The Birth of a Nation’s Legacy: Separating Myth from Fact

Ever since scholars began seriously considering the history of film in the mid-20th century, The Birth of a Nation has maintained a spot in the film canon as the first great cinematic masterpiece. 110 years after its release, the film still stands in high regard, widely lauded for its technical achievements in film histories, film courses, and among online classic film fans. When telling the story of how cinema developed from one-minute shots of a train arriving at the station to massive Hollywood epics, The Birth of a Nation is often seen as the bridge between early experiments and modern narrative cinema.

The popular book series 1001 Movies to See Before You Die‘s entry on The Birth of a Nation is representative of the modern-day praise of Griffith’s racist screed:

With countless artistic innovations, Griffith essentially created contemporary film language… virtually every film is beholden to [The Birth of a Nation] in one way, shape, or form. Griffith introduced the use of dramatic close-ups, tracking shots, and other expressive camera movements: parallel action sequences, crosscutting, and other editing techniques, and even the first orchestral score. It’s a shame all these groundbreaking elements were attached to a story of such dubious value.

While everyone goes to painstaking lengths to denounce the obviously vitriolic racism of the film, people are still eager to continue the decades-old story that The Birth of a Nation gave birth to modern cinema. This would be fine if such lofty claims, such as shaping literally every film since 1915, were true. The problem is it’s not true at all.

To set the record straight, I’m going to detail how Griffith and his film gained an oversized reputation and outline The Birth of a Nation‘s true lasting impact on cinema.

The Birth of a Nation: A Grand Epic

When Griffith set about to make an epic that matched the scale of Italy’s recent blockbuster Cabiria in 1914, he was easily the most recognizable and lauded director in America. After directing hundreds of the industry’s most popular and critically acclaimed films at the Biograph studios uncredited, Griffith made sure the public knew he was the man behind the studio’s success. Upon leaving Biograph, Griffith put a full-page ad in The New York Dramatic Mirror, not only taking credit for directing Biograph’s important features between 1908 and 1913 but for introducing the close-up, cross-cutting, and the fade-out, among other things (erroneously, I might add).

Griffith claims he invented numerous cinematic devices

Even if he didn’t originate these techniques, there is no doubt that his talent in incorporating these developing cinematic storytelling techniques endeared him and his films to the public. With unrivaled box-office success and two feature films already under his belt, Griffith was in the rare position in the American film industry to push all his chips in and make a grand epic on a scale no American film had yet achieved.

To do just that, Griffith turned to Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel and play The Clansman. A proud son of a Confederate soldier, Griffith did not register the controversial and incendiary nature of the story’s extreme racism. (He must not have read all the newspaper stories of the violent altercations that followed Dixon’s play, leading to several banned performances in several American cities.) Instead, Griffith saw the story as box office gold: a grand American epic that allowed him to stage epic battle sequences and tell the story of how modern America rose out of the ashes of the War of Northern Aggression all on the 50th Anniversary of Lee’s surrender.

A theater production of The Clansman

As the most expensive film ever made upon its release, Griffith made sure no one would ever forget the film’s ambitious scale. When The Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 8th, 1915, the theater charged $2 for tickets (around $60 in 2025 currency), ushers dressed in Civil-War-era gowns attended to patrons, and a full symphony orchestra accompanied the film (a score commissioned specifically for the film would premiere the next month at the film’s New York premiere). This was not your typical movie-going experience, with the most expensive seats costing nearly twenty times the admission price of low-end Nickelodeon theaters of the day.

The Birth of a Nation‘s release strategy was as unique as its premiere. Unlike modern-day releases that see movies drop nationwide on the same weekend, The Birth of a Nation was only booked on a road show engagement, premiering in different cities through individual contracts between theater managers and the production company. Griffith and the film’s producers made a targeted strategy to only screen the film in the largest theaters possible, trying as best as they could to recreate the Los Angeles premiere’s pageantry and unique scale in each subsequent screening. For all of 1915, Americans could only see The Birth of a Nation in higher-class venues in metropolitan areas, further cementing the film as a grand event rather than another day at the movies.

Several rural counties had to wait four years before they could book The Birth of a Nation in their theater. Source: The Birth of a Nation: Media and Racial Hate. (July 2022) Ang, Desmond.

There’s no doubt that The Birth of a Nation was the biggest American film to date. Boasting massive sets and elaborate battle sequences, the three-hour spectacle set a new high bar for the only years-old feature film format. That’s not all that the mainstream narrative of the film’s place in history claims, however. Remember, countless artistic innovations that created contemporary film language. To sort through these hefty claims, we’ll have to dive into the films released before The Birth of a Nation.

The Art of the Nickelodeon

The conventional narrative of cinema’s blossoming from short one-reel films of trains arriving at a station to three-hour historical epics is a rather short one. For the first thirty years of projected cinema, from 1895 to 1915, there was only a small handful of films routinely discussed. Even amongst active moviegoers and cinephiles, far too many only know A Trip to the Moon, The Great Train Robbery, and The Birth of a Nation from this period. Throw in a couple of Lumiere brothers films and one or two Griffith Biograph shorts, and you’re probably not very far off from compiling a complete list of familiar titles to the average Film 101 student.

Going by this Film 101 history, it’s no wonder so many credit The Birth of a Nation with single-handedly revolutionizing cinema storytelling. The jump between Porter’s rather static ten-minute Western to Griffith’s dynamic three-hour epic is massive. Without any context of what came in the middle, it’s easy to see someone blindly accept whatever accolades are heaped upon The Birth of a Nation, no matter how easily debunked.

If you don’t believe me, here are the only six from the 1910s included in the supposedly exhaustive 1001 Movies to See Before You Die list.

Once you dive into the films made between 1903 and 1915, The Birth of a Nation becomes much less impressive. Focusing just on Griffith’s career before The Birth of a Nation clearly shows how films slowly learned the necessary tools and language to tell more complex stories.

Once you zoom out to include Griffith’s contemporaries both in America and Europe, it’s easier to see the transformation from one reel stage-bound comedies and static chase comedies to hours-long cinematic spectacles as a group effort. Griffith played a key part in elevating cinema to an art form, but he was just one piece of the puzzle.

Watching more films from the Nickelodeon era will quickly show you that the vast majority of firsts The Birth of a Nation garners were done by someone else first. Here’s a quick list of some of the more popular erroneously named firsts:

Mythbusting claims about The Birth of a Nation with video examples

Many of these overstated claims still parroted today come from those who simply haven’t watched many films from the time period. A quick Google search can refute many of these claims, while some might require you to watch a few films made before 1915. (If I see one more person tell me The Birth of a Nation was the first film at the White House, I swear to God…)

So if The Birth of a Nation isn’t really the first anything, was it at least still influential? And since it didn’t introduce all the innovations widely heaped on it, how did it become known as the first great cinematic masterpiece?

The burning of Savannah shows off Griffith’s talent at capturing stunning visual compositions.

Becoming the First Great Cinematic Masterpiece

The first reviews that came out in early 1915 universally praised the film, focusing on its large scale and impressive recreations of history. Initial reception praised it as a massive success, but no one was anointing it as a true work of art; those calls would come later.

Among the first mentions in the press of The Birth of a Nation as a groundbreaking work that demanded to be considered high art came from Griffith himself. Moving Picture World reprinted Griffith’s remarks during the film’s New York premiere intermission, stating that he hoped his film would “place pictures on a par with the spoken word as a medium for artistic expression appealing to thinking people”.

Griffith repeated similar sentiments in the film’s massive publicity campaign that cost Griffith an unheard-of $12,000 at the time. The day of its premiere in New York City on March 3^rd, 1915, a small ad in the New York Times claimed The Birth of a Nation was a “dawn of a new art which marks an epoch in the theatres of the world” a very lofty statement that would have riled up the paper’s theaters critics who still dismissed the movies as cheap entertainment.

New York Times Ad that ran the day of the film’s New York premiere

Later that year, as The Birth of a Nation reached more cities, critics began using similar language to Griffith’s praise of his own film. A column for Motion Picture Magazine’s May issue nearly quoted Griffith’s New York Times ad declaring that the film “marks an epoch in the history of Motion Pictures” while declaring that “as a spectacle, as an historical document, and as art it is unequaled”(emphasis mine).

As we’ve seen with Griffith’s over-the-top claims from his December 1913 New York Dramatic Mirror ad, Griffith was a ruthless self-promoter who wasn’t afraid to exaggerate like the best in Hollywood. His own press statements and publicity campaign made an impact and certainly helped to establish The Birth of a Nation not just as a spectacular piece of entertainment but as a dramatic shift in cinematic art.

Racist is a bit of an understatement

Griffith also had another reason to speak of his film as an art form. His racist depiction of African Americans as violent, sexually charged threats to American peace and democracy mobilized a campaign to censor or outright ban the film. (Kansas’ governor successfully barred the film from screening in the state until 1924!) Speaking of his film as an artistic leap forward for the medium of film wasn’t just a good PR stunt but served to elevate the film beyond criticism in the face of court injunctions and public protests. Proponents of the film’s white supremacist message also used art as a shield to further promote the film and protect it from falling into obscurity, even as white American views on race drastically departed from The Birth of a Nation‘s views in the mid-20th century.

The film’s reputation only grew as the years went on. With the film’s slow roll-out and its commitment to spectacle, The Birth of a Nation played continuously for nearly ten years after its release, an unheard-of feat when the majority of films were tossed away and forgotten after their first run. As the first histories of the motion picture industry were written in the 1920s and 30s, The Birth of a Nation‘s enormous returns at the box office were conflated with being the first cinematic work of art.

Perhaps most importantly, the writers and historians of the day had very little access to the films they were writing about, all too often relying on second-hand sources to compile their histories. Without an accurate survey of the films of the time period, the oversized importance of the film grew unchecked, solidifying itself as cinema’s first masterpiece.

The Birth of a Nation‘s assassination scene

The Birth of a Nation‘s True Legacy

Although The Birth of a Nation might not have single-handedly invented the basics of film grammar, it still played an unmistakable role in film history. Propelled by Griffith’s stellar reputation, the pageantry of the film’s exhibition, the record-breaking budget, and its warped but grand recreation of American history, the film’s technical merits connected with American audiences.

The artistry behind the film is among the best of its era. Griffith’s talent as a director—built upon through his years of experimenting at Biograph—shines through in The Birth of a Nation‘s energetically staged battle sequences and a sweeping epic reimagining of American history. As harrowing a watch Griffith’s racist propaganda is to us today, it is no doubt a well-constructed film that connected with audiences not deterred by its white supremacist viewpoints.

Griffith tells us all we need to know in this effective homecoming scene

I would love to be able to say that we should all forget The Birth of a Nation and that the only reason it is still talked about is because a bunch of racists propped it up for their own gain, but history doesn’t let us shy away so easily from the uncomfortable. Instead, The Birth of a Nation remains a film we’ll likely continue to discuss. Despite not being the first film to be taken seriously or the first to use such fancy narrative devices as the close-up, its huge success popularized the developing storytelling techniques that Griffith and other directors had been refining to tell complex and entertaining stories onscreen. After The Birth of a Nation‘s enormous success, no one could deny cinema’s power not just as an art form but as a cultural force that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Even if The Birth of a Nation can’t be simply relegated to the dustbin of history, we can certainly take it off its pedestal. Today, we are lucky to have hundreds, if not thousands, of 1900s and 1910s films available to us with the watch at the click of a button. We can dive into the time period and compare The Birth of a Nation with the films before it with greater ease than anyone before. Instead of making a three-hour racist epic required viewing for budding cinephiles in college film courses, we can easily tell the artistic development of film with a large collection of films from numerous filmmakers.

Left: Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913) Right: Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914)

Watch Lois Weber’s expert use of cross-cutting to create tension in her 1913 home invasion thriller Suspense. Watch the Italian historical epics like The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) and Cabiria (1914) to see massive sets, extras, and innovative camera movement. Watch Griffith’s Biograph shorts like A Corner in Wheat (1909) or The Unchanging Sea (1910) to see him experiment with close-ups, cross-cutting, and narrative pacing during his formative years.

Revisiting The Birth of a Nation within its historical context allows us to better understand both its artistry and its deep flaws. By broadening our view to include the many other groundbreaking films of the era, we can appreciate the true richness of early cinema without feeling the need to place a deeply harmful work at the center of 125 years of cinema.