Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith & the American Theatre (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781587297908)

An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith's process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades.

Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith's career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Griffith's relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.


Author: David Mayer
ISBN-10: 1587297906
ISBN-13: 9781587297908
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Language: English
Published: 03/01/2009
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 10.60h x 6.60w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 04/03/2009 pg. 17
Choice 08/01/2009
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2009 pg. 268