4. D.W. Griffith and the forging of motion-picture art

Long before anyone thought movies could be art, a new generation of thinkers and artists had begun to explore the principles of motion pictures for analogies to their own innovations in philosophy, science, painting and literature. The invention of cameras and projectors to record and reproduce images of motion coincided with the development of modernism, and in some cases may have fostered it.

David Wark Griffith was an artist and modernist comparable in some measure to Pablo Picasso.

The story of Griffith’s pilgrimage along the path of movie progress, his early triumphs and late disasters is one of many Hollywood morality tales, perhaps the most significant. He came out of the defeated South, born in Kentucky in 1875 to genteel poverty and a sense of better times gone by. He had been an actor for twelve years with little to show for it when he entered movies. In 1906 he settled in New York and suddenly began to succeed. He found work both in Edison and Biograph. In addition to acting, he sold several synopses – short summaries of stories that could be made into one-reel films. He became known as an actor with ideas, and when Biograph’s regular director became ill, the company’s managers accepted an employee’s suggestion to try Griffith.

His first film, a gypsy melodrama called The Adventures of Dolly, satisfied his employers. Within a fortnight he was assigned to direct the entire Biograph output, which meant two one-reel films a week and an additional half-reel comedy or short melodrama.

As he became more familiar with the filmmaking process, Griffith gradually began to alter the traditional Biograph techniques to enhance his developing story-

telling style. The Biograph camera was mounted on a rolling platform in the studio so that it could be moved closer to the set. He also borrowed a technique from comedy and began cutting back and forth between two scenes of action. The individual shot began to replace the complete scene as the basic unit of construction in a Griffith film. He started to change camera placements within a scene and take multiple shots. Before the end of 1908 he made a ten-minute film Guerrilla, a Civil War melodrama, with the unheard-of total of more than forty separate shots. Griffith later made large claims for himself as the creator of basic cinema techniques.

Year after year he gave more detailed attention to natural and artificial lighting, using side lighting for the effect of firelight, backlighting with reflectors to soften facial features, changing light within a shot, using fades and focused lightings for individuals. By 1912 he became a master of the effects of chiaroscuro, of light and dark shading in motion-picture frame. He improved his skill as a director of actors, slowing down the movements of his players, creating a quieter yet more intense acting style commensurate with a close camera and a lager figure on the screen.

Each year he found new ways to increase the tempo of his films: he mounted a camera on the back of a car to shoot another car speeding behind it, and another time shot a racing train from a moving car. In A Beast At Bay / 1912 /, one of the most effective of his chase melodramas, he used a radical shift in spatial perspective, showing a man running towards a camera and then cutting to a shot of the same running man moving away from the camera.

Biograph’s officers doubled the administrators of the Motion Picture Patents Company, and they strictly adhered to the Trust’s cautious production policies. None of their pictures could be longer than two reels; Griffith and his players could receive neither screen credit nor personal publicity. As his skill and self-confidence grew, Griffith began to chafe under these restrictions. He had build up the acting company of extraordinary quality, including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet and Henry B. Walthall. Most of them had opportunities to defect to the independents for more money and recognition, but they all remained with Griffith.

Griffith saw the opportunity to try new ways of cutting and assembling separate shots – to try a new way of conceiving the space and time of the succession of moving images. In the 1920s Sergey Eisenstein used the French word montage to describe a type of film editing and assembling. Montage meant the building up of impressions through the juxtaposition of separate shots, in order to create a single, complete mental image or emotional state. Essentially montage was a means of attaining a specific response from an audience, and this is what Griffith worked toward with greater freedom in the longer film.

During the winter of 1913-1914 he quickly made four feature films for Mutual. The genesis of the film was Thomas W. Dixon’s novel and stage melodrama The Clansman. Its plot rested on fervid racism and fear of sexual relations between blacks and whites. Griffith changed the title to The Birth of a Nation as the film was about the creation of a new nation after year of struggle and division, a nation of Northern and Southern whites. The film cost nearly $60,000 to produce and an equal amount to promote. Ticket prices were set at a minimum $2. In theme, form and price it was meant to appeal to the American elite to tell them something about

their own culture.

Griffith’s strike sequence in the modern story is one of the classic examples of dynamic montage in American movies. It culminates with a sudden change of tempo and remarkable use of open space.

But Griffith had difficulty putting his individual sequences and vast historical panorama together as a coherent whole. When Intolerance was released in September 1916, audiences watched the film with awe but also with confusion. In the film there are three episodes: the fall of Babylon Chridayst’s life and crucifixion, and the sixteenth-century massacre of the Huguenots in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s day. Here Griffith made his greatest miscalculation: he misjudged the predilections of the audience.

After the commercial failure of Intolerance Griffith was continually in need of outside financing to support his production. He had demonstrated that movies could be art; he had attracted upper-class Americans to movie theatres for the first time. Along with the directors and players he had trained, and the techniques and styles he had developed, his films served to carry on the Griffith influence as Hollywood became a source of entertainment, mores and culture throughout the world.