to form his own production company, which distributed the film itself. Back in the early days of the film industry, film was distributed through what was called state rights booking, which means that a distributor in each state would pay you X amount of money for your movie and could do whatever they wanted to the print. They could cut scenes out, which some states did, to edit out the KKK. His next film, "Intolerance" (1916), was sort of an apology. In this film, he illustrated how people have been intolerant in the past, and in his present day. It's possible it was more of an explanation than an apology.