Case Study: D.W. Griffith
David Wark Griffith is generally accepted as being the most important figure in film making in the second decade of the century. Some film historians argue that he invented ‘the grammar of film making’ - such as close-ups, the use of camera angles, expressive lighting and virtually the entire art of editing. In fact, most of the techniques Griffith himself claimed to have invented have their precedents elsewhere. What is agreed is that he ‘refined’ these techniques, using them logically and fluidly to tell stories in ways that are the basis of narrative film making.
Ironically, David Griffith never wanted to be ‘in the movies’ at all. His ambitions were as a writer but poverty and the material needs of a new family pushed him into acting (a job he was not suited to) and ultimately directing (a role he was, unquestionably, suited to). In his first year directing over a hundred pictures for Biograph (1908) he developed some of the most important innovations in cinema. Griffith took unusual care with casting and rehearsal ( a practice virtually non-existent until that date). He encouraged a less melodramatic style of acting with his actors and instead, moved the camera in closer to reveal emotional responses.
Remarkable as it may seem, the close-up had virtually disappeared for five years since its shock value as a gimmick was exploited by Porter in ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903). When Griffiths first shifted the camera closer in the middle of a scene in ‘For Love of Gold’ (1908), at the point where the two thieves begin to distrust each other; and three months later to a close-up in ‘Enoch Arden’ (1908), to show a wife’s anguish as she waited for her husband’s return, his employers at Biograph were shocked. ‘The public will never pay to see half an actor !’ ‘Show only the head of a person ! It’s against all the rules of movie making !’ Despite the studio’s expectations, on both occasions, audiences fully understood the sudden shift in perspective, which Griffith compared to a literary technique used by Charles Dickens.
Griffith had grasped the crucial idea that film can tell stories in quite different ways than theatre. It was not necessary to see characters exit or enter rooms before the important action commenced, for example. The camera could concentrate on the most important action alone. The rest was unnecessary. These techniques which Griffith used repeatedly in the many shorts he made in his first year, were not judged to be ‘jerky’ or ‘distracting’ by audiences as Biograph had feared, and Griffith’s films were quickly singled out for praise by public and critics alike.
For five years, Griffith directed hundreds of shorts and from 1913 several feature length films, liberating camera placement more with each passing year. Following his lead, the close-up shot of a face, a part of a body, or an object became a basic part of film style. He revolutionised editing, breaking up scenes into many shots, filming from different angles and distances. Action in different locations were edited together so that the story moved swiftly from place to place in a technique called ‘cross cutting’. In ‘The Lonely Villa’ (1909) Griffiths cut between a wife trapped in her house as three thugs force their way in, to her husband riding to the rescue. By ‘intercutting’ these two scenes, and making each shot shorter than the last, Griffiths was able to create very real psychological tension.
Frustrated by the budget and time restrictions of the short (Biograph refused to issue the two-reeler ‘Enoch Arden’ as one film) Griffiths made a series of ambitious and relatively expensive films, which to his dismay, were totally outshone by the new four and five reel European pictures such as ‘Queen Elizabeth’, ‘Cleopatra’ and ‘Quo Vadis’ which arrived in America at this time. He was demoted by Biograph for his financial extravagance and left the studio in December 1913 to produce, independently, what was to be America ’s answer to the European epics, ‘The Birth of a Nation’.
‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) is an intensely controversial film because, while hailed as a technical masterpiece of its time by most critics, it is also a poisonously racist text which was directly responsible for the dramatic re-birth of the Klu Klux Klan (whose membership had reached five million by the time of World War Two). This organisation is shown riding to the rescue of white womanhood and the values of the old South in the films infamous finale. According to Cook (1996) The Clan’s leaders admitted to using ‘The Birth of a Nation’ as a key instrument of recruitment well into the sixties. Indeed the film’s characters and storyline are impossible to stomach today. The black ‘characters’, who are usually white actors in face paint, are such grotesque stereotypes that their nearest equivalent lies in the Jewish caricatures of the Nazi propaganda films made twenty years later, such as ‘Jud Suss’. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was described by one contemporary reviewer as ‘a deliberate attempt to humiliate ten million American citizens’. Nevertheless, Griffith was astonished and outraged at the storm of protest that greeted his film from black and liberal audiences.
In fact, the film was based on the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s novel ‘The Clansman’, an even more hysterical white-supremacist retelling of the events surrounding the American Civil War. The deranged Thomas Dixon was so excited by Griffith ’s film at an early preview that he stood up at the end of the performance and shouted to the director that ‘The Clansman’ was too tame a name for such a masterpiece. He said the film should be called ‘The Birth of a Nation’. Race riots and an upsurge in violent Clan activity led to censorship of particular scenes in some American states. Griffith was indignant that anyone could suggest his film was racist when the plantation owners of his film were shown to have a good relationship with their obedient slaves. Only the ‘renegade Negroes’ and vengeful mulattos’ were shown as repugnant, sex-crazed imbeciles.
The film’s effect on audiences of its time is difficult to imagine today. America was a country in which racism was a widespread and respectable ideology and officially sanctioned public lynchings (where black people were often tortured and burned alive) were attended by thousands of people every year. At almost three hours in length and accompanied by a full symphony orchestra playing a specially commissioned score The Birth of a Nation’s expert direction and editing roused frightening emotions in the audience. There are reports that in many cinemas the screen was shot at when the black villains appeared. Even the progressive president Woodrow Wilson was forced to admire the film’s power, describing it as, ‘like writing history in lightning’. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ proved Griffith ’s technical mastery of the medium and showed the depths to which such mastery could be used.
His next epic ‘Intolerance’ (1916) showed even greater technical control. The film had four storylines each illustrating the theme of intolerance ( Griffith had been stung by the charges of racism). A modern story dealt with the ruthless suppression of a strike and a family’s battle to live a decent life in the slums. The second, the fall of Babylon , the third the crucifixion of Christ and the fourth, the massacre of the Huguenots in Paris in the sixteenth century. In addition to the innovation of parallel narration for the film’s structure, Griffith made daring use of camera angles and placement, lights, irises, masks, double screen and split screens, colour tinted film, long ‘trucking’ (moving) camera shots and huge close ups. The film’s gargantuan scale dwarfed even that of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and at a reported two million dollars cost twenty times more to make. The Babylonian set alone occupied ten acres of land and stood three hundred feet high. However, the film flopped at the box office, financially ruining Griffith in the process.
Some film historians claim that the technical inventiveness of ‘Intolerance’ was simply ahead of its time and beyond the understanding of its audience. Others suggest that the film’s message of tolerance came six months too late as America was preparing for war (the film was actually suppressed in some states as being pacifistic). However, many critics agree that the film’s unwieldy proportions, sermonising and , on occasion, confused development were major flaws. Perhaps more damning though is the sacrifice of character development for spectacle. As one contemporary reviewer declared, ‘The fatal error of Intolerance was that in the great Babylonian scenes you didn’t care which side won. It was just a great show.’ (Johnson 1916)
‘Intolerance’ effectively put an end to the career of Griffith as a film director of epic films. He continued to make features for some years, but as Jacobs (1967) observes, Griffith ’s Southern prejudices and sentimentality accounts, ‘for his phenomenal pre-war success and his swift post-war eclipse’.