I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see that D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" made the cut at all, much less at #5! Most folks see that as a "Racist" film, not a "political" film at all. It deals with the Civil War, the aftermath of that called "Reconstruction", and the rise of the first version of the KKK.
Whenever you mention it, anyone that has ever heard of it immediately thinks "isn't that the Stormfront's favorite movie?"... but it was here long before Stormfront was even a wet spot on their daddy's jeans.
It does have a peculiar and unconventional viewpoint, but that viewpoint was borne of having been originally written by a man who lived through Reconstruction, and remembered the abuses perpetrated therein. The original novel it is based upon is "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon, which was itself the middle novel of his "Reconstruction Trilogy". Dixon was raised in North Carolina, and was a product of his times. Born near the end of the war in 1864, he saw first-hand the ravages of "Radical Reconstruction", and the destructive results brought about by it until it was ended by President Grant, and the reverberating echoes of that lawless time that rang out through the next several decades.
That experience made him a bitter man, but most folks these days just hang their hats on the "racist" trope, and leave it at that, never digging any deeper to find out the why of things.
So, while it IS a political film, it is mostly decried as a racist film nowadays with the revisionist history we are all being subjected to, and the politics of the matter are generally swept under the rug to hide them beneath a veneer being applied of racism.
So I am simply shocked, shocked I tell you, that it was included in a list of "political" films.
To add to it's disability, it is a silent film, and folks nowadays purely do hate having to read their films, so there is that to consider as well. Both the film, and all 3 of the novels it is based upon, can be - or at least could be at one time - found at the Internet Archive. I don't know if they still can be found there or not, given the radical changes the Archive have undergone of late.
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Whenever you mention it, anyone that has ever heard of it immediately thinks "isn't that the Stormfront's favorite movie?"... but it was here long before Stormfront was even a wet spot on their daddy's jeans.
It does have a peculiar and unconventional viewpoint, but that viewpoint was borne of having been originally written by a man who lived through Reconstruction, and remembered the abuses perpetrated therein. The original novel it is based upon is "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon, which was itself the middle novel of his "Reconstruction Trilogy". Dixon was raised in North Carolina, and was a product of his times. Born near the end of the war in 1864, he saw first-hand the ravages of "Radical Reconstruction", and the destructive results brought about by it until it was ended by President Grant, and the reverberating echoes of that lawless time that rang out through the next several decades.
That experience made him a bitter man, but most folks these days just hang their hats on the "racist" trope, and leave it at that, never digging any deeper to find out the why of things.
So, while it IS a political film, it is mostly decried as a racist film nowadays with the revisionist history we are all being subjected to, and the politics of the matter are generally swept under the rug to hide them beneath a veneer being applied of racism.
So I am simply shocked, shocked I tell you, that it was included in a list of "political" films.
To add to it's disability, it is a silent film, and folks nowadays purely do hate having to read their films, so there is that to consider as well. Both the film, and all 3 of the novels it is based upon, can be - or at least could be at one time - found at the Internet Archive. I don't know if they still can be found there or not, given the radical changes the Archive have undergone of late.
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