So everything I’ve read and heard about D.W. Griffith holds that he was an unmitigated genius who did more for the art of cinema than anyone has ever done for anything ever, and other such superlatives. Oh, and he was also mind-blowingly racist.
Honest critique is supposed to separate the art from the artist and judge it on its own merits. Take Roman Polanski, for example. He drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, then fled the country to avoid sentencing. And yet he’s one of the world’s greatest directors.
I think the main difference between the two is that Griffith’s most famous film is explicitly racist, whereas to my knowledge Polanski never made any movies about drugging and raping underage girls. This is why The Birth of a Nation is so much more difficult to watch than Rosemary’s Baby or The Pianist. Polanski’s movies are so engrossing that you forget about his fucked up life (holocaust survivor, pregnant wife murdered by Charles Manson, the aforementioned criminal trouble) . On the other hand, it’s hard to brush aside Griffith’s racism when you see the Ku Klux Klan riding in to rescue the poor white girls from a horde of marauding Negroes.
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