Release Year: 1915

Genre: Drama, War

Director: D.W. Griffith

Writer: D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods

Stars: Henry B. Walthall, Lilian Gish, George Siegmann

Think of SNL's "The Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started A Conversation With At A Party." You know: the kind of person who uses words like "inexusative," says "read it on the TV," messes up pretty much every fact that can be possibly be messed up, and goes on for way. too. long.

Now think of the most virulent, disgusting racist imaginable. Now think of their possible child.

That will get the human embodiment of The Birth of a Nation...a movie that has been called maybe the most racist film ever made.

If you want to turn away from this spectacle of horrific bigotry, now's the time. But know this—The Birth of a Nation is also a legitimately ground-breaking film. For all of the (many, many, many) valid criticisms we can make about the film's racism and rampant historical revisionism, we can't deny that it's one of the most important movies of all time.

Released in 1915, The Birth of a Nation was met with simultaneous raves and outcry. Proponents of the film saw it as a historical epic that told the story about the relationship between the South and North in America. Opponents saw it as a load of blatantly historically false, painfully and dangerously racist hogwash. (Psst: the opponents were right.)

But if there's anything we've learned about controversy, is that it gets peoples' attention.

Although it's tough to get exact box office figures from so long ago, the film made a boatload of money. This was only the second full-length feature film directed by D.W. Griffith, but its success would catapult him into fame (or infamy, depending on how you look at it). This feat is particularly impressive because Griffith was intimately involved in every aspect of the film, from directing to writing to producing.

The film itself is an account of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed. It follows two families—the Camerons from the South and the Stonemans from the North—as they struggle to make sense of this conflict and redefine their sense of the world in its wake. That all sounds well and good...but the movie also happens to extol the virtues of a certain white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact, the film even led to a revival of the Klan, which had died out forty years prior. While this is disturbing for obvious reasons, it reveals two important things. First—The Birth of a Nation is an incredibly effective piece of propaganda. And second—movies can be powerful. They might not always be powerful in a positive way, but they can truly change the course of history.

And that's exactly why The Birth of a Nation is worth studying.

Yes, it's vile, racist, and inflammatory. Yes, it takes a collage-art approach to history. But to study cinema without studying The Birth of a Nation would be to deny yourself front-row seats to the beginning of a lot of cinematic tropes...and the twisted, horrific way that some people in 1915 viewed American history.

Look, we're not even going to try and sugarcoat this. The Birth of a Nation is a super-difficult film to study. The movie's value system is repugnant: it portrays a violent group of racist terrorists like heroes. It's routinely called the most racist movie ever made (which is not a fun, high school yearbook-type superlative). After seeing the disgusting moral content of the film, it might be tempting to shut off the movie and never watch it again. 

But that's the exact reason why you should take a closer look at The Birth of a Nation.

After all, The Birth of a Nation is one of the highest-grossing films of all-time when adjusted for inflation, and it's widely considered the first "blockbuster." What does that say about the entirefilm industry? What does that say about American society at large? What does it say about the perspective of individual Americans? 

These questions are a heavy as an elephant made out of lead...but there's no hope of answering them unless we study this film.

They say that if you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. (Just ask famed philosopher George Santayana.) And judging by the fact that racism still exists in a huge way in America, we're going to go ahead and say that we're still kind of repeating it.

The same racist bile you see in The Birth of a Nation is still being spewed in the gloomy recesses of internet forums today. The Ku Klux Klan is still active—in fact, there were between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2014. Interracial marriages are still being met with hatred. The list of ways in which bigotry is alive and well goes on and on. And on. And on some more.

To watch this film is to confront, head-on, some of the most shameful aspects of American society. Yeah, it'll make your skin crawl and your stomach churn. But it will also prop your eyes wide open—both to the past and the present. Get your historical knowledge down...so you can work to break its cyclical nature.