Certain shrewd businessmen, seeking to advertise [The Birth of a Nation], made assertions to the effect that I have praised it and have stated that in its time Birth of a Nation greatly influenced my creative work. I emphatically protest against these assertions. True, I've always given Griffith his due as an outstanding master of the bourgeois film. But this can in no way be applied to Birth of a Nation. This film has never been shown here [U.S.S.R.] and I saw it abroad after The Battleship Potemkin appeared and therefore I could in no way have been influenced by Birth of a Nation. The disgraceful propaganda of racial hatred toward colored people which permeates this film cannot be redeemed by purely cinematographic effects in this production.
When it comes to the civil war, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding “African slavery”...The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.
"Classic or not, Birth of a Nation has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can't be ignored ... and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word."
— Andrew Sarris
