D. W. Griffith (1875-1948)

Quotation

It takes two years on the stage for an actor or an actress to learn how to speak correctly and to manage his voice properly, and it takes about ten years to master the subtle art of being able to hold one's audience.

Books

Please browse our Amazon list of titles about D. W. Griffith. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about D. W. Griffith.

Research

Films: D. W. Griffith
COPAC UK: D. W. Griffith
Library of Canada Search Form
Library of Congress: D. W. Griffith
Other Library Catalogs: D. W. Griffith

Biographical

David Wark Griffith (January 22, 1875 - July 23, 1948) was an American director (also known as D.W. Griffith). Important works: The Birth of a Nation (1915); Intolerance (1916); Broken Blossoms (1919); America (1924). Born in Crestwood, Kentucky, David Wark Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Scholars no longer dispute that few or 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 contributed Mise en Scene and various film editing techniques to film grammar. That being said, he still used many elements attributed to the "primitive style" of movie-making that predated classical 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. Although popular at the time of its release, his film The Birth of a Nation (1915) was also considered responsible for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Griffith remains both a praised and disdained 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 450 short films. Such output allowed him to experiment with cross-cutting, 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 The Birth of a Nation, and later, as a reaction to the criticism The Birth of a Nation received, his most ambitious project, Intolerance. The film was a flop, and Triangle went bankrupt in 1917, so he went to Artcraft (part of Paramount), then to First National (1919-20). At the same time he founded United Artists, together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. He was honored on a 10 cent postage stamp by the United States issued May 5, 1975. [This article in part is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on D. W. Griffith.]

Books from Alibris: D. W. Griffith