Biography dw griffith
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D.W. Griffith
(1875-1948)
Synopsis
Born on January 22, 1875, in Floydsfork, Kentucky, D.W. Griffith worked as an actor and playwright before turning to cinema, creating highly innovative filmmaking techniques. He directed the 1915 feature-length work Birth of a Nation, which was a blockbuster but was also highly racist in content. Later work included Intolerance, Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm. Griffith died on July 23, 1948.
Background
David Wark Griffith was born in Floydsfork, Kentucky, on January 22, 1875. He grew up on a farm, the son of an ex-Confederate colonel who died when Griffith was 10. An avid reader, the young Griffith eventually worked as a book clerk and later decided to pursue acting and write plays.
Innovative Filming Techniques
By 1908, Griffith had entered the fledgling world of moviemaking. He did acting work for the New York City film companies Edison and Biograph and went on to become a director of hundreds of shorts for the latter
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David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In th
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D. W. Griffith
American filmmaker (1875–1948)
D. W. Griffith | |
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Griffith in 1922 | |
| Born | David Wark Griffith (1875-01-22)January 22, 1875 Oldham County, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Died | July 23, 1948(1948-07-23) (aged 73) Hollywood, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard, Centerfield, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1895–1931 |
| Spouses | Linda Arvidson (m. 1906; div. 1936)Evelyn Baldwin (m. 1936; div. 1947) |
David Wark Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was an American spelfilm director. Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture,[2] he pioneered many aspects of film editing[3] and expanded the art of the narrative film.[4]
To modern audiences