Griffith, D.W.

Griffith, D.W. (1875–1948), motion picture director and producer.Born in Kentucky, David W. Griffith was a stage actor and playwright before becoming a movie actor in 1907. He was hired as a director for American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1908. His scores of one‐ and two‐reel films cranked out for the burgeoning nickelodeon market established him as the most original American filmmaker. From The Lonely Villa (1908) to The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and The Mothering Heart (1913), Griffith used rapid crosscutting to wring almost unbearable suspense out of last‐minute rescues. Working with Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and other young performers, he pioneered an untheatrical film acting style of small gestures and slight expressions.

Griffith yearned to make cinema a vehicle for sweeping spectacle and moral edification. After leaving Biograph to establish his own company, he made The Birth of a Nation (1915), adapted from Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman (1905). Griffith provided the screen's first national epic, a fresco of the American Civil War and its aftermath that displayed his technique at its most overwhelming. It also presented a deeply prejudiced view of African Americans and the effects of Reconstruction and an idealized image of the Ku Klux Klan. The stupendous success of The Birth of a Nation encouraged Griffith to mount the still more grandiose Intolerance (1916), which traced bigotry through the ages, daringly interweaving stories from four different epochs.

Thereafter, Griffith alternated historical spectacles like the World War I drama Hearts of the World (1918) and the Revolutionary War adventure America (1924) with more intimate and lyrical romances like True Heart Susie and Broken Blossoms (both 1919). His attitudes and techniques seemed antiquated in the 1920s, and his last two films, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and the anti‐alcohol melodrama The Struggle (1931), were strained efforts to move into talking pictures. Griffith spent his final years in seedy obscurity, ignored by the industry he had helped found. Yet he was the most celebrated and controversial American filmmaker of the silent era.

Bibliography

Richard Schickel , D.W. Griffith: An American Life, 1984.
Tom Gunning , D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, 1991.

David Bordwell