A FILM SPECTACLE

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2857, 23 August 1916, Page 3

A FILM SPECTACLE

"THE BIRTH OF A NATION." In the main Town Hall, commencing on Tuesday evoning next, J. C. Williamcoil, Ltd., will present tho motion picture, "The Birth of a Nation," founded on the Rev. Thomas Dixon's famous novel, "The Clansman." This human achievement of genius is put before the public in such a manner, it is claimed, Ihnt it reduces to something vory small the biggest things tho theatre has or can do. Tliero are hundreds of scenes in place of four or five, thousands of actors in place of a score, armies in landscape instead of squads of supers jostling on a platform among canvas screens. Hero will bo seen the evolution of a people, tho living chronicle of a conliict of statesmen, a civil war, a racial problem rising gradually to a puzzle ynt unsolved. Embodied in the picture are social pictures without number, short stories, adventures, romances, tragedies, farces, domestic comedies. In this motion picture a wholo art gallery of scenery, of humanity, of still lifo and lifo in wildest career is promised. Also portraits of things, of furniture, of street", homes, wildernesses; pictures of conventions, cabinets, senates, mobs, armies; pictures of family lifo, of festivals and funerals, ballrooms and battlefields, hospitals and flower gardens, hypocrisy and passion, ocstacy and pathos, pride and humiliation, rapture and jealousy, flirtation and anguish, devotion and triilfthcry, selfsacrilico and tyranny. The Southrons are shown in their wealth, with their luxury at home, their wind-swept cottonfields. The soldiers aro seen riding away to war, and tlio soldiers trudging homo defeated, with poverty ahead of them and new and ghastly ditbcnltics arising on every hand. In "The Birth of a Nation" the pictures are shifted with unending variety from huge canvasses to exquisite miniatures. In short, the film as it uncoils is said to pour forth beauty of scene, and face and expression, beauty of fabric, and attitude, and motion. However, the true greatness of this production is claimed to lio io its emotional appeal, an appeal so forceful that, it thrills. The box plans for the entire season will be opened at tho Bristol on Friday morning next. There will bo no extra charge for booking.