Early Griffith 1

David Wark Griffith created one of the most controversial works in film history with The Birth of a Nation (USA 1915); when he died in Hollywood in 1948, Leyda attended his funeral. In a lengthy subsequent article, he gave an account of his own ambivalent relationship to Griffith. When Leyda returned to the US in 1969 after twelve years in exile in order to teach film history at Yale, his first seminar was dedicated to the around 400 short fiction works that Griffith had shot for the Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913. Later on, the Griffith seminar also formed part of Leyda’s repertoire at New York University. One of his students was Tom Gunning, who published his dissertation on Griffith’s Biograph films in 1991. As Gunning put it, these films are more than just the discovery of the original forms of what has become so familiar today; it is their stubborn strangeness which makes them so watchable. For this series, ten films were put together into two programs. The selection was made based on the availability of analogue prints as well as the sheer pleasure during the selection screenings. Tom Gunning will give an online introduction to both programs, which will also have a live piano accompaniment by Eunice Martins.

THE SONG OF THE SHIRT and A CORNER IN WHEAT will be shown as 35 mm prints from the holdings of the Library of Congress, THE USURER will be made available by Metropolis/Kinemathek Hamburg, the other three films will come from the Arsenal archive.