D. W. GRIFFITH

'David Llewelyn Wark "D.W." Griffith' (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was an American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial 1915 film ''The Birth of a Nation'' and the subsequent film ''Intolerance'' (1916). David W. Griffith, Film Pioneer, Dies; Producer Of 'Birth Of Nation,' 'Intolerance' And 'America' Made Nearly 500 Pictures Set, Screen Standards Co-Founder Of United Artists Gave Mary Pickford And Fairbanks Their Starts.

Contents

Early life

Film career

Death

Achievements

Controversy

Legacy

Selected filmography

References

Further reading

External links

Early life

Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith and Mary Perkins Oglesby. His father was a Confederate Army colonel, a Civil War hero, and a Kentucky legislator. D.W. was educated by his older sister, Mattie, in a one-room country school. His father died when he was 10, upon which the family experienced serious financial hardships. At age 14, D.W.'s mother abandoned the farm and moved the family to Louisville where she opened a boarding house, which failed shortly. D.W. left high school to help with the finances, taking a job first in a dry goods store, and, later, in a bookstore.
D. W. began his career as a hopeful playwright but met with little success. He then became an actor. Finding his way into the motion picture business, he soon began to direct a huge body of work.

Film career

Between 1908 and 1913 (the years he directed for the Biograph Company), Griffith produced 450 short films, an enormous number even for this period. This work enabled him to experiment with cross-cutting, camera movement, close-ups, and other methods of spatial and temporal manipulation.
On Griffith's first trip to California, he and his company discovered a little village to film their movies in. This place was known as Hollywood. With this, Biograph was the first company to shoot a movie in Hollywood: ''In Old California'' (1910).
Influenced by a European feature film ''Cabiria'' from Italy, Griffith was convinced that feature films could be financially viable. He produced and directed the Biograph feature film ''Judith of Bethulia'', one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. However, Biograph believed that longer features were not viable. According to actress Lillian Gish, "[Biograph] thought that a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes". Because of this, and the film's budget overrun (it cost US$30,000 dollars to produce), Griffith left Biograph and took his whole stock company of actors with him. His new production company became an autonomous production unit partner in Triangle Pictures Corporation with Keystone Studios and Thomas Ince. Through David W. Griffith Corp. he produced ''The Clansman'' (1915), which would later be known as ''The Birth of a Nation''.

''The Birth of a Nation'' is considered important by film historians as the first feature length American film (previously films had been less than one hour long). It was enormously popular, breaking box office records, but aroused controversy in the way it expressed the racist views held by many in the era (it depicts Southern pre-Civil War black slavery as benign, and the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes restoring order to a post-Reconstruction black-ruled South). Although these views matched the opinions of many of American historians of the day (and indeed, long afterwards), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People campaigned against the film, but was unsuccessful in suppressing it. It would go on to become the most successful box office attraction of its time. "They lost track of the money it made," Lillian Gish once remarked in a Kevin Brownlow interview. Among the people who profited by the film was Louis B. Mayer, who bought the rights to distribute ''The Birth of a Nation'' in New England. With the money he made, he was able to begin his career as a producer that culminated in the creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote ''Gone with the Wind,'' was also inspired by Griffith's Civil War epic.
The production partnership was dissolved in 1917, so Griffith went to Artcraft (part of Paramount), then to First National (1919-1920). At the same time he founded United Artists, together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.
Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith's association with it was short-lived, and while some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often eluded him. Features from this period include ''Broken Blossoms'' (1919), ''Way Down East'' (1920), ''Orphans of the Storm'' (1921) and ''America'' (1924). Griffith made only two sound films, ''Abraham Lincoln'' (1930) and ''The Struggle'' (1931). Neither was successful, and he never made another film. For the last seventeen years of his life he lived as a virtual hermit in Los Angeles.

Death

He died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 on his way to a Hollywood hospital from the Knickerbocker Hotel where he had been living alone.

Achievements

D. W. Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Few scholars still hold that his "innovations" really began with him, but Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting"—using film editing to alternate between different events occurring at the same time—in order to build suspense. Some claim, too, that he "invented" the close-up shot. That being said, he still used many elements from the "primitive" style of movie-making that predated classical Hollywood's continuity system, such as frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, minimal camera movement, and an absence of point of view shots.
Credit for Griffith's cinematic innovations must be shared with his cameraman of many years, Billy Bitzer. In addition, he himself credited the legendary silent star Lillian Gish, who appeared in several of his films, with creating a new style of acting for the cinema.

Controversy

Griffith was a highly controversial figure. Immensely popular at the time of its release, his film ''The Birth of a Nation'' (1915), based on the novel and play ''The Clansman'' by Thomas W. Dixon, was a white supremacist interpretation of history, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attempted to have it banned. After that effort failed, they attempted to have some of the film's more disagreeable scenes censored. The scenes in question depict derogatory stereotypes of blacks, and white members of the Ku Klux Klan killing blacks to protect white women, which is portrayed as favorable toward the Ku Klux Klan members. Griffith did also say that he made the film with the intention to show how the Scalawags and Carpetbaggers began to rule as tyrants with President Lincoln out of the picture. Griffith did also try to denounce prejudice in his next film ''Intolerance'' by showing how slavery was wrong because the Babylonians tried to make some slaves out of their people who didn't believe in some of the main traditional gods. According to Lillian Gish in her autobiography, ''The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me,'' Griffith towards the end of his life expressed an interest in making a film that would be a tribute to African-Americans, but he never got the chance to make that film.

Legacy

Stamp issued by the United States Postal Service commemorating D. W. Griffith.

Motion picture legend Charles Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher Of Us All". This sentiment was widely shared. Filmmakers as diverse as John Ford and Orson Welles have spoken of their respect for the director of ''Intolerance''. Whether or not he actually invented new techniques in film grammar, he seems to have been among the first to understand how these techniques could be used to create an expressive language. In early shorts such as Biograph's ''The Musketeers of Pig Alley'' (1912) which was the first "Gangster film", we can see how Griffith's attention to camera placement and lighting heighten mood and tension. In making ''Intolerance'' the director opened up new possibilities for the medium, creating a form that seems to owe more to music than to traditional narrative.
Griffith was honored on a 10-cent postage stamp by the United States issued May 5, 1975.
In 1953, the Directors Guild of America instituted the D.W. Griffith Award, its highest honor. Its recipients included Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, John Huston, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock and Griffith's friend Cecil B. DeMille. On 15 December, 1999, however, DGA President Jack Shea and the DGA National Board—without membership consultation (though unnecessary according to DGA's regulations)—announced that the award would be renamed the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award because Griffith's film ''The Birth of a Nation'' had "helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes". The following living recipients of the award agreed with the guild's decision: Francis Ford Coppola and Sidney Lumet.
D.W. Griffith has five films preserved in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". These films are Lady Helen's Escapade (1909), A Corner in Wheat (1909), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), and Broken Blossoms (1919).

Selected filmography

★ ''Money Mad'' (1908)

★ ''Balked at the Altar'' (1908)

★ ''Romance of a Jewess'' (1908) with Florence Lawrence

★ ''Resurrection (1909)

★ ''The Country Doctor'' (1909) with Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford

★ ''In Old California'' (1910) with Henry B. Walthall

★ ''In the Border States'' (1910) with Henry B. Walthall

★ ''The Lonedale Operator'' (1911) with Blanche Sweet

★ ''The Smile of a Child'' (1911) with Blanche Sweet

★ ''Fighting Blood'' (1911) with Blanche Sweet and Lionel Barrymore

★ ''Out from the Shadow'' (1911) with Blanche Sweet

★ ''The Making of a Man'' (1911) with Blanche Sweet

★ ''Her Awakening'' (1911) with Mabel Normand

★ ''The Goddess of Sagebrush Gulch'' (1912) with Blanche Sweet

★ ''Friends'' (1912) with Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Lionel Barrymore and Harry Carey

★ ''An Unseen Enemy'' (1912) with Lilian Gish

★ ''The New York Hat'' (1912) with Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish

★ ''Drink's Lure'' (1913)

★ ''Oil and Water'' (1913) with Blanche Sweet, Henry B. Walthall, Lionel Barrymore and Harry Carey

★ ''Judith of Bethulia'' (1914) with Blanche Sweet, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish

★ ''Strongheart'' (1914) with Blanche Sweet, Lionel Barrymore and Alan Hale

★ ''The Avenging Conscience'' (1914) with Blanche Sweet and Henry B. Walthall

★ ''The Birth of a Nation'' (1915) with Lillian Gish, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh and Raoul Walsh

★ ''Intolerance'' (1916)

★ ''Broken Blossoms'' (1919) with Lillian Gish

★ ''Way Down East'' (1920) with Lillian Gish

★ ''Orphans of the Storm'' (1921) with Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish

★ ''One Exciting Night'' (1922) with Henry Hull

★ ''Mammy's Boy'' (1923) with Al Jolson

★ ''America'' (1924)

★ ''The Sorrows of Satan'' (1926)

★ ''Lady of the Pavements'' (1929) with Lupe Velez and William Boyd

★ ''D.W. Griffith's 'Abraham Lincoln''' (1930) with Walter Huston

References

Further reading

★ Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969)

★ Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973)

★ Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984)

★ Robert M. Henderson, D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)

★ William M. Drew, D. W. Griffith’s "Intolerance:" Its Genesis and Its Vision (Jefferson, NJ: McFarland & Company, 1986)

★ Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968)

★ Seymour Stern, "An Index to the Creative Work of D. W. Griffith," (London: The British Film Institute, 1944-47)

★ David Robinson, Hollywood in the Twenties (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co, Inc., 1968)

★ Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide, The Films of D. W. Griffith (New York: Crown, 1975)

★ William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)

★ Iris Barry and Eileen Bowser, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965)

★ D.W. Griffith (1875-1948)

External links

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★ Souvenir Guide for ''The Birth of a Nation'', hosted by the Portal to Texas History