Why is DW Griffith not the greatest director?

Why is DW Griffith not the greatest director?

He directed wrongthink and must be memory-holed.

How long is his neck?

Too boring

Why does Dickens get away with it?

Because he's an artist.
>Film
Read a fucking book, faggot.

Oops!

This is why film will never be art. Griffith is too concerned with narrative

As one unsigned review of The Birth of a Nation in Motion Picture News famously opined, “In dramatic and photographic technique, it is beyond our present-day criticism.” Imagine a contemporary critic openly recognizing that a film was so advanced, so far beyond his or her comprehension, that it actively defied established nomenclature. Yet that’s precisely the type of territory where one finds oneself when discussing the work of D.W. Griffith, whose conception of film form was borne of his desire to wrestle cinema from the confines of novelty and elevate it to the realm of high art. His controversial socio-cultural outlook—okay, racism—isn’t sufficient enough grounds to disregard his enormous influence on both mainstream and avant-garde filmmaking. If anything, his unselfconscious, unwavering desire to essentially imprint himself on the cinematic image, even at the expense of his public perception, ultimately made him a martyr for the cause; as Stan Brakhage hyperbolically but poetically claimed, “hunks of Christ broke off in Griffith’s psyche.”
But it was more than just retaliation that drove Griffith to make this epic story of “Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages,” a film whose very title seemed to disregard and actively contradict the sentiments Griffith displayed throughout The Birth of a Nation. The narrative possibilities of film form fascinated Griffith, as did the freedom with which to integrate narrative style into the medium. The most common criticism leveled against Intolerance is that its overall story is nearly impossible to follow, which isn’t an unfair assessment. Its four interwoven sagas of human injusticelikely work well enough on their own, but structured as they are, it can be damn near impossible to process them procedurally.

He slept with the Gishes

But it was more than just retaliation that drove Griffith to make this epic story of “Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages,” a film whose very title seemed to disregard and actively contradict the sentiments Griffith displayed throughout The Birth of a Nation. The narrative possibilities of film form fascinated Griffith, as did the freedom with which to integrate narrative style into the medium. The most common criticism leveled against Intolerance is that its overall story is nearly impossible to follow, which isn’t an unfair assessment. Its four interwoven sagas of human injustice—the “modern” story of a labor dispute in 1914 America, the Renaissance “French” account of the 16th-century slaughter of the Huguenots, the “Judean” tale of the Crucifixion, and the epic “Babylonian” depiction of the fall of Babylonia—likely work well enough on their own, but structured as they are, it can be damn near impossible to process them procedurally.
So how astonishing is it then that the film’s greatest failure—its inability to tell a cohesive story—is also one of its greatest achievements? With Intolerance, Griffith actively defies the notion that films are somehow required to tell stories, at least the kind that can be processed and unwrapped in a tidy manner, by arranging the images in a manner that welcomed didactic interpretation rather than oppressive sermonizing. Griffith famously likened the film to a “Sun Play,” a curious and innocuous phrase that aptly surmises so many of the director’s theories. “Sun Play” seems a direct reference to the most molecular function of the form—that is, the evidence of light’s movement captured on celluloid. Intolerance, in its grand unification form and content, is just as much about “Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages” as it is a poetic, theoretic, and geometric account of bodies in movement, the basest yet most profound record of mankind in art.

>influence means theft
i guess Griffith is a thief of Homer then

Miriam Cooper got along well with D. W. Griffith, saying he had been a perfect gentleman. However, when they first arrived in California, Cooper mistook his mannerisms as insulting (he had failed to return a hello to her one day). She complained to Mae Marsh, who was also trying to win Griffith's favor, and Marsh told Griffith. The next day on set, Griffith called Cooper "The Queen of Sheba". the nickname stuck for years afterwards. Cooper noted Griffith seemed to treat her differently from other actresses by continually giving her bigger parts (Griffith was known for casting an actress as a lead one day and a bit role the next to keep egos in check).

There's no mention of Homer in Intolerance. The point is that Griffith invented stream-of-consciousness and intertextual parallelism for the modernists, you fucking brainlet.

Griffith had already, in the over four hundred movies he had made — from the one-reelers on up to THE BIRTH OF A NATION — founded the art of screen narrative; now he wanted to try something more than simply telling the story of bigotry in historical sequence. He had developed discontinuity and crosscutting in his earlier works, and in INTOLERANCE, he attempted to tell four stories taking place in different historical periods, crosscutting back and forth to ancient Babylon, sixteenth-century France, the modern American slums, and Calvary. He was living in an era of experiments with time in the other arts, and although he worked in a popular medium, the old dramatic concepts of time and unity seemed too limiting; in his own way he attempted what Pound and Eliot, Proust and Virginia Woolf and Joyce were also attempting, and what he did in movies influenced literary form as much as they did. INTOLERANCE is a film symphony. No simple framework could contain the richness of what Griffith tried to do in this movie.

For many critics and scholars — myself among them — D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, and movie styles may look different today, yet the only real difference is Griffith’s still-daring ingenuity, which calls for a more open-minded reception than in our simplistic habits we are accustomed to: It calls for an optimistic, united popular audience, which Griffith took for granted. When Intolerance premiered on September 5, 1916, its opening intertitles introduced silent-movie viewers to an extraordinary narrative device: “Our play is made up of four separate stories, laid in different periods of history, each with its own set of characters.” Employing a prologue and two acts, Griffith called it “a sun-play,” marked by florid melodramatics developed from Emersonian Transcendentalism, which film scholar Bill R. Scalia has described as “calling for an original American literature,” for “poets with the ability to ‘see’ past the material, apparent world to the world of eternal forms, which shaped nature in accordance with a divine moral imperative. Through this connection, man-as-poet would discover God in himself.

>There's no mention of Homer in Intolerance.
there's no mention of Griffith in Joyce, either. nevertheless if you seek to cast Joyce as a thief of Griffith based on a degree of influence, it stands to reason that Griffith is a thief of fore-bearers of narrativity before him, predominantly the canon of Western literature dating back to Homer

Why is Ulysses considered the greatest novel ever made, but Intolerance is not considered the greatest film

Because Griffith never made a film. And he makes brainlets feel inferior

>Intolerance
>narrative
Nevermind, you're a brainlet. Carry on whining.

>there's no mention of Griffith in Joyce, either
The reference is right here, faggot. The question of whether Griffith is the greatest director is insignificant because anybody with an above-moderate degree of intelligence knows the answer. The real important question is why the fuck are you talking about Joyce if you don't have the reading comprehension beyond a third-grade level?

>avant-teen
Oopsies

Griffith lacked philosophy. Very childish compared to Bergman and Dreyer.

Oopsies!

Nice "acting"

Oopsies

Why'd he forget how to direct then?

Griffith knew the impossibility of total reality, total representation, so he transcended it. His goal is to employ multiple acting styles to demonstrate range and illuminate collective identity.

>Embracing the totality even though it's not achievable.

Nigga, he didn't transcend anything, he just tried to accomplish total representation and FAILED

He learned everything he knew about film from Emily Jean.

>Nigga
Not surprised niggers can't into reading comprehension

>quotes a nigga

Oops!

This fag sounds like he's got a severe case of "no pussy".

This fag sounds like he's got a severe case of "no pussy".

both true

It's true, I've never in my entire life gotten intimate with a woman (sexual intercourse, kissing, hugging, hand-holding, sustained eye-contact). I spend every waking hour on the internet arguing with people that I'll never meet in person over irrelevant topics.

Emily Jean gives me 10 kises every 5 minutes

that's really pitiful desu