A pictorial history of the movies (1943)

Record Details:

Title:
A pictorial history of the movies
Date:
1943
Publisher:
New York : Simon and Schuster
Volume:
A pictorial history of the movies
Leaf #:
00059
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
March 28, 2024
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% Griffith Turns a Page Nineteen fifteen was a momentous year for motion pictures, for ;t witnessed the production of a film that was, and still remains, a masterpiece of cinematographic art. David Wark Griffith, like Chaplin, is certainly one of filmdom's true geniuses. His very first picture, The Adventures of Dolly, a one-reeler he directed for Biograph in 1908, revealed a sense of situation and dramatic logic rare in those days. An unerring casting director, he introduced many a future star— including Mary Pickford— during his Biograph days. Griffith is the greatest innovator the screen has ever known. Such devices as the close-up, the fade-out, the iris dissolve, back lighting, the soft focus close-up, the cut-back, and the last-minute rescue are accepted so completely as a matter of course by present-day audiences that it is hard to imagine a time when they did not exist. Yet every one of them results from Griffith's experiments and discoveries from 1908 to 1914. Moreover, he was the first director consciously to treat the motion picture as an art form. His pictures have the indefinable quality of "atmosphere" and are distinguished by masterful lighting and composition. Had he been a painter instead of a motion-picture director, he would have been equally great.