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David Wark Griffith (1875-1948), American filmmaker, was a pioneer director-producer who invented much of the basic technical grammar of modern cinema.
On Jan. 22, 1875, D. W. Griffith was born at Crestwood, Oldham County, Ky., the descendant of a distinguished (but impoverished) Southern family. Scantily educated but convinced of his "aristocracy," he became an actor at 18 in Louisville. For 10 years he was a supporting player in provincial companies, using the stage name Lawrence Griffith to protect his family's honor but his real name for the plays and poetry he was trying to publish. In 1906 he secretly married actress Linda Arvidson Johnson, who viewed his literary and directorial aspirations unsympathetically and, after 5 years, left him.
Early Films
In 1907 Griffith sold a poem to Frank Leslie's Weekly and a play, A Fool and a Girl, to actor James K. Hackett. The play promptly failed, and Griffith was driven to try the then unsavory movie business. E. S. Porter, whose Great Train Robbery was the first "story" film, gave him the lead in a primitive one-reeler called Rescued from an Eagle's Nest and unwittingly started Griffith toward greatness.
In 1908 Griffith sold several stories to the Biograph Company and also acted in them. Within a few months he had a chance to direct. The success of his first effort, The Adventures of Dollie, led to regular employment, a series of rapidly improving contracts, and pride enough in his work to use his real name.
During 5 years with Biograph, Griffith made hundreds of short pictures and gradually won consent to increase their length beyond one reel, thus enabling him to expand narrative content. With the help of his famed cameraman, G. W. "Billy" Bitzer, he made revolutionary technical innovations in film making. He also started the cinema careers of Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, the Gish sisters, Lionel Barrymore, and many others.
Griffith Classics
In 1913 Griffith formed an independent company. Within 2 years he completed his epic masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), often considered the most important film ever made. Dealing with the Civil War and its aftermath in the South, it was, for its day, incredibly long (12 reels) and expensive ($100,000). However, it grossed $18 million within a few years of release and established once and for all the astonishing power and potentiality of cinema as a serious art form. The film also aroused storms of controversy because of its treatment of African Americans and Ku Klux Klansmen.
Determined to clear himself of charges of prejudice, Griffith next made one of the most enormous, complex, and ambitious pictures in history. Intolerance (1916) attempted to interweave four parallel stories - modern, biblical, 16th-century French, and Babylonian - into a monumental sermon on the evils of inhumanity. His financial backers were appalled; audiences found it chaotic and exhausting; but for all its faults, Intolerance established techniques and conventions which permanently affected film making. Individual fragments of this huge, disjointed picture became the basis for entire schools of cinematic development. The overpowering Babylonian sequences with immense crowds and sumptuous spectacle provided Cecil B. DeMille and others with the substance of their whole careers.
Formation of United Artists
In 1917 Griffith made a propaganda film for the British government, Hearts of the World, which served mainly to display the director's ultimately fatal tendency toward melodrama and sentimentality.
Returning to the United States, Griffith joined Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin in forming United Artists, through which he released such famous pictures as Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921); their varying success temporarily relieved his steadily mounting financial difficulties.
After his important film Isn't Life Wonderful (1924), Griffith was increasingly out of tune with popular taste and with the growing film industry. He was obliged to work as an employee in the new Hollywood studio system. After 1927 the transition to "talkies" posed further problems, and although he managed one more independent production in 1930 (Abraham Lincoln), his career was finished by 1931. He received one small directing assignment, for which he was not paid, in 1936.
Griffith had led the new medium of film into unexplored areas of spectacle, realism, intimacy, and social content. His contributions to the technique of film art include the invention of the close-up, the long shot, the fadeout, night shots, high and low photographic angles, cross-cutting, backlighting, the moving camera, and many other devices that are now taken for granted. Despite his genius, he was, except for 39 weeks on radio, unemployed and unemployable for the last 17 years of his life. A second marriage ended in divorce in 1947, and a year later, at age 73, he died, alone and almost forgotten, in a shabby side-street Hollywood hotel.
Further Reading
The literature on Griffith and his achievements is extensive. Useful introductory works are Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith, American Film Master (1940); a popular biography by Homer Croy, Star Maker: The Story of D. W. Griffith (1959); and Lillian Gish, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (1969).
Additional Sources
Schickel, Richard, D.W. Griffith: an American life, New York: Limelight Editions, 1996.
Williams, Martin T., Griffith, first artist of the movies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History:
Griffith, D. W. |
(1875-1948), screenwriter and film director. Contemporary journalists often write as if the impact of the mass media on American life came about in the last two decades. Nowhere are the shortcomings of that assessment more evident than in the career and work of D. W. Griffith, America's first great director. Born in La Grange, Kentucky, Griffith came from an impoverished southern farm family and barely attained a grade school education. He entered the struggling film industry in 1907 and found a market for his short one-reel melodramas among the immigrant working classes of the cities.
Over the next thirteen years the director made over four hundred films that drew on earlier innovations--the close-up, parallel editing, backlighting, location shooting--to create a coherent cinematic form. By 1914, Griffith's work had become associated with the birth of a new art form and the rise in popularity of movies among middle-class audiences, creating within the large cities a mass medium that appealed to diverse groups across the older Victorian barriers of class, sex, and ethnicity.
Throughout these years, Griffith and his contemporaries saw his films as an unprecedented agency for transforming modern society and politics. Griffith's films were praised by contemporary reformers because they taught moral lessons in an effort to Americanize the immigrants and revitalize Anglo-Saxon culture. He saw his stories as metaphors for the rescue of the people from the social dangers of the day: corrupt politicians, lusty foreigners, and greedy monopolists. Drawing on the themes of nineteenth-century melodrama and dime novels, the great director emphasized the struggle of pure heroes and heroines, bathed in soft light in contrast to dark villains.
Yet like many middle-class reformers, Griffith's antagonism toward those outside the Anglo-Saxon mainstream surfaced in numerous films, and dramatically so in his most famous movie, Birth of a Nation. Upon its release in 1915, the film aroused protests from civil rights groups for celebrating the restoration of white rule over African-Americans in the Reconstruction era. Deeply hurt by the criticism, Griffith defended white supremacy and antimiscegenation laws, displaying his reluctance to seek allies outside his own race and class in the struggle against industrial power. By 1920, he and his fellow progressives were bereft of support and helplessly watched a new corporate order rise to unprecedented power. Unsympathetic to the themes of moral emancipation espoused by Hollywood filmmakers, Griffith found by the early twenties that his career was virtually over.
Upon his death in 1948 many observers of the film industry tried to explain his tragic final years. Some claimed that the director's dream of progressive reform alienated him from the large corporation studios in Hollywood. Others, best exemplified by the noted critic, James Agee, observed that his forward-looking film techniques were yoked to revitalizing the old moral world that had informed the Victorian theater. But "all of it, good and bad, was dying when Griffith gave it a new lease on life....it died soon after and took him down with it." The filmmaker's efforts to save the old Anglo-Saxon vision of purity ended in defeat, but, ironically, his technical innovations gave birth to a modern art.
Bibliography:
Robert Henderson, D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (1972); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (1984); Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (1984).
Author:
Lary May
See also Movies.
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Columbia Encyclopedia:
D. W. Griffith |
Bibliography
See Mrs. D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young (1925); Lillian Gish's autobiography (1969); K. Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (1973); R. Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (1984).
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Fine Arts:
Griffith, D. W. |
An innovative American filmmaker of the early twentieth century. He is famous for his epic silent films, such as The Birth of a Nation, which required huge casts and enormous sets.
Quotes By:
David Wark Griffiths |
Quotes:
"We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue -- the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare."
"We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices."
AMG AllMovie Guide:
D.W. Griffith |
Filmography:
D.W. Griffith |
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
D. W. Griffith |
| D. W. Griffith | |
|---|---|
| Born | David Llewelyn Wark Griffith January 22, 1875 LaGrange, Kentucky, United States |
| Died | July 23, 1948 (aged 73) Hollywood, California, United States |
| Occupation | Actor, film director, film producer |
| Years active | 1908–1931 |
| Influenced by | Giovanni Pastrone |
| Influenced | Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford |
| Spouse | Linda Arvidson (1906–1936) Evelyn Baldwin (1936–1947) |
David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was a premier pioneering American film director.[1] He is best known as the director of the epic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance (1916).[2]
Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera and narrative techniques, and its immense popularity set the stage for the dominance of the feature-length film in the United States. The film has been extremely controversial for its negative depiction of African Americans, white Unionists and Reconstruction, and its positive portrayal of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. The film was widely criticized and subject to boycotts by anti-racist organizations such as the NAACP. Griffith responded to his critics with Intolerance, intended to show the history of prejudiced thought and behavior. The film was not a financial success but was praised by critics. Several of Griffith's later films were also successful, but his high production, promotional, and roadshow costs often made his ventures commercial failures. He is generally considered one of the most important figures of early cinema for his command of film techniques and expressive skills.
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Griffith was born in Crestwood, Kentucky to Mary Perkins and Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, who were of Anglo-Welsh ancestry. His father served as a Confederate Army colonel in the American Civil War and was elected as a Kentucky state legislator. Griffith was raised as a Methodist.[3] D. W. attended a one-room schoolhouse where he was taught by his older sister, Mattie Griffith. After his father died when the boy was ten, the family struggled with poverty. When Griffith was 14, his mother abandoned the farm and moved the family to Louisville, where she opened a boarding house. It failed shortly after. Griffith left high school to help support the family. He first took a job in a dry goods store, and later in a bookstore.
Griffith began his art career as a playwright but met with little success; only one of his plays was accepted for a performance.[4] Griffith decided to become an actor, and appeared in many plays as an extra.[5]
In 1907, Griffith, still writing as a playwright, went to New York and attempted to sell a script to Edison Studios producer Edwin Porter.[4] Porter rejected Griffith's script, but gave him an acting part in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest.[4] Finding this attractive, Griffith explored the motion picture business. In 1908, Griffith accepted an acting job for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, commonly known as Biograph, in New York City. At Biograph, Griffith's career in the film industry would change forever.[6] In 1908, Biograph's main director Wallace McCutcheon grew ill, and his son, Wallace McCutcheon, Jr., took his place.[7] McCutcheon, Jr., however, was not able to bring the studio success.[6] As a result, the Biograph head Henry Marvin decided to give Griffith the position;[6] and the young man made his first movie for the company, The Adventures of Dollie.
Biograph's In Old California (1910) was the first film shot in Hollywood, California. Influenced by the Italian feature film Cabiria (1914), Griffith was convinced that feature films were commercially viable. He produced and directed the Biograph film Judith of Bethulia (1914), one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. At the time, 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".[citation needed]
Because of company resistance to his goals, and his cost overruns on the film (it cost US$30,000 dollars to produce), Griffith left Biograph. He took his stock company of actors with him and joined the Mutual Film Corporation. He formed a studio with the Majestic Studio manager Harry Aitken[8]; it became known as Reliance-Majestic Studios (and was later renamed Fine Arts Studio).[9] His new production company became an autonomous production unit partner in Triangle Film Corporation along with Thomas Ince and Keystone Studios' Mack Sennett; the Triangle Film Corporation was headed by Griffith's partner Harry Aitken, who was released from the Mutual Film Corporation,[8] and his brother Roy.
Through Reliance-Majestic Studios, Griffith produced The Clansman (1915), which would later be known as The Birth of a Nation. Historically, The Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster. It is considered important by film historians as one of the first feature length American films (most previous films had been less than one hour long), and it changed the industry's standard in a way still influential today.[10] It was enormously popular, breaking box office records, but aroused controversy due to its depiction of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and race relations in the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Like its source material, Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel The Clansman, it depicts Southern pre-Civil War slavery as benign, the enfranchisement of freedmen as a corrupt Republican plot, and the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes restoring the rightful order. This view of the era was popular at the time, and was endorsed by historians of the Dunning School for decades, although it met with strong criticism from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other groups. The NAACP attempted to stop showings of the film; while they were successful in some cities, it was shown widely and became 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.[citation needed]
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.
After seeing the film, which was filled with action and violence, audiences in some major northern cities rioted over the film's racial content.[11]
In his next film, Intolerance, Griffith believed he was responding to critics. He portrayed the effects of intolerance in four different historical periods: the Fall of Babylon; the Crucifixion of Jesus; the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (during religious persecution of French Huguuenots); and a modern story. During its release Intolerance was not a financial success; although it had good box office turn-outs, the film did not bring in enough profits to cover the lavish road show that accompanied it.[12] Griffith put a huge budget into the film's production, which could not be recovered in its box office.[13]
When his production partnership was dissolved in 1917, 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. At United Artists, Griffith continued to make films, but never could achieve box office grosses as high as either The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance.[14]
Griffith was also a producer on the 1915 movie Martyrs of the Alamo.
Though United Artists survived as a company, Griffith's association with it was short-lived. While some of his later films did well at the box office, commercial success often eluded him. Griffith features from this period include Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), Dream Street (1921), One Exciting Night (1922) and America (1924). Of these, the first three were successes at the box office.[15]
On 29 March, 1929 at the bungalow of Mary Pickford at United Artists brought together Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, John Barrymore, Dolores del Río and Griffith to speak on the radio show The Dodge Brothers Hour to prove he could meet the challenge of talking movies. [16] Griffith was forced to leave United Artists after Isn't Life Wonderful (1924) failed at the box office.
He returned to his job as a director.[17] Griffith made a part-talkie Lady of the Pavements (1929) and only two full-sound films, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931). Neither was successful, and he never made another film.
In 1936, director Woody Van Dyke, who had worked as Griffith's apprentice on Intolerance, asked Griffith to help him shoot the famous earthquake sequence for San Francisco, but did not give him any film credit. Starring Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy, it was the top-grossing film of the year.[18]
In 1939, the producer Hal Roach hired Griffith to produce Of Mice and Men (1939) and One Million B.C. (1940). He wrote to Griffith, "I need help from the production side to select the proper writers, cast, etc. and to help me generally in the supervision of these pictures."[19] Although Griffith eventually disagreed with Roach over the production and parted, Roach later insisted that some of the scenes in the completed film were directed by Griffith. This would make the film the final production in which Griffith was actively involved. But, cast members' accounts recall Griffith directing only the screen tests and costume tests. When Roach advertised the film in late 1939 with Griffith listed as producer, Griffith asked that his name be removed.[20]
Mostly forgotten by movie goers of the time, Griffith was held in awe by many in the film industry. In the mid 1930s, he was given a special Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 1946, he visited the film location of David O. Selznick's epic western, Duel in the Sun, where some of his veteran actors, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, and Harry Carey, were cast members. The actors found their old mentor's presence so disconcerting that he was asked to cut short his visit in order that filming could resume.[citation needed]
Griffith was discovered unconscious in the lobby at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles, where he had been living alone. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 23, 1948, at 3:42 PM on the way to a Hollywood hospital.[2] A large public service was held in his honor at the Hollywood Masonic Temple, but few stars came to pay their last respects. He is buried at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard in Centerfield, Kentucky.[21] In 1950, The Directors Guild of America provided a stone and bronze monument for his gravesite.
Motion picture legend Charles Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher of us All". This sentiment was widely shared. Filmmakers as diverse as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles have spoken of their respect for the director of Intolerance. Orson Welles said "I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man."
Griffith seems to have been the first to understand how certain film techniques could be used to create an expressive language; it gained popular recognition with the release of his The Birth of a Nation (1915). His early shorts, such as Biograph's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), the first "gangster film," show that Griffith's attention to camera placement and lighting heightened 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.
D.W. Griffith has five films preserved in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." These 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).
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