One of the most notorious and important films ever made, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation shocks audiences with its blatant racism yet remains one of the defining films of the silent era.  Griffith's film not only serves as the model for the modern film narrative, it showed the potential of cross-cutting, close-ups, classical framing and other cinematic devices that have long since been taken for granted.  Separating the vitriolic content from its impressive style and historical importance is difficult because these techniques are used artistically to support its values, which ironically is another reason it is so groundbreaking.  The visual patterns used throughout show the traditional dominant institutions (family, government, and community) in classical compositions, the bastions of conservatism and representations of the foundation of the South's Aryan dominated society.  Threats to this way of life are considered dangerous, bringing upheaval to the communities and rupturing the harmony of Griffith's visual order.

One of the film's major goals was to present war as destructive, yet in Birth it comes across not as abhorrent in itself, but undesirable because it challenges the moral code the South has built upon for 100 years.  The North, like the progressive blacks and women of the film, bring choas when they don't fall in line with the social norms set up by the Aryan male leaders.  When these intrusions are shown, the pace of the action speeds up, characters move about with no sense of space or direction, and the environment loses the feelings of peace and harmony shown in the early sequences.  Blacks and females who contribute to upholding the traditional social structure are given a pseudo-heroic quality where their humility is equated with honor and respect.  Take for instance the slave who remarks how crazy the free blacks in the North are or the supportive women who stay at home sewing flags or outfits for the KKK.  Their sense of duty and acceptance of their place in the world dominated by the white male keeps the home and family unit in tact while the men unify the outside world by ensuring conformity and the defeat of any attempts to infringe upon, what they see as, the natural order.

As a historical document, it's important to recognize that Griffith's sentiments were sincere and his views were meant to come across as humane as well as in support of the traditons the South upheld.  But whether he constructed the film to be vehemently racist or not, the second half of the film comes across as little more than a complete justification for the existence of the Ku Klux Klan.  The advances it made in the artistry of cinema and the financial possibilities of feature-length narrative films make it possible to be seen as both a great and terrible work of art.  Structurally and stylistically, it is years ahead of its time, yet despite it being 90 years old, it must be held accountable for being constructed atop a foundation of hatred and intolerance.  Soon after its release, Griffith was shocked to learn audiences reaction to its racist nature and in 1916 released a similarly epic creation, Intolerance.  With a more complex narrative structure incorporating the negative effects of intolerance in four time periods, it is easier to appreciate from both a moral and artistic perspective but because it built on the advances he made in Birth of a Nation, it is only the little brother of the film that gave birth to modern film.