10 Most Infamous Banned Movies

8. The Birth Of A Nation

D.W. Griffiths was essentially the Stanley Kubrick of cinema's silent era. Pioneering the use of tracking shots, colour filters and cross-cutting, he was a director who in many ways invented mainstream cinema's means of expression. It was a shame then that The Birth of a Nation, at this point the most ambitious film ever made, was so insanely racist. I'm not talking 90's action film "incompetent sidekick black guy" racist, I'm talking representing the African American race as having the capacity to only be murderous rapists. If that wasn't quite enough, Griffiths patriotically heroicises the acts of the Klu Klux Klan. A now infamous scene, played to the tune of Wagner's Ride of The Valkyries, depicts the KKK on horseback triumphantly racing into a town full of white-folk being pillaged by African Americans. That's pretty much as racist as you can get - unless you're Edward Norton in the opening scene of American History X, perhaps. While the film was unnervingly a huge commercial and critical success, the black community were naturally furious. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People protested premieres of the film all across the country. The cities of Denver, Chicago, Missouri, Kansas City, Pittsburg, Minneapolis and St. Lois refused to screen the film due its morally repulsive representations as well as a mean of avoiding the riots it was causing in many areas. The Birth of a Nation is a hugely important piece of both cinema and censorship history. On the one hand it's a hugely progressive piece of work due to Griffith's superbly innovative cinematic techniques, on the other it's a monstrously regressive piece of White Power propaganda. The film actually incited violence against the black community by a number of impressionable white people across the country, a fact which is often cited by those in favor of stricter censorship. Whatever your thoughts on censorship are, it's clear that The Birth of a Nation is one of the most infamous banned movies of all time, both for its abhorrent representations and its superb craftsmanship.