D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), US film director, who greatly influenced the development of cinema in the 1910’s. He has been credited with developing many basic film techniques, including the use of close-ups and flash-backs. The son of a former Confederate soldier, he worked as an actor and journalist before becoming interested in the new art of cinema. From 1908 he wrote and directed hundreds of short films for the Biography Company and in 1915 released his master-piece The Birth of a Nation. This three-hour epic of the Civil War proved a huge critical and commercial success but was widely condemned for its racism. In reply to his critics Griffith made Intolerance (1916), a technically brilliant film that failed at the box office. Subsequent films, such as Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920), were less remarkable and he found no further work after the coming of sound.
“I made them see, didn’t I…I changed everything. Remember how small the world was before I came along. I brought it all to life. I moved the whole world onto a twenty-foot screen. I was a greater discoverer than Columbus. D. W. Griffith in Adela Rogers St John’s, The Honeycomb”
