The birth of an art... and a racist propaganda.

Rating: 6/10 (8 February 2015)

I watched The Birth of a Nation today, exactly one century after its original release. As a big movie fan I always considered this film to be the first real film, the first big example of cinema as an art and a form of entertainment. After watching the film, my view has been completely justified.
The film is the first ever to resemble a modern film, the first that the director is not just taking pictures and making them appear as being continuous, but is considering the artistic quality of his work with a similar way as a director of a play.The actors are starting to really act and not just posing for the camera and let the intertitles (remember,sound did not appear in films for over a decade after the film) explain the story.For the first time in film true sentiments such as love,passion and mourning are shown in a realistic way and techniques as making-up and editing a film also make their inaugural appearance. Furthermore, it is the first blockbuster,with a big production cost and much bigger box-office profit, as advertising and promoting the film was another first for the industry invented by director D.W. Griffith.
Unfortunately, on purpose or not, Griffith made another innovation. He showed how a film can be used as a propaganda tool and a way to send a message to the public,with the exact same way as the other arts do.But the message Mr.Griffith wanted to send,being a Southerner and a son of a Confederate soldier himself,was at least a despicable one,full of racism and hatred for the blacks and every man who believes in racial equality. Certainly a film director may alter history for better artistic quality, but in The Birth of a Nation the history of the US during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era is not altered; it's raped. The use of propaganda in this film is perfectly shown if you considered that it is partly responsible for the formation of an extremely dangerous Ku Klux Klan who used it for recruiting purposes as it shows the original KKK as heroic. Thus, Mr.Griffith is indirectly responsible for a great number of racial and hate crimes committed by the KKK in the next years.
In fact, I don't think there is any film in history more important for the industry as The Birth of a Nation, as techniques we now consider routine were invented by Griffith for this film. Thus, Griffith has to be given the credit of being "the father of film making" (as Charlie Chaplin described him) but his racist point of view, matched only by Nazi propaganda films 25 years later, means this film should not be held in high esteem for its content.