Griffith was born in Kentucky, the United States, his father was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and was bankrupt due to the Civil War. Griffith, from a poor family, had a difficult experience running around to survive. He is compassionate and a humanitarian. In his later creations, he prominently displayed an ideal of warmth and pacifism. He wished that human beings would treat each other sincerely, without poverty, without evil, without bars, without war. From his short films to his feature films, while solemnly revealing historical and social realities, the works are filled with "sentimental and romantic innocence". Griffith was a literary youth when he was young. At the age of 15, he first worked as an elevator driver in a store, and then transferred to a bookstore as a clerk, where he came into contact with contemporary literary works and met local poets and actors. This broke into the literary circle. Griffith was bent on becoming a great writer, and he was deeply influenced by Dickens' novels, which he showed again and again in his later films.
After publishing a play or two and a collection of poems, he was invited by the great director Edwin Porter to appear in a film invested by Edison Films. In this way, Griffith became an actor and wrote some scripts to sell. to the company. Later, the company was short of staff and asked him if he would like to write and direct it himself. Since then, Griffith officially began his directorial career. In Griffith's early creations (1908-1912), at an average rate of two films per week, he shot nearly 450 short films within 10 minutes for Biograph. His creative speed far exceeded the company's expectations, so he quickly became the company's main director and the company's absolute artistic authority. Shooting short films, although limiting Griffith's play, has cultivated his ability to tell a story in a very short space. Griffith loves literature and is good at melodrama. Most of his short films are taken from novels, poems and plays, among which the most representative themes and styles can be roughly divided into the following aspects:
1. Good and evil in society: "The Lonely Villa" in 1909 and In 1911's "Londel Reporter" and other films, they are all in the form of chase films, describing how the irrational evil forces attacked the kind and innocent people, how to get the heroic counterattack of the rescuers who came to hear the news. .
2. Family comedies: In films such as "Mr. Jones Has a Game" in 1908 and "The Transformation of an Alcoholic" in 1910, the husband is always alcoholic, playing cards, and pursuing women, while the wife is always moral, Moderately wait for the prodigal son to return. The film mocks the conflict between the husband and wife in a comedy.
3. The conflict between the rich and the poor in the society; in 1909, films such as "Wheat Country Merchant" and "Pig Alley Musketeer" were also in the form of social dramas, showing the different social morals and unreasonable behaviors of slums and corrupt classes. class relations. Of course, there are also police and gangster films like "Swordsman of Poor Lane", and war films like "Holocaust" and so on.
In these short films, Griffith is very different from Bout. As early as 1912, there was a statistical data showing that the total number of shots in short films (single) at that time was usually 11 to 46 shots, but Griffith actually used as many as 60 to 100 shots for performance. Griffith realizes more maturely than Bout that in the film "the essence of a 'scene' involves not only the arrangement of performers and objects in space, but also the arrangement of individual shots in time. Whereas Griffith began to make a lot of transitions between scenes, Griffith directly deconstructed the dramatic space and then reassembled it to suit the audience’s mental and emotional engagement.” In Baut's case, scenes, passages, and shots are the same thing and play a role in advancing the narrative. In Griffith's case, a scene or paragraph is composed of several shots, and the scene or paragraph is not only the connection of the plot, but also acts as a visual concept. In addition, Baut pays attention to the development of the plot and the form of external actions. And Griffith attaches great importance to the emotional factors of the action, emphasizing the performance of the emotional value of the film, so the narrative of the film is more complicated. This is the key to what Griffith is called an artist and his films are called works of art.
In 1915, Griffith, who was mature and ambitious in all aspects, finally had the opportunity to show his skills after jumping from the original company and began to film "The Birth of a Nation". The Birth of a Nation was 12 copies long and cost $100,000, setting a precedent for Hollywood's later "luxury blockbusters." Griffith brings together the experience he has gained while shooting short films, and in this film, which is set in the American Civil War, the unique expressive power of cinematography and editing, and the use of different Scenes, changing angles, camera positions and mobile photography, etc., using techniques such as "transformation", "circling in and out", "fade in and out", "flashback", etc., and finally carefully constructed with 1500 shots . In the 3-hour film, there are both spectacular scenes and historical greats on the screen, as well as delicate warmth and ordinary people; there are not only cruel wars, tense rescues, but also comfortable life and the expression of wonderful tastes. . In order to pursue the reality on the screen, Griffith refers to the real photos taken by Matthew Brady during the Civil War, and imaginatively plays and creates on the screen, forming some wonderful passages. Such as the Battle of Petersburg, the assassination of President Lincoln and so on. However, there are some unacceptable fictions in the film, such as black people's abuse of white people, the victory of the Ku Klux Klan "to fight violence with violence" and so on. Magneto Lawson said of the film that "there has never been such a striking contradiction between the revolutionary nature of technique and the reactionary nature of content".
"The Birth of a Nation" tells the story of white people who went to the South to be persecuted and murdered by black people during the Civil War, and had to rise up to resist and organize the Ku Klux Klan for self-defense and revenge. The content and themes of the film are strongly racist, discriminating against and insulting black people to glorify the Ku Klux Klan. This may have something to do with the racism that Griffith's Confederate colonel father instilled in him as a child. This interpretation of history has aroused strong social repercussions, and people have expressed their opinions and written articles, denying the political content of the film. Black people in particular were extremely dissatisfied, and there were parades and riots in some places, and the film was banned in Yibu in some cities. Faced with severe condemnation from people from all walks of life. Griffith was deeply shocked. He believed that in the film he had both a real "Uncle Tom" who sympathized with white people and a few "real souls" that had softened the racial contradictions of "The Ku Klux Klan". . To this end, he wrote a short essay "Freedom of the Screen", pointing out that those who criticized him violated the freedom of cinema, while stating his humanitarian stance. However, the controversies themselves made the film commercially lucrative and a huge success, making $1 million in just one year, setting a box office record unheard of in film history. This fact has greatly stimulated the reform of American film companies in terms of operation and distribution, paving the way for Hollywood to produce large-scale luxury feature films. Sadur said: If you look back on history well, "February 8, 1915, the day when The Birth of a Nation was first released in the United States, was the beginning of Hollywood's domination of the world, and it was also the time when Hollywood art dominated the world for at least the next few years. the beginning".
Notice
Part of this article is excerpted from Zheng Yaling/Hu Bin's "History of Foreign Films"
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