Essential Griffith

I’m getting into the works of D.W. Griffith, and want some advice on which films to get. I already have Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Broken Blosoms, what other films should I focus on?

That’s already too many.

Sumner,

In terms of the features, I would recommend Orphans of the Storm and Struggle. His 1909 short A Corner in Wheat, which you should be able to find on YouTube, is also an essential.

haha!

but seriously, check out “the musketeers of pig alley”. i think it qualifies as the birthplace of the gangster film genre.

Thanks!

Well, i think Intolerance and Broken Blossoms are his best, but Way Down East and True Heart Susie are worthwhile and among his most admired. I don’t think his films have aged too well (Feuillade and Sjostrom probably better), which is a pity cos he was crucial to the development of cinema

i dont think anything from the silent era has aged well. you cant watch silent films as anything other than curious relics. museum pieces. stimulating artistically, but nothing that we can consider to have aged well, in the sense that they are constantly enjoyable on fresh, new levels.

Bobby Wise,
What a ridiculous statement. In future, please state that this is only your opinion and not fact, because I actually CAN view silent films as something other than curious relics etc.

Well, i understand there’s a need to make allowances for the earlier pioneering stuff but surely some of the masterpiecs of the 20s if not a few before stand up magnificently today. Only recently Cahiers du Cinéma nominated Sunrise as the single greatest film in cinema history, based not only on reputation but enjoyability today, and it overrides limitations caused by lack of sound or technology taken for granted now . And look at the ratings The Passion of Joan of Arc gets here. Man with a Movie Camera seems modern as well as dynamic, even supporting a system that ultimately crumbled and depicting outdated aspects of life. . I’m not sure if we’re talking at cross purposes but for me the best films of the silent era surpass almost anything from the last decade. I just think Griffith’s style and Victorian sensibility haven’t aged as well as some of his contemporaries (Bauer is another who could do with more appreciation, and even Alice Guy’s early shorts i find generally chirpier)

This is one of the best films ever made and almost no one has seen it. This is s-a-d!

Here are a few silent films that have aged very well: City Lights, Steamboat Bil Jr., Greed, Pandora’s Box, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sunrise, and no doubt some of the Vertov-Dovzhenko-Pudovkin films I haven’t seen yet.

Are Griffith’s films anything more than historically important? I agree that his masterpieces are insanely well-woven and epic, but other than establishing the conventions do his films stand up next to the films that perfected his ideas?

Doesn’t he get trounced on by someone like Charlie Kaufman? Unfair comparison, you say, and I agree – but the point is to illuminate the difference between artistic power and historical importance. This isn’t to knock all silents in the artistic greatness department, I think The Passion of Joan of Arc, City Lights and others stand up very well in all categories.

Well, Eisenstein too, even if Potemkin’s reputation has declined somewhat. Lots really. At my former local film society in Wales, each season we screened a great silent film with specially composed piano accompaniment, and kids used to really enjoy them too- the general reaction didn’t strike me as that for some dusty museum piece, for sure.

maybe its just me. silent films are artifacts to me. like saying heiroglyphics have aged well. extreme example yeah, but thematically relevant, if not temporally.

for my definition, something that ages well means something that seems new again and again. something fresh, and even relevant, no matter when it is revived. silent films are historical wonders in a way sound films can never be, even early sound films from the late 20s. they’re a curious, miraculous invention. its hard to put it into words, but it seems a total contradiction to me to say that a silent film has aged well.

Griffith’s movies are unspeakably beautiful, it just takes a while to get used to the way films that old uses film language. A different sensibility, but once attuned something like WAY DOWN EAST is so amazing.

I wish you could see the beauty in a great silent film, Bobby, that sense of purely visual storytelling, that concentration of humanity in the facial expressions, that absence of the merely whizz-bang gemcrack that ninety percent of all dialogue falls into. Even in contemporary films, some of the greatest scenes are ones without any dialogue at all, where it could be silent and you would still have a powerful sense of the story just from the images.

i probably expressed myself badly. i can definitely see the beauty in silent films. hitchcock is one of my favorite directors, and the sequences of his that i love most are those numerous ones that devolve (or evolve) into silent films: pure visual narration. in other words, pure cinema.

i just cant enjoy silent films on the same level that i can enjoy sound (modern) films. maybe because their status as historical artifacts fractures my suspension of disbelief so much. i relate to them a different way. i any event, i never watch silent films as casual viewing. i just cant.

I was serious when I said that’s too many already, Griffith was an outright RACIST. Yeah, it’s good to see one or two to get any idea of his conitnuity, but that’s it. Don’t wate time watching Griffith when theres so much else out there. He’s been mummified by Americans as some god in filmmaking because his films were insanely popular. Don’t perpetuate it.

Death’s Marathon has yet to be mentioned.

All of the essential Griffith is currently available from Kino.

And I couldn’t disagree more with those here disparaging Griffith’s reputation (have you watched the films?!?!). And Bobby Wise, I know you didn’t just disparage ALL silent film? I think you just need to look harder and deeper (yeah, I said it), for starters, Vidor and von Stroheim are still very fresh today. And Murnau! The Last Laugh, c’mon, you cannot be serious! Not to mention Keaton, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Pabst, Lang (thought I’ll admit his best films aren’t silent), early Renoir, Ozu (the man’s silent films are genius), early Dreyer, I could go on.

These films aren’t artifacts and a close-viewing will reveal that they have a lot to offer, including directions cinema has yet to take (for example, look how the advent of sound destroyed soviet montage (not so much in Russia, but it prevented the proliferation of the style and further experiment)).

Cinephiles, and especially those on this site who are in love with independent movie-making, should really take a good look at the silent era. The true death of American independent film (well, maybe not death, but it held things back for 30+ years) was the advent of natural sound recording processes.

Sorry for ranting.

We should probably talk about Birth of a Nation and get it out of the way. It was based on a novel called The Klansman, written by a high ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith was a Southern “gent.” His father was in the Civil War (possibly a casualty, I’m not sure). And Griffith, like many Southerners, harbored sore feelings about losing.

The Birth of a Nation is a slanted film in which the KKK is depicted as heroic. There’s one particularly vile scene in which, after blacks are given voting rights, the state assemblies are suddenly filled with black elected officials who put their bare feet up on the tables and drink booze openly. When the film premiered, it’s reported that whites left the theater and promptly lynched blacks in the streets.

All of this is terrible karma, although this was America at the time. It makes sense that our first real film would be racist, shameful as it is. Shortly afterward, Griffith made Intolerance as an attempt to counteract his own, well, intolerance — but U.S. race relations are not addressed in that film (as far as I remember).

Bad karma and time caught up to Griffith fast, and this pioneer of the industry was a penniless, bitter, booze-ravaged alcoholic by the advent of the sound era, nearly completely forgotten, too proud to accept handouts, too messed up to direct. He ended much like Ed Wood Jr., minus the porn. Ironically, his comeback, and one of the last films he made before he died, was none other than a biography of — Abraham Lincoln.

What Griffith discovered was the emotional intimacy of the close-up. He understood how much you could really move someone just by showing emotions on the faces of actors, and to do this as naturally as possible. He invented extended action sequences. He invented the epic. These aren’t minor or inconsequential inventions, and they were vastly appreciated in France, England and Germany (as well as here). He is an extreme case of a talented man who was deeply flawed by a very ugly shadow over the heart. But he paid dearly for it.

@Justin,

Good points. But to be fair, the Italians invented the epic. It was after seeing Pastrone’s Cabiria that Griffith got the idea to make The Birth of a Nation. There had already being a number of Italian super-productions before The Birth of a Nation (all of which were very popular in the U.S. (another lost benefit of silent films is that foreign productions have an equal footing in the marketplace. The first decade of the 20th century was dominated by the French film industry, the second decade by the Italian, the third by the U.S and Germany, and, following the consolidation of the major studios, has been dominated by the U.S. (though to be fair, WWII took a major toll on the viability of European studios)).

So anyway, just clearing up that Griffith didn’t invent the epic.

RUS, you’re right, I had forgotten about the Italian contribution.

re: Birth of a Nation

Arguably (I dispute it), DWG invented linear narrative cross-cutting and close-ups, taking film outside the laws of theater, and therefore defining it as a unique form. Whatever the truth of that statement be, he certainly took those inventions and ran with them. He therefore gave us a blueprint > multiple techniques drawn from basic principles. We can hopefully now appreciate the form in and of itself, and while we can never completely divide the content from the form, we can recognize that the content in this case is inane, racist and very much the product of fear and ignorance, and not sweat it. That is our Gen XYZ birthright. As a document, a film like Birth of a Nation is an expose of 1915 popular opinion, arrogant beyond belief, prophetic agitprop, unaware that its racist tub thumping will be derided and stamped out in under 100 years**, and its creative invention adopted for alternative ideological uses.

I think his Birth of a Nation is essential viewing, just as I think everyone should be aware of how Goebbels (arguably) invented (mass-media) propaganda. I disagree that we should be avoiding this discussion. You do not get wise by burying your head in the sand, or putting a label on something that reads “ouch, uncomfortable, hide”…

You have to know how ignorance and ideology are used to manipulate if you want to be an effective citizen of a free world.* * *

**_maybe_

• * * *_certainly_

Griffith didn’t invent the close up either. It’s the bullshit (and apparantly extremely successful) remains of his self-aggrandizing promotion. He claimed he created a lot of things. He was simply part of a large commercial engine, more of his prints were in circulation so it’s really easy to “pinpoint” the use of a particular shot scale. I didn’t mean the content of his films were racist, I mean Griffith was a racist, and it’s not like some hidden secret only revealed through an interpretation of his films. He was an outspoken racist. He perpetuates the stereotype because he had an idea that his films WERE historical accuracy and the universal language (a myth). Showing black raping white was used as just another type of manipulaton, another reason to not let blacks be free.

But that’s my point. You make valid arguments for both DWG’s unoriginality and also point to a syndrome of self—aggrandizing creative theft that lingers in Hollywood to this day. If we weren’t having this conversation, then this would get politely nodded at and ignored once again, as we move on to more palatable subjects.

And BOAN is racist, racist as hell. So I am saying his work, at least in this instance, is explicitly so.

Well, to be fair, the content of some of his films is racist (of course Birth of a Nation is racist, the NAACP didn’t boycott it for sh*ts and giggles). Griffith is important because he was the first truly successful (domestically and internationally) American filmmaker to make what are now considered feature length films (at the time, it was questioned whether audiences would tolerate films of that length (of course, there was a time when it was questioned whether audiences would watch a film longer than 20 minutes)). And yes, some of his films are genuinely entertaining (I happen to like A Corner in Wheat (**spoiler**possible influence on Witness?, man being “drowned” in a grain silo? jk, he lives**spoiler**)). Though he didn’t invent cross-cutting, his films use it masterfully, and ought to be known by any student of film, filmmaker, aspiring filmmaker, cinephile, or whoever.

To answer the question of which films to get, well, god bless netflix. Get whatever you can get your hands on. FYI, Netflix doesn’t always have the best editions (especially for silents, a lot of stuff put out by Westlake (the worst)). I’m pretty sure the copy I got of Birth of a Nation was put out by Image, the short films and the more obscure stuff you can get the KINO releases of, the rest is a hodgepodge: some KINO, some Westlake, some Image. Happy hunting.

yes, griffith was a racist, yes his films display racist content. and yes, his work should be studied. for all the reasons mentioned and then some.

you cant discuss aesthetics without discussing what they were used for. so any analysis of griffith just needs to look at both sides of the coin.

Well, yes, I don’t think the racism threaded through the narrative of Birth of a Nation is much in dispute, and it deserves just consideration as part of Griffith’s legacy, but, even a Northerner like Abraham Lincoln, widely regarded as liberal and progressive even today, was fond of racist jokes and had many beliefs that are certainly racist by the standards of today.

yep. liberal then meant a WHOLE different thing from liberal today.

hahaha yeah, sadly very true.