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and express his emotions vividly, which is different from The Great Stone Face.
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Good point.
BoaN - the racism is bad enough, but to be honest what I also get out of every single Griffith film besides Broken Blossoms is a very Bruckheimer staging. He goes for the melodramatic cheap sell. Maybe it was innovative then, but to be honest having seen many films of the same era from different countries, I think the Bruck comparison is dead on. He had contemporaries that were doing better sensationalistic films, like Cabiria for one, and they didn't have to rely on the very black and white (no pun intended) bad guy/good guy setups.
Many of the moments of Intolerance are spectacular and that film is also much better than his standard fare, but even there we see a reliance on archtypes and cliches, if not by cinematic standards (which to be honest, by 1911-1915 there were such things as cinematic cliches) then by literary cliches.
Much of Griffith's work, seen in films like A Corner in Wheat or The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, films he wrote, falls squarely on cartoonishly evil and good characters/moments in order to grab the audience. Things that by today's standards are considered manipulative filmmaking, and IMO were manipulative even by the standards of that era. Indians get drunk, eat dogs and attempt to assult girls around age 10...oh, are they the villains? Should I be rooting against them.
Then he falls back on the parallel edit to have someone come racing to the rescue again and again. Audiences ate it up, but Bruckheimer audiences eat it up too.
But Fantomas could deliver the same thrills using at least some interesting devices such as paralleling characters and graying the area between good and evil, and that and Cabiria were both 1914 (Fantomas serial actually began before that) when Griffith was staging that craptastic Battle of Elderbush Gulch film. I mean Cabiria is on a scale as big as BoaN, but with better sets and better characters.
Griffith has the supreme benefit with posterity of having one of the most well-preserved collections of films, so that it was much easier to re-discover his work later on. Many other directors were doing work just as ambitious in terms of staging, yet with a much subtler use of techniques and narrative, but many of those films have been lost to time.
Anyway, there's my latest anti-Griffith rant. You just see what the French, Italians, and Germans were doing at the same time and you know that Americans were doing their best to control their own market and prevent foreigners from distributing product to America on a scale that would upstage them...and then now we all have to say "hail to DW, the forefather". Pffftt, I say.
