Widely hailed as a masterpiece of silent cinema and widely denounced as the most racist film in Hollywood history, this D.W.Griffith's epic Civil War drama will retain its power to create divisive controversies for centuries to come. One of very few films to present the life in the Deep South from a white suprematist point of view, it's also a rare pre-60's film, where Blacks aren't just simple servants or happy-go-lucky handymen. Here, they are a group of well motivated, properly organized and dangerous villains - people to be reckoned with! A case could be made that such portrayal is actually less offensive than the horribly patronizing representation of African-Americans in countless other Hollywood movies. Nevertheless, the enormous popularity of the film had a disastrous side-effect of reviving Ku-Klux-Klan activities in the early 20's.
