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A Remembrance of Early Movies prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Speaking of Mister Griffith, he started in on films around 1908, I believe. He made many one-reelers (about 15 minutes long, the normal length then) for the Biograph Company, and built on many of Mister Porter's findings. Mister Griffith soon became one of the only directors that we knew by name. His pictures always seemed a cut above the rest, and that was because they were: Although Mister Porter had invented modern film editing, Mister Griffith perfected it. Mister Griffith used the cross-cut to build suspense and tension during chase scenes. Almost all of his pictures included a climactic rescue. I remember one of his early films called The Lonely Villa, in which a family is in danger from intruders to the house, and the father is away. Mister Griffith cut back and forth between the family, forced further and further into the house by the incoming intruders, and the father rushing to the rescue. Each shot was shorter and shorter, building the tension brilliantly. Mister Griffith practically invented the shot, from the camera's point of view, using long, medium, and close-up shots in a certain sequence to produce a certain reaction. He also realized the power of the pan shot and the traveling shot-no one had substantially moved the camera around within a shot before. Perhaps most importantly, Mister Griffith made his movies Say Something. He didn't want to just entertain, he also wanted to uplift and moralize. You could call his movies the first Message Pictures. He used his cross-cutting in A Corner in Wheat in 1909 to draw a parallel between the starving poor who wait in vain at a soup kitchen and the vulgar rich who disdain the feast laid out for them. He would go on to make the first great moral dramas on screen. Mister Griffith reached his personal climax in 1915 with Birth of a Nation. Now, that was a movie! They don't make them like that anymore. It was the longest movie that had ever been made-12 reels when released! That's more than two hours! Now by this time, there were many movies that were at least three or four reels long, but Birth of a Nation tripled that. Yet despite the belief held by many movie executives that fifteen minutes was as long as an audience could sit still, the picture was the most successful ever made-and still is, in fact. Birth of a Nation was controversial in 1915, and it's controversial now in 1932. I expect it will be controversial for years to come. The hero of it is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, a vigilante group which sprang up during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. Mister Griffith's view, as near as I could tell, was that the "darkies" should've known their place, which was not equal with whites-he glorified the servants who stayed to help their masters after the war, and criticized those who strove for equality. All I knew was that the battle scenes were amazing, of epic scale, and yet Mister Griffith never lost sight of each individual character. Despite his simplistic and often misguided moral views, Mister David Wark Griffith was the greatest filmmaker the silent screen ever knew. Probably the greatest that the cinema will ever know. His contributions to filmmaking have made him, and I say deservedly, the Father of Modern Filmmaking. prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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