Birth of a Nation theatrical poster.

“It is like writing history with lightning.  And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

– President Woodrow Wilson.

Despite its controversial historical and ideological perspectives, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) is technically one of the greatest motion pictures of all time.  It was the first movie screened in the White House and is one of my favourite films, second perhaps to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).