D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith did more than anyone to make cinema a narrative art and made the most damaging film in American history doing it. He was the son of a Confederate colonel in Kentucky, failed as a playwright and actor, and fell into directing at Biograph in 1908, where he made hundreds of short films and worked out much of the grammar: the close-up for emotion, cross-cutting between simultaneous actions, the moving camera, the fade. The Birth of a Nation in 1915 applied all of it to a three-hour epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of the white South against freedmen played mostly by white actors in blackface. It was the most commercially successful film of the silent era, was screened at the White House, and is the direct cause of the Klan's revival that same year - the second Klan adopted its burning cross from the film, which had invented it. The NAACP campaigned against it and there were riots. Griffith answered the criticism with Intolerance in 1916, a vastly expensive four-strand film cutting between ancient Babylon, the Passion, the St Bartholomew's Day massacre and a modern story, and its Babylonian set - the hanging gardens, the walls, the elephants - is the image of Babylon that most people carry. It failed financially and he never recovered the position. He died in a Hollywood hotel in 1948, and the industry has been arguing about how to honour the technique without the film ever since. He also co-founded United Artists in 1919 with Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks, so that directors and actors could control distribution. The Directors Guild named its highest honour after him in 1953 and removed his name from it in 1999. Both decisions were about the same film.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history