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D.W. Griffith movies at the American Cinematheque (photo: D.W. Griffith circa 1915) A series of D.W. Griffith movies made at Biograph at the dawn of both the 20th century and the art of moviemaking will be screened at the American Cinematheque next weekend. "Retroformat Presents: D.W. Griffith at Biograph, Part 3 - 1909 – 1910" will take place on Saturday, April 26, 2014, at 7:30 p.m. in the Steven Spielberg auditorium of The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The evening will be hosted by Tom Barnes; musical accompaniment will be provided by Cliff Retallick. Among the D.W. Griffith films to be presented by Retroformat are the following: Lines of White on a Sullen Sea The Gibson Goddess The Mountaineer’s Honor Through the Breakers A Corner in Wheat Her Terrible Ordeal The Last Deal Faithful D.W. Griffith and his stars As found in Retroformat’s press release, those early D.W. Griffith efforts feature "innovative cinematography" by frequent Griffith collaborator G.W. Bitzer,...

For years the essay film has been a neglected form, but now its unorthodox approach to constructing reality is winning over a younger, tech-savvy crowd

For a brief, almost unreal couple of hours last July, in amid the kittens and One Direction-mania trending on Twitter, there appeared a very surprising name – that of semi-reclusive French film-maker Chris Marker, whose innovative short feature La Jetée (1962) was remade in 1995 as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam. A few months earlier, art journal e-flux staged The Desperate Edge of Now, a retrospective of Adam Curtis's TV films, to large audiences on New York's Lower East Side. The previous summer, Handsworth Songs (1986), an experimental feature by the Black Audio Film Collective Salman Rushdie had once attacked as obscurantist and politically irrelevant, attracted a huge crowd at Tate Modern when it was screened shortly after the London riots.

Marker, Curtis, Black Audio: all have...

I’ve finally made it to the grand master of the bravura sequence, or, more specifically, of the ending bravura sequence, King Vidor.

It isn’t surprising that a producer as knowledgeable as Selznick often ran to the services of the two major champions of “slice of cake” cinema and strong sequences, Hitchcock (Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case) and Vidor (Bird of Paradise, Duel in the Sun, Light’s Diamond Jubilee, even Ruby Gentry), who, without a doubt, made the best films for Selznick.

Love Never Dies, Wild Oranges, Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread, Comrade X, Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and their terrific denouements once made me write that Vidor was a director of film endings. No doubt I was exaggerating, but it isn’t for nothing that he hesitated for a long time between several different endings for The Crowd. I was also exaggerating because...

Scene from The Unchanging Sea and Inception The following video essay by by Michael Joshua Rowin and Kevin B. Lee of Fandor.com (via Matthew Seitz) takes a look at the parallel editing of Christopher Nolan's Inception, but using the work of D.W. Griffith to show where it all started, the video opens by saying, "[When] compared to the work of a filmmaker who directed a hundred years before Nolan, Inception doesn't look all that mind-blowing. Considered the father of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith practically invented such techniques like parallel editing, pushing them to unprecedented levels of complexity and depth."

"The true architect of Inception is D.W. Griffith." ~ Michael Joshua Rowin It's a fascinating look at the effect cinema's history has had on the movies today and why cinephiles always make sure to point out the directors that started it all as a warm reminder that by not opening...