100-Years-Lost Film Found at Cinémathèque Française -- April 1, 2023

New York Evening World, 27-February-1915

In 1915, pioneer director D. W. Griffith released an epic film entitled The Birth of a Nation. It was a US Civil War film based on two novels by white supremacist clergyman Thomas Dixon. Audiences were impressed by the dynamism of the battle scenes in the first half of the motion picture but were disgusted by the overt racism of the depiction of Reconstruction and African Americans during the second half. 

Social justice organizations like the NAACP and the United Daughters of the Confederacy pushed for the film to be banned. They succeeded in most jurisdictions, and all prints and negatives of the vile film were thought to have been destroyed by 1918 or 1919. 

The financial and moral failure of the film led to the early end of Griffith's once-promising career.

Finding an intact print of the thought-to-be-lost film in 2023 in the Cinémathèque Française has caused mixed feelings for film historians and civil rights activists. The only public showing of the film so far led to large scale, peaceful protests in New York City.