D. W. Griffith borrowed cross-cutting from Dickens and helped invent film grammar
Challenged over cutting between two storylines, D. W. Griffith reportedly asked whether Dickens didn't write that way. He directed nearly 520 films, shot the first movie made in Hollywood, and made The Birth of a Nation, a record-breaking hit that also fuelled riots and the Ku Klux Klan's revival.
Griffith was born on a Kentucky farm on 22 January 1875. His father, nicknamed Roaring Jake, had been a Confederate colonel and state legislator, and died when the boy was ten, leaving the family poor. Griffith quit high school in Louisville to work in shops, toured as an actor and tried playwriting with almost no luck. In 1907 Edwin Porter of Edison Studios rejected his script but cast him in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest instead.
At Biograph, where he met cameraman Billy Bitzer, he got the director's chair in 1908 after the regular director fell ill and his replacement floundered. Griffith turned out 48 shorts that first year. His 1909 adaptation of The Cricket on the Hearth used cross-cutting, the Dickensian trick of running parallel stories. In Old California (1910) became the first film shot in Hollywood, and his first feature, Judith of Bethulia, came in 1914, although Biograph worried, as Lillian Gish recalled, that such length would strain viewers' eyes.
His 1915 epic, first titled The Clansman, adapted Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novel portraying slavery as benign and the Klan as heroes. It shattered box-office records, so much that, in Gish's words, people lost count of its earnings, yet the NAACP fought to ban it and audiences rioted in northern cities. Stung by calls for censorship, Griffith answered with Intolerance (1916), weaving four eras from Babylon to the present. He paid for much of it himself, and its failure left him in debt for life.
In 1919 he co-founded United Artists with Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, but after flops such as Isn't Life Wonderful he was pushed out. Only two of his films had full sound, and after The Struggle in 1931 he made no more. He received an honorary Oscar in 1936 and died in 1948. Chaplin called him the teacher of everyone, while Sergei Eisenstein admired the craft yet condemned his most famous film as racist propaganda.
Source: D. W. Griffith
