Yes, The Birth of a Nation was an influential and arguably groundbreaking movie - but that doesn’t mean it’s importance and relevance hasn’t been inflated for a variety of reasons.

At the time of its release, BOAN was a huge critical and commercial success, and it did signify a change in the US film industry. Hardly any of this was down to innovation: despite his later claims, very little that is found in the film, like cross-cutting, the epic scope and length, etc., was originated by D.W. Griffith. The 1914 Italian film Cabiria is likely the real originator, and was an influence on Griffith, but it didn’t achieve the popular success of BOAN. The film also wasn’t Griffith’s first full-length (defined here as more than an hour) film, as his earlier Judith of Bethulia did this too, and other studios had occasionally released longer films such as Traffic in Souls in 1913.

What BOAN instead accomplished was putting all these new-ish elements into a film that dramatized one of the defining moments of American history (still within living memory at the time) and presented it as the origin of the true (white) American identity. The film is a mixture of a well-known director with a cast of popular actors; a plot laced with drama, romance, historical reenactment, war, and Lost Cause/southern nostalgia; battle sequences and other forms of 1910s special effects seemingly bringing the war to life; and also sheer novelty, as few prior American movies had attempted to be this ambitious in its filmmaking. These combined to make the movie a huge financial success, and it soon became a popular touchstone for others in the film industry. As an example of its popular reception (by white people), awhile back I was reading through an issue of the film magazine Photoplay from the 1920s, about a decade after the film’s release. An article asked actors to rank their favorite movies, and several named BOAN for, above all, changing the industry, as an almost obligatory mention. From this perspective, the film opened the door for longer and more complex filmmaking, turning short one- or two-reel movies (a staple of the pre-1915 industry that nonetheless didn’t disappear overnight) into an anomaly amongst real movies.

This, of course, ignores all the many, MANY controversial/bad/harmful elements of the film and its source material (which is a whole other bag of NOPE I won’t get into.) If BOAN has always been seen as groundbreaking and a cinematic achievement, it has also always been seen as dangerous, retrograde, and violently racist too. Protests and occasional bans greeted it upon its release in 1915, and while mostly led by black organizations, there were non-black audience members uncomfortable with how Griffith chose to portray the Civil War and Reconstruction. But the movie also came out at the 50 year anniversary of the end of the Civil War, and two years after a much-publicized 1913 “reunion” at Gettysburg, where white soldiers from both the American and the Confederate armies symbolically reconciled with each other while simultaneously throwing black civil rights under the bus and denying black soldiers a place at the event. At the time of the movie’s release, the Lost Cause and the Dunning School ensured that the vision of history presented in BOAN was both popular and widely-accepted. Even white allies who protested alongside black activists didn’t deny the history found in it - only that the movie was unnecessarily racially inflammatory. In order to portray the Civil War as “brother against brother” and southerners as having been cruelly treated after the war, white Americans deliberately welcomed a version of history which romanticized the Confederacy, downplayed the role of slavery in the conflict while also sanitizing slavery itself, and ignored black participants in the war and Reconstruction. In BOAN, the “heroes” are white northerners and white southerners who unite the country by banding together to protect white supremacy, deny black civil rights, and reestablish a political and social order that’s basically antebellum America but without (legal) slavery this time (oh and the KKK is here too.) People like Thaddeus Stevens, who fought for black voting rights and other political rights after the war, are vilified as basically race traitors, and black people are either totally erased from the narrative or presented in stereotypes to justify white supremacy (and also literally erased from the film because blackface.) To most white audiences, this history seemed accurate, and as David Blight has argued in Race and Reunion, perceived as necessary for the country to fully “heal” from war. BOAN literally showed these audiences what they wanted to see.

So yeah, the movie got popular partly because of political reasons, and as the Lost Cause continued to loom over historical and popular depictions of the Civil War, it retained its position in pop culture. I mean, even more modern Civil War films (Gods and Generals...) sell some of the same lie, and if recent events are anything to go by, the myth lives on for too many people. However something else worth noting is that film criticism and the teaching of film at academic levels has historically been dominated by white men, reflecting trends in the industry. Andrew Sarris, the critic who first articulated the auteur theory in the 1960s, placed Griffith in his established “pantheon” of great directors; no surprise that Sarris and everyone in that “pantheon” were white men. I’m not calling critics who praise BOAN for all its “technical achievements” white supremacists, as many of them offer critiques of the racial issues in the film too. Instead, a lack of diversity in who writes, teaches, and produces film means that truisms about the type of creators and movies that we herald as “the best” get repeated, as there is relatively little pushback from marginalized voices who aren’t comfortable lionizing hateful films like BOAN or Triumph of the Will (to name another infamous example.) From my perspective I’ve seen some changes recently, in that it looks like more and more film and media studies students are learning about Oscar Micheaux and black filmmakers instead of Griffith, but the shift has still not significantly dislodged BOAN from its place in film history. (For what it’s worth, I saw this movie in a history course about American film, and found it boring and filled with Griffith’s worst features, including gross sentimentality and rampant racism and misogyny; however what’s more important here is that I watched it in the context I explained above, whereas many film courses I still think don’t teach it with any historical context or very little.)

Long story short: yes, the movie was influential and successful, but the tweet isn’t really wrong either.