The Beginnings of Film Narrative

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

D. W. GRIFFITH'S BACKGROUND AND EARLY CAREER

D.W. Griffith, arguably the most influential pioneer in the art of the narrative film, was born on a farm near La Grange, Kentucky in 1875, ten years after the Civil War. He came from a family of wealth on his mother's side. His father, known as "Roaring Jake" and "Thunder Jake" for his oratory skills, achieved glory on the battlefield as a colonel in the Civil War. But Griffith's father was also a wanderer and a gambler who left his family in debt when he died. Hence, after Griffith's mother moved the family to St. Louis, Griffith took a number of jobs to help his mother financially and never finished high school. A job at a bookstore sparked a passion for literature, and his prime ambition in life was to be a writer.

He was also, at an early age, intrigued by the theater. His eventual career as an actor, he claimed, was the result of advice he received from a stage manager who told him that a good playwright had to be an actor first. Although his literary success was limited (he produced one play and published one poem), his success as an actor was more considerable. After playing bit parts in repertory companies in St. Louis, he went on tour with various productions all over the country, often playing leading roles and receiving good notices. Eventually he settled in San Francisco where he gained steady employment and acted in better quality plays. He was on tour in Minnesota when the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 occurred. Rather than returning to the devastated city, he decided to try his fortunes as a playwright and actor in New York, where his career took an unexpected turn.

Married and short of cash, he took the advice of a colleague and approached a movie production company, the Edison Studio, for work as a scriptwriter. His scripts were too complex and expensive to produce, but film companies were eager to use stage actors because of the prestige they brought to film from the theater. Thus Griffith was hired not to write for films but to act in them. After playing a lumberjack in an Edison film directed by Edwin S. Porter, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), he got work, again as an actor, for a rival studio, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. He came at an auspicious moment. The company was flooded by the demand for short fiction films and, after a brief time acting, he was offered the opportunity to direct. Between 1908 and 1913 Griffith directed over 450 short films for the Biograph Company, molding the film medium into a sophisticated instrument for creating dramatic and suspenseful film narratives.

In order to appreciate the significance of Griffith's contribution to the creation of narrative film art, it is necessary to recall the state of the fiction film when Griffith began making movies in 1908. Film viewing by then was no longer a novelty but a regular mode of entertainment. People saw movies in small storefront theaters called nickelodeons because the price of admission was usually a nickel. Audiences saw anywhere from fifteen- to sixty-minute programs of short, mostly fiction films, lasting up to ten minutes each. But these films did not tell stories very well. They comprised a series of loosely spliced scenes or tableaus, shot with a static camera in long takes (sometimes lasting up to ninety seconds) with the camera remaining at a fixed distance from the action. The scenes proceeded in a strict chronological order, and the temporal and spatial relations between the shots were often ambiguous or unclear. The most common type of shot was the long shot, in which the human figure fills only a small portion of the lower quadrant of the frame, much as the human figure appears in the proscenium of stage dramas. In a theater, however, even though the actors may appear tiny, especially to spectators in the last row of the balcony, their words loom large, conveying dramatic excitement through the expressiveness of the human voice. This resource, of course, was not possible in the then-silent medium of film, which relied on static printed title cards to convey exposition or dialogue. Griffith found ways to compensate for the lack of spoken words, increasing the drama and emotional power of his fiction films in three ways. First, he paid close attention to elements of the filmic mise-en-scène. Second, he photographed his scenes in more imaginative ways. Third, he added complexity to his narratives through editing.

GRIFFITH'S REFINEMENT OF NARRATIVE FILM TECHNIQUES

MISE-EN-SCÈNE

The term mise-en-scène denotes all the elements of film direction that overlap with the art of theater. Thus a film's mise-en-scène involves the director's choice of actors and how they are directed, the way the scene is lit, the choice of setting or set design, props, costumes, and make-up. Since Griffith was an actor before he came to film, it is not surprising that he carried over his experience from the stage to the screen. Griffith, more than other contemporary filmmakers, took the time to cast actors who looked the part and carefully rehearsed the players before shooting the scenes (a practice rare in early filmmaking). He also chose costumes, props, and settings with an eye to providing narrative information that would enhance the film's dramatic effect. Griffith realized, moreover, that blatantly artificial painted background details, common in early films, would undermine the realism of filmed fictions. In a pre-Griffith film such as The Great Train Robbery (1903), for example, a fairly realistic rendering of a railroad telegraph office is marred by a painted clock on the wall, its hands perpetually set at nine o'clock. Griffith insisted on the construction of authentic-looking three-dimensional props and sets for his films. He also brought increased realism to the screen by directing the players to act in a restrained, natural, less flamboyantly theatrical style.

THE ENFRAMED IMAGE

Griffith did more than improve the mise-en-scène of early cinema. Early on he began to shape and arrange the profilmic...