Griffith's Contribution to Film Development

(The full English name is David Llewellyn Walker Griffith, commonly known as David Griffith,1875,65438+was born on1October 22nd, and 1948 died on July 23rd), an American director, who is regarded as a pioneer who made great contributions to the development of early films. His most famous works include The Birth of a Country and Alienation.

Early career

Griffith was born in a poor family in rural Kentucky, USA. His father Jacob Griffith was a colonel in the Southern Army during the Civil War. Griffith has been in contact with romantic the legend of heroes since childhood, and his father's words and deeds have greatly influenced his views on race. Griffith's love for Victorian poetry further contributed to the emotional prejudice instilled by his father. He has been familiar with the works of Browning, Kingsley, Tennyson and Hood since childhood. This makes Griffith always maintain romantic thoughts and poetic feelings. Some people say that some of Griffith's works are full of affectation, sweet talk and endless preaching, which means that he is too emotional in his creation.

Griffith, 17 years old, works as a reporter in Louisville Courier, and starts writing plays in his spare time. At the suggestion of his friend, he joined the touring troupe. He didn't stop writing plays and poems while acting, but these small works were hard to get published.

Biography period

Griffith's ideal is to be a playwright. 1897, Griffith entered the theater under the stage name Lawrence Griffith, but the result was not satisfactory. So in 1908, Griffith reluctantly joined Edison Company. Although he applied to be a screenwriter, Edwin S. Porter only gave him a performance role in the movie "Free from Ying Chao". After playing his first movie role, Griffith joined Biograph and became a movie actor to support his family. However, at that time, Biograph's business was sluggish and it had already owed the bank $200,000. On average, each film can only sell less than 20 copies, and the director is ill. So Biograph took the initiative to find Griffith as a director and promised to go back as an actor if it didn't succeed. Griffith's first film was Dolly's Adventure (released on July 1908). During the five years of Biography, Griffith made hundreds of films until Judith of Bethulia (19 14). This stage, also known as Griffith's apprenticeship, can be divided into two small stages, the time is 19 1 1 year. Prior to this, Griffith insisted on using his stage name "Lawrence" in two contracts. In the third contract, Griffith changed the name of the contract given to him by Biograph from Lawrence to D.W. This shows that he has changed his concept of film, admitted that film is an art, and is willing to associate his name with this industry.

When he first started directing, Biograph paired Griffith with Billy Bitzer, a senior photographer who joined the company 1896, to help him shoot. Since then, the two have worked together for decades, and they are the first perfect director/photography partner in film history. With the help of Bitzer, Griffith knew nothing about film directors at first, and even had to do every scene layout for Bitzer. In the second year of joining Biograph, he shot nearly 65,438+050 films, and Biograph became a hot film company because of him, so that the company had to add AB anti-theft signs to the released films from time to time to prevent other companies from stealing columns. During the biographical period, Griffith showed unparalleled film narrative talent. He not only learned all the knowledge needed for film technology, but also absorbed and developed new skills extensively. Together with photographer Billy Bitzer, he studied and developed a set of basic grammar of film narration, which laid a solid foundation for the development of film later.

Griffith first brought the narrative techniques of his favorite Dickens novels into the film, and created a parallel editing technique, which was later called Griffith's last-minute rescue. In the movie A Fatal Hour (1908), he used parallel editing to create tension in the climax for the first time (at that time, newspapers in the industry called this technique alternating scenes, also called backcutting or deletion). Since then, Griffith quickly developed the technique of parallel editing into ordinary narration, not just the last climax. He also made more than two clues parallel. 1909 The story of A Corner in the Wheat is adapted from two novels by Frank Norris, and the story is also conducted in parallel in three locations, namely, the life of a poor farmer in a rural wheat field, the business of a bakery and the office of a stockbroker. The characters and plots in the three story lines do not overlap at all. Through the parallel editing of the poor and the rich, we can not only see the shadow of Griffith's later famous work Conflict with Different Groups, but also see the inspiration of montage technology. Griffith later became more and more proficient in using this editing technique. At 19 12, according to the statistics of Moving Piture World magazine, there are as many as 68 shots in Griffith's film Sandy. At the same time, the number of shots in other single films is generally only half or even less (generally, the length of a single film is 10 to 16 minutes). For example, the Italian film Queen Elizabeth, which was popular in the United States at the same time, had only 23 shots in 53 minutes, which shows that Griffith's narrative skills have far surpassed those of filmmakers all over the world at the same time.

Griffith also made bold progress at the farewell scene. At that time, the film was still used to the indomitable spirit of the actors flooding the whole screen, and the audience had begun to find that the feet of the actors often appeared in Griffith's films. Biograph thinks this is Griffith's negligence, but he doesn't know that this is Griffith's intention. Fortunately, the audience didn't mind, so he let Griffith continue to develop. Griffith began to try different scenes in the movie. Through 19 10's Uncovering the Sea, Griffith added panorama to his lens language, and the lens language of panoramic-middle-close-up/close-up of classic film narrative was found by Griffith. Griffith's further contribution to the scene is to use different scenes and seats according to the plot in the same scene. This method completely breaks the staged concept of time and space, separates a scene space and shows different levels of details, which is a major breakthrough in film narration. In contrast, until 19 13, the famous director Edwin S. Porter's Prisoner of Zenda still kept the characters in a panoramic view, and there was no progress at all.

In addition, Griffith also likes to use depth-of-field lenses, and his photos are particularly rich in details in the depth direction. Griffith is not afraid to let the actors walk from a distance, even in front of the camera, and he is not stingy to let the actors slowly move away from the camera. In the film Scenery of Lederman, the Kiowa Indians who were forced to migrate first drew a line in the panorama, then turned around and walked through the lens from one side, and finally stopped when the protagonist Yin Ying and his father reached the middle panoramic position, showing that the eagle's father was seriously ill and fell down, and completed many scene changes in one lens. Griffith's pursuit of farewell to the scene naturally made him boldly develop the movement of the camera. Before that, the motion of the camera was limited to the mirror that swayed left and right and up and down. 19 10 years later, Griffith began to try other camera sports, such as a bigger rocking mirror and put the camera in the car. In Lonely Dell Operator (19 1 1), Griffith and Bitzer put the camera on the moving train, making his last-minute rescue look more thrilling and oppressing the nerves of the audience. Before the emergence of Cabiria movement in 19 14, Griffith kept the world leading level in camera movement.

In addition, Griffith also made a meaningful exploration of the possibility of lighting. As early as 1908, Griffith boldly used fire as a light source in the film "The Reform of Alcoholics". In the movie Pippa Pass 1909, Griffith simulated the change of sunshine in a day. 19 16 Griffith said that looking back on his days in Biographical Literature, he liked the film very much. Although Griffith rarely used this kind of light in the future, it was obviously borrowed by other filmmakers. For example, Allen wycoff, a photographer of Cecil de Miller, called this kind of lighting "Rembrandt Lighting" and used it extensively in Demule's films, such as "Cheating" in 19 15.

Griffith and Bitzer also made many other contributions. For example, fade in and out, circle in and circle out. Biesel, the "aperture lens", is very proud of the method of circle out, because by focusing the center of the circle on a small focus area to guide the picture switching, there is neither too abrupt jump nor booing the impatient audience.

Because Griffith's films use a lot of shots in the middle or even closer, he is keenly aware that the change of shots makes the film performance different from the stage performance, and the appearance of close-ups makes it unnecessary for actors to make exaggerated movements, thus obtaining the performance closest to real life. Griffith's film performance concept brings together a group of young actors. Except Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore, many other actors, such as Mae Marsh, dorothy gish, lillian gish, Blanche Swift and other later stars, have no acting experience before. To some extent, Griffith is the first director in film history who knows how to direct actors' performances. Compared with other film companies, he is not stingy with rehearsal time. The success of his film allowed him to pay four times the salary of others to keep the actors. These people also left with Griffith when Griffith later left Biograph.

In addition to actors, a large number of effective forces in the film industry finally entered the film circle from Griffith's team. For example, Mark Cenit was in charge of comedy shooting at Biograph, which laid the foundation for his later work "Keystone". Other directors who graduated from Griffith Film Academy in other periods include eric feng Strouhen (the famous Xiongnu image in Griffith's films), Wilkes in The Birth of a Country, and Tod Browning (who designed the famous push-pull lens for the Babylonian part in Let's Oppose it). Joseph Hennabury (played Lincoln in The Birth of a Country), donald crisp, Paul Powell, etc.

Griffith also used a wide range of materials in the film theme during the period of Biographical Literature. He filmed a wide range of content, except the last-minute rescue of the drama that made him famous, as well as comedies, dramas and so on. 19 12 pig valley musketeers are considered as the originator of "gangster movies". Griffith also began to boldly touch on social issues, thinking that serious social themes can enhance the artistic status of movies. 1909, he filmed "Lederman's View", which reflected social problems through the love when two Indians were forced to migrate because of the expansion of white power (there were more than 40 films about Indians in Griffith's life). In the same year, he also filmed A Corner of the Wheat Field, which reflected the gap between the rich and the poor and questioned the economic gap between the rich and the poor in modern society with the values of traditional Puritans. Griffith's "Queen Bethel" has an epic war scene in the end. Griffith began to tend to use ready-made novels in materials. In addition, Griffith said that the most influential of his early films was The Assassination of Duke Gith (1908) shot by Frenchman Charles Le Baki, which was also the most popular French film in the United States, which made Griffith have a strong interest in gorgeous historical themes.

19 1 1 years later, Griffith's pursuit of all aspects of film art made him unwilling to be limited to the length of a single drama, and he began to develop into a longer and more complicated feature film. Because many movies are booming in America, Biograph promised Griffith to shoot two movies. 19 12 Griffith made three films with two books in California, but when it was released, he met the Italian blockbusters Queen Elizabeth and Ke Vardis? The influence of movies such as ""is unknown. From the film technology itself, these European films d'art's films are far less than Griffith's films, but the blockbuster effect brought by the big production scenes has made them the focus of the public. The investment of nearly $50,000 brought back 20 times the box office for the producers, and Italian studios had to make copies in shifts 24 hours a day to catch up with the needs of distribution. These undoubtedly had an impact on Griffith. 19 13 years, he shot a feature film Queen Bethel with enough material, but Biography only allowed Griffith to cut a film with four books. Since the film cost $36,000, more than double the budget, the head of Biograph decided to promote Griffith to the production director who did not participate in the specific shooting. At the same time, in order to cater to the demand of feature films, Biograph signed an agreement with theater producers Klaw and Erlanger to remake their stage works.

This angered Griffith, so Griffith left Biograph in June of 19 13 and joined Reliance-Majestic as an independent film producer/director with an annual salary of $5,200. Aitken, the director of Relian-Majestic, promised that Griffith could shoot two independent works of his own every year in addition to regular works. Since then, Biograph Company has gone from bad to worse, and declared bankruptcy on 19 15, thus completing its historical mission.

Because Biograph never promotes its actors and directors, all films have no other information except their names, so although everyone knows that Biograph's films are good-looking, few people know Griffith. So after Griffith left Biograph, he published an advertisement in Drama Mirror Weekly in new york, listing the 150 films he directed, and publicly announced that he was the producer who made Biograph a success. In his advertisements, he listed the innovations of film art: close-ups and close-ups, panoramic views, Dickensian parallel editing, suspense keeping, turning around and natural performances. Although it is hard to say that these techniques were initiated by Griffith, it is undeniable that these film languages have been systematically used in Griffith's hands, laying the basic grammar of classic film narration. His films are widely praised in the film industry, and become the object of universal imitation and learning, which has far-reaching influence, which makes Griffith worthy of his position as the father of movies.

The pinnacle of a film career.

The Birth of a Country and Let's Oppose Different Groups are two insurmountable peaks in early American films, which are far superior to other films of the same period in all aspects. They indicate that Griffith has reached the peak of his personal career, and also show the best skills of film technology, and strive for the status of film as an art, and categorically point out that film is one of the most powerful social forces in American society.

The birth of these two films is by no means accidental, both of which are the results of five years of intense work by directors. As early as Biographical Literature, Griffith was brewing these two works. After leaving Biograph, Griffith made four films for the new company, none of which was his favorite. Subsequently, Griffith got the right to shoot "Golden Gate" (later "The Birth of a Country") and found that this was the story he had been pursuing. Griffith started shooting the film on a large scale. He is not only in charge of creation, but also contracts all the chores.

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