25- The Birth of a Nation: Part II Artwork

The History of Film

A (mostly) chronological exploration of international film history. Each episode is a deep dive into the history of the people, events, technologies, cultural forces, and most all the movies that have molded cinema into what it is today! Join host Jacob Aschieris and other listeners for an in depth, thoughtful listening experience, and learn why no story ever written for the screen is as dramatic as the story of the screen itself!

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The History of Film

25- The Birth of a Nation: Part II

September 28, 2021 • Jacob Aschieris

When I write these, I never know just how long they will be. As it turns out, talking about a film that has had a huge impact on the development of film history, and made the world so much worse, is taking a lot of words. So, this is the second of what I hope to be three episodes of The Birth of a Nation. In this episode, we describe the plot of the movie in detail (though I still skipped a couple of things here and there for the sake of brevity, believe it or not), and talk about how the ideas present in the story interact with each other.

The clip I play toward the end is from the 1993 Documentary D. W. Griffith: The Father of Film, directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill.

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