D. W. Griffith and the Use of Off-Screen Space

Recent scholarship has helped to dispel the mistaken idea that the films of D. W. are outmoded museum pieces which, though not to be ignored for their historic value, are no longer of interest as art. Old prejudices die hard and despite the revival of later films, such as Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Dream Street, all too often a list of firsts in the history of the narrative film is the total consideration which is allowed. Even among individuals who have seen and appreciated after The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, there is an ignorance of the films which served as the director's apprenticeship. In fact, dismissing the scores of films directed between 1908 and 1913 at Biograph as simply a period of learning his craft by is almost as wrong as the previous tendency to write off the director as a pioneering footnote of film making. The mass production of the short films for Biograph allowed a unique opportunity for experimentation. In A Short History of the Movies,1 Gerald Mast writes: Griffith made no technical innovations in his longer films that he had not already begun or perfected in the short ones. He adds: Griffith was not just the cinema's first technician; he was also its first moralist, poet, auteur. Certainly, most of the Biograph films are simple narratives with many melodramas made quickly and inexpensively to answer the demand which had developed for them. But among the scores of titles are privileged moments as interesting today for their genius and technical ability as anything which has been made since. In fact, many of these short films demonstrate more initiative than most high-budget productions of our own time. One such film is A Corner in Wheat

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• And the Early Cinema of the DFFB

  Christina Gerhardt•The Sixties•2017

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