Before 1908, the so-called "movie" was still a ten to twenty-minute "spectacle film", and the so-called "director"'s job was nothing more than normalizing the exposure of the camera, arranging the physical movements of some actors, or selecting some beautiful carcasses worthy of being photographed. . At that time, the photographer was the boss on the set. The director has no control over the specific cinematography, sometimes even just an employee called "action" and "cut" on set.
In 1908, David Wark Griffith (or DW Griffith) joined the New York-based Biograph Company. Before that, Griffith was an actor. Although he was young and handsome, he was very popular with drama companies, but he was not an actor at all. He came to New York and applied to the Biograph Film Company for an actor's position. The company immediately confessed to him that he was not suitable for acting after seeing Griffith's performance. But the company knew that Griffith usually likes to write short stories, poems, and screenplays, so they invited him to be a director in the film company.
In the five years beginning in 1909, Griffith made more than 400 short films for Biograph Films. Most of the content and techniques of these short films come from the combination of his experience in theatrical aesthetics at that time and the simple use of the camera. But Griffith was a rare diligent man among the film directors at the time. He found that the effects of new techniques such as "movement of the camera", "close-up can emphasize emotions", "cross-cutting", etc., were combined in different order. The pictures can bring a different rhythm of the film, so as to convey the story more wonderfully. Griffith's short films are fantastic, and each one is worth watching.
Griffith in 1913 had established his sense of authority and his ambitions had grown. He gradually realized that these short films were only considered "second-rate" films. So in that year, he left Biograf Films and started making "feature films". Griffith's masterpiece "The Birth of a Nation" (The Birth of a Nation), which is now well known to movie fans, was originally titled "The Clansman" and was adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name. The novel revolves around the "white supremacy" KKK party and tells a long and romantic story during the American Civil War. Now it seems that the novel is destined to be racist, but Griffith at the time liked this nostalgic romantic epic so much that he spent a lot of money to buy the copyright and adapt it into a movie.
The film is 3 hours long, the shooting cost is estimated to be 100,000 US dollars (about 2.5 million US dollars today), and about 18,000 ensembles are used. Before the movie was released, these numbers had already begun to build momentum, and gradually formed a wave of discussion, and the appearance was not very different from the promotion of today's movies. The film was shot in California because Griffith loves natural light, which is the most intense and long-lasting. The film also invented the function of "production management" to coordinate the efficiency of the flow of funds and the length of filming.
The film premiered in Los Angeles on January 8, 1915. Even though the film was strongly boycotted by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), the entire audience was engrossed and silent until the end of the film for three hours. When the cast and crew came on stage, the audience cheered and applauded, and even shouted that Griffith was a great "hero". The film was then released on the East Coast, and the response was equally dramatic. According to incomplete statistics (considering that there was no perfect box office calculation system at that time), the film received a total of 4.8 million US dollars (about 120 million US dollars in present) at the box office, and made a net profit of 1.8 million US dollars. It was a windfall at the time, and no one had expected films to have such commercial mojo.
The Birth of a Nation now looks like a lengthy, racist film, but it was invited to the White House at the time. The commercial success and production method of the film are defined by film history as the beginning of "commercial film". Griffith is also known as the "father of American film", but at that time, the film also instigated many audiences to believe in the prejudiced values. The film began to be branded with the imprint of capital and ideology, which is the blessing of the film and the curse of the film.
(Part of the information comes from Wikipedia and "The Big Screen" by David Thomson. The article was originally published in "21st Century Racer", and this article has been modified on the basis of the published article)
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