In this episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast, we take on Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s silent epic that is both a landmark in cinematic technique and one of the most poisonous works ever put on screen.

At first glance, it’s a three‑hour saga about the Civil War and Reconstruction. For decades it was praised for inventing the grammar of film—cross‑cutting, parallel montage, sweeping camera moves. But what keeps it relevant, and what makes it so disturbing, is how it uses those tools to glorify white supremacy and reframe racial terror as heroism.

The film is built on myths: the “happy” plantation, the noble South betrayed by progress, and above all, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as America’s saviors. Black characters are almost entirely played by white actors in blackface, and the plot warns of a fabricated danger—the Black man as predator threatening white purity—while celebrating vigilante violence as righteous.

As we say on the podcast, “this isn’t a film that happens to be kind of racist. This is white‑supremacist propaganda that also happened to do some interesting things cinematically.” Watching today, it’s hard not to see the ways it anticipates fascist propaganda: the cult of tradition, fear of difference, action without deliberation, and the idea that terror can be redemptive. The Klan’s ride to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is as much a spectacle of ideology as it is of editing.

The film ignited a nationwide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, shaped public memory of Reconstruction, and even screened at the White House. Its images helped rewrite history to justify new laws, new segregation, and new violence.

What makes Birth of a Nation impossible to ignore is how it demonstrates cinema’s power to build seductive lies. We look at the film now not to admire Griffith’s craft, but to understand how technique can be fused with myth to terrifying effect. In a country where segregation and racial terror were already real, this movie gave them a heroic narrative, and audiences embraced it.