The first movie screened before the president in the White House was DW Griffiths’ silent The Birth of a Nation, now seen as outrageously racist, with white actors in blackface and a heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. But back in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson loved the film: “Like writing history with lightning,” he said of the new art of cinema.
A hundred years later, President Barack Obama invited the director Ava DuVernay to screen her Oscar-nominated drama Selma in the White House family theatre. The first family sat down on January 16 for popcorn with the film’s cast, including Oprah Winfrey and the rapper Common, and watched the British actor David Oyelowo’s astonishing performance as Martin Luther King Jr. History was being