Those Awful Hats 1909 Arthur V. Johnson, Robert Harron, Florence Lawrence, Mack Sennett Linda Arvidson, Flora Finch, John Compson D.W. Griffith - Screenwriter Billy Bitzer -Cinematographer http://www.YouTube.com/DIRECTORSSERIES http://www.YouTube.com/THEATRECORNER http://www.YouTube.com/IRARONA http://www.YouTube.com/TVNETWORKS http://www.youtube.com/TVDAYS http://www.tvdays.com (400 DVD TITLES) DW GRIFFITH at BIOGRAPGH BY IRA H. GALLEN This film sent the bosses at Biograph into a fury because they felt that Griffith had wasted money shooting such a short production, including the special effects that were needed. But its a great parody and an unusually witty Griffith observation of the times, and of a certain problem -- involving those ridiculously outsized Victorian-style hats that were in fashion for women -- that could occur in going to the Nickelodeons of the era and trying to see a movie. Griffith spent a great deal of time at the Nickelodeon watching people's reactions to his films, and it was during this time that he noticed that if you sat behind a women who wore one of the large-sized Victorian hats, you couldn't see the screen in front. It's a Griffith first in his work of using a split screen effect as he shows a movie being projected on a wall, and people already in the theater watching. He also makes skillful use of the notion of the "establishing shot" -- the first woman that walks down the aisle looking for a seat is Linda Arvidson, and she doesn't take a seat but walks back out; it's here Griffith established what a normal woman's hat looks like. As the next group of women enter, the hats become larger and more annoying. The actor in a checked coat is Mack Sennett trying to be comical as he's bumping into people, and starting an argument with John Compston, before finally taking a seat up front. It's when a woman with a large hat sits in front of Sennett that the argument starts up, because he can't see the film and the woman doesn't want to take off her hat. After a moment a large construction crane comes down and takes the woman's hat off and lifts it away, and causes some women now to take off their hats. But there's still one lady who doesn't care, and then the crane is lowered again and lifts the lady and her hat out of the theater. It's then that the title card comes up and says "Ladies will please remove their Hats." DW GRIFFITH by IRA H. GALLEN It was an era that laid the foundation upon which was built the Golden Age of Cinema; an era whose development and advancement of the moving picture as an art form was inextricably tied to one man's creative and innovative genius. The man's name is D. W. Griffith--David Wark Griffith--and his story is that of the period between 1908 and 1913 when he created a method of storytelling in purely cinematic terms that was to raise the moving picture permanently out of the category of a scientific curiosity. This he did by the use of techniques that broke precedents and created a vocabulary of visual devices for the emergence of film as art as well as by the development of a stock company of actors and actresses with him at the American Mutuscope and Biograph Company in New York, who would later emerge as some of the greatest individual talents during the glory years of the Golden Age David Wark Griffith's film creation, THE BIRTH OF A NATION, was to make history and achieve immortality when released in 1914. With THE BIRTH, Griffith was to bring together the words "art" and "film" as a permanent equation for the first time. Only five years after his initial explorations into the then crude world of moving picture images, his epic, THE BIRTH, was both an historical creation as well as a history making event in its own right. The American artist, whom the world would come to recognize simply as D.W. Griffith, became as much a household name as any of his creations on film, and for him the status of "genius" was to be given; a father figure in the birth of film art. To describe "genius" in finite terms as it applies to the methods of D.W. Griffith is to seek after that which is beyond precise definition. He felt degraded by motion pictures and therefore sought to raise the level of the medium by breaking all of the conventions and existing practices of filmmaking as they then existed. Despite the overwhelming importance of D.W. Griffith to the development of cinema art; his name, his work and the work of those who helped him create his moving pictures have become a generally unknown commodity amongst the American public.