10 Movies That Lied So Much They Told The Truth

And finally, we have D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation - a 1915 epic drama that doubles as both a ground-breaking cinematic landmark for its era and perhaps the most shamelessly racist piece of cinematic propaganda ever produced.

The mission of Griffith's film, which chronicles the American Civil War leading up to Abraham Lincoln's assassination, is to depict the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic, necessary entity, while presenting Black people in blackface and as inferior, stupid, and a danger to white women.

In its time, The Birth of a Nation proved phenomenally popular with audiences, despite protests that it risked sparking racially motivated violence, yet viewed under any remotely contemporary lens, Griffith's film is something else entirely.

If Griffith's dishonest storytelling was a hit with audiences of its time, from the Post–civil rights era onward the popular narrative largely shifted to presenting The Birth of a Nation as a repugnant but historically relevant work of racist propaganda.

Ultimately, on a long enough timeline, Griffith ended up telling on himself, the film's grotesque messaging revealing him and his associates to be precisely who they were to audiences en masse.