D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith (born January 22, 1875, Floydsfork, Kentucky, U.S.—died July 23, 1948, Hollywood, California) was a pioneer American motion-picture director credited with developing many of the basic techniques of filmmaking, in such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), and The Struggle (1931).

(Read Lillian Gish’s 1929 Britannica essay on silent film.)

Early life and influences

D.W. Griffith, the son of Jacob Griffith, a former Confederate colonel, was born in a tiny hamlet not far from Louisville, Kentucky. He received his early education in one-room schools, largely under the tutelage of his older sister, and was subject to the strong influence of his father’s imaginative stories of the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War and family readings of the works of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott. The family was impoverished upon the death of Jacob, when David was 10 years old. After a brief stay with relatives, the family moved to Louisville. Griffith’s formal education was terminated in secondary school by the necessity of contributing to the family’s financial needs. He became, successively, an elevator operator in a dry-goods store and a clerk in a bookstore. During the latter clerkship, Griffith was exposed to the literati of Louisville and to the actors and actresses who played at Louisville’s Temple Theatre.

Griffith began an acting career with several amateur theatre groups and made his professional debut in small roles with a stock company at the Temple Theatre. A barnstorming career with various touring companies followed, concluding with a Boston engagement in the spring of 1906. Following that engagement, Griffith completed a play, A Fool and a Girl, based on his personal experiences in the California hop fields, which was produced in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1907. The play was a failure despite the presence of Fannie Ward in the leading role. After the closing of the play, Griffith wrote a second play, War, which was based on events that occurred in the American Revolution. This later play remains unproduced.

On the advice of a former acting colleague, Griffith sold some scenarios for one-reel films, first to Edwin Porter, the director of the Edison Film Company, and then to the Biograph Company, both located in New York City. Griffith appeared as an actor in one film for the Edison Company, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, photographed by Porter, and in several films for the Biograph Company. When an opening for a director developed at Biograph, Griffith was hired. During the next five years, from 1908 to 1913, Griffith made more than 400 films for Biograph, the majority in the one-reel format, lasting approximately 12 minutes. His first film was The Adventures of Dollie (1908), about a baby stolen by and recovered from Gypsies. During the latter part of his employment, he experimented with longer films; his last Biograph film, Judith of Bethulia (1913), a biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, based loosely on a poem of the same title by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, comprised four reels.

During his Biograph period D.W. Griffith introduced or refined the techniques of motion-picture exposition, including the close-up, a film shot in which a single object or face filled the screen; the scenic long shot, showing an entire panoramic view; and cross-cutting, a technique of editing scenes at various locations together and intermixing them to give the impression to the viewer that the separate actions were happening simultaneously. With the assistance of his brilliant cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, Griffith made effective use of the fade-out and fade-in, a technique in which the screen darkens gradually to black or lightens from black to a full image, to indicate the end or the beginning of the story or of an episode, and the framing of film images through the use of special masks to produce a picture in other than the standard rectangular image. Griffith introduced to the screen young actors and actresses who were to become the motion-picture personages of the future. Included among these were Mary Pickford, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mack Sennett, Mae Marsh, Lionel Barrymore, and Harry Carey.