If you are a student of history or a student of film, this film is definitely a must see, but I would suggest that you come at this movie from the proper perspective. From a film history standpoint, the film was responsible for defining many of the visual and story elements that are standard even today. From a historical standpoint, it is fascinating, but not as a study of the American Civil War. The historical fascination of this movie lies in its perspective, in 1915, of a war that was not very distant for the people alive at the time. It most certainly takes a controversial viewpoint of the Ku Klux Klan and the reconstruction of the south, but it is important to keep in mind, that this film was made a mere 50 years after the events portrayed in the film and many of the beliefs and ideals of the period depicted in the movie were still alive and well amongst people who had lived through the war themselves. As I write this, we are 94 years removed from this film, 144 years removed from the American Civil War, and I recently helped elect America’s first African-American President. Birth of a Nation, indeed.

I hated this movie, because I was the younger of two brothers, and all the younger of two brothers get killed. Boooooooo!

Of course the older borthers make jackasses of themselves. Yaaaay!

Now about the controversy. I think content is 95% of what makes a movie great, and the content is not good. The pioneering techniques were important, yes, but it is the story and characters that are important to me, so a big thumbs down.

See it to help better understand how a silent movie could prove just as watchable and gripping as its counterparts with sound are. Watch it to see early uses of now common film techniques (like a shot where most of the screen is black and you only see an image through a circle in the middle to indicate the character is looking through a telescope).

Yes this movie is controversial with good reason. You almost have two separate films here: the first section is a pretty straightforward treatment of the Civil War itself with a bias toward how Southerners may have viewed it, the second section becomes almost a recruiting film for the Ku Klux Klan. Some will argue you shouldn’t see movies like this because they engender hate and I suppose if you’re not prone to thinking through arguments to their logical conclusion that may be the case. However, the thinking man or woman will be able to see the arguments presented and realize the inherent flaws in “white power” thinking.

One good example is that many of the scenes paint blacks as shiftless and ignorant (Griffith has one of the “faithful servants” deride a freed Northern black as a ‘crazy nigger’ and the actors portraying them tend to be stooped over a bit as though they’re primitive and apelike. But the mulatto Reconstruction leader Lynch is portrayed as scheming and power-hungry, concocting plans to bolster his power, outsmart the white man who put him in the position, and marry that same man’s sister. You cannot logically argue “all blacks are stupid” and turn around and say “all blacks are scheming”: to be ‘stupid’ is to be incapable of the types of plotting Lynch is shown engaged in. You can’t have it both ways.

In the end, this film is illustrative of all the flaws in racism and I would argue has the OPPOSITE effect of what Griffith wants. I know it was impossible for me not to see that the color of white Southerner “little Colonel” Stoneman’s skin was essentially the same as his supposed inferior Lynch. Another plus is some editions of the film feature “Birth of a Race”, a movie made by black filmmakers to counter the racist dogma present in “Birth of a Nation”.