Download or read book D W Griffith His Life and Work written by Robert M. Henderson and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It has been said that after Griffith, nothing new has been added to the motion picture. The one-time Kentucky farm boy, high school dropout and itinerant stock company actor revolutionized the movie industry, transforming a fledgling attraction into the world's most powerful entertainment medium. D.W. Griffith produced and directed The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and Orphans of the Storm. He launched the screen careers of Mary Pickford, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Lionel Barrymore. From the ranks of his assistants came Erich von Stroheim, Raoul Walsh, and Mack Sennett. Yet the man who was known as "the Master" and "the Belasco of the screen" ended his career in obscurity, unemployed and ignored by the industry he had helped create. With compassion and clarity, this book traces the rise and fall of David Wark Griffith. It presents a fully faceted portrait of a theatrical personality who lived by grandiloquent gestures and practiced exaggerated Southern gentility. [Author] Henderson traces Griffith's Confederate background; describes his early years on the stage as an actor and aspiring playwright; and then details his film career, from the first directorial assignments at Biograph Films, where he made more than four hundred one- and two-reel movies in five years, to the pathetic final years on the fringes of Hollywood. Griffith's faults are observed, his genius is explored, his financial difficulties are explained, and the infant colossus that was Hollywood in the days prior to the First World War is brought vividly to life. Griffith's two masterpieces, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, influenced a generation, or more, of filmmakers, notably the Soviet giant Eisenstein. Between 1908 and 1915, Griffith invented the basic syntax of the motion picture. He demonstrated, or devised, the dramatic use of the close-up, the fade-out, the scenic long shot, and above all, the use of film editing. His series of feature films, in widely different styles, remain anchor points in any examination of cinema art. This eloquent biography details the full story of Griffith's achievements. It is a masterful life-and-times study of the pioneer movie director who became the seminal figure in American film."--Jacket.
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 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 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 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 Anthony Slide and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) is one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture. As director of The Birth of a Nation, he is also one of the most controversial. He raised the cinema to a new level of art, entertainment, and innovation, and at the same time he illustrated, for the first time, its potential to influence an audience and propagandize a cause. Collected together here are virtually all of the “interviews” given by D. W. Griffith from the first in 1914 to the last in 1948. Some of the interviews concentrate on specific films, including The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and, most substantially, Hearts of the World, while others provide the director with an opportunity to expound on topics of personal interest, including the importance of proper exhibition of his and other’s films, and his search for truth and beauty on screen. The interviews are taken from many sources, including leading newspapers, trade papers, and fan magazines. They are often marked by humor and by a desire to please the interviewer and thus the reader. Griffith may not have been particularly enthusiastic about giving interviews, but he seems always determined to put on a good show. Ultimately, D. W. Griffith: Interviews provides the reader with a unique insight into the mind and filmmaking techniques of a director whose work and philosophy is as relevant today as it was when he was at the height of his fame in the 1910s and 1920s.
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 Working Class Hollywood written by Steven J. Ross and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.
Download or read book The First King of Hollywood written by Tracey Goessel and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first truly definitive biography of Douglas Fairbanks, the greatest leading man of the silent film era"--
Download or read book Raoul Walsh written by Marilyn Moss and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raoul Walsh (1887–1980) was known as one of Hollywood’s most adventurous, iconoclastic, and creative directors. He carved out an illustrious career and made films that transformed the Hollywood studio yarn into a thrilling art form. Walsh belonged to that early generation of directors—along with John Ford and Howard Hawks—who worked in the fledgling film industry of the early twentieth century, learning to make movies with shoestring budgets. Walsh’s generation invented a Hollywood that made movies seem bigger than life itself. In the first ever full-length biography of Raoul Walsh, author Marilyn Ann Moss recounts Walsh’s life and achievements in a career that spanned more than half a century and produced upwards of two hundred films, many of them cinema classics. Walsh originally entered the movie business as an actor, playing the role of John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the same year, under Griffith’s tutelage, Walsh began to direct on his own. Soon he left Griffith’s company for Fox Pictures, where he stayed for more than twenty years. It was later, at Warner Bros., that he began his golden period of filmmaking. Walsh was known for his romantic flair and playful persona. Involved in a freak auto accident in 1928, Walsh lost his right eye and began wearing an eye patch, which earned him the suitably dashing moniker “the one-eyed bandit.” During his long and illustrious career, he directed such heavyweights as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, and Marlene Dietrich, and in 1930 he discovered future star John Wayne.
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 424 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 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 American Racist written by Anthony Slide and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2004-09-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "American Racist makes significant contributions to the understanding of both southern history and the medium of film and its influence on American culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book D W Griffith written by Richard Schickel and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He transformed a nickelodeon novelty into a new art form and a powerful, glamorous American industry. He codified the rules and techniques of screen story-telling, and pioneered the conventions that brought films to life, from surging spectacle to soul-baring close-ups. A poor farm boy from the South, Griffith rose to fame with The Birth of a Nation, a cinematic masterpiece stained by the racism that infected his heritage. Though he went on to direct some of the most legendary films of the silent era, Griffith was doomed by his over-reaching drives, and he died an embittered man, shunned by the community he had largely created. His story is told here with unsparing truth and compelling narrative sweep.
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:
