Best Known As: Ground-breaking director of Birth of a Nation
Name at birth: David Wark Griffith
D.W. Griffith was an American filmmaker who is considered by many to be the most influential figure in the history of cinema. He began his career as a stage actor and writer in the first part of the 20th century. He took his stories to the early movie studios, landing at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1908. Until 1913 Griffith oversaw the production of almost all of Biograph's movies, more than 450 films. He joined Reliance-Majestic's studios, taking most of his regular actors and technicians, including his best cameraman, G.W. "Billy" Blitzer. The quality of Griffith's productions was generally considered superior to his contemporaries, and his projects became more ambitious than the standard one-reel films. His three-hour feature The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a stunning success and is considered the most important film in the development of cinema as an art. Its racism -- the protagonists are members of the Ku Klux Klan -- keeps it from being enjoyed as a cinematic experience, but as an item of historical interest it includes all of Griffith's innovations in the language of cinema: cross-cutting, close-ups, parallel narratives, camera movement and more restrained acting.
His next film, Intolerance (released in 1916), was equally ambitious but a financial disaster. In 1915 he joined with Mack Sennett and Thomas Ince to form the Triangle Corporation, but the venture failed and Griffith left in 1917. He continued making movies, having success especially with Way Down East (1920), but most of his films during the '20s lost money, including those he made with United Artists, the studio he co-founded with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. As silent movies were replaced by talkies, Griffith's position in the film industry waned. His last feature, The Struggle (1931), was a failure. Although he was no longer making movies, he was honored in 1935 with a special Oscar. His other films include Broken Blossoms (1919), Orphans of the Storm (1922) and Abraham Lincoln (1930).
Griffith had a long working relationship with actress Lillian Gish.
(born Jan. 22, 1875, Floydsfork, Ky., U.S. — died July 23, 1948, Hollywood, Calif.) U.S. film director. After acting in touring stage companies, he sold film scenarios to the Biograph Co., which hired him as a director (1908 – 13). In over 400 films for Biograph he developed filmmaking as an art form with techniques such as the close-up, the scenic long shot, and crosscutting, and he collaborated with cinematographer Billy Bitzer to create fade-out, fade-in, and soft-focus shots. He nurtured the careers of future stars such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Mack Sennett, and Lionel Barrymore. His epic dramas The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) greatly influenced later filmmakers. After cofounding United Artists Corp. in 1919, he directed Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921). His last films were Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931). He is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the history of motion pictures.
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.
(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).
Griffith, D. W. (David Llewelyn Wark Griffith), 1875-1948, American movie director and producer, b. La Grange, Ky. Griffith was the first major American film director. He began his film career as an actor and a scenario writer in 1908 with the Biograph Company. He soon began to direct and at once began to explore the full potential of camerawork, editing (or montage), and acting. He introduced the fade-in, fade-out, long shot, full shot, close-up, moving-camera shot, and flashback. He initiated scene rehearsals before shooting and was extremely meticulous about lighting arrangements. In 1913, taking his cue from the longer "spectacle" films produced in Italy, Griffith made the first American film of four reels, Judith of Bethulia (1913), and followed with the then-immense ten-reel Birth of a Nation (1915), an anthology of film technique and a landmark in the history of cinema. Stung by criticism of his negative portrayal of mulattos, he responded with a more audacious work. Intolerance (1916) sought to demonstrate the persistence of racial and social prejudice through the ages. In 1919, with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, he founded United Artists. Among his films, frequently alternating between historical spectacles and modest domestic dramas, are Hearts of the World (1918), Broken Blossoms (1918), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1922). Griffith had experimented with sound as early as 1921, but his movies with full sound were not commercially successful.
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).
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.
"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."
Career Highlights: The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Hearts of the World
First Major Screen Credit: Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker (1908)
Biography
David Wark Griffith was the most important and influential film director of the silent period, one of the greatest American filmmakers, and the man who developed the basic visual language of storytelling in cinema. Born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith, D.W. Griffith grew up in poverty, particularly after his father died. He became a stage actor in the 1890s, touring with regional stock companies and writing unsuccessful plays. Griffith's luck changed when he took up a friend's suggestion to try out at the Biograph motion picture studio on Fourteenth Street in New York. Although he appeared in one film for Edison, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), all of his other early film work was at Biograph. In mid-1908, Biograph's main director, Wallace "Old Man" McCutcheon, took ill and his son, Wallace McCutcheon Jr., took over as director. The younger McCutcheon proved worthless at the job, and Biograph head office man Henry Marvin offered it to Griffith. His very first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908), proved so popular that Griffith stayed on as director, helming practically all of the 450 odd films Biograph produced in the next five years. With Griffith at the helm, they quickly became the most popular motion-picture company in America.
Despite the fact that Biograph did not permit onscreen credits for actors, Griffith practically invented the star system through his discovery of actress Florence Lawrence, who was billed as "The Biograph Girl." When she jumped ship to competitor Vitagraph, he moved a new "Biograph Girl" into place, who later became "Biograph Mary" and eventually known by her name, Mary Pickford. In his Biograph years, Griffith gathered around him a repertory company of actors and technical people, many of whom became important on their own: Mack Sennett, Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Robert Harron, Donald Crisp, Henry B. Walthall, Christy Cabanne, Frank Powell, Henry Lehrman, and Dorothy and Lillian Gish, to name a few.
Examination of films made by Griffith's principal photographer, Billy Bitzer, in the early 1900s reveals that many of the techniques once credited to Griffith alone were developed by Bitzer before Griffith came to Biograph -- close-ups, moving shots taken from trains or cars, expressive long and medium distance shots. Yet even Bitzer noted that Griffith was the first to assemble such shots into a coherent pattern that served a story. Griffith's contributions in editing have never been challenged -- he introduced crosscutting, parallel montage, rapid editing, still frames, and other techniques. He also introduced the practice of shooting out of sequence; at least one of his Biographs still exists in its unedited state, and it reveals that Griffith's actors were so well drilled that they could play several scenes in the same setup without stopping the camera, maintaining a shot-to-footage ratio of nearly 1:1! Griffith made so many important films at Biograph that to name them here is impossible, but noteworthy titles include the social drama A Corner in Wheat (1909), The Lonedale Operator (1911), The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1911; which introduced the gangster genre), The New York Hat (1912), and the three-reel The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913). Griffith broke with Biograph over the subject of multi-reel features, an area of the business already well established by 1913, but Biograph didn't see the need to follow the trend. Griffith took his entire repertory company with him when he left, and the talent drain was too much for his former employer to withstand; within two years Biograph folded.
After making a few low-budget quickies, including the first psychological horror feature, The Avenging Conscience (1914), Griffith made his most famous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), likely the most controversial American film of all time. It revolutionized the whole movie industry from top to bottom. The sprawling American Civil War epic lasted nearly three hours and employed the most advanced cinematic techniques seen to that time, including breathtaking battle scenes, poignant, well-paced acting, and rapid-fire editing. It also demonized Southern African-Americans -- portrayed in all cases by blacked-up white men -- as uncivilized savages, rapists, and murderers, with the Ku Klux Klan presented as saviors of the South. No distributor would handle it, so Griffith put it out on a roadshow basis, charging high ticket prices with a live orchestra playing an original score written for the film. The Birth of a Nation made millions in 1915 money, and though its total box office is not known, it was once unofficially recognized as the all-time box-office champ before Star Wars (1977). Its effect was so powerful that it moved President Woodrow Wilson to comment that it was "like history written by lightning," though when he realized the greater social implication of these words, he retracted them.
Griffith sank every cent gained from The Birth of a Nation into the longest, most expensive experimental film ever made, Intolerance (1916), "the Sun Play of the Ages," which simultaneously weaves four tales of social injustice from Ancient Babylon, the story of Jesus, the massacre of the Huguenots, and a "modern" story called "The Mother and the Law," which he had made earlier and shelved. For the Babylonian story, he built one of the largest movie sets ever, so massive that Bitzer had to photograph it from a cable car. Dizzyingly complex and running four hours, no one went to see Intolerance, even as it remains one of the most impressive personal achievements of any film director. After World War I, Griffith compiled the Babylonian footage and The Mother and the Law into separate films and distributed them overseas, where they were hugely successful, and The Fall of Babylon (1919) was widely acknowledged by European filmmakers as inspiring the practice of "Russian montage" associated with Sergei Eisenstein and French filmmakers such as Abel Gance.
During the First World War, Griffith directed Hearts of the World (1918) and several other war-themed films mostly lost to us, and for the Triangle firm produced a number of other pictures that proved important, mainly the first Douglas Fairbanks comedies. With Fairbanks, Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin, Griffith co-founded United Artists in 1919, and while it had no studio of its own, its very existence shook up the industry. In 1919-1920, Griffith was at his height creatively, making three of his greatest films, Broken Blossoms (1919), True Heart Susie (1919) and Way Down East (1920), all starring his personal muse, Lillian Gish. The last of these may be the most perfect "D.W. Griffith film," couched in Victorian drama, stated in matchless camerawork and cutting, and dazzling in its scale and scope. Although the venture was not commercially successful, Griffith teamed up with inventor O.T. Kellum in 1921 to produce the first American feature with a fully synchronized music and effects soundtrack, Dream Street; Griffith himself appeared in a spoken introduction to the film in direct sound.
At this time, Griffith's status as the foremost American film director began to unravel and he was beset by a number of personal tragedies. Actress Clarine Seymour, whom he was grooming for stardom in films such as The Idol Dancer (1920) died suddenly during an operation at the age of 22, and in September of that year Robert Harron, the beloved "boy" actor of The Mother and the Law, with whom he'd worked since 1908, died of an accidental gunshot wound at age 27. Griffith's productions for United Artists, made at his own studio at Mamaroneck, NY, were a string of flops; Griffith's attempts to win sympathy for inflation-ridden post-war Germany in Isn't Life Wonderful (1924) was a critical and commercial disaster of the highest order; and while his Revolutionary War epic America (1924) was a hit, it didn't recoup enormous cost overruns on the film. During these years, Griffith made Orphans of the Storm (1922), his last film with the Gish Sisters, and it has become the most frequently shown of his films; while it has moments of charm, it doesn't really represent Griffith at his best. By 1924, Griffith had already sold his share in United Artists against the advice of his partners, and that year he sold the Mamaroneck studio as well and became a contract director for Paramount -- this would prove, in the end, his undoing.
It started off well enough; for Paramount, Griffith made his last great film, the comedy Sally of the Sawdust (1925), which made an unlikely movie star out of veteran vaudevillian W.C. Fields. But soon Paramount was anxious to be rid of Griffith, and kept assigning him projects they believed incompatible with his talents so that when a film died at the box office, they could finally wash their hands of him. To Paramount's dismay, film after film he made for them were all commercial successes, even if critical notices were unkind. Back at United Artists in 1930, Griffith made Abraham Lincoln starring Walter Huston; easily one of the worst of his films, it nevertheless was a smash hit and made it look as though Griffith was finally back on track. However, his low-budget depression drama about alcoholism, The Struggle (1931), gave the studio heads what they wanted. In retrospect, The Struggle is Griffith's best talkie, but it was a resounding flop that finally ended Griffith's 25-year, 530-plus film run as a director. Although likely a third of the people working in Hollywood in 1931 felt that they owed their careers to D.W. Griffith, no one would hire him -- the age of the autocratic director who controlled every creative aspect of a film was truly finished. Griffith was still fairly well off, and spent the rest of his life on the family estate near Louisville, sharing his home with the families of the servants who had once worked for his father.
The whole idea of film preservation grew up around the work of D.W. Griffith; the donation of his personal collection of films to the Museum of Modern Art film library in 1940 was the basic seed that jump-started the collection as a whole, and by 1980 they had located all but about 30 of his 530 films. Otherwise, D.W. Griffith hasn't been well treated by posterity -- although the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation seemed to have dissipated by the wide observances of his centennial in 1975, the rise of academic political correctness late in the century led to a backlash against the aging, nearly hundred-year-old film, with many insisting that it be banned. In 1999, the Director's Guild took Griffith's name off its DGA Award, and about that time a colorful Red Grooms sculpture representing Griffith directing a scene from Way Down East was quietly removed from the campus of Northern Kentucky University. While there are many who would like to see the name of D.W. Griffith expunged from the rolls of history forever, there is no question that without him the basic language of the movies would not have developed when it did, and that his work established for the first time the potential of motion pictures as an art form -- period. ~ Dave Lewis, All Movie Guide
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance (1916).[1]
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. However, it also proved extremely controversial at the time and ever since for its highly negative depiction of black Americans and their supporters, and its positive portrayal of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith responded to his critics with his next film, Intolerance, intended to show the dangers of prejudiced thought and behavior. The film was not the financial success that its predecessor had been, but was received warmly by critics. Several of his later films were also successful, but high production, promotional, and roadshow costs often made his ventures commercial failures. However, he is generally considered one of the most important figures of early cinema.
Griffith, of Welsh ancestry, was born in La Grange, Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith and Mary Perkins Griffith. His father was a Confederate Army colonel in the American Civil War 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 7, upon which the family experienced serious financial hardships. At age fourteen, Griffith's mother abandoned the farm and moved the family to Louisville where she opened a boarding house, which failed shortly. Griffith left high school to help with the finances, taking a job first in a dry goods store, and, later, in a bookstore.
Griffith began his career as a hopeful playwright but met with little success; only one of his plays was accepted for a performance.[2] Griffith decided instead to become an actor, and appeared in many plays as an extra.[3]
Film career
In 1907, Griffith, still having goals for becoming a successful playwright, went to New York and attempted to sell a script to Edison Studios producer Edwin Porter.[2] Porter rejected Griffith's script, but gave him an acting part in Rescued From An Eagle's Nest[2] Finding his way into the motion picture business, he soon began to direct a huge body of work. 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 also change forever.[4] In 1908, Biograph's main director Wallace McCutcheon grew ill, and his son, Wallace McCutcheon, Jr., took his place.[5] McCutcheon, Jr., however, was not able to bring the studio success.[4] As a result, Biograph head Henry Marvin decided to give Griffith the position;[4] Griffith then made his first movie for the company, The Adventures of Dollie.
Biograph was the first company to shoot a film in Hollywood, California, the film In Old California (1910). Influenced by the Italian feature filmCabiria (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. 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. He joined the Mutual Film Corporation and formed a studio, with Majestic Studio manager Harry Aitken[6] known as Reliance-Majestic Studios (which was later renamed Fine Arts Studio).[7] 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[6] and his brother Roy. Through Reliance-Majestic Studios, he produced The Clansman (1915), which would later be known as The Birth of a Nation.
D. W. Griffith on a movie set with actor Henry Walthall and others
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 arguably it changed the industry standard to one still recognized today.[8] It was enormously popular, breaking box office records, but aroused controversy due to its depiction of slaveryrace 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 freedman 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. However, attempts by the NAACP to stop showings of the film failed, and it went 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[citation needed].
However, after seeing The Birth of a Nation, audiences in some major northern cities also responded by rioting over the film's racial content.[9] After The Birth of a Nation had run its course in theaters, Griffith would also respond to the negative reception a vast amount of critics gave the film through his next film Intolerance, which dealt with the effects of intolerance in four different historical periods: the Fall of Babylon; the Crucifixion of Christ; the Massacre of the Huguenots; and a modern story. During its release, however, 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.[10] Like The Birth Of A Nation, Griffith put a huge budget into the film's production, which was also a key factor in its failure at the box office.[11] 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. 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.[12]
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. 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.[13]
Griffith was forced to leave United Artists after Isn't Life Wonderful (1924) failed at the box office, and returned to his job as a director.[14] 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.
Griffith died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 on the way to a Hollywood hospital, after being discovered unconscious in his room at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles, where he had been living alone.[1] There was a large public service in his honor at the Hollywood Masonic Temple, where numerous stars came to pay their last respects. He is buried at Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard in Centerfield, Kentucky.[16] 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. Regardless of whether he actually invented new techniques in film grammar, he seems to have been the first to understand how these techniques could be used to create an expressive language, something that would gain popular recognition with the release of The Birth of a Nation (1915). 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.
California Historical Marker marking the site of D.W. Griffith's movie ranch in Sylmar, California
Griffith was a leading character in The Biograph Girl, a 1980 stage musical about the silent film era. On December 10, 2008 Hollywood Heritage Museum hosted a screening of Griffith's earliest films, to commemorate the centennial since his start in film.[17] On January 22, 2009 the Oldham History Center in La Grange, Kentucky opened a 15 seat theatre in Griffith's honor. The theatre features a library of Griffith films to choose from.[18]
^ ab"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.". New York Times. July 24, 1948, Saturday.
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)
Matthew Smith, "American Valkyries: Richard Wagner, D. W. Griffith, and the Birth of Classical Cinema," in Modernism/modernity 15:2 ([1] April 2008), 221-42.
Iris Barry and Eileen Bowser, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965)
US History Companion. The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
- Woodrow Wilson, on seeing The Birth of a Nation in 1915
It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
