NATION follows two families over the course of the War and its aftermath, The Stonemans of the North, and the Camerons of the South. The families are friends until they are forced to fight against one another in the war. Aesthetically, Griffith’s astounding war reproductions are NATION’s most memorable; the image of Col. Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) plunging a tattered Confederate flag into a Union cannon remains one of the most famous of cinema from the first half of the twentieth century. Griffith’s reproduction of Lincoln’s assassination is also impressive in its attention to historical detail.

These elements all take place in Part I of the film, and sometimes it is only this section of film that is screened for students, for it is in Part II where historical accuracy and tales of selfless heroism are placed aside to make room for stories of horrific racial stereotypes, white paranoia about blacks, and a valorization of the Klu Klux Klan that would make Adolf Hitler blush. Showing the first half of the film without the second allows you to appreciate its technical achievements without having to subject yourselves to the insane second portion, but by separating you run the risk of glossing over and forgetting its existence, and that’s a real danger. We can celebrate Griffith’s importance in the area of crosscutting and development of the feature as the standard form of narrative cinema, but we should not be allowed to forget the fact that the man not only feared and hated African-Americans, he continued to claim throughout his life that his film was an accurate representation of that period of American history.

His “accurate” representation suggests that all African-Americans are lecherous lazy fools, looking to wrest control of our country from whites so they can drink and chase after white women. In one infamous scene, a black character (In reality, a white man in black face) chases one of the white women through a forest after she rebuffs his sexual advance. Rather than give herself over to him, she flings herself off a cliff, committing suicide, and preserving her purity or some such nonsense. It is clear that Griffith’s racism comes from a place of paranoia; fear of losing control of government, of women, perhaps of retribution for the atrocities committed against a people for a couple of centuries, but the depths to which he will sink to degrade an entire race of people is mind-boggling.

I’m not advocating we destroy THE BIRTH OF A NATION or we put in a box so that people can’t see it, merely that when we watch it we don’t avoid or hide the racism, we face it and don’t excuse Griffith’s ignorance because of his technological brilliance. We can admire its accomplishments, but we should not be allowed to forget its mistakes.