Can one film be a technical landmark and racist propaganda at once?

Yes: critics and historians describe it as both. The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith, is described as a landmark of film history, lauded for its technical virtuosity. Reviewing it, Jonathan Kline wrote that Griffith introduced dramatic close-ups, tracking shots, expressive camera movements, parallel action and crosscutting. The critic Richard Corliss went further, saying Griffith, more than anyone else, invented the film art.

The same film portrays its black characters, many of them played by white actors in blackface, as unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women, and it portrays the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist hate group, as a heroic force. The historian John Hope Franklin wrote that its picture of Reconstruction is not supported by the facts. It was adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novel The Clansman, and Dixon wrote that every man who comes out of the theater is a Southern partisan for life.

Historians and economists link it to harm beyond the screen. In November 1915 the Klan was revived with a cross burning at Stone Mountain, Georgia, and Franklin observed that without the film the Klan might not have been reborn. A 2023 study in the American Economic Review found that roadshow screenings of the film were associated with a sharp spike in lynchings and race riots between 1915 and 1920.

Critics have tried to name both facts at once. Roger Ebert called it a great film that argues for evil, and said that understanding how it does so teaches a great deal about film. Richard Brody put it more sharply: the worst thing about it is how good it is.