Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. D.W. Griffith has been reduced by his critics to a “yes, but …” sentence. Was the native Kentuckian a ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. After the deeply divisive reception of "The Birth of a Nation," director D.W. Griffith released "Broken Blossoms," in which a ...

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is inarguably one of the landmarks of American cinema. The distillation of the storytelling techniques, editing ideas, framing and visual composition, and nuanced ...

This scene from D.W. Griffith's 1915 “Birth of a Nation” romanticizes the Ku Klux Klan and illustrates racism in the United States during the film's time period ...

Prior to his premature death at age 45 in 1955, James Agee was our most artful composer of film criticism, and what he recommended, one would do well to check out. It might seem quaint now, but Agee ...