including the published and unpublished writings, photos, and illustrations from the archives of D.W. Griffith's official biographer Seymour Stern as researched by Ira H. Gallen
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| Learn about the working relationship of D.W. Griffith & cameraman Billy Bitzer -click to view video- |
In exploring the Life and Art of the father of American Cinema, D.W. Griffith, you’ll have a chance for the first time on the Internet to download hundreds of Streaming Video Movie images, photos and unpublished data from his exciting and controversial film career. It’s a point in time seldom explored, as the Movie Industry was to be born out of America’s Age of Innocence during the Victorian era, when D.W. Griffith began creating his art.
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| D.W. Griffith Controversy |
The rich and well-to-do had the legitimate theater of the live stage, but to the immigrants coming to America, these “flickers”--seen by paying 5 cents and shown in small dusty reconverted store fronts--were the poor person’s entertainment of the time.
The normal running length of a movie was no more then five to ten minutes, when a 32 year old out-of-work theater actor and failed playwright named D.W. Griffith was forced to start acting in them, and soon directing at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City between 1908 -1913.
D.W. Griffith during his stay at Biograph made almost 500 of these movies, and did it in a way that would create a method of storytelling in purely cinematic terms that raised moving pictures permanently out of the category of a scientific curiosity.
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| The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, 1913
Alfred Paget & Charles Hill Mailes -click to view scenes- |
He did this with the use of techniques that broke precedents and created a vocabulary of visual devices, setting the stage for the emergence of film as art.
He also hand-picked a stock company of players, technical staff, writers, assistant directors and cameramen, that would rival the developing industry. Most of the storylines were based on the events of the day, taken from the daily newspapers, with topics ranging from domestic violence, robberies, Comedies, Dramas, Costume pictures, Crimes of passion, Love Stories, and alcoholism, to the rights of women.
He reworked the writings of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Tolstoy into his movies, as well as the first series of successful pro Indian adventure stories, civil war & western adventures, and stories from the Bible.
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Gertrude Robinson in
Pippa Passes or The Song of Conscience, 1909 based on Pippa Passes poem by Robert Browning -click for video- |
His actors and actresses were the “who’s who” of the movies’ glory days such as Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, Lionel Barrymore, Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Harry Carey, and Henry B. Walthal, among others . The American Mutoscope and Biograph company in NYC became the finest training ground for any would-be actress or actor in this country after D.W. Griffith began directing there, and it has fascinated me for over twenty five years, as I’ve searched out hundreds of those these rare cinema gems.
When you view these Biograpgh film shorts, realize that Griffith never used a script, and at times was directing three to four different movies simultaneously. One day an actor might be staring in one production, or the following week be used as an extra or bit player in another. I know these men’s and women’s lives and films at Biograph as well as you know contemporary actors today, and now is your chance to do the same.
The Birth of Cinema Controversy, Racism and an Art
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| Read about the controversy of The Birth of a Nation -click to view- |
It was after leaving the Biograph company in search of his independence as a director that Griffith would create the first full length feature film in America, called The Birth of a Nation, in 1915--a movie that would bring the worlds of ART and FILM into a perfect equilibrium.
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| Mae Marsh and
Henry Walthall The Birth of a Nation, 1915 -view scenes- |
But this Civil War epic also demonstrated for the first time to the world the effect that a motion picture could have in the swaying the masses through this medium of story telling.
His portrayal of the Negro race caused protests, riots in the streets, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the formation of the NAACP, who wanted the film banned.
At no time with malice aforethought did Griffith go out to create a motion picture that would degrade the African Race. But without recognizing it--a result of his own post-Civil War upbringing in the south, as the son and nephew of Confederate officers--due to his own naiveté, he did more harm than good in the way the film portrayed the Reconstruction period.
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| The Birth of a Nation, 1915
George Siegmann terrorizes Lillian Gish |
The Birth of A Nation turned D.W. Griffith into a household name, but it also started the fortunes of such men as Louis B. Mayer, and created the star system as we still know it today.
Even as it transformed the entertainment industry into the beginnings of its modern form, the demand for this movie's censorship rumbled from the lowest of barrooms to the floor of Congress.