Whatever role DW Griffith may have played in bringing a racist film to the screen, the root of much of the bigotry can be located in his source material, a racist text called The Clansman, written by Thomas Dixon Jr.

McEwan sees the underlying story as deeply flawed. “The film argues that giving black people rights was a terrible, terrible error, that they did all sorts of horrible things that actually they didn’t do, and that the noble Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was this wonderful saviour that saved America,” he says. “It couldn’t be any more wrong.”

The film is credited with reviving the racist KKK, who adopted it as a recruitment tool. “The Ku Klux Klan had been kind of a dead organisation by 1915, but when the film [came out and became a hit] the KKK was refounded, capitalised on [the film’s success] and in the 1920s became a massive organisation at the peak of nativist fervour in the United States,” says Paul McEwan.

“It [also inaugurated] the use of certain kinds of racial stereotypes which then became repeated again and again, right up until the 1960s and even beyond,” says Rice. As a case in point he cites a particular moment in the film that showed black lawmakers in South Carolina “as certain bestial simians eating fried chicken and bananas, leering at white women in the galleries”.

But the film’s racism was heightened because critics and film historians have judged it to be so brilliant in its use of cinematic techniques. “I don’t think we would remember this film as we do had it not been for the way [Griffith] uses parallel editing and shows us the KKK [rushing] in to save [the heroine], on horseback no less,” Ellen Scott says. “And he cross-cuts that image with the image of [a] black man attacking various people. So we have these two images cut together and in some sense the suspense that creates is the main impact of the film. I think that the film’s techniques were woven in with the film’s racist power.”

Art out of atrocity?

The prevailing view is that the film’s racism doesn’t ultimately detract from its technical and artistic prowess.

“It absolutely does not,” says White. “There are many works of art that have elements of them that people may find objectionable. It doesn’t necessarily change their aesthetic value, or doesn’t necessarily change the imagination or intelligence in them,” he says. “The racist paradoxes of The Birth of a Nation [are ones] we have to live with, but we’re only fooling ourselves if we deny [the film’s] greatness.”