New Opening Titles On Re-release
One famous part of the film was added by Griffith only on the second run of the film and is missing from most online versions of the film (presumably taken from first run prints.)
These are the second and third of three opening title cards which defend the film. The added titles read:
A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE: We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue – the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word – that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare
and
If in this work we have conveyed to the mind the ravages of war to the end that war may be held in abhorrence, this effort will not have been in vain.
Various film historians have expressed a range of views about these titles. To Nicholas Andrew Miller, this shows that "Griffith's greatest achievement in The Birth of Nation was that he brought the cinema's capacity for spectacle...under the rein of an outdated by comfortably literary form of historical narrative. Griffith's models...are not the pioneers of film spectacle...but the giants of literary narrative." On the other hand, S. Kittrell Rushing complains about Griffith's "didactic" title-cards, while Stanley Corkin complains that Griffith "masks his idea of fact in the rhetoric of high art and free expression" and creates film which "erodes the very ideal" of "liberty" which he asserts.
Read more about this topic: The Birth Of A Nation
Famous quotes containing the words opening and/or titles:
“The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)