The Birth of a Nation (United Artists) (1915)

man in the world. He loves to work with raw material and see a young player blossom into the full power of poetic expression. His aim has been to produce natural acting. The old jumpy-see-sawing ot the arms and pawing of the air, mis-named pantomime, has disappeared under his watchful care. In less than six years Griffith has made screen acting a formidable rival of that seen on the legitimate stage. These developments are but details of the forward movement of the art of motion photography. The old stilted forms have passed. The motion picture artist must henceforth be capable of taking W-i! 46 PamS " He mUSt have the P° etic imagination and the technique to give expression to his dreams. With these requisites he becomes the super-artist of the new movement. This Griffith, whose vision leaps to the furtherest ends of the world of fancy—pausing here to note the smile in the eyes of Youth; then to see the shadow of sinister crime fall across the vision of unsuspecting Purity; picturing now a tear on a child’s cheek; now a nation in the throes of war, while roses bloom and pastoral scenes, such as Corot never dreamed of reproducing, form the background. These are the things that Griffith’s art show 8 as no drama of the spoken word could hope to do. A new epic force illuminates human vision and human figures alive with the instincts and purposes of life obey the will of the super-artist. This pioneer who has done so much to show the possibilities of this new art is unresponsive when it comes to his personal life. He thinks only of his work. He holds that people are interested in the deeds that men do, rather than in who the men are. We asked Mr. Griffith for a biographical sketch. He answered that he was born in Kentucky, that he grew up in a house like most boys; started out after his school ar^d college days to find his place in the world, and that since he went into the business of producing pictures he has lived most of the time under his hat. A NATION IS BORN ^MONG our fathers lived a poet-leader who dreamed a new vision of humanity—that out of / tbe conflicting interests and character of thirteen American States, stretching their territories from the frosts of the north to the tropic jungles of Florida, there could be 1 % bmlt one mi S ht y people. For eighty years this vision remained a dream—sectional¬ ism and disunity the grimmest realities of our life. Lord Cornwallis, the British Commander, had surrendered at Yorktown, Vir¬ ginia, to the allied armies of the Kingdom of France and the original thirteen States by name—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Through seventy-five years of growth and conflict these States clung to their individual sovereignty, feeling with jealous alarm the slow but resistless growth of a national spirit within the body of the Federal Union. This new being was stirred at last into conscious life by Daniel Webster’s immortal words— “LIBERTY AND UNION, ONE AND INSEPARABLE, NOW AND FOREVER!” The issue, which our fathers had not dared to face—whether the State or the Union should ulti¬ mately have supreme rule—was joined in 1861 over the problem of the Negro. The South held with passionate conviction that we were a Republic of Republics, each State free and sovereign. The North, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, held that the Union was indestructible and its sovereignty supreme. Until Lincoln s day the right of each State to peaceful secession was scarcely disputed, North or South. New England had more than once threatened to withdraw long before South Carolina in her blind rage led the way. And yet, unconsciously, the new being had grown into a living soul, and, in the mortal agony of four years of Civil War and eight years of more horrible Reconstruction, a Nation was bom. [Copyrighted 1915 ] THOMAS DIXON.