WHO is he?
Iconic American filmmaker, screenwriter and editor who directed over 500 short and feature length silent films during the first three decades of the 20th century. Close to 450 of these were made during a staggeringly productive 5-year period between 1908 and 1913. Griffith faded to obscurity and his career came to an abrupt halt after the arrival of talking pictures.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Griffith’s “novelistic” movies could be seen as some of the earliest examples of the kind of genre cinema that Hollywood mastered during its golden age: gangster movies, melodrama, Westerns and war pictures. Some of these films are also very ideologically charged, be it leftist screed against the avarice of capitalism or reactionary glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and the suppression of slave revolts. The others are paeans to universal values such as undying love and the brotherhood of men.
Style
Though a controversial figure in terms of his ideology, Griffith is now unanimously hailed for his revolutionary technical discoveries. His films harness the full power of crosscutting in which two sequences interrelated in time or in spirit are intercut in such a way that they enhance each other’s power. Also noteworthy are the shots with moving camera such as the makeshift dolly shots or crane shots that he invented, close-ups to better describe objects and irises to emphasise key portions of the frame.
WHY is he of interest?
Widely considered the father of narrative cinema and the greatest pioneer of the American film industry, Griffith is responsible for many of the tenets of cinematic storytelling that we have internalised today. His editing innovations, opposite in function to Soviet montage theories, laid the foundations of a film grammar that have come to be taken for granted. It would not be a hyperbole, in fact, to say that every narrative film made today owes something to Griffith.
WHERE to discover him?
Often relegated to the sidelines by the long epics he directed, the 15-minute Marxist classic A Corner in Wheat (1909) might perhaps be the most powerful film Griffith ever made. Centring on a wheat tycoon’s manipulation of the market and the social malady it triggers, the film employs crosscutting to an exhilarating end, contrasting the excesses of the upper class with the struggles of the poor.
