D.W. Griffith: father of film

A three part survey of the life and work of D.W. Griffith. His formative years in the theatre and at Biograph were followed by his major successes between 1915-1921: “The Birth of a nation”, “Broken blossoms”, “Way down east” and “Orphans of the storm”. The subsequently influential “Intolerance” was a critical and commercial failure prefiguring the failure, in the twenties, of “America”, “Isn’t life wonderful” and “The Sorrows of Satan” and later, of his neglected sound films, “Abraham Lincoln” and “The Struggle”. Brownlow and Gill make extensive use of colour-tinted extracts from his films and interviews with Lillian Gish, Blanche Sweet, Karl Brown and others. Narrated by Lindsay Anderson.