Scott Lord Silent Film: Mary Pickford in The New York Hat (D.W. Griffith, Biograph)

Directed by D. W. Griffith for the Biograph Film Company the film features the first photoplay written by Anita Loos. Subsequently, Loos was to write the scenarios and screenplays to films which starred Douglas Fairbanks. The New Movie Magazine during 1930 nostalgically related that the film had also introduced Lionel Barrymore to the screen and that Loos, who had only been sixteen years old at the time of its release, had received “the large sum of $15” for writing the film. Author Iris Barry explains that it was not only Anita Loos that was behind the scenes, “At this period, ideas for films were commonly bought from outsiders and members of the company alike. Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett and others contributed many of the plots Griffith used.” This in part can be taken into consideration when apply Autuer theory to the abrupt difference between the scriptwriting methods of D.W Griffith and Thomas Ince and when reconsidering autuer theory when comparing the directorial efforts of D.W. Griffith and Ingmar Bergman in the mileau of a theatrical acting company.
In the volume D.W. Griffith, American Filmaker, Iris Barry writes that 1912 was a year that D.W. Griffith was an innovator not only in the depiction of social themes and social problems but also in film technique and the uses of the camera as well as the legnthening of the onscreen running time of the two reeler. Barry describes the filmmaking involved in “The New York Hat” (one reel),The film uses cut-backs, close-shots and sharply edited scenes with ease and mastery: close-ups made acting a matter of expresssion and minute guestures instead of the stereotyped guestures of the popular theater.” Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, writes, "Close ups already predominate this film."
In the short scenes of Griffith’s film, Mary Pickford is shown to the right of the screen in medium close shot, trying on a hat, her hands and elbows shown in the frame. Griffith cuts on the action of her leaving the frame to exterior shots. In a later scene, Griffith positions her to the left of the screen, and, his already having shown time having elapsed between the two scenes, then brings the action back to the right of the screen frame. As an early reversal of screen direction, or screen positioning, there is the use of screen editing in between the complimentary positions of showing her in the same interior. During the film the actress is, almost referentially, often kept in profile, facing to the right of the screen's frame. Although Griffith may have been still developing editing techniques, it has been noted that the acting style in the film can be seen as an example of a more naturalistic and less histrionic acting style than that of other contemporary films.

The cinematographer to "The New York Hat" was G.W. Bitzer.
Silent Film D.W. Griffith Biograph Film Company

Scott Lord Silent Film: Mary Pickford in The Broken Locket (D.W. Griffit...

Both Mary Pickford and Lottie Pickford appear in the one reel film "The Broken Locket", directed by D.W. Griffith and photographed by G.W. Bitzer. Silent Film D.W. Griffith Biograph Film Company

Scott Lord Silent Film: Intolerance; Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages...

Three years before the premier of "Intolerance" (D.W. Griffith, 1916), author Eustace Ball, in the volume "The Art of the Photoplay" advised, "Put one plot at a time; the single reel picture lasts only eighteen minutes and only one line can be worked out well in this time. This is another important detail in which the photplay differs from the drama."
David Bordwell sees cinematic history as a "Basic Story" and that within this approximation, D.W. Griffith is attributed with having invented "cinematic syntax". This syntax is apparent in what Raymond Spottiswoode referred to as the "grammar of film", or shot structure and perhaps in what is expanded later into semiotics and the "grande syntagmatique". While crediting Edwin S. Porter with the use of crosscutting two simultaneous actions, Bordwell notes the crosscutting of four historical periods (seperate storylines, which thematically merge) in Griffith's film Intolerance, filmed thirteen years later.

Susan Jean Craig, The City University of New York, in her dissertation "Skin and Redemption-Theology in Silent Films 1902 to 1927 describes the editing of motifs as film technique, "Filmmakers learned that they could use simple shorthand of now widely recognized filmic devices to amplify characterization and backstory: creating metaphoric links between seemingly unrelated storylines by shifting the action betwen them, called intercutting, underscoring human behavior and emotion through high-contrast lighting of scenes and subjects; and stressing subtle psychological shifts in motivation simply by moving the camera closer to the actor's faces. Thus, when D.W. Griffith wanted to introduce a prostitute in his 1916 epic "Intolerance, Love's Struggle through the Ages (Triangle Film Corp.) he didn't need to showa young woman trading sexual favors for payment. Instead he cut from a simple two second shot of a woman dressed too elaborately for her station in life to an intertitle that dubbed her "The Friendless One" to make his point crystal clear. Scholar Phillipe Gauthier sees crosscutting as a programmed languague and dismisses the need to view D.W. Griffith as its inventor, but rather as his "method of film construction", which having previous existed, he "developed and systemized", specifically that editing used in chase scenes and last minute rescue scenes to meet the exingencies of his narrative technique. While properly evaluating the work of D.W. Griffith and the canonical structuring of editing through a "suspensefull call for help, the proximity of the threat and the last minute rescue", Phillipe Gauthier finds early examples of the origins of film technique neglected by earlier prominent film historians. The director of the 1908 Pathe film "A Narrow Escape", if nothing else, certainly does quite often cut on the action of the character leaving the frame.

Author Stanley J. Solomon, in The Narrative Structure of the Film, from his volume The Film Idea describes the use of simultaneuous threads of action to climax thematically, "The last two reels (of the total thriteen in extant circulating versions) are among the most exciting sequences in all cinema. As the four stories head toward their conclusions, Griffith begins to cut back and forth much more quickly than he did earlier- mainly without the interference of the image of the rocking cradle...delaying the outcome of each story and building up a tremendous amount of suspense." Solomon looks to Iris Barry often. Iris Barry herself, author of D.W. Griffith, American film master, notes "Intolerance" directed by D. W. Griffith as being seminal. "The film Intolerance is of extreme importance to the history of the cienema." She singles out shots that use only part of the screen's area, tracking shots and rapid crosscutting as techniques used by Griffith in extraordinary combinations with his camera angles.

Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema implies that the storyline to "Intolerance" was entirely improvization on the part of D.W. Griffith; not only is there no credit for the photodramatist that wrote the photoplay, but there was originally no scenario to the film. Peter Cowie adds, "Like all Griffith's work, 'Intolerance' has a didactic ring that makes the captions seem pompous. But it lives up to the director's dictum 'Art is always revolutionary, always explosive and sensational."


Author Kenneth McGowan in his volume Behind the Screen, the history and technique of motion pictures concisely explains, "In 'Intolerance' (1916j Griffith used intercutting not only within the film's four seperate stories, ancient Babylon, first century Judea, Renaissance France and to the America of his day. He also intercut between the four stories and he often interjected between them the symbolic use of 'the cradle endlessly rocking'." Author Stanley J. Solomon in turn finds a thematic continuity in the film, "The four stories demonstrate the cause and effect relationship between individual acts and broadly calamitous events....That concept held in that the peculiarly suggestive medium of film, visual information should consist of fragments which, when carefully chosen and sensitively edited, would produce the idea of a completed action."
Both Lillian Gish and Paul Rotha write of Griffith having found lines in a poem by Walt Whitman that were to connect the stories thematically, Gish appearing at intervals throughout the film to contrast the dramatic quickening of the pace of the film and lending it a symbolism, "Intolerance was, and still is, the greatest spectacular film." Motion Picture World during 1916 popularized the film as bringing Griffith to a pantheon by subtitling its review with, "Griffith Surpasses Himself by a Spectacular Masterpiece in Which All Traditions of Dramatic Form are Successfully Revolutionized." Paragraph subtitles were to include, "Original Method of Construction", "Human Interest in Abundance" and "Marvelous Spectacular Effects".

In her book entitled Screen Acting, Mae Marsh explains the differences between the acting required for each camera distance. She begins with telling us that during a long shot facial expressions register indifferently and need to be compensated by body movement. She allows that most dramatic action is filmed in three quarters legnth, from the face to the knees, intermediate shots that require both facial expressions and body movement. Lillian Gish writes, "It took a while before we became friends with Mae Marsh and the fault was ours. At the beginning we thought ourselves superior because we had been trained in the theater."

To return to the syntax of film, its grammar of cinematic shot structure, film historian Arthur Knight explains D.W. Griffith's use of the close-up, stressing that it could also be used to reveal inanimate objects, as in the insert shot. "But the close up does more than merely emphasize what is important in a scene, it eliminates everything else. It forces the audience to see what the director wants it to see- and only that.It concentrates attention on the slightest detail, whether it be an object, an actor, or a portion of an actor...It was Griffith's unique ability to reveal filmically the inmost thoughts and emotions of his characters to reveal them clearly and intimately to his audiences."

It is thought that the later films of D. W. Griffith, including "The White Rose" (1923) with Mae Marsh, more elaborately presented theme as being intertwined with the drama in which the characters were situated. D. W. Griffith

Actress Constance Talmadge appeared in a cornocopoia of short comedies for The Vitagraph Company of America between 1914-1916 before being cast by Griffith in "Intolerance". Lillian Gish in her autobiography The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me gives an account of Constance Talmadge wearing pads to "make her figure more womanly" while in costume for the film. Added to that she reports long delays between shots while filming. Although during 1918 Lillian Gish had talked D.W. Griffith out of casting Constance Talmadge in the film "Hearts of the World" in favor of her sister Dorithy Gish, Constance Talmadge would later become Dorothy's "constant companion", travelling to Europe with her, the two "inseperable".

G.W. Bitzer, in his autobiography "Billy Bitzer, his story" writes, "All Griffith pictures after 1913 were made with a Pathe camera, including 'Intolerance'. It was a camera he preferred and happened to be the least expensive camera made. Bitzer claimed the camera enabled him to be the first to use wash-drawing effects, which were to become popular with cameramen later.
D.W. Griffith at Biograph Film Company Victor Sjostrom

Scott Lord Silent Film: Carol Dempster in America (D.W. Griffith, 1924)

Directed by D. W. Griffith the photographer of the film "America" (fifteen reels) was Hendrik Sartov. The film stars Carol Dempster and Neil Hamilton. Author Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, deemed "America" to be "the last film of importance" from director D.W. Griffith and noted the film for its "remarkable war scene". Although the storyline of the film, set during the American Revolution and The Old North Church, is presented as needing to be driven by Sam Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere, author Edward Wagenkneckt, in The Films of D.W. Griffith, writes, "'America' has no unbroken line of personal interest, and all the characters stand in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by history. Griffith moves them about from place to place like pieces on a checkerboard as the exingencies of the war or the story seem to require." The story begins by following a minute man, one of the Sons of Liberty at the outbreak of the war at the Battlesof Lexington and Concord. Author Edward Wagerneckt concluded on "the last of Giffith's top rank films", "Photographically America was an unqualified trumph. Scene after scene of breathtaking beauty crossed the screen."

A photocaption placed in Motion Picture Magazine during 1924 read,"THe Battle of Bunker Hill is one of the most thrilling episodes of the picture...excelled only by the inspiring and breathtaking ride of Paul Revere." Photoplay Magazine durng 1924 described the film as "one of the greatest thrill pictures ever made...Mr. Hamilton is pushed into stardom and Miss Dempster does the best work of her carreer."

The periodical Picture Play Magazine during 1924 relflected upon D.W. Griffith's striving for historical accuracy in his images of the American Revolution and his visiting important locations and his searching for "every available historic spot" which may have been preserved, in the article Mr. Griffith's Next Production, "At this writing, Mr Griffith is doing interiors at his Mamoroneck studio...And a little later, when snow has fallen, he will set out to do scenes at Valley Forge".
During 1924, D.W Griffith also directed Carol Dempster and Neil Hamilton in the film “Isn’t Life Wonderful?” (nine reels).

It is not without interest that Tom Gunning, in his volume on D.W. Griffith and The Biograph Film Company, chronicles that before his having entered filmmaking, Griffith had written an unproduced play entitled "War" that, staged within the context of the American Revolution, had also centered around the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
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D.W. Griffith D. W. Griffith

Scott Lord Silent Film: Linda Arvidson in The Adventures of Dollie (D.W....

Actress Linda Arvidson, writing in the periodcial Film Fun during 1916, includes the "now historic" film "The Advntures of Dollie" (one reel) directed by D.W Griffith for the Biograph Film Companyin 1908. Arvidson wrote under the name Mrs. D.W. Griffith. In one installment she reminisces about travelling to film exterior scenes, claiming they hadn't automobiles yet and visited locations by train or by boat. In a later installment she dicusses her salary for the film, "How much money I made! Twenty eight dollars in two weeks, enough for a whole spring outfit." What is more enjoyable is the autobiography of Mrs. D.W. Griffith, When Movies Were Young, published in 1925. Much of the material from the Film Fun periodical is repeated, worded similarly, as she gives an account of D.W. Griffith the actor being offered a provisional chance to direct his first film, "The Adventures of Dollie", given that he could return to acting if necessary. Mrs. D.W. Griffith exlains Griffith having been accepted as a director for Biograph, "For one year now, those movies so covered with slime and so degraded would have to come first to come first in his thoughts and affections....agonizing days when he would have given his life to be able to chuck the job." She includes not only the studio on East Fourteenth Street but the theaters on Third and Ninth Avenues as places into which one would not be seen going.


Author Edward Wagenkneckt, in his volume The Films of D.W. Griffith, chronicles that 'The Adventures of Dollie", filmed in July of 1908, was the first of 450 films directed by D.W. Griffith for the Biograph Film Company before leaving in September of 1913 all but eleven having been one reelers. The cinematographer to the film was Arthur Marvin. Arthur Marvin also during 1908 photographed the film "Behind the Scenes" for D.W. Griffith, the film having starred Florence Lawrence, Kate Bruce and Gladys Egan.

Lillian Gish, i her autobiography The Mr. Griffith and Me, with writer Ann Pinchot, chronicles that "The Adventures of Dollie" was the film that had begun Griffith's catapult to fame, "Although Billy Bitzer was not the photographer to the film, he helped with the direction...Soon everyone wanted more films by the man who was responsible for 'Dollie' . On the momentum of his first success, he turned out ten more pictures in a month." Lillian Gish quotes G.W. Bitzer in the chapter, but note that Bitzer's autobiography was published four years after Gish's.

Author Roger Manvell, in his sixty page introduction to the anthology "Experiment in the Film" credits "The Adventures of Dollie" as the first film in which D.W. Griffith had used the flashback.

Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, notes that it was in 1908, in the film "For Love of Gold", that D.W. Griffith had first used the close up shot in film.

In regard to my webpage series "Lost Films, Found Magazines", begun at a time when film preservation was unearthing many unseen masterpieces from the silent era, author Tom Gunning, in his volume D.W. Griffith and the origins of American Narrative Film, lends a caution that supports the premise of needing a film history detective while dismissing the perfect accuracy of historiography and the endeavor. "The accounts of Griffith's biograph films given by Lewis Jacobs, George Sandoul and Jean Mitry are filled with descriptions that do not correspond with the actual films. Based primarily on written descriptions rather than on the films themselves, these errors are recycled in textbooks on film history." Gunning cites in particular the autobiography of the wife of D.W. Griffith, Linda Arvidson. According to Gunning, the point of departure used by Lewis Jacobs was primarily the editing that Griffith employed; while looking at Terry Ramsaye and his analysis of shot structure, Gunning adds the phrases "screen grammar" and "pictorial rhetoric" to the familiar "syntax of film narration". "For Sandoul, Griffith's stylistic innovation shattered the theatrical unity of space by introducing the ubiquity of the camera and a unity of action." Gunning also advances the semilogical analysis of Christian Metz as a review of Griffith at Biograph having brought a "liberation of film from theatrical tradition" with the creation of a "film language.", the cinema of attractions bringing new "codified constuctions" to accomadate the cinema of narrative integration, "syntagmas in which individual shots depend on their relation to other shots in the chain for their meaning." Tom Gunning writes, "Dollie's story forms a perfect match with Todorov's "minimal complete plot" although Griffith structures the story through a "spatial as well as narrative circuit". Gunning is referring to the writing of Tzvetan Todorov on narrative equilibrium, progress and resolution who places plot among the elements of narrative, which also include characters, point of view, setting, theme, comflict and style.

Arthur Knight, in his volume The Livliest Art gives one summary of the importance of D.W. Griffith, "He created the art of the film, its language, its syntax. It has often been said that Griffith 'invented' the close-up, that he 'invented' cutting, the camera angle, or the last minute rescuse...He refined these elements already present in motion pictures."

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Scott Lord Silent Film: The Female of the Species (D.W. Griffith, Biogra...

Actress Mary Pickford appears with Dorothy Bernard and Charles West in "The Female of the Species", directed by D.W. Griffith and photographed by G.W. Bitzerfor the Biograph Film Company in 1912.

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Scott Lord Silent Film: Mary Pickford in What The Daisy Said (D.W. Griff...

During 1910 D.W. Griffith directed actress Mary Pickford in the short film "What The Daisy Said", photographed by G.W. Bitzer for the Biograph Film Company. Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, gives the 1910 film "Simple Charity", directed by Griffith, as one of the earliest on screen appearances made by Mary Pickford. Silent Film Biograph

Scott Lord Silent Film: Carol Dempster in The White Rose (D.W. Griffith, 1923)

By then a producer for United Artists, after directing actresses Carol Dempster and Mae Marsh in “The White Rose” (twelve reels) in 1923, D. W. Griffith in 1924 directed the film “America” and “Isn’t Life Wonderful” during 1924.

D.W. Griffith

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