As an amateur film buff, I’d always heard about this film and finally watched it a few years ago. I admired the many innovations and techniques, especially for a silent film.
BUT
A weird thing happens toward the end. The damsel in distress at the cabin, and to rescue comes (and here’s the weird part) - you start cheering here comes the cavalry! Yay-— um what the heck? The Klan?
It’s kind of like that moment in Hitchcock’s Psycho where Bates is trying to sink the car in the swamp and it stops. You sit on edge - oh no!. Then you realize he’s manipulated you into rooting for the villain for an instant, something you would never otherwise do.
The last hour of Birth of a Nation gets dicey. I saw it first at the DW Griffith in NYC and a crazed yenta stood up and denounced it. But it has many fine things in it and is completely innovative. To be a film buff, one has to see everything in the context of the time. But that last hour is wild!!!
The film was based on a pulp novel by Thomas Dixon, the name of which was “The Klansman.” Dixon wrote a number of such novels, which were popular in the South and very widely read by white southerners. In them the Scotch-Irish were lauded as a superior racial strain who had made America. This was a them dear to Woodrow Wilson’s heart as a social Darwinist.