“I think one should mention Griffith in every discussion about the cinema: everyone agrees, but everyone forgets, nonetheless.” - Jean-Luc Godard
What better time to remember and experience some of the films of this brilliant practitioner of early cinema than at the beginning of a new school year? If you’re looking for inspiration, you can’t do much better than D.W. Griffith.
David Wark Griffith was born in La Grange, Kentucky on January 22, 1875 and started working as an actor for the Biograph film company in 1908 for $5 a day. Griffith was given his first directing job at Biograph, which is where he met cameraman G.W. “Billy” Bitzer, with whom he began a sixteen-year association, “one of the most remarkable partnerships in the history of cinema.” (The Film Encyclopedia, Ephraim Katz) By the time Griffith left Biograph in 1913 he had directed some 450 short films. From there he would go on to direct several of the most important feature films in the history of cinema.
“But quantity alone did not make Griffith’s early film career so extraordinary. From the very start, he showed a remarkable instinctive understanding of the creative potential of the medium using inherently cinematic techniques—changing camera angles, intercutting, crosscutting, parallel action, camera movement, dramatic lighting, the close-up, the full shot, rhythmic editing, etc. He wasn’t the first to employ these techniques, which had been discovered and used before him. But he was the first to use them consciously and creatively, taking the linguistic components of film and molding them into a syntax, thus giving cinema an articulate language all its own. His innovative achievements in liberating the cinema from the restrictive traditions of the stage are all the more remarkable considering the theatrical roots of his background.” (The Film Encyclopedia)
Griffith scholar Joyce Jesionowski (Ithaca College/SUNY Binghamton), writing in her book Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Films, put it this way:
“Griffith may have been the first filmmaker to think systematically about the relationship he wished to have with the viewers of his films.”
Jesionowski will introduce the first three programs in Cornell Cinema’s series of features and shorts: Broken Blossoms (1919), Intolerance (1916) and a program of shorts. Dr. Philip Carli, silent film scholar and acclaimed pianist will perform live with Intolerance (1916), America (1924) and Way Down East (1920). He will also introduce Way Down East. Laurent Ferri, curator of the Cornell Library’s exhibit "Lafayette, citizen of two worlds," will introduce America (1924), set during the American Revolution in which the Marquis de Lafayette played a significant role.