D W Griffith

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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

D. W. Griffith (David Llewelyn Wark Griffith), 1875-1948, 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).

Griffith, D.W. ( David Wark) (1875–1948) US film director. His expressive use of the camera, lighting and dramatic editing established film as an independent art form. In 1915, Griffith released the Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation, often cited as the most important document in cinematic history, but also condemned as racist. Intolerance (1916) was his response, examining the persistence of prejudice. In 1919, he co-founded United Artists, and in 1935 he won an honorary Oscar.