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DW Griffith
Book Precis
Henderson, Robert. D.W. Griffith His Life and Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Robert Henderson chronicles the rise of the early silent film director D.W. Griffith, from Griffith's beginnings as a relatively obscure actor, to a figure who is considered today one of the pioneers of American silent cinema. Henderson discusses Griffith's early melodramatic films starring the director's favorite actress Lillian Gish, such as "Broken Blossoms," before moving on to Griffith's epic "Birth of a Nation." This later work was the first film to truly embrace the panoramic and visual ability of film to tell a gripping story to a wide audience.
Although Griffith did not invent the cinematic devices of close-ups and wide shots, the director was the first to understand and deploy the narrative power of these devices to reveal details about a character's emotional life and to create sympathy between the audience and the main character. Before Griffith, films were largely short, comic works, or brief recordings of exciting events, without developed plots. Griffith's artistic insights facilitated the transition from movies as mere moving pictures or photograph-like shots that moved, to a true art form.
Griffith trusted the intelligence of his audience. For instance, he showed that splicing two different sequences such as a house on fire and the approaching fire engine together over the course of a film would not confuse an audience. He took his work seriously, and conducted research to film "Birth of a Nation." Henderson states that Griffith was "almost obsessed" with research. But Griffith focused only on research that confirmed his racist ideas. (p.150) This is why Griffith remains controversial even to this day, because of the racist images in his great cinematic work about the Civil War. His screenplay for "Birth of a Nation" was based upon a novel called The Klansman by an unrepentant pro-Confederate Southerner. Black leaders protested the film even in its day and the film remains widely credited for causing resurgence in the popularity of the Klu Klux Klan, a Southern Reconstruction-era instrument of hatred. Yet even if one despises the ideology he embraced, no one can deny Griffith's longstanding influence upon the techniques deployed in American cinema.
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