• Born: 22 January 1875
• Birthplace: La Grange, Kentucky
• Died: 21 July 1948
• 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).

• Born: Jan 22, 1875 in La Grange, Kentucky
• Died: Jul 23, 1948 in Hollywood, California
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: 1900s-teens
• Major Genres: Drama, Romance
• Career Highlights: The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Hearts of the World
• First Major Screen Credit: Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker (1908)

Biography

One of the pioneers of contemporary filmmaking (and often cited as the single most important figure in the history of American cinema), D.W. Griffith was also one of the most controversial figures in the history of Hollywood. The son of a physician and Confederate hero during the Civil War, Griffith grew up in poverty in Louisville, KY, and gravitated to acting at an early age. At the turn-of-the-century, he worked as a performer in various touring companies with mixed success and in virtual poverty. After years of frustration on the stage, he turned to movies, and became an actor and writer, establishing himself at New York's Biograph Studio. He eventually became a producer and, in 1908, a director. He directed every Biograph release through the end of 1909, and, later as chief of production, supervised the making of every film released by the company for the next three years, personally directing all of the major productions. Most of these 450 films were comedies, although a significant minority were dramas. But it was in 1913 that Griffith's ambitions became clear with Judith of Bethulia; violating the restrictions of the studio heads, Griffith made the Old Testament drama into a four-reel film, almost double the length that had been approved, and an epic by the of the film standards of the day.

After leaving Biograph, Griffith embarked on an ambitious production based upon Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, which ultimately became known as Birth of a Nation (1915). The first great epic film of American cinema, this movie, more than any other, defined what the medium could do. Assisted by his cameraman Billy Bitzer, Griffith had already utilized such techniques of film construction and design as the close-up, rhythmic editing, parallel action, and dramatic lighting; these had been used before -- but not with Griffith's coherence or purpose. Birth of a Nation was the culmination of his efforts, drawing these techniques together in an epic-length story that carried viewers through the Civil War and into Reconstruction, with in-depth, detailed drama involving dozens of characters. Griffith single-handedly elevated American film -- which had previously stood in the shadow of its European cousins (Italian filmmakers, in particular, had been more ambitious much earlier) to world-class stature, and forced Americans who had thought of movies as light entertainment to perceive them as serious creations, worthy of respect equal to the greatest stage dramas and capable of creating theatrics that the a live performance couldn't hope to match. The movie's Civil War setting, however, was to prove a blemish on Griffith's reputation -- a Southerner by birth and family history with a deep resentment of the toll that Reconstruction played on his homeland, Griffith was outspoken on his views regarding the races, and black audience members all over the country rose up in protest against the depiction of slaves and ex-slaves in the movie. Demonstrations began almost from the instant the film was released, and Griffith -- despite including a plea for reconciliation of all of mankind's differences in his subsequent film Intolerance (1916) -- never fully recovered from the controversy. (A film answering Birth of a Nation was produced in 1919; entitled Birth of a Race, it presented a completely different view of black Americans and their ancestors.) The ripple effect of Birth also moved in other directions: The news that Griffith was doing an eight-reel drama also led his former mentor, Mack Sennett, to make the hour-long Tillie's Punctured Romance, the first comedy to run longer than two reels.

Griffith never had another success as great as Birth of a Nation, and, indeed, faced ongoing financial problems for much of the rest of his career. In addition, while his filmmaking technique was beyond reproach, his dramatic sensibilities were rooted in the touring theater of the 20th century's first decade. While he expanded the structural boundaries and storytelling capability of film with Intolerance -- the parallel action of which took place across several time periods -- and ventured into topical filmmaking with a vengeance in the World War I story Hearts of the World (1918), his characters and dramas seemed dated and one-dimensional. His smaller scale productions, such as True Heart Susie (1925) and Broken Blossoms (1919), worked better and have endured, but Griffith fell increasingly behind the rest of the country and the filmmaking community in the kinds of stories he told. He co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Charles Chaplin, but his involvement with the new studio failed to give him the financial independence that he needed to sustain his productions. His career began a downward spiral in the early '20s, despite such major works as the livelyAmerica, an account of the Revolutionary War, and Isn't Life Wonderful?, a compassionate look at post-war Germany. Almost all were box-office failures, costing Griffith creative control over his films. Other than his comedies with W.C. Fields, Sally of the Sawdust and That Royale Girl, his last silents were trivial, impersonal dramas. He made only two sound films: the biopic Abraham Lincoln, distinguished by Walter Huston's acting and Griffith's ease with sound, and The Struggle, a sensitive but neglected drama of alcoholism. Their failure sealed his fate, and he never got another job. Griffith died largely forgotten at age 73 in 1948; the legacy he left was an art form called cinema. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

The Struggle Buy this Movie	The Battle of the Sexes Buy this Movie	Sally of the Sawdust Buy this Movie	Isn't Life Wonderful Buy this Movie
America Buy this Movie	Orphans of the Storm Buy this Movie	Way Down East Buy this Movie	Broken Blossoms Buy this Movie

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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.

For more information on David Wark Griffith, visit Britannica.com.

(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.

(David Wark Griffith), 1880–1948, 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.

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."

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