kevinslockwood As the title suggests the Klan were heroes and this is a great movie :)

Michael Ledo The Alpha Film edition was restored, but has no special features.The film claims the US became a disunion when black people were brought over here....ummm whose fault was that? The production follows the lives of the southern Cameron family living in Piedmont, South Carolina and the Stoneman family of Pennsylvania. Two of the men met while at a boarding school, afterwards becoming pen pals and eventually falling in love with each other's sister. When war breaks out they find themselves in battle against each other at Gettysburg. Later the Stonemans go south after the war and must join with the Klan to regain their "Aryan Birthright" against carpetbaggers, mulattoes, and Yankee blacks who dare to want equality and interracial marriage.Many of the stages were historical recreations and D.W. Griffith made sure you knew that with a sign. There was actually very little in dialogue. It would show you people talking, but you never knew what they said, rather the sign would explain the scene. The second half of the film was like watching my friend Sean Hannity, race baiting and outright lies. Only the Klan could have saved Piedmont from the incursion of the black man. Southern blacks fought with the Klan which contradicted their aims in the legislature where black law makers have their shoes off and feet on the desk, drinking from bottles. They passed laws to disenfranchise white people, make white people salute them, and legalized interracial marriage...about as factual as a Trump tweet.On the plus side Lillian Gish and Miriam Cooper were screen gems.The film is iconic including quotes from then President Wilson. Historically it re-energized the Klan membership because "truthiness" matters more than truth to some people.

esadoff Disclaimer: I detest the KKK and White Supremacy This is possibly the greatest film ever made. While it is truly deplorable in what it condones and promotes, the propaganda aspect of the film is paralleled only by Triumph des Willens. Watching this movie in 2016 is a constant battle between feeling sympathetic towards the downtrodden white supremacist and remembering that that very same person that the movie is making you feel sympathetic towards is an absolutely terrible person. This movie makes me, a northern Jew, feel bad for the KKK at times. I have never before, and likely never will again, see a movie that I have so viscerally despised yet admired. It's enthralling and dangerous. It comes as no shock that this film helped renew the KKK after it came out. It's an important historical piece and also is possibly still the greatest film made over 100 years later. You need not be, and hopefully are not, a member of the KKK or a white supremacist to watch. Contextualizing it into modern history is something that is incredibly important.

calvinnme ...yet I still give it an 8/10 for all of the ground that it broke. When it was released in 1915, the Hollywood movie industry was still in its infancy as movie makers such as DeMille had only been there about a year or so. Most movies were made on the East coast and used artificial lighting which often gave the films a very flat look.Most filmmakers would film outside until the late afternoon and then close up shop. Griffith however liked to use lighting just as the sun was going down as it gave everything a soft glow. These scenes looked better than anything you could have achieved in a set with artificial lighting in those days. The battles scenes also looked very good, like a lot of care was taken to set them up and make them as realistic as possible. This kind of an epic was rare for the times and must have surprised most movie goes who were more used to short films that were often shot on sets with artificial lighting. Some of the innovations of BOAN (it should be noted that while Griffith didn't originate all of the techniques used in BOAN, he was the first to integrate them all so seamlessly in a feature-length film) included night-time photography-Billy Bitzer achieved by firing magnesium flares into the night for the split-screen sequence of the sacking of Atlanta, being the first film to have an original score, the first film to employ hundreds of extras for the battle scenes, flashbacks and parallel editing, and extensive use of close-ups, long shots, dissolves, etc. to heighten the impact of the story.It's not fair to other films and filmmakers to say this film and this film alone changed movie history but it's definitely on the short list of films that did along with DeMille's "Squaw Man" released the previous year which is remembered as Hollywood's first feature length film, even though it is not. That honor goes to Helen Gardner's "Cleopatra" made in 1912.Then there are the features of the story that give this film a well-deserved bad rap for having revived the KKK. ' There is the Austin Stoneman character who is biracial and wants to rule the South with an iron fist. He sets himself up as some kind of alternate President during reconstruction. Where was the real president, Andrew Johnson? Locked in a broom closet? This character was supposed to be a thinly veiled caricature of Thaddeus Stevens. Since white Confederates have their civil rights suspended during this time, the state houses of the south are shown packed with the absolutely worst stereotypes of black men, with them eating, drinking liquor, and taking their shoes off and putting their feet on their desks during the chaotic legislative sessions. They are also shown as sex-mad for Caucasian females, the biracial Austin Stoneman included. Let's just say that the story is as subtle as a sledge hammer, but when you realize that its contemporaries considered a guy in a cape with a long mustache tying virgins to railroad tracks to be high drama, the actual message of BOAN may be hogwash, but the complexity of the story telling and the sophistication of the acting is to be admired. That's why I recommend it in spite of the point of view of the script. Sorry for the long review, but a long film often requires one.