Just after the release of Do the Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee was asked why he would make a film that left white viewers feeling 'uncomfortable'. His response turned the interviewer's question on its head:[H] ow do you think Black people have felt for 80 years watching stuff like The Birth of a Nation ... and we go on and on. Black people have had to live under this thing for 400 years ... We made [Do the Right Thing] so we could put the spotlight on racism and say that everything is not okay, that this [USA] is not the land of milk and honey and truth and justice. 1 Clyde Taylor has observed that cinema histories have tended to chart the trajectory of US film by using Griffith's film as a starting point: 'almost a myth of origin - [and] there is an inclination to unburden this grand originating moment from any discourse on race relations in the United States'. 2 Valerie Smith, in Representing Blackness, further argues that the problem is not just that The Birth of a Nation is 'considered by many to be the symbolic, although not literal, origin of US cinema', but that it 'is frequently offered up by film critics and historians as the inaugural moment of African American cinema as well'. 3 Bolstering the film's fabricated status as US cinema's (and African American cinema's) origin is its seemingly monolithic presence: a grandiose spectacle and 'media event of a type that complements the definition of mass culture'. 4 As Lee's comments suggest, The Birth of a Nation is not a singular event around which subsequent US filmmaking developed, but rather a text problematically enmeshed within mobile discourses and public debates about US history, national identity, race and representation. Indeed, Lee elsewhere stated that he had 'no problem' with The Birth of a Nation being screened, but that its 'social impact' and contexts need to be made clear, and its legacies recognised as painful, personal and heterogeneous. 5 Lee encapsulates these dynamics in his work by incorporating the film in the disruptive, self-reflexive montage of Bamboozled (2000) and BlacKkKlansman (2018), the latter showing Griffith's film screened as part of a ritualistic 4