The 5 Greatest Directors in the International Cinema

His years at Biograph began a long association with cameraman Billy Bitzer. Bitzer initially spurned Griffith's radical ideas of how to make use of the camera, but the partnership presently became a fruitful and germinal superstar. Brownlow quotes Griffith's dismissal of skepticism: "Well, come on, let's do it anyway. I don't give a damn what anybody thinks about it" (25). He continued to have that attitude throughout his career, and Bitzer soon embraced his approach. The rules whitethorn have declared to be impossible what Griffith was asking for; Bitzer soon helped him find ways to swing the rules.

Griffith's innovations included expanding the length of his get hold ofs, and one of his last Biograph productions was the first four-reeler to be produced in America, Judith of Bethulia. By the prison term he left Biograph, he was preparing to produce his first masterpiece, turn in of a Nation, a three-hour saga about the Civil War, released in 1915. His two greatest films, Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, were the most probative examples of his approach to filmmaking, a philosophy that led him to stretch the boundaries and break the rules continually, as part of his lifelong experiment in establishing a working aesthetic language for the new medium.

Birth of a Nation was a critical and commercial success, although its heroic pictorial matter of the Ku Klux Klan remains extremely controversial. The story is based on doubting Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, and is set in t

modern audiences often find it difficult to watch because it is frequently shown at the wrong speed and because so many of the technical innovations which stir audiences at the time have at one time become customary in the modern cinema. Nevertheless, when properly projected to an audience prepared to watch a full-length, silent, black and white film with sometimes racist elements, Birth of a Nation retains much of its master copy power. The climactic scene, in which a group of Klansmen ride to the present of the heroine, is still exciting to watch. However, "astounding in its time, it triggered off so many advances in film-making technique that it was rendered obsolete within a few years" (Brownlow 88).

Its breathless originality was part of the reason that it now seems dated to modern audiences.

Griffith was among those in Hollywood to admire the film - and to recognize its roots. Brownlow rites, "Griffith was well aware of his own contributions to motion pictures. He once said he love Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, 'and particularly loved the ideas he took from me'" (105). Among the most obvious ideas were the film's famous deep-focus photography and the use of low angles that allowed the audience to see the ceilings of the sets, techniques that Griffith first used in Sorrows of Satan (1926).

Hitchcock's attention to detail was an important part of his genius. Finler quotes music director Francois Truffaut, a huge fan of Hitchcock's, who published a book-length query with the director, examining his techniques: "If Hitchcock, to my way of thinking, outranks the rest, it is because he is the most complete film-maker of all . . . He masterminds the construction of the screenplay as well as the photography, the cutting and the soundtrack, has creative ideas on everything and can do anything and is even expert at publicity" (6).

Welles is a curiously composite participate . . . Fascinated like other modernists by the problematic record of reality and identity
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