D.W.Griffith Essay -- Biography Biographies Bio

Perhaps no other director has generated much(prenominal) a broad range of critical reaction as D.W. Griffith. For students of the inquiry picture, Griffiths is the roughly familiar name in film history. Generally admit as Americas most influential director (and certainly oneness of the most prolific), he is also perceived as being among the most limited. acclamation for his mastery of film technique is matched by repeated indictments of his moral, artistic, and intellectual inadequacies. At one extreme, Kevin Brownlow has characterized him as the only director in America inventive enough to be called a genius. At the other, Paul Rotha calls his contribution to the come near of film negligible and Susan Sontag complains of his supreme vulgarity and even inanity his pop off reeks of a fervid moralizing about sexuality and violence and his life force comes from suppressed voluptuousness.Griffith started his directing c areer in 1908, and in the following fivesome years do som e 485 films, almost all of which have been preserved. These films, one or two reels in length, have customarily been regarded as assimilator works, films in which, to quote Stephen Zito, Griffith borrowed, invented, and perfected the forms and techniques that he latelyr used to much(prenominal) memorable effect in The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and representation Down East. These early Biographs (named after the studio apartment apartment at which Griffith worked) have commonly been studied for their stylistic features, notably parallel editing, camera placement, and treatment of lite and shadow. Their most famous structuring devices are the last-minute rescue and the cross-cut.In modern years, however, the Biographs have assumed higher status in film history. some(prenominal) historians and critics rank the... ...oes Griffith create the impression of narrative immobility?By and large, Griffiths films of the mid- and late 1920s have not fared well crit ically, although they have their defenders. The customary enchantthat Griffiths work became dull and undistinguished when he lost his personal studio at Mamaroneck in 1924continues to prevail, despite calls from John Dorr, Arthur Lennig, and Richard Roud for re-evaluation. The eight films he made as a contract director for Paramount and United Artists are commonly studied (if at all) as examples of late 1920s studio style. What critics find startling about themparticularly the United Artists featuresis not the omit of quality, but the absence of any identifiable Griffith traits. Only Abraham Lincoln and The peel (Griffiths two sound films) are recognizable as his work, and they are usually treated as early 1930s oddities.