Page "History of film" Paragraph 118

The biggest success of these years was D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation ( 1915 ), made for Triangle.

Griffith applied all the ideas for film staging that he had worked out in his Biograph films to a bigoted white southerner's epic view of the Civil War and its aftermath.

Despite protests in the northern cities of the United States organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others, it took many millions at the box office.

Stung by the criticism of his film, Griffith made a new film he had just finished, The Mother and the Law, into one of the strands of an even bigger film with an even bigger theme, Intolerance ( 1916 ).