FIRST FILM CLASSIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 May 1935, Page 11

FIRST FILM CLASSIC

MADE SCREEN HISTORY • America has just been celebrating the 20th- anniversary of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” (writes Campbell Dixon, in the London “Daily Telegraph”). It is altogether fitting (how difficult it is on these occasions to avoid the idiom of Gettysburg) that we in England should do so, too. Hollywood may have given us better films than “The Birth of a Nation,” judged by the standards of to-day, but none that had comparable influence on the evolution of the screen. Griffiths found the movies a cheapjack entertainment in cellars. For ten yeai’s the trade had been content to turn out one arid two-reelers, and exhibit therri in dirty little “flea-pits” (converted stables, pool rooms and the like) called nickel-odeons, because the standard charge for admission was a nickel (2|d). As the current system of distribution set a uniform charge for all productions, producers believed that long' pictures could not pay; exhibitors were equally convinced that nobody would pay more than a nickel for admission. Griffiths, one of the most courageous craftsmen who ever lived, • thought otherwise. The Rev. Thomas Dixon had written a best-seller of the Civil War called “The Clansman,” and urged that it would make a wonderful fllin. Griffiths, his imagination fired, at once planned a super picture, at a cost of £15,000 to £20,000. In 1915 this was sufficient to make anything from six to 10 ordinary features, and most of Griffith’s associates promptly declined to have anything to do with an enterprise so rash and prodigal. At last he and Dixon succeeded in raising the money privately, and “The Clansman” was made, in 12 reels, at a cost of £lOO,OOO. “The Clansman” was a picture of the troubled South, painted on a colossal canvas. The story was packed with action, multitudes of men and horses filled the screen, audiences sat spellbound before a vision of conflicting ideals, hate and heroism and the smoke of battle—all the birth-pangs of a nation, conjured up by the first screen magician.

A NEW TECHNIQUE “The Birth of a Nation”- is as oldfashioned now as Wilson Barrett’s original stage production of “The Sign of the Cross.” But in a score of ways it made screen history. Unknown players—Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Ralph Lewis, Henry B. Walthall and Wallace Reid—became stars almost overnight; and, more important, Griffiths invented or perfected all manner of technical devices which gave the screen a new elasticity and a new emotional quality; night photography, soft-focus photography, moving camera shots, split-screen shots (showing two scenes simultaneously), shots from new and effective angles and the use of the iris—e.g., the closing of a scene to a pin-point and re-opening on a new scene.

Hitherto it had been generally assumed that producing a film was much like producing a play. The players “went through the motions” as they would on the stage, and the camera simply recorded the scene from the point of view of the stalls or pit. Griffiths changed all this. He saw that the camera could be something more than a soulless recorder; could be made to play a vital, exciting part, deepening atmosphere and intensifying emotion. . “The Clansman” was well received, but caused no sensation. Then Dixon astutely renamed it “The Birth of a Nation,” and, helped by the publicity given to the fights it caused between negro haters and sympathisers, it became the topic of the day. Shown at theatre prices, it drew into the cinema a well-to-do class that had despised the nickel-odeons. The adult film was born. In 1931 "The Birth of a Nation was still playing somewhere, and the gross takings at the box-office had amounted to 18,000,000 dollars (£3,600,000), still a record. Mr. Griffith’s excursions into sound have been unhappy; he may never produce again. But pictures like rhe Birth of a Nation,” “Intolerance,” and “Way Down East” lifted the. screen amongst the art and gave happiness to millions. With all his faults, he remains the greatest figure the movie world has known.