Answer:
The Birth of a Nation is an American film from 1915, directed by D. W. Griffith. It is, due to its technique, one of the most famous of the silent film era, with technical advances not used until those times that made the film a remarkable progress in terms of the still young cinematography. However, the film has been one of the most controversial because its argument openly promotes racism, clearly supports the supremacy of the white race and describes in its scenes the supposed heroism of the members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Explanation:
Although from a technical point of view the film was admirable in its time, the same can not be said from a moral point of view, since African-Americans were treated in a derogatory way in it, to the point that Griffith justifies the creation of the Ku Klux Klan as a method of containing the alleged outrages that the black population perpetrated in the southern United States. Criticism towards D. W. Griffith was a reason for the same filmmaker to shoot the following year 1916 the movie Intolerance to erase the accusations of racism that were weighing on him.
The film is accused of racism because of the very bad image given to the black population and especially freed slaves after the Civil War, dismissing them as lazy, drunk, eager only to steal property from their former masters and abuse white women, to the point that in the outcome we can see some southern women, kidnapped by an armed freedman, saved from abuse thanks to the men of the Ku Klux Klan.
When the movie premiered, there were riots against African-Americans in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities. The authorities of Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and St. Louis canceled the premiere to avoid excesses in their cities. Even in the town of Lafayette (Indiana), a white man, just outside the room where the film was screened, murdered a black teenager with gunshots for no apparent reason.
