Griffith, David Wark

Person

Griffith, David Wark

1875-1948

David Wark Griffith, filmaker, was born in 1875 on a poor Kentucky farm. A quiet boy given to reading, Griffith had little formal education, but spent much of his free time in the library. As a young man he was determined to become a playwright and left home to learn his craft as an actor. For twelve years he crisscrossed the country, acting in minor productions, learning how to tell a story and how to sell it. Griffith played a number of roles as an actor before agreeing to move behind the camera as a director at the Biograph Company. . During his five years at Biograph, Griffith took the raw elements of moviemaking as they had evolved up to that time -- lighting, continuity, editing, acting -- and wrought a medium of extraordinary power and nuance. Determined to get beyond the short format films, he left Biograph and in 1915 made Birth of a Nation, acknowledged as the first masterpiece of cinema, bringing to film the status accorded to the visual and performing arts. Griffith’s next film, INTOLERANCE (1916), marked a new standard in film spectacle and in narrative complexity, intertwining four separate stories from four different historical eras. As the 1920s passed on, Griffith’s films seemed more and more old-fashioned, and no longer appealed to the younger audiences. A Victorian storyteller, he had become temperamentally and artistically out of sync with his times. Though he had almost single-handedly invented the art of modern cinema, Griffith spent the last fifteen years of his life unable to find work. On July 23, 1948 he died in a small Los Angeles hotel.

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