[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] By one way of reckoning, week of February 8, 2015, can be called 100th birthday of medium with which many of I us have spent our lives enthralled: feature film. But nation didn't see any parades, fireworks, grand speeches, or other shows of celebration. That's because film that premiered at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915, was D. W. Griffith's The Clansman, soon to be retitled The Birth of a Nation--the most virulently racist major movie ever released in United States. Of course, definitions of such landmark dates can be debated. (Thanks to a vigorous campaign by French, many people think motion pictures were first publicly projected in Paris by Lumiere brothers in December of 1895, when in fact this was accomplished in New York by a former Confederate artillery officer named Woodville Latham seven months earlier.) (1) But three-hour Birth of a Nation had a profound dual impact: aesthetically, it synthesized various cinematic storytelling devices that had been created until that time into a grand whole that many saw as announcing arrival of a full-fledged art form; commercially, it performed so spectacularly in road-show engagements across country as to effectively propel industry from era of storefront nickelodeons mainly serving working-class crowds toward that of stand-alone movie palaces aimed at middle-class viewers. In a real sense, Hollywood itself was constructed on foundations laid down by Birth, which is sometimes still reckoned most commercially successful movie ever released. It's also frequently awarded a superlative that appears on cover of an excellent recent study, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, by historian Melvyn Stokes: the most controversial motion picture of all time. To be sure, The Birth of a Nation was controversial on its first release, and it has remained so ever since. What's stunning now, though, is how completely uncontroversial it was to almost all white Americans in 1915. In a tale that sentimentally embraces both Confederate and Union forces in its account of Civil War, then blames South's Reconstruction woes on a combination of vicious northern politicians, scheming mulattos and scalawags, and African Americans fumbling with levers of democracy, film celebrates Ku Klux Klan as heroes who saved white South from ruination. This all reads as howlingly ahistorical now, but then it perfectly articulated a widely embraced doctrine that has a name: white supremacy. It's tempting to say that this is what (white) audiences were cheering wildly from coast to coast in 1915, with very few dissenters on their side of color line. But in reality, they were also swept away by audiovisual onslaught that Griffith constructed. Though Birth's publicists erroneously credited him with inventing many of movie's stylistic techniques (iris shots, close-ups, parallel action, etc.), there's no questioning that Griffith, who'd made some 450 mainly short movies since he began directing in 1908, not only understood better than any other film- maker of day how to orchestrate these techniques to serve a unified, compelling end, but also was first to demonstrate their potential for creating long-form films that could keep viewers in frenzied fascination for hours. It's almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like for viewers to encounter Birth in 1915. Many would have never seen any movie before; only a few would have seen one longer than twenty minutes; and no one had seen anything with visual dynamism, emotional power, and spectacular sweep of this one. Among its innovations, Birth owed much of its impact--ironically, for a silent film--to being first feature-length film with a score written specifically for it and performed by a live orchestra, along with a battery of backstage sound effects. …