The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work together constitutes what we refer to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergmann, Capra or the Coen brothers, each volume, comprised of 20 or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary and/or controversial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multi‐dimensional capacity. Individual volumes interrogate any number of subjects—the director’s oeuvre; dominant themes, well‐known, worthy, and under‐rated films; stars, collaborators, and key influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency in the scholarly world.

Published

1. A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann
2. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague
3. A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker
4. A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager
5. A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon
6. A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus
7. A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau
8. A Companion to François Truffaut, edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillian
9. A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Robert Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez‐Albilla
10. A Companion to Jean‐Luc Godard, edited by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline
11. A Companion to Martin Scorsese, edited by Aaron Baker
12. A Companion to Fritz Lang, edited by Joseph McElhaney
13. A Companion to D.W. Griffith, edited by Charlie Keil

Under Contract

14. A Companion to John Ford, edited by Peter Lehman
15. A Companion to Wong Kar‐wai, edited by Martha P. Nochimson
16. A Companion to Robert Altman, edited by Adrian Danks

Kaveh Askari, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA

Jennifer M. Bean, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, USA

Nicole Devarenne, University of Dundee, Scotland, DD1 4HN, UK

Daniel Fairfax, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA

Annie Fee, University College London, WC1E 6BT, UK

André Gaudreault, Université de Montréal, QC H3T 1 J4, Canada

Philippe Gauthier, University of Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Maggie Hennefeld, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA

Laura Horak, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

Joyce E. Jesionowski, Binghamton University (emerita), NY 13902, USA

Moya Luckett, NYU’s Gallatin School, New York, NY 10003, USA

David Mayer, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

Paul McEwan, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA 18104, USA

Russell Merritt, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Anne Morey, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA

Andrew Patrick Nelson, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717, USA

Charles O’Brien, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

Jan Olsson, Stockholm University, 114 18, Sweden

Tom Rice, University of St. Andrews, KY16 9AJ, UK

Ben Singer, University of Wisconsin – Madison, WI 53706, USA

Grant Wiedenfeld, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77340, USA

Time has not been kind to D.W. Griffith. His reputation among non‐specialists is tainted by the infamy surrounding The Birth of a Nation, the film you love to despise because of its inflammatory racial politics. The curse had taken full effect through the hate mail and phone threats received by Griffith in his room at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles, where the secluded drunkard spent the last days of his life; Jack Shea, president of the Directors Guild of America, formalized the verdict on December 14, 1999 with the announcement that the D.W. Griffith Award, established in 1953 and recently conferred to Stanley Kubrick, would be renamed as the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award, because Griffith “helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes.” Griffith is persona non grata in film museums, too. Public showings of The Birth of a Nation are an unlikely and highly unwelcome occurrence in the United States. Reconstructing the film’s original version is not an impossible feat (the available versions are mostly from the amended 1921 reissue), but the film’s centennial came and went, with no restoration project in sight.

If the editor, authors, and publisher of this book are to be applauded for its very appearance, it’s because at the present time – with or without The Birth of a Nation – D.W. Griffith is a profoundly unfashionable film director. Outside the realm of academic literature, critical assessment of his work is dependent upon two mirroring mantras. For a silent majority, Griffith’s shorts of the so‐called Biograph period all look alike, but we can’t really appreciate Intolerance without ticking off some of the early work. Conversely, a small but vocal patrol of devotees has argued that the Biograph years are Griffith’s most inventive, and that he might as well have retired after Broken Blossoms and Way Down East. Both approaches have an element of truth. They do, however, perpetuate the parallel myths of a deterministic creative trajectory (with Intolerance as the fulfillment of Biograph’s promises) and of film style as a poetic messenger of conservative ideals (with The Birth of a Nation as their most despicable expression). Either way, D.W. Griffith elicits deference rather than empathy. He may well be admired as long as he is kept at arm’s length.

A different but no less depressing fate has been bestowed upon Griffith’s longtime cameraman, G.W. Bitzer. The pictorial beauty of the films they made together from 1908 to the 1920s is nothing short of breathtaking, and yet very little of it can be seen today, aside from for a handful of titles. Bitzer was proud of what he could achieve with his Biograph camera and its Zeiss Tessar lenses, and was more than reluctant to settle for a Pathé replacement when Griffith left his alma mater company in 1913. In spite of this, generations of scholars have looked at Griffith’s early films through faint 16 mm reproductions of the paper prints deposited at the Library of Congress. The irony of this situation is that virtually all the films are still extant, a case with no equal in the cinema of the first two decades. Many titles survive as gorgeous‐looking camera negatives. If copied properly, the paper prints are almost as beautiful. It is way too late for a resurrection of the complete works of D.W. Griffith in their original medium and format. A “critical edition” in digital form may come to exist some day. Don’t hold your breath.

Back in 1996, not despite but thanks to those murky 16‐mm prints, an international team of scholars undertook the task of examining every single film directed by D.W. Griffith for a multi‐volume publication commissioned by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, where all the films were screened in the best available prints. It took twelve years to complete the job. Charlie Keil was one of the most eminent collaborators in The Griffith Project. This book is the tangible evidence of his awareness that Pordenone’s endeavor was nothing but a point of departure. D.W. Griffith is still waiting to be taken on his own terms, as we would do with Herman Melville when reading Benito Cereno, or with Richard Wagner when listening to Parsifal. To justify or condemn them won’t take us far. Their ideas about art and those about society are inextricably linked to each other. We need to know more about both. Griffith’s Biograph films should all be returned to the form in which Billy Bitzer wanted them to appear onscreen. An attempt should be made to restore The Birth of a Nation to its 1915 release version. Whether or not this will be achieved, concealing it from public sight won’t make us good citizens. Our civil conscience ought to be mature enough to look into the tragedies of our past without fear.

The depth and scope of the contributions presented in this volume are the most eloquent proof that today’s film scholarship is ready to undertake the task. D.W. Griffith’s most undervalued works, his views on gender and morality, and the reception of his films are given here the renewed attention they have long deserved. The essays on the Biograph period are testimony to the inexhaustible source of knowledge embedded in Griffith’s early output. Most heartening of all, however, is the fact that such knowledge comes from scholars of younger generations as much as from well‐established authorities in the field. In this sense, A Companion to D.W. Griffith is the fulfillment of The Griffith Project’s ultimate goal: to be a bridge between past and future research, a catalyst of intellectual discovery about one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.