President Wilson and the KKK?

[migrendel]

"The Birth of a Nation", I think, is arguably the most significant film ever made, though less for its aesthetic achievement than for the fact that it introduced our modern conventions of film.  If one views films made prior to that point, they were largely set pieces, even mere apercus, and almost always of brief duration.  Though many of Griffith's earlier films like "The Lonedale Operator" and "A Corner in the Wheat" attempted to form a coherent narrative, "The Birth of a Nation" was the first film that ever really proved that a film could tell a story of literary sweep and scope.  Yes, the film reflects Southern racial attitudes of the World War I era, and yes, it often displays a troweled-on Victorian sentimentality (one intertitle reads "Bitter memories will not allow the poor bruised heart of the South to forget.").  However, there could be no modern film without this epochal work, and to condemn the fact that Wilson appreciated the sea-change at hand is simply foolish.
Despite that fact that all filmmakers since are indebted to Griffith's innovations, I cannot accept, however, that this film is the artistic equal of "Triumph of the Will", one of the greatest films ever made.  After the decline of silent film, I think, films suffered an irrevocable aesthetic decline.  Now, the emphasis of filmmaking was dramatic verisimilitude conveyed through dialogue, rather than the composition of arresting, beautiful images.  Film, which had once been an almost painterly art, now tended toward mimesis.  The most aesthetically minded filmmakers tried to circumvent this by either ignoring sound filmmaking (e.g. Carl Theodor Dreyer in "The Passion of Joan of Arc) or using it for jarring and/or comedic effect (e.g. Chaplin in "City Lights" and "Modern Times"). 
Of all early sound films, "Triumph of the Will" best maintains the tradition of visual hegemony while incorporating realistic sound.  There are mighty moments that take the breath away, like Hitler's descent from the sky, with all its implicit kinship with the symbolism of the divine.  There is the camera's almost pornographic fixation on recording every detail, every nuance, undertaken with unmistakeably erotic intent during the Hitler Youth rally scene.  Even the scene where party officials eat their meal forms a glorious cadenza, a human side to all of this monumental pageantry.
Since the obvious and necessary focus of history has been on who and what the Nazis chose to obliterate, we forget that the Nazis conversely worshipped an ideal of beauty.  Though diffuse in its canonical definitions and historical origins, the Aryan notion of beauty could, at its most potent and pure, reduce anyone to dithyrambs.  Though some critics have charged that a film undertaken with the intent of advancing a political ideology inevitably subjugates art, as a characteristically morose and dogged Susan Sontag contended, I feel that Leni Riefenstahl's ability to make fascism seductive for even those diametrically opposed to its precepts distinguishes her among the first rank of artists.  Of the other films mentioned, like "Fahrenheit 9/11", they do not possess 1/100th of Leni Riefenstahl's genius, but, to be fair, neither do almost all films.

[migrendel]

I'm sorry if I misunderstood your assessment of Fahrenheit 9/11.
However, I disagree with your argument about the Victorian sentimentality.
The fact that Griffith so extensively employed the conventions of the popular arts of his time can only be adduced to show that his aesthetic sense was not a timeless, classical one, like Riefenstahl's, but the product of social considerations that would inevitably become outmoded.  The possibilities that this raises about Griffith, namely, that he was pursuing a mass audience or he was genuinely afflicted with a quintessentially and uniquely Victorian sense of style, both indicate that he did not possess an enduring artistic vision.  To give a literary analogy, a typically Victorian writer seems very dated when compared to Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, because such writer made extensive use of melodrama as opposed to Hardy and Eliot's emphasis on psychological introspection.