A "deeply ecstatic film...possibly the most searching discourse on film language that any filmmaker has yet attempted," is what Tony Rayns in Time Out wrote of Wyborny's kinetic two-part feature. The first section begins with the title situating the action in a specific place (not the U.S.) and time (1911, three years before Griffith made his epic with the same title). What proceeds is an anecdotal, elliptical narrative about men in a desert (Greed, 1924, deliberately comes to mind) trying to make some social order. In the second half, the plot collapses (or rather explodes) into colored air as the shots that more or less constitute the film's first half rather deliriously obliterate their content through optical transformation and repetition while rather proudly proclaiming the beauty of what these shots really are-emulsion and base. The film that begins as a narrative ends as a lyric to the birth not of a nation but of the cinema. The Museum of Modern Art