The Birth of a Sequel

In February 1915, director DW Griffith released his Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation, "founded on" the novel The Clansman by Thomas F Dixon. The film was hailed as a cinematic masterpiece, and decried as a racist travesty. It was also key to the revival of the then-dormant Ku Klux Klan. Of the two men behind the film, DW Griffith is still regarded as a master of his art, while Thomas Dixon conspicuously lacks in defenders. In 1916, Dixon began work on the first movie sequel, The Fall of a Nation. Focusing on the imagined production of this "lost film", my novel interrogates the notion of what art might be worth, when a great "masterpiece" also propagates hate and incites violence.