J. Hoberman writes:

What did Griffith bring into the world? Imagine an unholy combination of The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie as violent and sentimental as Saving Private Ryan and as tricksy as Forrest Gump, landing with the force of Titanic in the nickelodeon universe of 1915, where the typical attraction was 20 minutes long. Griffith’s blockbuster, a three-hour account of the Civil War and Reconstruction adapted from a popular melodrama by Thomas Dixon, was the longest, costliest and most spectacular American movie to date. The screen had never been filled with so many actors and so much action; battle scenes had never been so vivid; and the past had never been represented with such immediacy.

(LRB 12 February 2009)

Oxford | hardback 414 pp. |ISBN: 9780195336795