D. W. Griffith

American filmmaker

• Born: January 22, 1875
• Birthplace: Floydsfork, Kentucky
• Died: July 23, 1948
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

A genius in the exposition of complex plots through revolutionary filmmaking techniques, Griffith was the foremost figure in the development of the American film as an expression of American values and as a commercially successful medium.

Early Life

D. W. Griffith was born in the family farmhouse at Floydsfork in Oldham County, Kentucky, the second youngest of seven children. His mother, née Mary Oglesby, was the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky farmer who provided his daughter and her husband with a cottage and employment on his farm. David’s father, Jacob Griffith, who claimed descent from Virginia planter aristocracy, was a romantic ne’er-do-well who, although he died when David was only seven years old, had a profound influence on his young son. Jacob Griffith had a checkered career. He had left his home in Virginia as a young man and gone to Kentucky, where he studied medicine as an apprentice for two years and briefly practiced it in Floydsburg. Unsuccessful and easily bored, he went off to fight in the Mexican War. He then returned to Kentucky, married, and, in 1850, left his wife and three children to escort a wagon train from Missouri to California toward the end of the Gold Rush. After returning home, in 1853-1854, he served in the Kentucky legislature. His glory days, however, lay ahead. At the outbreak of the Civil War he became a colonel under General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. He was wounded on several occasions, and one of these wounds, improperly treated, contributed to his later semi-invalidism and death. His most unusual wartime experience was to lead a victorious cavalry charge from a buggy since his wounds prevented him from riding a horse.

After the war, the Griffith family lived in the genteel poverty common among many of their station at the time. Jacob Griffith dabbled again briefly in Kentucky politics but spent most of his time regaling his family with tales of his heroic experiences and of the Lost Cause. He also convinced the young and impressionable David of his descent from Welsh kings. He read to his family in his deeply resonant voice from Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Walter Scott, and William Shakespeare and took his children to a magic-lantern show that made a deep impression on the young David. By 1882, Jacob Griffith was dead, a victim of his wartime wounds and heavy drinking. It was during David’s childhood years that his outlook was to be developed: He became a romantic imbued with a sense of southern gentility and convinced of his destiny to make his name in the literary and artistic world.

After the colonel’s death, the family eventually moved to Louisville, where the young Griffith’s mother opened a rooming and boarding house. Griffith took a variety of menial jobs to supplement the family’s income. Most significant, he worked in the bookstore run by Bernard and Washington Flexner, members of a remarkable family of Jewish intellectuals. The shop was a gathering place for many local writers, including James Whitcomb Riley. Griffith’s literary appetite was further whetted by this experience. He also attended, as means would allow, this river town’s numerous theaters and developed that intense interest so characteristic of youth. He was soon convinced that his destiny was to become a playwright, an American Shakespeare. He also developed an interest in acting as the means by which he could best learn stagecraft. By his early twenties, he had a job as an actor in a touring group of amateur players, much to his mother’s dismay. In deference to his mother, he took the name Lawrence Griffith and began his theatrical career.

By the late 1890’s, when Griffith began his theatrical career, he had developed the physical appearance he was to retain for most of the remainder of his life. Tall and thin with an aquiline nose, high forehead, and a moderately wide, thin-lipped mouth, he conveyed an aristocratic mien well suited to the stage actor. Later in life, he always wore a wide-brimmed hat.

Acting then, as ever, was an insecure profession. There were always more actors than roles, and anticipating the changing tastes of a fickle public was difficult. Thus, although Griffith acted, he took numerous other jobs as well. He worked in a steel mill and on a ship that carried lumber along the West Coast. He rode a freight train across the country and begged for food. These experiences were important, however, for they acquainted the son of southern aristocrats with the variety and conditions of men. In 1905, in San Francisco, he met a young actor, Linda Arvidson, who was to become his first wife. After the marriage, a year later in Boston, the two continued to act intermittently and maintained a hand-to-mouth existence. Griffith continued to write plays and sold one, A Fool and a Girl, in 1907 for seven hundred dollars. He also sold a poem and a short story for considerably lesser amounts and got an occasional acting role. In his early thirties, however, he was essentially a failure as an actor and writer. Yet his passion for both did not abate, and a chance meeting in 1908 that enabled him to use his talents successfully ignited a spark that was to develop into an obsession: a career in the fledgling motion-picture industry.

Life’s Work

In the spring of 1908, in were chosen, Griffith ran into an old friend, a fellow actor he had not seen for several years. As each recounted his experiences to the other, Griffith told his friend of the financial straits in which he and his wife then found themselves. The friend told Griffith that the motion-picture industry had been a lifesaver to him and suggested Griffith contact some of the numerous studios then operating in New York. Although Griffith knew little about this rapidly growing new industry, he took his friend’s suggestion and found employment at the Edison Company. In his only film for Edison, Griffith worked under cinematographer-director Edwin S. Porter, the creator of the famous “chase” film The Great Train Robbery (1903). Griffith was to use the device of the chase in many of his own films, including The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1922). Griffith also learned from Porter the rudiments of the trick-shot or special effect, which he later incorporated into his films. At that time interested primarily in scriptwriting, Griffith turned to American Biograph Studios, where he and his wife then found employment, she as an actor and he as a writer and actor. Within weeks, however, Griffith was given his first opportunity to direct. Having found what, in combination with writing, proved to be his calling, Griffith started to work, immediately choosing the cast and crew of his first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908). His most important choice was his cameraman, Billy “G. W.” Bitzer, who worked closely with Griffith throughout the heyday of the director’s career.

Thus, in 1908, Griffith began his five-year tenure at Biograph, a period during which he developed his craft as a technician and storyteller, built up a talented crew of technical personnel headed by Bitzer, and created a stock company of players including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, and, most important, the Gish sisters, Dorothy and the luminous Lillian who was, for Griffith, the embodiment of “virginal innocence” and his favorite and most talented performer. During his years at Biograph, Griffith made more than four hundred films, none longer than two reels and of varying quality. Moving his operations to California and establishing his fame inside and outside the industry, Griffith became dissatisfied with Biograph’s financial and creative restrictions. In October, 1913, he left Biograph, taking with him his players and certain technical and business personnel, and joined the recently allied Reliance-Majestic production company and the Mutual distributing company, for whom he made four films in 1914. Within less than a year he started to work on the first and best-remembered of his masterpieces, The Birth of a Nation , the film that elevated the motion picture to art.

The Birth of a Nation is about two families, one from the South, the other from the North, during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Based on two books by Thomas Dixon, an avowed racist, the scenario by Griffith was significantly different, less racist. The film, which when first shown ran two hours and forty-five minutes, is nevertheless pro-Southern, and its leading villains, especially in the section dealing with Reconstruction, are white abolitionists and carpetbaggers, blacks, and mulattoes. Indeed, it is the Ku Klux Klan , under the leadership of the film’s Southern hero, which eventually prevails. For this reason, the film was at the time and has continued to be widely criticized. Nevertheless, it was the greatest film of its time and is considered one of the major films in history because of its impact on later filmmakers.

Griffith’s Civil War battle scenes in the film, based on his study of the photographs by Matthew Brady, have never been topped. His attention to historical accuracy in set construction was also remarkable, and he set a standard few filmmakers have reached since. The film is also important for Griffith’s ability to develop three-dimensional characters in what is essentially a spectacle film. Technically the film was far ahead of its time, and every film director since has been consciously or unconsciously influenced by it. Many of the features found separately in earlier Griffith films are found together in The Birth of a Nation: the close-up, the fade-out, the wide landscape shot, the use of moving cameras attached to vehicles in action scenes, and the action close-up of horses’ hooves. Most important, Griffith was the first director-producer-writer to master the art of editing, enabling him to switch rapidly from place to place and character to character in a long, complex narrative and maintain the interest of the viewer. The film, which President Woodrow Wilson described as “history written by lightning,” was a great critical and popular success, even as it was simultaneously attacked, vindicating Griffith’s solicitation of additional financing when Reliance-Majestic ran short of funds. Unfortunately, Griffith enjoyed his greatest success with this, one of his very first feature films. At the peak of his creativity, he soon was to find that he was artistically and intellectually far ahead of his audience.

The success of The Birth of a Nation led Griffith to undertake immediately his magnum opus, Intolerance , which many film historians regard as the greatest film ever made, but which, at the time of its release in 1916, was a commercial failure. The theme is essentially the same as that of The Birth of a Nation: the damage wrought by hypocritical do-gooders who attempt to remold society in the image of what they think it should be without regard for the pain and suffering they cause. The scope of the film is, however, much larger, and this is what confused audiences. Griffith moves rapidly from twentieth century industrial America, to ancient Babylon, to Palestine at the time of Jesus, to sixteenth century France during the wars of religion. The segments of the film are bridged by a recurring scene of the universal mother forever rocking the cradle, reflecting Griffith’s conviction of the endurance of love even during periods of evil and destruction. The spectacle of the film is revolutionary, especially the scenes of the walls and public buildings of Babylon. All the revolutionary technical innovations found in Griffith’s first great film are here as well. In Intolerance, however, the subject matter was too obscure for the average viewer, and Griffith’s editing confused more than excited.

Griffith continued to make films, though none of the scope and expense of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, with the partial exception of Orphans of the Storm, set during the French Revolution and notable for its action sequences, such as that of the storming of the Bastille. After 1916, Griffith became less independent because of the financial failure of Intolerance and found his creativity often stifled by the studios, even by United Artists , which he founded jointly with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charles Chaplin. One very significant additional film, however, was made. It was far more intimate than the aforementioned films and was made almost entirely on interior sets. This was Broken Blossoms (1919), a tragic tale set in the slums of London about the corruption and destruction of the virtuous and good.

Griffith reached the apex of his career by his early forties. From 1921 on, he found himself the prisoner of studio heads and their accountants. The independence that had fostered his creativity his ability to work as director, producer, writer, and editor was lost. He made his last film in 1931, a forgettable one called The Struggle. From that time until his death, Griffith was lost. He returned to Kentucky for several years, married a woman thirty-five years his junior (his first marriage had broken up during his Biograph days, although he did not get a divorce until 1936), and then returned to Hollywood in the late 1930’s to work for Hal Roach on One Million B.C. (1940). When that film was completed, Griffith’s name was mysteriously excluded from the credits. During the 1940’s, lonely and embittered, he often was the recipient of praise and awards but unable to find employment in the city whose success he, more than any other, had assured; he was merely tolerated by many who had appropriated his innovations to their own use. Divorced for a second time in 1947, Griffith suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in the small hotel where he lived. He died at Temple Hospital on July 23, 1948.

Significance

Griffith was the foremost creative figure in the history of motion pictures. He developed the motion picture, America’s greatest contribution to the arts, into a viable commercial and artistic medium. His influence on the evolution of the medium is incalculable, and it was recognized by many during his time, especially in the years during which he was ignored. He is a tragic figure in the history of American art. Beginning his career in an age when people of creative genius were allowed freedom in the application of their directorial, literary, and technical talents, he fell victim to the cupidity and timidity of an industry that he, more than any other, helped to create. To the end the southern gentleman, he was unable to sacrifice his uncommon ideals to the demands of a medium that often has flourished on the trivial and the banal.

Bibliography

Croy, Homer. Star Maker: The Story of D. W. Griffith. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959. An anecdotal account of Griffith by a person active in the film industry in its early years. Not always accurate, it is nevertheless engagingly written and provides a satisfactory introduction to the subject. Includes an introduction by Mary Pickford.

Gish, Lillian, and Ann Pinchot. The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. 1969. Reprint. San Francisco, Calif.: Mercury House, 1988. A delightful autobiography by the actor most loved and admired by Griffith, and who reciprocated in affection and admiration for him.

Griffith, D. W. The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith. Edited by James Hart. Louisville, Ky.: Touchstone, 1972. The subject’s own account of his life, essential for the serious student.

Henderson, Robert M. D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Readable and authoritative account of Griffith’s life by the leading authority on the film pioneer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. This biography of Griffith focuses on his year at Biograph.

Mast, Gerald. A Short History of the Movies. 2d ed. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Includes a valuable evaluation of Griffith and his films within the context of the entire history, national and international, of filmmaking.

Niderost, Eric. “The Birth of a Nation.” American History 40, no. 4 (October, 2005): 60-80. A history of the film and its reception. Includes discussion of the attempt by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to halt its Los Angeles premiere and how the film benefited the Ku Klux Klan.

O’Dell, Paul, and Anthony Slide. Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1971. A brief but useful volume in the International Film Guide series. O’Dell emphasizes Griffith’s artistic contributions to motion pictures, contributions he believes have been ignored by those who have concentrated only on his technical innovations.

Schickel, Richard. D. W. Griffith: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. A massive, comprehensive biography. Schickel, a film critic for Time magazine, has written numerous books on American film and the personalities prominent in its development. Though packed with information, this book is highly readable and incorporates updated material on Griffith.

Williams, Martin. Griffith: First Artist of the Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. A fine, brief treatment of Griffith and his films, this book provides readers with an ideal introduction to the subject.