Tonight I watched a 1915 movie entitled
The Birth of a Nation:
Early in the video, it was stated that the movie was based on the book
The Clansman by Thomas Dixon. When I did a search for the book on Amazon, I discovered the Kindle version (http://www.amazon.com/Clansman-Historical-Romance-Klux-Klan-ebook/dp/B004UJUAH0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1435380944&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Clansman) was available free of charge.
Enjoy!
I'm working on posting up notes about my "Library of Silence" over in the Movie, Music, TV category; and while I'm nowhere near getting to this film yet, I've been writing notes to post on the short films Griffiths made in 1910 and 1911 based in the Civil War.
That movie is three effing hours long?
You will feel every single minute, too. :P
It's an important movie for many reasons, not all of them good, but I quit well before the end when I watched it last year, not for the offensive thematic subject matter (which comes and goes, until the end anyway) so much as just being unable to adjust back to the expectations of the day.
But yeah, I was surprised when building my silents collection at how many of those films are practically modern in being monstrous in size. Except that instead of watching The Return of the King you're watching, well... this.
Which could be worse, because thematic faults aside (some of which, to be as fair as possible, were just part of the background assumptions of the period), Griffiths was a filmic genius years ahead of his time in many ways. Other epic silents, not so much.
Griffiths' next movie (and effectively his last one, trying to recoup from the disastrous public relations debacle), is much better, and also quite insane in its own way, and was the greatest of the early silent financial disasters: Intolerance. If I recall correctly, it runs longer than 3 hours. More than half the film could be, and eventually was (to try to recoup lost studio money on the original), cut down into two completely separate feature length films -- and that's only two of the four stories it jumps between (though the other two aren't nearly as long and worked-out, which is why they didn't get their own separate feature edits.)
Anyone ever play L. A. Noir? As you're driving around post-WW2 Los Angeles, one of the landmarks (where part of the story occasionally takes place, too) is part of the remaining, decaying set from Intolerance, if I recall correctly.