In spite of Hollywood's consistent perpetuation and encouragement of stereotypes--ethnic, racial, religious, and otherwise--the Associated Press has reported that The Directors Guild of America is dumping its prestigious D.W. Griffith Award to dramatize the disapproval of the racial stereotypes its members perceive in the pioneer filmmaker's movies. ``As we approach a new millennium," DGA President Jack Shea said in a highly ironic statement in December 1999, "the time is right to create a new ultimate honor for film directors that better reflects the sensibilities of our society at this time in our national history.'' The DGA national board voted unanimously to retire the Griffith Award and create a new career achievement award. The name of the new award will be announced later.
It is evident from this decision and the wording of the official statement, that today's active directors have never seen a representative sampling of Griffith's films and are not at all familiar with the director's career, accomplishments, or legacy that in effect created their own profession. Their action appears to be based solely upon reaction to Griffith's best-known film, The Birth of a Nation, and very likely reaction to second-hand reports and/or viewing of selected excerpts rather than the film itself. What follows below is some pertinent background on Griffith the director and this 85-year-old film that is still as controversial as at the time of its release. The last section of this essay will cover a number of Griffith films with which the Directors Guild evidently is unfamiliar, films which show the director not only to advocate an opposite position on race relations than he is accused of promoting in The Birth of a Nation, but also films that show him to remain far ahead of 1990s and 2000s mainstream Hollywood in treating serious social issues.
David Wark Griffith (1875-1948) was the first film director who became a superstar in the popular media of his day, his name alone guaranteeing receipts at the box office from the mid-teens through the early 1920s. He was often credited with virtually single-handedly inventing modern motion picture story-telling techniques. He did not actually invent such concepts as close-ups and editing, which had been around for years when he started making films in 1908. But Griffith, unlike many filmmakers of the early years, was able to recognize and exploit the dramatic impact of these devices, developing them to the point that film became a genuine expressive art form. Unable to make a living at his chosen profession of stage actor and playwright, he accepted a job as a film actor and soon turned to directing. At the Biograph studio he directed well over 400 short films, experimenting with different techniques, acting styles, and subject matter, and gauging their effect on the audience. With the help of veteran cameraman G. W. "Billy" Bitzer (1872-1944), who had been at Biograph since its beginnings in the 1890s, he explored a variety of photographic effects that were soon copied by other filmmakers. He also helped pioneer filmed stories that lasted longer than about 15 minutes on the screen, or the amount of film that would fit on one 1,000-foot reel (the maximum capacity of most projectors of the time). Over the initial objections of his employers, by 1911 he was making two-reel films, and in 1913 secretly planned to make his production of Judith of Bethulia into a biblical epic that ran an hour, or four reels. It was not the first film of such a length, nor even the first four-reel American film (the French Queen Elizabeth and the American Richard III and Cleopatra are four- and five-reel productions from 1912 that have survived). Movie patrons were starting to develop a taste for "feature-length" attractions and Biograph officials were finally realizing this, but for defying their authority they demoted Griffith to a "supervisor" and delayed releasing the film for several months.
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