er, and Bitzer soon embraced his approach. The rules may have declared to be impossible what Griffith was asking for; Bitzer soon helped him find ways to break the rules.
Griffith's innovations included expanding the length of his films, and one of his last Biograph productions was the first four-reeler to be produced in America, Judith of Bethulia. By the time he left Biograph, he was preparing to produce his first masterpiece, Birth of a Nation, a three-hour saga about the Civil War, released in 1915. His two greatest films, Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, were the most significant examples of his approach to filmmaking, a philosophy that led him to stretch the boundaries and break the rules continually, as part of his lifelong experiment in establishing a working aesthetic language for the new medium.
Birth of a Nation was a critical and commercial success, although its heroic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan remains extremely controversial. The story is based on Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, and is set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Henry B. Walthall stars as members of two families torn apart by the conflict.
Modern audiences often find it difficult to watch because it is frequently shown at the wrong speed and because so many of the technical innovations which thrilled audiences at the time have now become commonplace in the modern cinema. Nevertheless, when properly projected to an audience prepared to watch a full-length, silent, black and white film with sometimes racist elements, Birth of a Nation retains much of its original power. The climactic scene, in which a group of Klansmen ride to the rescue of the heroine, is still exciting to watch. However, "astounding in its time, it triggered off so many advances in film-making technique that it was rendered obsolete within a few years" (Brownlow 88). Its breathless originality was part of the reas...