Kitten and Puppy
In the beginning of the film, a kitten is dropped onto a puppy with a cut to a title card reading “Hostilities.” The dog and cat do not really engage in much in the way of hostilities, just a little mostly playful slapping, but the point is made. The meaning, however, remains rather ambiguous. It is fairly clear that the director introduces this scene for symbolic purposes, but exactly what is being symbolized is so open to interpretation that a half-dozen works of analysis of the film is likely to offer a six different ideas of precisely what is being symbolized here. Suffice to say that the kitten and puppy are at least symbolic foreshadowing of the conflict that is shortly to come.
Gus Chasing Flora
The entire sequence where the ex-slave-turned-soldier Gus lustfully chases after Flora with a menacing look on his face even as the title cards suggest he is calling out that he means her no harm is the film’s central symbolic invocation of its fundamental premise: that the KKK exists to protect the white race from being defiled by the black race. Flora fails and falls, but her brother—who creates the KKK—retaliates for that death with a lynching.
Parched Corn
One of the most famous symbolic images in the film is the corn (specifically identified as “parched corn” in a title card) which the Confederate soldiers are forced to eat as the war nears its inevitable end. The image has since become one of the most recognizable in the film in part because of its symbolic status indicating the desperation that comes with facing inglorious surrender.
The KKK
The Ku Klux Klan are not just the heroes of the film, they are symbolic of something even more reprehensible: the line that separates post-Reconstruction America from being overrun and destroyed by the poisoning of the white race with inferior black blood. Narratively, they are terrorists plain and simple, but the film intensifies the justification of their violence to a level beyond even the mundane protection of individuals.
Double Meaning Wedding
The film ends with a double wedding of siblings: a brother and sister from the North marry as sister and brother from the South. This inter-marriage of not just those from opposite sides of the conflict, but into the same families is highly suggestive: it becomes not just a symbol of the healing of the nature following the war, but also of the incestuous necessity of preserving the purity of racial bloodlines.
