Word: griffiths
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...inspired both black and white feature-filmmaking was D.W. Griffith. His 1915 epic "The Clansman," cannily retitled "The Birth of a Nation" after its Los Angeles premiere, became a groundbreaking popular, technical and critical success. The first blockbuster, it was the most widely seen movie of the silent era. In its bold editing and composition of shots, in its alternation of intimate scenes with spectacular battles and a final thrilling chase, the film established a cinematic textbook, a fully formed visual language, for generations of directors. The potent drama of its subject and method stirred President Woodrow Wilson...
...acclaim of Griffith's masterwork made his virulent, derisive depiction of blacks all the more toxic - indeed, potentially epidemic. This was not simply a racist film; it was one whose brilliant storytelling technique lent plausibility and poignancy to images of crude Negroes in the Reconstruction Senate, and of a black man pursuing a white woman until, to save her virginity, she throws herself off a cliff. Viewers could believe that what they saw was not only historically but emotionally true. "Birth" not only taught moviegoers how to react to film narrative but what to think about blacks...
...Birth of a Nation" provoked another movement: the birth of an African American cinema. Educated blacks, enraged by the film's message and influence, wanted to refute "Birth" in its own medium. (The NAACP also wanted to suppress it.) Within a year of Griffith's film, the Chicago-based brothers George and Noble Johnson had set up the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and released "The Realization of a Negro's Ambition." Soon entrepreneurs, black and white, were making black-cast pictures in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Fla. - virtually everywhere but Hollywood. Eventually some 500 race films were made...
...poll returns on TV Washington are still coming in. None of the new shows have become out-and-out hits yet (The Court debuts this week). But they already have one set of dedicated fans: public servants, happy to see their jobs valorized. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Wayne Griffith even screened the Embassy pilot for foreign-service classes. "They were all wondering if they were going to get their royal love interest in their first tour, of course," he says. One person's dramatic license is another's recruitment poster...
DIED. THOMAS GRIFFITH, 86, versatile, accomplished Time Inc. editor and author; in New York City. Griffith, who wrote a popular press column for TIME, eschewed advocacy writing and promoted the creation of a dispassionate national press council. The final editor of the weekly LIFE magazine, which closed in 1972, Griffith also wrote three books, including the 1995 Harry and Teddy, which tracked the intersecting lives of TIME's founder Henry Luce and ace reporter Theodore H. White...