Early Griffith 2

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.

Films:
The Girl and Her Trust D.W. Griffith USA 1912 16 mm 16 min.
The Musketeers of Pig Alley D.W. Griffith USA 1912 16 mm 17 min.
The Mothering Heart D.W. Griffith USA 1913 35 mm 23 min.
The Battle of Elderbush Gulch D.W. Griffith USA 1913 16 mm 28 min.

The Arsenal Archive, the Bundearchiv-Filmarchiv (THE MOTHERING HEART) and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek provided prints of the films. The print of THE BATTLE AT ELDERBUSH GULCH is presumably the same one that Leyda saw in 1967.