D.W. Griffith's “The Birth of a Nation” plays as a strange and troubling artifact, a grainy, flickering work of artistic brilliance whose images are at once breathtaking and repugnant.

With sweeping shots and intimate close-ups, the 1915 silent film heralded the future of cinema, but its abhorrent depiction of African-Americans and celebration of the Ku Klux Klan reawakened virulent strains in the nation's violent racial history.

The movie baffles, enthralls, angers and mystifies. It was the fusing of a thrilling new art form with primitive instincts. Its revolutionary cinematography, editing, narrative range, battle scenes and sprawling cast mesmerized audiences and inspired generations of filmmakers. It was also searing propaganda that revitalized the Klan and roused prejudices that echo today in police shootings of black men, outrage over affirmative action and furor over whether we must rise for the national anthem.

The work, which immediately became a disturbing touchstone and point of bitter division, was shown in President Woodrow Wilson's White House.

Few film titles have evoked such passion. This was certainly on the mind of Nate Parker, who brazenly borrowed the name for his upcoming picture. His “The Birth of a Nation” is a repudiation of Griffith's vision, a black director's rendering of an 1831 slave rebellion that is likely to play into America's conversation about race. But the movie is shadowed by its own controversy: Parker's acquittal in a rape trial involving an intoxicated white co-ed nearly two decades ago when he was a college wrestler.

The Kentucky son of a former Confederate army colonel, Griffith was a master of images, a brash auteur who burst like a wizard from the nickelodeon era to give America its first blockbuster 24 years before a less abrasive version of racism in “Gone With the Wind.” His caricatures of blacks — as craven, simple-minded and savage — spurred protests in Philadelphia and Boston; Kansas, Ohio and other states refused to show it. The NAACP, which was founded in 1909, condemned it as “three miles of filth.”

The three-hour-plus film traces the turbulence from the Civil War into Reconstruction. Told through the entwined lives of two families — the Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South — the story was adapted from the novel “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon Jr. It depicted Northern abolitionists, carpetbaggers and freed slaves, many of whom were elected to state legislatures, as perilous to the storied if largely invented gentility of the antebellum South.

Similar to today's restive and politically charged America, the country at the time of the original movie's premiere bristled with racial tensions, anti-immigrant fervor and looming dangers from abroad.

Much of the film's allure, at least among white audiences, was the glorification of the Old South. It was a populist paean to recapture certain vestiges of an America undergoing dramatic change, similar to Donald Trump vowing to “make America great again,” a phrase that has roused supporters in Appalachia, the South and the Rust Belt, where blue-collar workers feel threatened by immigration and economic globalization.

The movie's mythologizing of the Old South carries the same urgency as its anti-war message. The battle scenes and depictions of death and the physically and emotionally wounded are unflinching. They provoke and haunt, as if Griffith were mastering the power of a new medium to not only entertain but also to creep deep into the conscience.

While the picture's racism was reprehensible, its art was unmistakable. Honing his talent for years on short, one-reel films, Griffith, a playwright and an actor, took on “The Birth of a Nation” like an artist with an unending canvas. He mastered cross-cut editing, stoked tension, unspooled plot lines and perfected the close-up, including luminous shots of his star Lillian Gish. He understood the thrall of great sweep and the poignancy of meticulous detail.

Film critic James Agee wrote in an essay on Griffith, “for the first time the movies had a man who realized that, while a theater audience listened, a movie audience watched.”

Griffith's romanticizing of the Klan and the Old South through cinema was a forerunner to the work of others who used film for propaganda means, notably Soviet directors from the end of World War I and into the Cold War and Leni Riefenstahl.

But as the decades wore on, Griffith, whom Charlie Chaplin referred to as “the master,” could not escape the recriminations his images aroused. He never apologized for “The Birth of a Nation,” saying that speech and ideas should not be censored. But two films he later made suggested an artistic reconciliation: “Intolerance” (1916) told four tales from history, including the life of Jesus Christ, that spoke to intolerance; and “Broken Blossoms” (1919), an interracial love story between a Chinese man and a British woman.

“?‘Intolerance' was his answer to his critics,” said Kuntz. “Maybe he felt a little stung.”

When it opened in 1915, “The Birth of a Nation” was praised by film critics for its sweeping story and artistic innovation. Even generations after its premiere, the film, which is on DVD and has been colorized, remains powerful.

In 2003, Roger Ebert wrote: “To understand ‘The Birth of a Nation' we must first understand the difference between what we bring to the film, and what the film brings to us. All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. ‘The Birth of a Nation' is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl's ‘Triumph of the Will,' it is a great film that argues for evil.”

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com