sit it through again and take another hour.  There is not a good film in the world but is the better for being seen in immediate succession to itself.  Six-reel programmes are a weariness to the flesh.  The best of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith contained more in twenty minutes than these ambitious incontinent six-reel displays give us in two hours.  It would pay a manager to hang out a sign:  “This show is only twenty minutes long, but it is Griffith’s great film ‘The Battle.’”

But I am digressing.  To continue the contrast between private passion in the theatre and crowd-passion in the photoplay, let us turn to Shaw again.  Consider his illustration of Iago, Othello, and Lear.  These parts, as he implies, would fall flat in motion pictures.  The minor situations of dramatic intensity might in many cases be built up.  The crisis would inevitably fail.  Iago and Othello and Lear, whatever their offices in their governments, are essentially private persons, individuals in extremis.  If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect afterward that it was a fight between only two or three men in a room otherwise empty, stop to analyze what they stood for.  They were probably representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other earlier in the film.  Otherwise the conflict, however violent, appealed mainly to the sense of speed.

So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff.  Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann).  The lady is brought forward as a typical helpless white maiden.  The white leader, Col.  Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara.  He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed.  The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes.  As a result this rescue is a real climax, something the photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve.

The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense.  On the films, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s poisonous hatred of the negro.

Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors.  Wherever the scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad.  Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good.  The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree:  in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character.