Oh my God. Ben Mankiewicz might have to commit Seppuku on air to demonstrate how much he wishes to virtue-signal.

Forget that the film is the seminal example of American long-form narrative film and helped to accelerate the development of the film narrative language. Forget that the film is based upon a novel written in 1905, when this country was something completely different than what it is now. Forget that the film is directed by the first of the great American directors. Forget that the film launched a fledgling industry into the stratosphere, so that pissing, moaning leftist shits like Mankiewicz could have a career on easy street.

None of that matters. Blacks were portrayed in an unflattering light and the KKK was revered as heroic in nature!! The film is RACIST, don't you understand???!!!

You watch. If Mankiewicz is involved with the intr and outro of this film, he'll be crying and moaning about it. I can't believe TCM is even airing it.

Airing at 8 PM Eastern tonight

I remember reading a magazine film critic in the 1980s, stating his opinion that in film, the only two films that matter in the progression of film are Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane. Everything else is just an emulation of them.

Haven't watched Birth of a Nation in decades, and I don't have TCM. But if y'all have never seen it, do it.

Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln follows Birth of A Nation. Excellent movie. Should be a lot of comparing the two movies from Mankiewicz.
God, I miss Robert Osborne!

Already recording it to watch later. Have to see if it has a trigger warning before it.

I believe Woodrow Wilson screened the movie in the White House. While he served a term as governor of NJ, and was President of Princeton University, I believe him to be a Virginia born Southern Democrat. The Klan was at its zenith during the Wilson presidency, with massive rallies in many northern cities.

Wilson did indeed screen the movie at the White House. He also desegregated the federal workforce, in which blacks had made great progress up to then.

I saw this movie and also Griffith's Intolerance in 1961 as a high school student, part of a silent movie festival at the local community college. Lillian Gish, who played Elsie in Birth of a Nation, and the woman who rocks the cradle of history in Intolerance, was in many movies with Griffith. She lived until 1993. Recently on X I saw a letter that Ms. Gish wrote responding to a question about how silent movies under Griffith were made. The question was: did the actors improvise, or follow a script? Here was her response: