David Lewelyn Wark Griffith Essay, Research Paper

Overview

David Lewelyn Wark Griffith, an

American filmmaking pioneer, screenwriter, producer, and director, was born

January 22, 1875, near Louisville, Kentucky. Best known for his controversial

perceptions of race and class in American society, D.W. Griffith left an

indelible mark on the history of cinema. He died July 23, 1948, in Hollywood,

California.

I. THE MOVIES’

FIRST GENIUS

II. GRIFFITH AND FILM LANGUAGE

1. The State of

the Art

2. Revolutionizing

Perception

III. INVENTING

HOLLYWOOD: BLOCKBUSTERS AND DISASTERS

1. The

Birth of a Nation (1915)

2. A Schism

Between Form and Content

IV. THE PARADOX

OF D.W. GRIFFITH

V. A GRIFFITH CHRONOLOGY

I. THE MOVIES’

FIRST GENIUS

"The task I am trying to achieve is above all to make you see."

— D.W. Griffith

Although his sensibilities were rooted in nineteenth century ideas of

honor and family, masculinity and femininity, race and history, D.W. Griffith

became a towering influence over the most characteristic art form of the

twentieth century, the cinema. Intensely ambitious and passionately in

love with art, Griffith displayed all of the maddening contradictions

of a medium’s first genius: a ham actor himself, he could move other performers

to achieve startling nuances of character; a sentimental hack writer,

he drew upon the influence of many disciplines to establish revolutionary

methods of storytelling on film; a fiery social critic and champion of

justice, he could be brutally insensitive and show great lapses in taste

and logic.

Even in his own time, Griffith was received as an artist who placed thrilling

techniques in the service of unexamined, sometimes reprehensible, ideology.

His critical and historical reputation has fluctuated wildly since he

first began making short films in 1908, from his own claims to greatness,

to the cinema students who mythologized him in the sixties, to the current

attempts to denounce him and his achievement.

But Griffith, more than any other early filmmaker, had a profound effect

on the global movie industry. His rebellion against established cinematic

codes and practices helped pave the way to the film culture that persists

some eighty years later. In the words of historian David A. Cook, Griffith’s

achievement is "unprecedented in the history of Western art, much

less Western film."

II. GRIFFITH

AND FILM LANGUAGE

THE STATE OF THE ART

Griffith was a thirty-three year old itinerant actor and sometime playwright/novelist

when he directed his first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908).

The grammar of cinema at that time had been dictated by businessmen (among

them Thomas

Edison) who were purely concerned with managing costs and profits.

Afraid that expanded reputations would lead to a demand for higher salaries,

the people who financed films made sure filmmakers received no public

acknowledgment of any kind; the studios received sole credit for the products.

The average film ran one reel in length (approximately ten to twelve

minutes) and limited its perspective to what had been the audiences’ stationary

view of a theater stage, with actors photographed most often in wide head-to-toe

shots. All of these rules were based largely on perceptions of what the

film audience could understand and/or tolerate. However, Griffith reasoned

that if the human mind is capable of drawing many connections during the

act of reading a book, then motion pictures could somehow imitate the

same imaginative process visually.

REVOLUTIONIZING PERCEPTION

The film factory that hired Griffith for Dollie, the Biograph

Company, was pleased with his work and within a few months he was their

sole director. He was soon challenging every convention of his time. Simply

stated, Griffith’s movies moved. With the help of veteran Biograph

cameraman G.W. "Billy" Bitzer, Griffith began moving the camera

closer to his actors and cutting to a variety of angles within a single

scene. Even more surprising, he began to edit his films not only to connect

scenes chronologically, but to give dramatic rhythm to a piece, cutting

to startling close-ups of details that enhanced both the story and the

actor’s characterizations. The Biograph management was intensely resistant

to these innovations, but they could not deny the overwhelming increase

in their revenue. Audiences loved Griffith’s movies, immediately resonating

to dramatically new approaches to the presentation of narrative.

One fresh technique led to another, and another, in logical and imaginative

sequence. From cutting shot-to-shot within a scene, Griffith leapt to

the bold device of parallel editing, structuring films with more than

one story line and cutting back and forth as the narrative strands came

together in an exciting climax. He also developed a technique called intercutting,

perhaps his most radical experiment, because it juxtaposed close-ups of

actors with shots of objects and/or people about whom the character was

thinking. Film was now imitating the processes of consciousness, not merely

imitating the stage.

III.

INVENTING HOLLYWOOD: BLOCKBUSTERS AND DISASTERS

Griffith’s explosive creativity could not be contained by the American

movie business as it existed. His toughest battles with Biograph were

over movie length, for his stylistic innovations seemed to demand ever

greater complexity in the stories he told. In his five years at Biograph

(1908-1913) he had made more than 450 films, most of them one-reelers,

by organizing overlapping schedules with a rotating company of stock performers.

Now he wanted to expand the boundaries of his medium in all directions.

He left Biograph, taking most of its important personnel with him, and

relocated to southern California.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)

Always looking for exciting stories suited to his kinetic style, Griffith

obtained the rights to The Clansman, a distorted and sexually paranoid

novel of the Reconstruction

era in the post-Civil War South.

As the son of a Confederate veteran

raised on tales of abominations against the Aryan race, Griffith thought

himself uniquely suited, both temperamentally and intellectually, to film

this story.

He was right only on the first count. The Clansman was the most

expensive film ever made in America at the time, budgeted at $40,000 (or

about four times the cost of the average film). By the time it was finished

it had absorbed over $100,000. Griffith expanded the narrative to encompass

all of the Civil War, adding the emotional resonance of its brother-against-brother

conflict by constructing parallel stories of two families, one from the

north, one from the south, whose lives intertwined.

The result after five months of shooting was a culmination of everything

Griffith had learned and developed in the film business. Aesthetically,

The Clansman was peerless. Vast armies clashed on battlefields

stretching for miles into the distance, and great events were humanized

by their indelible effect on sympathetic characters. The preview audience

in Los Angeles collectively jumped to its feet cheering at the finale,

a response that would be repeated all over the country. The film was released

a month later with a new title, The Birth of a Nation, and it was

an instant smash hit on a scale never before seen, running continuously

in some theaters for as long as a year, and reaping profits in excess

of ten times its cost.

Nation was the first great box office blockbuster, a galvanizing

cinematic experience that literally made fortunes for its investors (many

of whom, like Louis

B. Mayer, went on to build and dominate Hollywood

in the following decades). It was also a shameful scandal, generating

a cultural upheaval and underscoring Griffith’s profound limitations as

a thinking man.

A SCHISM BETWEEN FORM AND CONTENT

"Griffith struck it right when he adapted ( The Clansman)

for the film. He knew the South and he knew just what kind of picture

would please all white classes"

— review of The Birth of a Nation in Variety, March 12,

1915

The Birth of a Nation, in addition to its stirring technique and

historical recreations, contained all of the original novel’s virulent

racism, an epic glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Bulging with cruel

distortions and paranoid delusions about the nature of African-Americans

and their role in Reconstruction, the film remains a monument to ignorance

at the dawn of a new century. Griffith was genuinely shocked and hurt

by the outrage of the black community over his epic, little realizing

that his own ideologies were learned attitudes, not historical or natural

facts. He viewed criticism of Nation’s content as an infringement

on his First Amendment rights, even while his film advocated the violent

suppression of rights for an entire ethnic group.

He was already at work on another film, The Mother and the Law,

when Nation began its thundering conquest of the box office. Chafing

at criticism of his masterwork, he expanded the new production into an

unprecedented extravaganza, crosscutting between four stories of social

injustice over the ages. He called his opus Intolerance (1916)

and its physical production dwarfed any film previously attempted.

Intolerance cost twenty times the budget of Birth of a

Nation, with Griffith channeling most of his profits from the earlier

film into gigantic sets that still numb the imagination. Audiences and

critics, however, viewed its restless parallel action as confusing and

aimless. Though recent scholarship has vindicated Intolerance as

a mature work of art, its box office failure in 1916 haunted Griffith

for the rest of his life. Like many a Hollywood filmmaker after him, D.W.

Griffith had fatally confused bigger with better.

IV. THE PARADOX

OF D.W. GRIFFITH

A testament to self-absorbed extravagance and artistry gone awry, the

massive Babylonian set from Intolerance loomed empty above the

growing town of Hollywood, crumbling for a year before it was finally

torn down. In the space of three years, 1914-1917, Griffith’s grand ambitions

for cinema had led him to demonstrate, unwittingly, the untapped potential

of a new art form in all its power and excess.

Even so, and despite the financial failure of Intolerance, some

of Griffith’s finest movies were still to be made. Broken Blossoms

(1919), a tragedy of urban life, has long been considered by many historians

to be his true masterpiece, a return to the kind of atmospheric drama

that shaped his art. Way Down East (1920) may be his most representative

success, a wildly melodramatic film that made huge profits with the same

kind of feverish cinematic effects that gave Nation such broad

appeal. Way Down East’s spectacular last minute rescue still makes

audiences gasp with wonder and respect for Griffith’s mastery of the moving

image. Yet The Birth of a Nation remains at the center of his life

and art, the definitive example of Griffith’s paradoxical genius, for

he was both a great innovator of the movies’ narrative vocabulary and,

at the same time, an elitist who was serenely unaware of the misconceptions

that often undermined his best work.

Finally, Griffith’s nineteenth century parochialism ended his career

in the Hollywood that emerged during the twenties. While the silent cinema

rose to artistic heights beyond his wildest dreams, the man himself quickly

grew irrelevant to the cynical, post-World War I audience. He made his

last film in 1931, though he tried for many years to finance a number

of productions.

D.W. Griffith died in 1948, alone and disillusioned. At the end he found

himself unable to work in his chosen art form, an art form that, largely

through his innovations, shaped the culture and consciousness of the twentieth

century.

A Griffith

Chronology

1875 – DWG born January 22, the son of a Confederate veteran.

1895 – Begins more than a decade of odd jobs, acting in stock companies under the stage

name "Lawrence Griffith". Writes fiction and plays unsuccessfully.

1907 – First known employment in the movies, as a bit player in Biograph’s Falsely

Accused!.

1908 – DWG directs his first film, The Adventures of Dollie, in collaboration

with cameraman Billy Bitzer.

1909-1913 – Develops a number of exciting visual techniques from many sources, most

notably the novels of Charles Dickens; makes approximately 450 films of one and two-reel

length; gathers a stock company of actors that includes Mary Pickford and Lilian Gish.

1914 – Breaks with Biograph; begins work on epic The Clansman, the longest

American film of its day.

1915 – Release of The Clansman under a new title, The Birth of a Nation,

unleashes a storm of both controversy and praise. The film is Hollywood’s first

"blockbuster," reaping profits in excess of ten times its cost.

1916 – DWG’s most ambitious production is Intolerance, released Sept. 15; public

response is cool, DWG loses a fortune.

1919 – Forms United Artists Film Corporation with silent film greats Charles Chaplin,

Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks; makes the highly regarded Broken Blossoms.

1920 – The DWG melodrama Way Down East premieres September 3. It will become his

greatest commercial hit after Nation.

1921-1930 – The rise of Hollywood as a global cultural force; DWG’s films in this period

gradually lose impact for the new audience.

1931

– DWG’s last film, The Struggle, is pulled from release after

poor audience reception.

1935 – Receives honorary Oscar for "lasting contribution".

1948 – DWG dies on July 23 at the Hollywood Knickerbocker hotel. He is 73.

Recommended Reading – Suggestions from the Author

Brown,

Karl; Adventures with D.W. Griffith; 2nd ed.; New York; Da

Capo Press; 1976. Here’s

a review of Adventures with D.W. Griffith.

Eisenstein,

Sergei; "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today"; In Film

Theory and Criticism; 4th ed.; Edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall

Cohen, and Leo Braudy; New York; Oxford University Press; 1992; First

published in Jay Leyda, Film Form; New York; Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich; 1949.

Geduld,

Harry M., ed.; Focus on D.W. Griffith; Englewood Cliffs, NJ;

Prentice-Hall; 1971.

Gish,

Lillian, with Ann Pinchot; Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith,

and Me; Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall; 1969.

Hart,

James, ed.; The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography

of D.W. Griffith; Louisville, KY; Touchstone Publishing Company;

1972.

Recommended Viewing – Suggestions from the Author

The

Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)

The

Birth of a Nation (1915)

Intolerance

(1916)

Broken

Blossoms (1919)

Way

Down East (1920)

Author’s Note:

A great number of Griffith’s films survive and are available on video.

Beware of truncated prints, however. Many tapes rented and sold in stores

are not the complete work Griffith intended.

Leonard Maltin’s Annual Movie & Video Guide publishes an

extensive list of specialty mail-order houses for the serious collector.

The author recommends Facets Video,

1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614, ph. 800-331-6197.

Related Resources

African-American

Representation in Television and Film

Classic

Images

Milestones

in Cinema: Visual Effects

Civil

War

Further

Readings – A Short Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley

Libraries

History,

Theory, and Criticism of the Arts – A National Endowment for the

Humanities listing of productions and distributors of material relevant

to film history and theory

Overcoming

the "Sour Grapes" Version of Southern History

The

Black Experience in America by Norman Coombs

The

Silents Majority Classic Film Fan Club

Sources

Cook,

David A.; "D.W. Griffith and the Consummation of Narrative Form";

chap. 3 in A History of Narrative Film; first ed.; New York;

W.W. Norton and Company; 1981.

Bowser,

Eileen; "The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915"; History

of the American Cinema; Charles Harpole, ed., vol. 2; Berkeley,

CA; University of California Press; 1990.

Lang,

Robert, ed.; The Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffith, director;

Rutgers Films in Print, vol. 21; New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers

University Press; 1994.

Schickel,

Richard; D.W. Griffith: An American Life; New York; Simon and

Schuster; 1984.

Simmon,

Scott; The Films of D.W. Griffith; Cambridge; Cambridge University

Press; 1993.