Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 8 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other silent film director has been as extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than five hundred films has been the subject of a systematic analysis, and the vast majority of his other works still await proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from 'Professional Jealousy '(1907) to 'The' 'Struggle '(1931) - will be explored in this multivolume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field. Created as a companion to the ongoing retrospective held by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the Griffith Project is an indispensable guide to the work of a crucial figure in the arts of the nineteenth century. The latest volume assesses Griffith's work in 1914-15. It includes an extensive, multi-authored evaluation of 'The Birth of' 'a Nation.'

Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 12 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 426 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 The Griffith Project Volume 10 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other silent film director has been so extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than five hundred films had been the subject of a systematic analysis. Now, for the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from 'Professional Jealousy '(1907) to 'The Struggle' (1931) - is explored in this multi-volume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field. Created as a companion to the ongoing retrospective held by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, 'The Griffith Project 'is now an indispensable guide to his work. This is the final volume of the project.

Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 9 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other silent film director has been so extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than 500 films has been the subject of a systematic analysis and the vast majority of his other works stills await proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from Professional Jealousy (1907) to The Struggle (1931) - will be explored in this multi-volume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field.

Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 11 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other silent film director has been as extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than five hundred films has been the subject of a systematic analysis, and the vast majority of his other works still await proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from Professional Jealousy (1907) to The Struggle (1931) - will be explored in this multivolume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field. Created as a companion to the ongoing retrospective held by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the Griffith Project is an indispensable guide to the work of a crucial figure in the arts of the nineteenth century.

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 The Griffith Project Volume 8 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by British Film Institute. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other silent film director has been as extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than five hundred films has been the subject of a systematic analysis, and the vast majority of his other works still await proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from "Professional Jealousy "(1907) to "The" "Struggle "(1931) - will be explored in this multivolume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field. Created as a companion to the ongoing retrospective held by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the Griffith Project is an indispensable guide to the work of a crucial figure in the arts of the nineteenth century. The latest volume assesses Griffith's work in 1914-15. It includes an extensive, multi-authored evaluation of "The Birth of" "a Nation."

Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 6 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1912 is the first 'golden year' in the career of D.W. Griffith. There is still a wealth of treasures waiting to be uncovered in this year. Their reappraisal is one of the aims of this sixth installment in the multi-year research project commissioned by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Sacile.

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 The Birth of a Nation written by Paul McEwan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic underdogs, silent epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) is widely considered to be the most controversial film of all time. At once one of US culture's greatest artistic achievements and one of its most abhorrently racist artefacts, it becomes more shocking with every passing year. Comprising a decade of archival research and published on the 100th anniversary of the film's release, this richly detailed study considers both the film's afterlife and the artistic, industrial and moral surroundings in which it was created. Drawing on an unbroken century of production and reception history, Paul McEwan recounts the film's origins and development, Griffith's unique editing and cinematography and the construction of racial identity and fear in the film. Assessing its contribution as an art form, while directly grappling with the complexity of the art-or-racism debate, Paul McEwan shows how The Birth of a Nation has had a central role in the development of film and Film Studies worldwide.

Download or read book Epics Spectacles and Blockbusters written by Sheldon Hall and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the history of the American blockbuster-the large-scale, high-cost film-as it evolved from the 1890s to today.

Download or read book Cinema s Original Sin written by Paul McEwan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-12-13 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life. In every decade since 1915, filmmakers, museums, academics, programmers, and film fans have had to figure out how to deal with this troublesome object, and their choices have profoundly influenced both film culture and the notion that films can be works of art. Some critics tried to set aside the film’s racism and concentrate on the form, while others tried to relegate that racism safely to the past. McEwan argues that from the earliest film retrospectives in the 1920s to the rise of remix culture in the present day, controversies about this film and its meaning have profoundly shaped our understandings of film, race, and art.

Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 11 written by Eileen Bowser and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Marketing Blurb

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 Screening the Stage written by Steven Neale and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduced by a comprehensive account of the factors governing the adaptation of stage plays and musicals in Hollywood from the early 1910s to the mid-to-late 1950s, Screening the Stage consists of a series of chapter-length studies of feature-length films, the plays and musicals on which they were based, and their remakes where pertinent. Founded on an awareness of evolving technologies and industrial practices rather than the tenets of adaptation theory, particular attention is paid to the evolving practices of Hollywood as well as to the purport and structure of the plays and stage musicals on which the film versions were based. Each play or musical is contextualized and summarized in detail, and each film is analyzed so as to pinpoint the ways in which they articulate, modify, or rework the former. Examples range from dramas, comedies, melodramas, musicals, operettas, thrillers, westerns and war film, and include The Squaw Man, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Merry Widow, 7th Heaven, The Cocoanuts, Waterloo Bridge, Stage Door, I Remember Mama, The Pirate, Dial M for Murder and Attack.

Download or read book Hollywood and the American Historical Film written by J.E. Smyth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do Hollywood filmmakers construct and interpret American history? Is film's visual historical language inherently different from the traditions of written history? This definitive collection of essays by leading scholars probes the theoretical and historical contexts of films made about the American past - from the silent era to the present. Exploring issues deeply connected with historical filmmaking, from historiography to censorship, to race, gender, and sexuality, the book discusses a wide range of films and genres- including classics such as The Virginian, Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane. This collection is essential reading for anyone interested in studying, or researching American history and film. Includes essays by Susan Courtney, David Culbert, Nicholas J. Cull, Vera Dika, David Eldridge, Vittorio Hösle, Marcia Landy, Mark W. Roche, Robert Rosenstone, Ian Scott, Robert Sklar, J.E. Smyth, and Warren I. Susman.

Download or read book The Griffith Project Volume 5 written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other silent film director has been so extensively studied as D. W. Griffith. However, only a small group of his more than 500 films has been the subject of a systematic analysis and the vast majority of his other works stills await proper examination. For the first time in film studies, the complete creative output of Griffith - from Professional Jealousy (1907) to The Struggle (1931) - will be explored in this multi-volume collection of contributions from an international team of leading scholars in the field. Created as a companion to the on-going retrospective held by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, The Griffith Project is an indispensable guide to the work of a crucial figure in the arts of the nineteenth century. With contributions from Eileen Bowser, Tom Gunning, Kristin Thompson, Ben Brewster, Steven Higgins, Richard Koszarski, Scott Simmon, J.B. Kaufman, Russell Merritt, Patrick Loughney, Cooper Graham, Andre Gaudreault, Yuri Tsivian, Richard Allen.