Research Paper

D. W. Griffith and His Transformation in Narrative Film

Linna Wang

Film 106A
Professor J. Kuntz
TA Michael Potterton
Section 1J
Jan 26 2013
In both his narrative film style and his artistic skills in film editing techniques, D. W. Griffith offered new perspectives on filmmaking method. Rather than following the cinematic principles and using cameras merely as a recording machine, he boldly ran to aesthetic innovation on different aspects of filmmaking. We can call him the inventor of the early film techniques. Although controversy rose due to his ignorance of his own racism, exaggeration in certain films and late years failure, it is with no doubt that Griffith had led filmmaking into a new era. Like other art forms, film then developed into a new kind of art form.

A new way of telling a screen story
In early years of filmmaking, we can see filmmakers attempted to be innovators in narrative of film. The first narrative film in 1903, The Great Train Robbery, produced and directed by Edwin S. Porter, who was an employee in the Edison Company, was indeed a coup and gained enormous popularity among a vast majority of audiences. The 12-minute-silent film gave people ideas of story telling in motion pictures.
It seemed that D.W. Griffith had an unusual perspective on telling a story happening before cameras. Although he ran with failures on the point of being an actor, he certainly was a successful writer, especially a “screenwriter” when dealing with motion pictures. His inspiration of his romantic and poetic ideals mostly came from his favorite novels like those of Maupassant and Lev N. Tolstoy. Some of his inspiration was even inspired by some famous epic poem.
From his perspective, telling a story on screen is not only keeping the audiences understanding of what is happening without confusion. Rather than merely recording with continuity using cameras, storytelling from his perspective is more like artistic creation of art and literature. The company noticed that the movies he had made were entirely different from those in early cinema. Just like what he said when responding to his employer who was astonished by his novelty in using a parallel story line during his film, “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know that way.” “Well, doesn’t Dickens write that way?” “Yes, but writing is different.” “Not much. These stories are in pictures, that’s all.”
Similar to different styles in the creation of literature, Griffith was creating his own style on film narrative, concerning every problem of humanities, history and nations, and unveiled the philosophy behind these. Early filmmaking companies like Edison and The Lumiere Brothers hired employers from all kinds of careers to be cameramen. They let them understand how the technology works and forced them to make improvements on this technology to sell their product. However, when it came to D. W. Griffith, he was concerned by, not the industry itself, but shaping filmmaking to an independent art form. His narrative film concept propelled filmmaking to new heights.
People called Griffith a whole-souled romantic. The romanticism implanted in him was due to his father’s subtle affect on him in childhood. As he became more sophisticated in controlling motion pictures, he realized that a film would become convincing and emphatic only if the content was meaningful and attractive. Therefore in telling a story D. W. Griffith seemed to have more meaning to convey. “His aesthetics were used to dramatize the social and cultural tensions of the era, giving them an explicitly Protestant tone. Reporters referred him as the ‘messianic savior of movie art, a prophet who made shadow sermons more powerful than the pulpit’…the merging of politics, vice crusading and films represented in Griffith’s career offers a chance to probe one of the great historical dilemmas of the era.” Compared to the Lumiere Brothers who regarded film as a “scientific treasure”, Griffith forged films that went beyond people’s thought of that time period. Just like when discussing Griffith’s movie The Adventure of Dolly, Billy Bitzer, his cameraman, said that, “In the light of a complete scenario today, I can readily say that Griffith was years ahead of us.” Griffith’s film affected American culture substantially.

The advanced innovator in the field compared with previous filmmakers
As Griffith developing filmmaking into an independent art form, he began his fearless venture on the method of narrative in filmmaking art. At the borderline of time when filmmaking industry was about to be transformed, D. W. Griffith became a pioneer in this transformation and gave definition to filmmaking as a completely new art form that was entirely different from the previous trick films. By further improving the technique Méliès and Porter used, Griffith, with his own thought, justified and incorporated a united, systematic, and clear method of filmmaking.
It is true that from Georges Méliès film was more than a continuous story. Rather, he found accidentally that special effects may appear when breaking time and space into disorders. In the film directed in 1902 called Barbe-bleue, he made his first attempt in using parallel cross-cutting. Most significantly, spectacles appeared in films like A Trip to the Moon in 1902.
Emphasizing more on the special effects and techniques themselves, Méliès nevertheless failed to connect those unique techniques with meaningful content. In Sadoul’s book Histoire Generale du cinéma, it contrast Griffith’s film editing to that of Méliès :
“He(Méliès) had used editing, camera movement, superimposition, over-lapping dissolves and close-ups, but he treated them only as theatrical tricks, magical effects of stagecraft. Griffith, drawing on the still very rudimentary discoveries of the English School after 1902, transformed these tricks to magical effects to means of dramatic expression. The chase had already broken the screen’s identification with a scene played in a single set. Griffith, profiting from his experience filming both in exteriors and in the studio, used the camera as a dramatic element.” Méliès discovered magic in films and became a magician in dealing with motion pictures. In the movie The Great Train Robbery directed by Edwin S. Porter, known as the father of story film, we can see advanced continuity of scenes and arrangement of motion pictures. Unquestionably, Edwin discovered the editing of film with obscurity in early years. However, Griffith congregated those techniques and developed them in a way that was more mature. He realized that, in filmmaking, the essence of a scene in a movie was not merely depended upon the arrangement of actors and elements in space. Different settings and control of shots in terms of time in moving image can be a crucial factor relating to audiences’ perception of the film. Comparing Edwin Porter’s crosscutting among different scenes, Griffith determined different kinds of shots in a scene are the basic units in a movie, and different shots can create voluminous effects because of more freedom in space and time. The Great Train Robbery may be a smashing success of that time, but it would become a pigmy in Griffith’s period.

Establishment of the language in narrative film As his techniques became more mature in filmmaking, Griffith started to realize that in directing those motion pictures, the most significant thing is that how things is going on screen effects on audiences’ mind. “He saw a need for a means whereby action could be developed and emphasized, characterizations built, atmosphere evoked, the whole story expressed with more fluidity and variety.” Griffith decided to move a bold alteration is narrating the film. He found the shot is the key when expressing the meaning in moving images. A director need not only guide the camera to show content in front of it, but also to regulate each shot with details such as the precise angles. He started to alter the camera’s position in the middle of a scene, moving the camera more and more closer to the actor. It is more like a way of communication with the audiences, informing them the actors’ emotions are rather than leaving them infer. This bold technique formed the early filmmaking device called a close-up, showing the face and expressions of the actor. As he used more of these techniques, Griffith had recognized the symbolic and psychological value behind this method. “Phenomenologically, the close-up has the effect of isolating a detail from its background and giving it a greater dramatic emphasis by making it fill the frame.” Criticisms rose soon after his bold alterations. Nevertheless, Griffith kept on with his other attempts on cutting shots between scenes and changing camera’s positions with a plethora of shots in one scene. Moreover, he carefully chose the position of each shot and artistic value of each had given a great deal of consideration. Each shot is connected neither in a continuous timeline nor a complete space in a scene.
Besides increasing the number and variety of shots, he was also concerned with the lighting in his features. Though his cameraman objected his rebelliousness on the traditional filmmaking principles, the revolution on his creation seemed an absolute triumph in film history. As the book described,
“The Drunkard’s Reformation. In one scene the actors were to be illuminated by a fireside glow. The cameraman protested that the film would not take an image if they followed Griffith’s directions-or that the peculiar lighting would cast ugly shadows on the players’ faces. But Griffith disdained all their objections, and Marvin and Bitzer photographed the scene under his direction. Projected the next day in the studio, the scene was greeted with a murmur of admiration, and the cameramen were perhaps the most surprised and approving of all. From then on lighting was regarded more seriously as a means of enhancing the dramatic effect of a film story.”
He improved the close-up shots with different shading by controlling the light, creating various kinds of atmosphere in a close camera shot. He gradually became an expert on using light combining with the camera position.
In dealing with effects of a variety of shots, he started to add more complexity in his devices. In his movie The Lonely Villa, he not only used the intercutting skill to show three different actions happening simultaneously, but he also used what people called “last minute rescue” which created suspension among audiences, giving them a feeling of a continuous tension and fear of the situation in the story. He developed this special technique with augment in After Many Years. “In the logic extension of the technique he had employed in After Many Years, Griffith simply cut back and forth between one action and another, gradually increasing the tempo of alteration until all three actions converged in the dramatic climax of the tale.” This special technique of manipulating timelines and space effectually solved a crucial problem of story telling methodology in filmmaking.
As multishot in a film grew more popular, Griffith could proficiently use panorama long shots, full shots, close-ups, and multiple crosscut actions in his motion pictures. He gradually developed his own style of filmmaking. Later the Soviet filmmaker and theorist concluded his unique and systematic style in movie making in a French word “Montage”, which people much discussed today. “Montage meant the building up of impressions through the juxtaposition of separate shots, in order to create a single, complete mental image or emotional state…it was a means of attaining a specific response from an audience.” With his triumphant montage style, Griffith established a language in narrative films with his talents.

Above all, D. W. Griffith’s bold innovations had made him the first artist in filmmaking history. Ignoring the company’s worries that the films he produced would have gone too far because of his radical fragmentation in dealing with shots, he built a variety of devices in an abnormal way in comparison to the traditional one. His brand new film structure propelled film to a new artistic level, and all his creative works were eventually hailed as masterpieces.