America

D. W. Griffith (1924)

Performer(s): Neil Hamilton, Erville Alderson, Carol Dempster, Lionel Barrymore.

Summary: Torn between his revolutionary political beliefs and his love for the daughter of a Virginia Tory, Nathan Holden struggles with his fellow patriots for independence. But at the crossroads of this path to freedom stands Captain Walter Butler. A murderous redcoat, Butler ravages the fledgling colonies with a band of barbaric Mohawks.

-description from the University of Vermont library catalog


I saw a bit of this movie when I was 13 years old. It was in seventh grade American History and we were studying the American Revolution. One day our teacher showed us an short film showing a battle between American and British soldiers. Every few seconds the film would pop as a repair splice went through the projector. The film had no sound and scratched-up images that flickered and had a jerky quality to them. The black-and-white color kept fading in and out but you could still see that what we were watching was a battle of some sort. I was very confused by this piece of film and wondered where it had come from since our teacher had not told us anything about it before starting the projector.

This film looked so old and was in such bad shape I thought that maybe it was actual footage of a battle from the American Revolution. I had seen photos from the American Civil War and film of World War I and World War II. I had also seen film of the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Why couldn't it be possible that I was watching a piece of film shot during the American Revolution? It looked real enough and the soldiers were wearing the right uniforms. Still, part of me knew this could not be possible but I never asked my teacher about it because I was afraid he would laugh at me. It wasn't until years later, when I saw a television program about D. W. Griffith, that I understood what I had seen that day was a clip from his movie America.