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The Films of D.W. Griffith

by Scott Simmon. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 180 p., ill., ISBN 0-521-38128-2 (hardback), 0-521-38820-1 (paperback).

The Birth of a Nation

by Robert Lang (ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994 (Rutgers Films in Print Series), 310 p., ill., ISBN 0-8135-2026-6 (hardback), 0-8135-2027-4 (paperback), $ 15.00


No director of the silent era has received as much scholarly attention as D.W. Griffith; the critical bibliography concerning his work is so vast that it's even hard to follow its international development (a comprehensive guide to references and resources would be a daunting yet exceptionally useful project). In a way, it seems that each new generation of specialists is eager to identify itself through a set of books and articles on Griffith, attempting to authenticate an updated interpretative canon.

In this respect, Simmon and Lang have provided two concise summaries of the trends, ambitions and contradictions affecting silent film studies and cinema scholarship as a whole. The quality and refinement of research have gone through a dramatic progress since the latest guides to The Birth of a Nation and the work of its director (respectively, by Fred Silva, ed., and Harry M. Geduld; both published by Prentice-Hall in 1971); still, the reaction against the former penchant towards the "great man" theory and its unbalanced view of Griffith's life as the rise and fall of a genius has resulted into an unequally unbalanced attention towards his ideology, sexuality, and political beliefs, to the detriment of an understanding of the aesthetics underlying them (Tom Gunning is a single exception in this respect, yet is name is not included among the contributors of the Birth of a Nation anthology). Eighty years since its release, Griffith's epic is still awaiting an authoritative analysis of its style and technique.

The same kind of bias may explain the fact that the Biograph years, The Birth of a Nation, and Intolerance are playing such a dominating role in Simmon's book. It can hardly be denied that the years from 1908 to 1913 are of paramount influence in the development of film narrative, it would have been interesting to compare the first eight years of Griffith's career with his later output. The fact that many of the films he made after Way Down East are regarded as resounding failures (a debatable point in itself) should not prevent us from knowing more about them. These films came to exist in a period of major transformation in the film industry and reception, so why not dealing with them as well?

These remarks are in no way meant to diminish the value of Simmon's book, whose commitment and expertise in the field ensure a rigorous and stimulating treatment of the subject. No student of early cinema can afford to ignore his multi-layered yet straightforward approach to the massive corpus of the Biograph period. Its reading will certainly prove to be a rewarding experience, as long as it will be kept in mind that choices had to be made in order to keep this introduction within reasonable dimensions. Whether or not we may want to call it The Films of D.W. Griffith - Part I, a thorough comparison between this book - along with the Rutgers guide to The Birth of a Nation - and the 1971 predecessors would be a useful and provocative classroom exercise. (Paolo Cherchi Usai)