D. W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith was born in Kentucky in 1875, the son of a Confederate lieutenant colonel who died when he was ten. A bookshop clerk in Louisville, then a touring actor, he joined Biograph in 1908, at the age of thirty-three, and shot some four hundred and fifty short films there in five years; he is credited with developing cross-cutting, the close-up and the fade. He founded United Artists in 1919 with Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks. Pushed aside after two sound films, he lived alone in a Hollywood hotel and died in 1948.

In the catalogue 1

• CinemaIntoleranceD. W. Griffith · 1916Cinema