D. W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith (American director)

born: January 22, 1875, Crestwood, Kentucky

died: July 23, 1948, Hollywood, California

Important works:

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Intolerance (1916)

Broken Blossoms (1919)

America (1924)

David Wark Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Scholars no longer dispute that few of any of Griffith's "innovations" actually began with him, but still he is given credit for canonizing a set of codes that have become the universal back-bone to the film language. In the broadest terms, Griffith's contributions can be categorized as MiseEnScene and editing (FilmEditing.). That being said, he still used many elements attributed to the "primitive style" of movie-making that predated cassical Hollywood's continuity system. These techniques include frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, hardly any camera movement and no Point-of-View Shots.

Griffith has been a highly controversial figure. While highly popular at the time of its release, his film /BirthofaNation (1915) was also considered responsible for the resurgence of the KluKluxKlan in the United States.

Griffith remains both a praised and distained character in the history of the cinema.

Griffith began his career as a hopeful playwright, but failed. He soon found his way as an actor. Finding his way into the motion picture business he soon began to direct a huge body of work. Between 1907 and 1913 (the years he directed for the American Biograph Company), Griffith produced an astounding 500 short films. Such output allowed him to experiment with CrossCutting, camera movement, close-ups, and other methods of spatial and temporal manipulation. Convinced that longer films (then called "Features") could be financially viable, he became a co-founder of Triangle (1915), which produced /BirthofaNation, and later, as a reaction to the criticism Birth of a Nation received, his most ambitious project, /IntolerancE . The film was a flop, and Triangle went bancrupt in 1917, so he went to Artcraft, then to First National (1919-20). At the same time he founded United Artists, together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.