A number of notable centenaries take place in 2015, among them the 100th anniversary of D.W. Griffith’s racially sectarian epic “The Birth of a Nation.” While that isn’t cause for celebration, it deserves reflection.

So consider it a bold and disconcertingly timely bit of programming that the Denver Silent Film Festival is giving audiences an opportunity to tussle with the long shadows cast by Griffith’s artistically ground-breaking, morally tarnished masterwork.

The three-hour drama set primarily in Piedmont, S.C., during and immediately after the Civil War screens Sunday and will be followed by a panel discussion, led by the festival’s artistic director and film critic Howie Movshovitz.

For a great many film historians, “The Birth of a Nation” marked the birth of Hollywood cinema. The movie premiered in Los Angeles in February 1915. The next month, President Woodrow Wilson, a son of the Confederacy who reintroduced segregation into federal agencies during his administration, screened the film at the White House.

It was the first time a movie was shown at the White House. Though his administration issued a denial, he also purportedly gave the film one of the great money quotes of all time (to the dismay of the NAACP, which was working to censor the film): “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

Eight months later, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was launched in Georgia. In the 1920s the Klan — evangelizing a doctrine of “Americanism” — grew into a nationwide organization with political might in Indiana and Michigan in the Midwest, where the Great Migration was populating cities with Southern blacks, and in the West in Oregon and Colorado. In 1925, Colorado Gov. Clarence Morley, Denver Mayor Benjamin Stapleton and a preponderance of state and city officials were affiliated with the Klan.

Griffith and screenwriter Frank E. Woods worked with novelist/playwright Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman,” adapting the latter’s vigorous racist rebuttal to the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist tome, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

When it opened, the movie was said to be far less vile than its source material. But the movie — and movies themselves — turned out to have a reach and a permanence far more potent than Dixon’s original. And though the film didn’t employ the n-word with Dixonian abandon, the reunification of whites remained the aim.

The prologue to the 1930 re-release of the film (included on the Blu-ray of the 2011 restoration) finds two Hollywood gents discussing the movie: actor Walter Huston and Griffith.

Nearby, three kids peek into the room.

“Is that D.W. Griffith?” a flaxen-haired girl sheepishly asks in the publicity-savvy set-up.

“Yes,” says the boy, who then adds knowingly, “He made ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ “

“He looks all right, doesn’t he?” the girl rejoins. Not so frightening after all might be the implication.

Yet in many ways, Griffith made the first American horror film, complete with a terrifying, brilliantly edited chase through the woods that ends in a death. The renegade Gus (played by Walter Long in blackface) pursues the youngest daughter of the film’s upstanding Cameron family.

Even if you have not seen this highly sentimentalized dirge of the South — and its trumpeting of the Ku Klux Klan — you likely know its symbolic fruit, its storehouse of racist imagery.

With apologies to Winston Churchill, history can be written — or revised and rescripted — by the vanquished, too.

“The Birth of a Nation” begins by celebrating an aristocracy — not, it’s worth noting, a democracy — and by lavishing its gaze (courtesy of talented cinematographer Billy Bitzer) on the genteel mores of the Camerons of Piedmont, S.C. Over the course of three hours, it bemoans violently, viscerally the cause of that demise: the Civil War. absolutely, but more, Reconstruction.

Columbia University history professor Eric Foner, writing in the New York Times recently in a piece titled “Why Reconstruction Matters,” mentions Griffith’s movie and provides this apt summation of the vilification of Reconstruction: “For decades, these years were widely seen as the nadir in the saga of American democracy,” he writes.

He then lists the alleged villains of that era. It might as well be a casting call for “Birth.”

There’s the “radical” congressman and abolitionist who intends to — tweaking a line from Woodrow Wilson’s “A History of the American People” — “crush the White South under the heel of the Black South.” There are buffoonish black legislators and shiftless newly freed slaves. (Thanks be to glory for the faithful house negroes.) Atop the list of infamy are the craven and leering mulattos: Stoneman’s housekeeper and paramour and his protégé, Silas Lynch.

Although the movie has many disingenuous moments — the director’s use of quasi-footnoted intertitles to anchor his “facts” stands out — Griffith came by his point of view if not honestly, psychologically.

His father, a one-time Confederate colonel and later a Kentucky legislator, died when Griffith was 10. His mother relocated the family to Louisville where she started a boarding house. It failed. A wounded and robbed aristocracy indeed. This may be part of why images of children — and intimations of lost innocence — play more than cameo roles throughout the film.

Why watch “Birth” now?

Film history types know that the Denver Silent Film Fest is offering them a rare opportunity to see the film on a big screen in all its tainted glory.

American Studies sorts will also likely understand the benefits of watching the movie with an audience. One representing a racial mix would be more than karmically satisfying.

But what about the rest of us? Three hours in the company of stereotypes — about blacks and whites — can be exhausting, dispiriting, infuriating. Given the tenor of the national conversations about the tenacity of racism, the resentments and self-justifications vented by the filmmakers cut a little too close for comfort. Not that this film should ever be comfortable.

In 2005, digital artist Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, created a visual “remix” of Griffith’s movie called “Rebirth of a Nation.” It was shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and traveled widely.

It’s worth tracking down the DVD for its critical contemporary spin. Consider viewing the original a prerequisite.

Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy

Also on the bill …

As canny a bit of programming as it is, “The Birth of a Nation” is only a sliver — a sharp one — in the Denver Silent Film Festival’s three days of screenings and events, which take place at the University of Denver.

Here are a couple more highlights:

The fest kicks off with a film perfect for the homers among you: Raoul Walsh’s 1924 adventure “The Thief of Bagdad” features East High’s own Douglas Fairbanks — OK, he was expelled — in the title role (tonight, 7:30). It ends with King Vidor’s stunning World War I film “The Big Parade.” (Sunday, 8 p.m.)

Sitting in Union Station’s waiting room, festival artistic director Howie Movshovitz begins talking tenderly about a scene from “Ménilmontant,” Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 short feature about two orphan girls who relocate to Paris.

“I’m going to tell you about a sequence but I don’t want you to write about it,” Movshovitz says. “I think it’s as beautiful and touching as anything I’ve ever seen.”

I’ve kept my promise, but it’s fair to say his description is enough to justify the price of a ticket. The movie screens along with “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City.” (Saturday at 4 p.m.)

— Lisa Kennedy

DENVER SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Narratives short and feature-length, a conversation with Career Achievement recipient Richard J. Meyer and a panel on D.W. Griffith’s vexing masterpiece “Birth of a Nation” on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. Also screening: King Vidor’s “The Big Parade”; “The Thief of Bagdad,” with Denver’s Douglas Fairbanks; and Pauline Kael’s “favorite film” “Ménilmontant.” Through April 26. At Davis Auditorium in Sturm Hall, the University of Denver, 2000 E. Asbury Ave. Three-day pass $20-$55; single tickets $5-$12 via denversilentfilmfest.org and newmantix.com/dsff