New DVDs: D. W. Griffith

[strandinthewind]

November 18, 2008

Critic’s Choice

New DVDs: D. W. Griffith

By DAVE KEHR


D. W. Griffith, one of the most celebrated figures in American film, is probably the only silent-movie director whose name is known to the general public. And yet, as a new boxed set from Kino, “Griffith Masterworks 2,” reminds us, he is still underappreciated, with much of his work waiting to be rediscovered.

A few decades ago Griffith was most famous — or perhaps most notorious — for having made “The Birth of a Nation.” This 1915 Civil War film did much to convince the world that motion pictures were an exciting, articulate new form of expression, but at the same time perpetrated hateful stereotypes of blacks and celebrated the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force.

More recent scholarship has concentrated on Griffith as one of the great form-givers of early cinema. His work — particularly in the years 1908-9, as documented in Tom Gunning’s essential book “D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film” — contributed several major elements to the evolving capacity of movies to tell a story.

But beyond Griffith the racist and Griffith the innovator lies Griffith the artist, and his creativity did not stop after the box office failure of his most daring film, “Intolerance,” in 1916. The Kino box (a welcome sequel to its “Griffith Masterworks,” of 2002) is proof that he continued to function on a very high level, up to and including his final movie, in 1931, “The Struggle.”

The oldest picture in this new collection is “The Avenging Conscience: or ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ ” (1914), a pre-“Birth of a Nation” feature that finds Griffith working in a very different register. A mash-up of several stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Griffith’s fellow tortured Southerner, the film grows more directly from one of the director’s obsessive themes: that of the young couple whose union is prevented by an older authority figure.

In this case the nameless hero (played by Henry B. Walthall) is forbidden to marry his sweetheart (Blanche Sweet) by the uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken) who raised him and wants him to remain at home as his assistant.

Instead of expanding this story into epic form (as he would in “The Birth of a Nation”), Griffith journeys inward in “The Avenging Conscience,” giving his hero a series of nightmarish visions that first drive him to strangle the despotic uncle, and then to suffer a nervous breakdown. With superimposed imagery of ghouls and biblical figures, Griffith is working toward an interiorized, psychological sense of character without much precedent in American films of the time. There are moments in “The Avenging Conscience” that seem to anticipate the stylized imagery of German Expressionism, which would not emerge in the movies until “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” in 1920.

By 1920, Griffith himself had moved on to “Way Down East,” his first picture shot in the studio he built in Mamaroneck, N. Y., hoping to escape the tyranny of Hollywood. Kino is presenting the Museum of Modern Art’s magnificent restoration of the 149-minute “road show” version, an hour longer than most of the prints in circulation. Only in this cut can Griffith’s grand formal design be fully appreciated.

The first act develops the story of Anna (Lillian Gish), an innocent country girl who has been seduced and abandoned by a Manhattan sophisticate (Lowell Sherman). After the death of her baby, she finds work as a servant for a New England squire (Burr McIntosh), whose son, David (Richard Barthelmess), falls in love with her, blissfully ignorant of her past. This part of the film covers months, if not years, and is presented in a conventionally chronological, novelistic manner.

But in the second act Griffith shifts gears. The action now covers only a couple of days and consists of three successive, rising movements, each centered on intense cross-cutting among parallel lines of action. It culminates when the squire learns of Anna’s past and casts her out into a raging snowstorm, occasioning one of the most celebrated sequences in Griffith’s work: the chase across the ice floes, as David rushes to rescue the unconscious Anna from plummeting over a waterfall. The literary underpinnings of the first half give way to the burstingly cinematic technique of the second, an effect as devastating today as it was when the film first appeared.

“Sally of the Sawdust” (1925) shows Griffith working effectively in a lighter vein. The last of his Mamaroneck films, this comic melodrama starring W. C. Fields was adapted from Fields’s Broadway hit “Poppy.”

Griffith’s first sound picture, the 1930 “Abraham Lincoln,” offers the Broadway star Walter Huston, in one of his first film appearances, as a saintly, remote Lincoln, whose path toward greatness and martyrdom is presented as a series of disconnected, tableau-like scenes. This style looks back to the earliest movie storytelling and also transforms Lincoln’s life into a sort of passion play.

The standard film histories blame the “old-fashioned” technique of “The Struggle” for bringing on the end of Griffith’s career. But seen today “The Struggle” looks less like the quaintly antiquated Victorian melodrama it is often described as than like an exercise in radical realism that flew in the face of standard Hollywood practice in 1931. (Audiences apparently loathed it: a 1939 profile of Griffith in The New York Times suggests that the film played only a few days at a Broadway theater before being withdrawn.)

On an immediate, emotional level, “The Struggle” is Griffith’s most personal film, the story of a factory foreman (Hal Skelly) who suffers, as Griffith did, from alcoholism. Stylistically, the movie could not be further removed from the gauzy products of Hollywood’s dream factory, then functioning at its height.

Shot in the Audio-Cinema Studio in the Bronx and in the surrounding streets, “The Struggle” has a hard, weighty quality that goes beyond documentary and taps into the solid, stubborn materialism that Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet would develop decades later in films like “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.”

Griffith, who died in 1948, might have remained a Victorian at heart, even as he stood on the cutting edge of the most modern of arts. But he was a Victorian in the sense of Dickens and Zola, a man who struggled to see the world as it was. Griffith played a key role in the invention of Hollywood, but he never shared the industry’s escapist sensibility; in the end it was his difference that took him down, not his datedness. (Kino International, boxed set, $89.95; individual titles, $24.95, not rated)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/mo...s.html?ei=5070

[strandinthewind]

I cannot wait to get this for Christmas!!!!!!!!!

D.W. Griffith was no saint, but his brilliance is why we have movies today. He developed so many of the techniques we take for granted. And, his brilliance inspired many contemporaries and subsequent film makers to push the creative envelope.