January 22, 1875: D.W. Griffith is born.
Called “the Teacher of us All” by Charlie Chaplin, David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was born in Kentucky to a Confederate Civil War veteran and his wife and began his creative career not as a director but a playwright. As a playwright, he was hideously unsuccessful; only one of his plays was ever performed, and it played for only two weeks. In 1907 Griffith attempted to sell a script to Edwin S. Porter, an early film pioneer who rejected the script but signed Griffith on as an actor in one of his films instead. Cinema in its primitive stages was little more than a novelty, and it was somewhat formless narrative-wise because there existed no standard ”grammar” concerning the frames, shots, scenes, and sequences that make up a movie. Some early attempts to transform film into a legitimate art form involved no less than simply performing staged theater productions in front of an immobile camera, resulting in largely unedited films composed of one or a few shots.
They were not the first to innovate with film form, but D.W. Griffith and his cinematographer Billy Bitzer were two figures who helped to codify this “film grammar”, the visual language of cinema, through which complex stories and emotion could be depicted with continuity. During his career, which lasted from 1908 to 1935, Griffith directed over 500 films and utilized techniques that are standard today: combinations of shots of varying distances, tracking and panning shots, match on editing, and notably parallel editing.
However, Griffith also infamously directed the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a Reconstruction-era story that glorified the Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the white South from the combined forces of brutish black freedman and scheming white Northerners. It was one of the first ever American feature-length films, and it was technically innovative but morally repugnant, containing racist depictions of African-Americans that were criticized most significantly by the NAACP, which attempted to have the film censored. In response, Griffith made his 1916 high-budget epic Intolerance, which addressed none of his criticisms and did little to mollify his critics, but was highly influential (along with Griffith’s oeuvre as a whole) to filmmakers of the school of Soviet montage editing. Similarly, his atmospheric and eerie 1919 film Broken Blossoms may have influenced the concentrated visual style of German Expressionist directors.