D. W. Griffith
| D. W. Griffith | |
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| Birth name: | David Llewelyn Wark Griffith |
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| Date of birth: | January 22 1875 |
| Birth location: |  La Grange, Kentucky, United States
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| Date of death: | July 23 1948 (aged 73) |
| Death location: | Hollywood, California, United States |
| Academy Awards: | Academy Honorary Award 1936 Lifetime achievement |
| Spouse: | Linda Arvidson (1906-1936) Evelyn Baldwin (1936-1947) |
David Llewelyn Wark "D.W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was an American film director. He is widely credited with being the first to realize and develop the potential of film as an extended dramatic medium, and with making the first feature-length movie. Critic James Agee said of him, "To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man."
Legendary actress Lillian Gish called Griffith "the father of film." At the height of his prominence, Griffith reached a worldwide audience, screening his films for people low and high, from the urban working-class to presidents at the White House. His films became part of the making of history and showed the power of movies for creating social change. More than anyone else of the silent era, Griffith understood, unleashed and exploited the potential of film as an expressive medium.
Griffith is best known as the director of the controversial 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and that film is generally considered to be the first feature-length movie.
Early life
Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky. His father was Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a Confederate Army colonel and Civil War hero. He 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.
In politics, Griffith was a Republican. He supported Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
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 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 were the standard opinions of the majority of American historians of the day (and indeed, long afterwards, E.M. Coulter's The South During Reconstruction, published in 1947, would repeat many of these views), 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. 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. 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. Some claim, too, that he "invented" the close-up shot.
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
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
- Resurrection (1909)
- In Old California (1910)
- Judith of Bethulia (1914)
- The Birth of a Nation (1915)
- Intolerance (1916)
- Broken Blossoms (1919)
- Way Down East (1920)
- Orphans of the Storm (1921)
- One Exciting Night (1922)
- America (1924)
- The Sorrows of Satan (1926)
- D.W. Griffith's 'Abraham Lincoln' (1930)
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- 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)
External links
- D. W. Griffith at the Internet Movie Database
- Souvenir Guide for The Birth of a Nation, hosted by the Portal to Texas History
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Griffith, D.W. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Griffith, David Llewelyn Wark (full name) |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American film director |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 22, 1875 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | LaGrange, Kentucky, United States |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 23, 1948 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Hollywood, California, United States |
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