The film industry of 1915
was far different from today's. Movies were short -- rarely more than ten minutes
-- and turned out in a matter of days -- so much so that director D.W. Griffith made nearly 150 films
in 1911 and 1912 alone. Performers were rarely billed
(producers were afraid that if actors became well-known, they'd ask for more
money), and no one looked at film as an art; it was cheap entertainment as
disposable at yesterday's newspaper.
Almost no one thought of film as an art -- except for Griffith. Seizing upon
the popularity of Thomas Dixon's novel and play, The Clansman, he determined to create the first film epic; a
movie about the Civil War and Reconstruction that would ultimately clock in at more than three hours
and change the way Hollywood and the world would think of, and make, movies.
Griffith used The Clansman -- which he re-titled The Birth of a Nation
-- to basically invent modern film grammar,
using jump cuts, a moving camera, and, most importantly, the close-up
to tell his story. In spite of the unprecedented production costs ($110,000 -- about $2.5 million today) and admission
prices ($2 -- or about $45 in 2010), the film was a smash hit, grossing
$10,000,000 (nearly $250 million in current dollars).
Unfortunately, The Birth of a Nation has a not-so-small problem: it's arguably the most racist film ever made by a major director -- not that any movie that
glorifies the founding of the Ku Klux Klan could be expected to be anything else. Griffith may or
may not have been a racist himself -- he grew up in Kentucky just after the
Civil War, and his father
was a colonel in the Confederate Army -- but he also used many of his films to decry current
social conditions, including a 1911 film
that painted the Klan as villains. Regardless, the imagery in The Birth
of a Nation, with its white actors made up in blackface committing every form of stereotypical debauchery, is today a red-hot potato. As recently as 2004, the Silent Movie Theatre
in Hollywood had to cancel a planned screening of the film because of protests by many groups, including the NAACP.
In spite of the film's controversial content, its importance in the canon is
undeniable. In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked it the #44 American film of all time (though it was dropped when AFI reconsidered the list in 2007). Regardless, it's still readily available for the home viewer, and, because of its innovation and
importance, is still taught in film history classes.
Griffith, on the other hand, didn't fare as well. In spite of the blockbuster
status of Birth, he spent almost all of his profits financing his
follow-up film, Intolerance,
which decried the very intolerance he'd been accused of. While the film was
well-received by both the public and critics, it was too expensive to turn a
profit. Griffith's reputation still had power, though, and he founded the United Artists
company with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks (the biggest stars in the world). But despite some hits
in the early '20s, by 1924, his box-office failures had mounted and he left
United Artists.
He made a brief attempt at a comeback with two unsuccessful talkies, and was
basically out of the business by 1931. He still looked for work, but his
style, once the most innovative in the world, was thought to be old-fashioned.
Even the Directors Guild of America,
which had named its annual award for him in 1953, dropped his name in 1999. 95 years ago today, though, there was no one who
had a greater vision for the possibilities of what film might be than D.W.
Griffith.
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