Word: schickel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...GRIFFITH: AN AMERICAN LIFE by Richard Schickel...
...tracks Griffith's long parabola, Richard Schickel also provides an exhilarating, authoritative account of the early days of film when anything seemed possible on-and offscreen. During the green director's first year, 1908, he cranked out 60 one-reelers in six months, following up with 151 more in 1909. He put in a seven-day week, sunrise to sunset. Along the way, Griffith practically invented the autocratic personality of film director. On the set he tended to treat actors as children, looking down his "fine, cantilevered nose," as Lionel Barrymore put it. He was not above firing...
...Schickel, a TIME cinema critic, views his subject as father to all the auteurs to follow, and with good reason. Griffith had both a view and a vision. In Birth of a Nation (1915) he restaged his father's Civil War, complete with dramatic scenes of the Ku Klux Klan that brought charges of racism along with blockbuster success. In Intolerance (1916) he took on, among other things, Belshazzar's feast, with elephants, dancing girls and collapsing Babylonian towers...
...justice to these epics, Griffith, as much as any one man, devised the primary techniques of film. The closeup, the fadeout, cross-cutting-all developed on his set. But Schickel provides a lively argument for Griffith as poet as well as technician. Through the famous storms and battle scenes, the director seemed to be trying to find his own way back to a lost innocence...
...leaves it not with a sense of relief at a cultural duty properly discharged, but in that state of disarray and wonder that occurs when artists actually manage to act on the poet's simple, hard advice and ' 'make it new.'' -By Richard Schickel...