This date seems made for controversy. In choosing not to wade into the argument over Roe v. Wade, AWC is instead profiling a man whose legacy is every bit as divisive. D.W. Griffith was born 140 years ago in Kentucky on January 22, 1875. He is most remembered for directing 1915’s “The Birth of a Nation,” which in turn is remembered for two things: Being the first blockbuster movie with techniques that revolutionized the use of film, and simultaneously being one of the most racist movies ever made.

Griffith lived at a time when the so-called Dunning School of thought dominated historical discussion of the Reconstruction era. This was a serious scholarly attempt to argue that freeing the slaves and giving them the vote had been a disaster in the South, and that white Southerners had been justified in resisting Reconstruction by all means. One of those means was, of course, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, which Griffith presented as a heroic force in his masterpiece (a word that can fairly be used for reasons coming up). The movie plays up the idea that freed black men (played by white actors in blackface, because this wasn’t bad enough already) preyed on Southern women, and had to be kept in line by the KKK.

This is not the stuff that Oscar campaigns are made of in 2015, and even in 1915 it was a hard sell in many places. The NAACP tried to get the film banned. There were riots around its showing in Boston and Philadelphia, and it never opened in several cities, including Chicago and St. Louis. Its on-screen portrayal has also been credited with inspiring the real life revival of the KKK in Stone Mountain, Georgia the year it came out.

“Birth of a Nation” would be easy to dismiss, if not for the fact that Griffith combined his reprehensible views on history (his father had been a Colonel in the Confederate Army, even though Kentucky never joined the Confederacy) with a flair for filmmaking that has impacted every moviemaker since. All the visual and editing techniques that help movies tell stories got their start somewhere, and for many of them, that start was in “Birth of a Nation.” Griffith pioneered things that are part of the basic vocabulary of film today, like close-ups, flashbacks, transition through dissolves, and nighttime photography. There was a choreographed battle sequence with hundreds of extras. Griffith also included an original score with the silent film, designed to be played by an in-house orchestra. In an era where filmmakers were happy to just point the camera at something and let it roll, Griffith realized that films could be presented much more creatively.

Griffith’s film was a hit with white audiences. (Woodrow Wilson saw it at the White House, and is supposed to have said “my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The quote has been disputed.) But the criticism it generated stung Griffith, and he tried to respond with “Intolerance” the following year. This was a sprawling 3 ½ hour epic that told the story of intolerance in different historical eras, including ancient Babylon and the life of Christ. Griffith hoped this would help blunt the criticism that he had made a bigoted movie. Griffith ended up making around 500 films before he died in 1948 at age 73.

For better or worse, his legacy is almost entirely bound up in “Birth of a Nation,” a movie which revealed a man with one eye trained hopelessly in the past, and the other seeing far into the future. It’s a complicated legacy, but AWC submits that Griffith’s use of techniques which will forever define moviemaking make his a life worth celebrating. If you can’t get on board with that, we could always discuss something less polarizing…like Roe v. Wade.

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