D.W. Griffith
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The film recalls what President Woodrow Wilson reportedly said after screening D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: "It's like history written with lightning."
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Directed by Mel Gibson
influenced by The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Themes
As time passes and The Passion breaks box office records, there are increasing parallels between this film and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation .
Django Unchained (2012)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Themes
There’s a point in “Django Unchained” when its sheer absurdity, luridness and violence pose an inescapable challenge to the skeptical literalists in the audience: Sure, this is an outrageous distortion, the "Django Unchained" movie itself seems to say, but is it any more outrageous than “The Birth of a Nation” or “Gone With the Wind”?
In Basterds, however, Tarantino was engaged with an exhaustive canon of World War II movies, from Casablanca to Schindler's List, while the subject of Django Unchained—slavery in the American South—is one that has been conspicuously absent in Hollywood films in the century since D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.
He isn’t breaking any new ground here, as there was an entire subset of 1970s blaxploitation films set in the American West and South that dealt with slavery, but the scope of Tarantino’s ambitions and the mainstream status of his film, despite its exploitation fixations, makes his evocation of that dark chapter of American history that much more daring and dangerous (it is telling how few Hollywood filmmakers have dared to tackle this topic on screen since D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915).
Even a scene where a group of Ku Klux Klan are presented as almost endearingly goofy, in a wonderful spoof of the outrageously racist pro-Klan silent classic The Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith, 1915), the violent fate of such characters is not at all problematic due to what they represent.
The release of “Django Unchained,” and the discussion surrounding it, have brought “Birth of a Nation”—D.
One of the earliest — The Birth of A Nation (1915) — was actually pro-slavery!
In 1915, D.W. Griffith practically defined narrative moviemaking with The Birth of a Nation , which proudly celebrated the Ku Klux Klan’s reign over riotous, newly-freed slaves in America’s south.
No subject could speak more directly to the fractured racial foundation of the United States than this film does, while also bookending a century of American cinema that began when the fledgling silent-movie business was transformed by D.W. Griffith's racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation.
Frances Ha (2013)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)
You could make a season of films like that, and it would have to include Griffith and Lillian Gish (Broken Blossoms); von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich (Morocco, The Devil is a Woman); Antonioni and Monica Vitti (L’Avventura); Hawks and Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not); Capra and Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman, The Bitter Tea of General Yen); Godard and Anna Karina (Vivre Sa Vie, Pierrot le Fou); Ingmar Bergman and nearly every actress he worked with (Persona, Cries and Whispers, Summer with Monika); Hitchcock and Grace Kelly (Rear Window), and Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie); and Truffaut and Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim) and Truffaut and Catherine Deneuve (Mississippi Mermaid).
Triumph of the Will (1935)
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
influenced by The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Themes
My reaction watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was similar to that of D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation.
The first was D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” and the second was Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.”
The Visit (2015)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
influenced by Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)
She has a creepy resemblance to Lillian Gish, an actor most famous for her silent cinema performances in D.W. Griffith films like Broken Blossoms and Birth of a Nation.
Cinematography and lighting have certainly evolved greatly since early Hollywood, but the basics of how one shoots a scene, at least in mainstream pictures, has long since been set in stone, and more importantly, the continuity-based editing techniques used to put it all together are fundamentally identical today as they were in 1915, when D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation pioneered and solidified many feature editing practices.
One is D.W. Griffith's 1915 classic "The Birth of a Nation."
She and her friend kept up a running patter along the lines of “No! Don’t go in there!” and “Run, bitch, run!” while periodically clutching each other like the Gish sisters in Orphans of the Storm.
What’s most intriguing about Scorsese’s glass of water is that it’s capable of allowing in films from the traditional cinema, such as those of Méliès or Safety Last , without infecting them with its bug of digi-artifice: Harold Lloyd dangling precariously above the streets from the hand of a clock remains terrifying, while the same stunt repeated later by Asa Butterfield is nothing more than an exercise in 1’s and 0’s, just as the constant digital snow and breath can never make one think of the cold (compare, for example, with the ice floes of Way Down East ).
Cloud Atlas (2012)
Directed by Lana Wachowski
influenced by Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)
Visuals
(A tactic Cloud Atlas, to name Intolerance’s most recent disciple, might have benefitted from doing.)
It was one of a handful of productions of the time that, alongside the Italian film Cabiria (1914), experimented with long-form storytelling.