D.W. Griffith and the birth of cinema

David Wark Griffith helped give cinema its syntax. His importance to the medium's basics is beyond measure. Griffith’s gradual discovery of what he could do with cameras and editing can be traced via the short subjects he did for Biograph early in his career. Films like the decidedly anti-capitalist "A Corner in Wheat" (1909), as well as "The Musketeers of Pig Alley "(1912), which investigates crime and gang activity, contain some of the most elemental techniques for producing narrative film, including cross-cutting to compare and contrast different themes or close-ups that enhance the menacing tone of the characters. His short film "In Old California" (1910), has the distinction of being the first movie to be shot in Hollywood.

When Griffith tried to convince Biograph to let him attempt a feature length movie—"Judith of Bethulia" (1914)—the studio balked, believing that a film that ran an hour or more would be too much of a strain on viewers’ eyes. Griffith left Biograph and formed his own Majestic Studios, producing films to be released through the Mutual Corporation. The first was "The Clansman," based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, which would later be known as The Birth of a Nation.

When embracing cinema’s history, there are a handful of staples that are rudimentary to even the most basic frame of reference. One of them would most certainly be "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). Three parts movie milestone and two parts racist dogma, "The Birth of a Nation" is also both a starting point for epic film, and a culmination of Griffith’s myriad of cinematic ideas, each of which had been investigated in the series of short subjects the director had done leading up to this epic feature. Griffith’s amazing strides in the cinematic process via "The Birth of a Nation" have long been difficult for many to comfortably appreciate, because his story, based on Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s novel The Clansman," is so disconcerting, it overshadows our attempts to look past the story’s bigotry and appreciate the technique.

Griffith’s composition of shots, where he places objects and people within the frame, how he presents crowds, and the way he explores the possibilities of deep focus, are all just as impressive as his oft-lauded battle sequences. The assassination of President Lincoln, for example, opens with a tight iris shot of two people and expands to a high-angle shot of the entire Ford Theater, with the audience applauding in their seats as the play begins. Griffith edits to a closer shot of the president’s arrival, switching to a frontal shot of Lincoln and his party seated in their box enjoying the show. Griffith uses the iris to center upon assassin John Wilkes Booth, allowing minutes to pass before the shooting, effectively building dramatic tension. The authenticity of the assassination, Booth’s jump to the stage, and the subsequent reaction to the dying president is enhanced by an overhead shot of the once sedate, applauding audience bustling nervously in reaction to the disruption.

However the reconstruction sequence, where black people (mostly whites in blackface) are shown to be lazy, shiftless, and violently oversexed, has permeated the film's technical achievement and turned it into a repugnant racist diatribe. The anger towards this movie remains, judging by the boycotts and protests that still occur when the film is scheduled at silent-film retrospectives, and the removal of Griffith’s name from the Director’s Guild of America award in 1999, after it had been won by the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, John Ford, and Ingmar Bergman since its being instituted in 1953.

In response to the reaction of "Birth of a Nation," Griffith next filmed "Intolerance" (1916) an epic feature about man's inhumanity to man. Intercutting between four different stories, each centuries apart, and shooting on beautiful ornate sets, Griffith was expanding the scope of cinematic presentation while experimenting and edgier and less conventional telling of the story.

Griffith's other silent films were mostly melodramas, such as "Broken Blossoms," (1919), "Way Down East" (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921) each used elements Griffith had discovered in his progression of the cinematic process. He continued to expertly use shot composition, camerawork, and editing techniques to create the proper mood and audience reaction.

"Way Down East" is best known for the exciting climax featuring Gish trapped in the ice during a snowstorm. Shot on location during an actual blizzard, this harrowing sequence features Gish’s character, having fainted on an ice floe, floating toward a waterfall with her right hand and her hair in the freezing river and heightens the dramatic tension. The structure of Griffith’s shots, and Billy Bitzer’s masterful camerawork are most impressive when shooting from further away, allowing for more of the snowy atmosphere to fill the screen, while Gish’s diminutive body lies to the left and towards the back of the frame. Seconds later, Griffith will cut to a much closer shot of the woman lying still on the ice, her hair hanging in the water, floating toward the edge. A few more seconds and Griffith switches to a medium shot, close enough to see the heroine clearly, but far enough away to absorb the extent of her danger.

Time has not been kind to D.W. Griffith. By the time of his death in 1946, he had become forgotten, dismissed as a relic from a bygone era. Orson Welles said "I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man."

D.W. Griffith's name will often conjure up awful images of the Ku Klux Klan coming to the rescue when reconstruction allows for integration. But the fact remains that he is, as Charlie Chaplin stated, "the father of us all." While others might have fleshed out cinema's language more fully, it was D.W. Griffith who created its most important rudimentary procedures.