Download or read book D W Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film written by Tom Gunning and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legendary filmmaker D. W. Griffith directed nearly 200 films during 1908 and 1909, his first years with the Biograph Company. While those one-reel films are a testament to Griffith's inspired genius as a director, they also reflect a fundamental shift in film style from "cheap amusements" to movie storytelling complete with characters and narrative impetus. In this comprehensive historical investigation, drawing on films preserved by the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Tom Gunning reveals that the remarkable cinematic changes between 1900 and 1915 were a response to the radical reorganization within the film industry and the evolving role of film in American society. The Motion Picture Patents Company, the newly formed Film Trust, had major economic aspirations. The newly emerging industry's quest for a middle-class audience triggered Griffith's early experiments in film editing and imagery. His unique solutions permanently shaped American narrative film.
Download or read book D W Griffith Master of Cinema written by Ira H. Gallen and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhaustively researched and accessibly written, D.W. Griffith: Master of Cinema is a remarkably comprehensive biography of the legendary director and his days creating his craft at the American Biograph Company between 1908 through 1913. Meticulously detailed, utilizing a wealth of archival documents and photographs, the book effectively details Griffith’s place as a film pioneer. Even a casual film fan can see the lines being drawn from the techniques Griffith developed to modern cinematic experience. Ira Gallen’s exploration of Griffith’s family and his early life sets the stage for his career, and give great context for who he would become. His intricate details about early stage and film paint such a vivid and evocative picture of the time that you will be truly drawn into another world while reading it.
Download or read book A Companion to D W Griffith written by Charles Keil and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive volume on one of the most controversial directors in American film history A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers an exhaustive look at the first acknowledged auteur of the cinema and provides an authoritative account of the director’s life, work, and lasting filmic legacy. The text explores how Griffith’s style and status advanced along with cinema’s own development during the years when narrative became the dominant mode, when the short gave way to the feature, and when film became the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment. Griffith was at the centre of each of these changes: though a contested figure, he remains vital to any understanding of how cinema moved from nickelodeon fixture to a national pastime, playing a significant role in the cultural ethos of America. With the renewed interest in Griffith’s contributions to the film industry, A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers a scholarly look at a career that spanned more than 25 years. The editor, a leading scholar on D.W. Griffith, and the expert contributors collectively offer a unique account of one of the monumental figures in film studies. Presents the most authoritative, complete account of the director’s life, work, and lasting legacy Builds on the recent resurgence in the director’s scholarly and popular reputation Edited by a leading authority on D.W. Griffith, who has published extensively on this controversial director Offers the most up-to-date, singularly comprehensive volume on one of the monumental figures in film studies
Download or read book Adventures with D W Griffith written by Karl Brown and published by New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1973-01-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book D W Griffith written by Anthony Slide and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with one of the great early film directors, maestro of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Hearts of the World
Download or read book D W Griffith s the Birth of a Nation written by Melvyn Stokes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-15 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film. This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.
Download or read book D W Griffith written by Iris Barry and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay by Iris Barry.
Download or read book The Films of D W Griffith written by Scott Simmon and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1993-07-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the work of the first widely acknowledged master filmmaker.
Download or read book Stagestruck Filmmaker written by David Mayer and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith’s process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades. Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.
Download or read book Thinking in Pictures written by Joyce E. Jesionowski and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1989-11-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking in Pictures shows for the first time, in rigorous shot-by-shot analyses, what Griffith really did--and allows us to understand the implications for film narrative in general. Anyone with an interest in early cinema will find the book compelling, but the text will also intrigue readers seeking understanding of film usages on a more general, theoretical level. When Griffith began making films, the shot had been recognized as a basic element of film, the camera had a certain amount of freedom, transitional effects had been explored, audiences displayed an appetite for narrative. It was the synthesis of these elements, as Jesionowski traces it, that was Griffith's great achievement--for which he has always been honored by other filmmakers, by critics, and by audiences who continue to be moved and excited by his films. Thinking in Pictures shows for the first time, in rigorous shot-by-shot analyses, what Griffith really did--and allows us to understand the implications for film narrative in general. Anyone with an interest in early cinema will find the book compelling, but the text will also intrigue readers seeking understanding of film usages on a more general, theoretical level. When Griffith began making films, the shot had been recognized as a basic element of film, the camera had a certain amount of freedom, transitional effects had been explored, audiences displayed an appetite for narrative. It was the synthesis of these elements, as Jesionowski traces it, that was Griffith's great achievement--for which he has always been honored by other filmmakers, by critics, and by audiences who continue to be moved and excited by his films.
Download or read book Suspense and Resolution in the Films of D W Griffith written by George Pavlou and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a significant and original contribution to studies on D.W. Griffith and film, through a systematic analysis of the director’s chase scenes, which create suspense and resolution in his films. The predominance of the emphasis of building suspense differs in the various stages of his chase scenes. The primary source of material discussed here is Griffith’s films after 1913 when he left the Biograph Company. Griffith’s post-Biograph films are more complete and representative of his techniques than his earlier films, which were subject to financial constraints while he was still innovating and developing his cinematic techniques. Most of his films used in this analysis were provided by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The purpose of this study is to determine a definition of a Griffithian chase scene in terms of his editing techniques. Categories are established, defining specific tools. This is done by determining and documenting consistencies, comparisons, and specific patterns occurring in his chase scenes that generally do not occur in his general editing. Griffith’s basic mechanics in editing are filmic time and space, parallel action, referential crosscutting, and decomposition. A major finding in this book is that Griffith’s chase scenes are the most important part of his films in terms of suspense and resolution. His chase scenes are complex, unique and sometimes even unpredictable. As such, this is an important new work on D.W. Griffith, and will be of interest to scholars and others interested in both the director and film, and will also be an asset to libraries and bookstores.
Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 12 written by Eileen Bowser and published by . This book was released on 2008-09-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE GRIFFITH PROJECT Paolo Cherchi Usai, General Editor Volume 12: Essays on D.W. Griffith Edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai and Cynthia Rowell With contributions by William M. Drew, Helmut Färber, André Gaudreault, Philippe Gauthier, Lea Jacobs, Joyce Jesionowski, Charlie Keil, Richard Koszarski, Arthur Lennig, Pat Loughney, David Mayer, Russell Merritt, Jan Olsson, Paul Spehr, Yuri Tsivian, Linda Williams In early 1996, an international group of 35 specialists in silent cinema volunteered to write commentaries on more than six hundred films directed, written, produced and supervised by D.W. Griffith – or featuring him as a performer – for the eleven-volume series The Griffith Project, the largest monograph ever assembled on an individual film director, in conjunction with the massive retrospective held at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival from 1996 to 2008. All authors involved in The Griffith Project were bound to strict editorial rules, most notably the fact that all titles in the series would be assigned to them in pre-determined groups rather than as a result of their own individual preference for this or that specific entry. The patience and commitment demonstrated by all scholars in this endeavor requires at least a symbolic recognition. We therefore invited the members of the project team to write an essay on a (D.W. Griffith-related) topic of their own choice. The papers included in this volume constitute the response to our carte blanche invitation. Our offer was also extended to other experts on D.W. Griffith who, for various reasons, were unable to participate in The Griffith Project but consistently supported it with their generous advice and insight. This volume brings The Griffith Project to completion, as 2008 sees the last installment of the D.W. Griffith program at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival with the screening of his films produced between 1925 and 1931. Not surprisingly, twelve years of research on D.W. Griffith have unearthed an impressive wealth of knowledge but also an equally amazing array of new questions, certainly enough of them to fill several more volumes. Some of them (including the increasingly complex issue of D.W. Griffith's role as production supervisor) are only introduced or barely mentioned here, but we are confident that what we have called the 'Griffith Project' will continue – at the Giornate and elsewhere – with more research and newly found or preserved prints. PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. He is co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House (Rochester, New York). He directed the experimental feature film Passio (2007). His latest book is David Wark Griffith (Editrice Il Castoro, 2008).
Download or read book Focus on D W Griffith written by Harry M. Geduld and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1971 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Birth of a Nation written by Robert Lang and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The birth of a nation follows the lives of two white families divided by, and enduring, the American Civil War, and includes elaborate cameos of historical events such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Download or read book Closely Watched Films written by Marilyn Fabe and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch"--Page [4] of cover.
Download or read book The Man who Invented Hollywood written by David Wark Griffith and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Movies Mr Griffith and Me written by Lillian Gish and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
