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,
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.