ABSTRACT
Movies began as a novelty, one of the many technological inventions of the 19th century, though, at the time, not seen as important as the railroad, the telegraph, photography, or the electric light bulb. Electoral politics entered almost immediately into the catalogue of early films. In 1896, William McKinley, soon to become the 25th President of the United States, was filmed in a very short movie, walking with an aide across the lawn of his house to receive a piece of paper from another man. D. W. Griffith’s Corner in Wheat represents a strain of populism that runs strongly through American and European politics, and it is worth examining before we get to The Birth of a Nation. It takes a great deal of self-confidence to make a film with the same name as one of the monuments in the history of American cinema.
