For Immediate Release
KINO TO RELEASE GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2 BOX SET WITH FIVE NEW RESTORATIONS
– PLUS ACCLAIMED KEVIN BROWNLOW DOCUMENTARY.
Kino International is proud to announce the release of D. W. GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2, comprised of five newly restored Griffith features, a rare Biograph short and the DVD release of Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s three-part documentary D.W. GRIFFITH: FATHER OF FILM (1993).
The entire box set is being offered at the special low price of $89.95, while each feature DVD in the set will be available separately at $24.95 – with the exception of the three-hour documentary FATHER OF FILM, which comes with a SRP of $29.95. D. W. GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS 2 is the second in Kino’s GRIFFITH masterworks series; Griffith Masterworks 1 was released in 2002.
Included in MASTERWORKS 2 is a new presentation of WAY DOWN EAST (1920) restored by the Museum of Modern Art, newly mastered in High Definition and accompanied by a new musical score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930), featuring an outstanding performance by Walter Houston and one of two “all talking” films made by Griffith, is also presented in High Definition from a MOMA restoration. Accompanying it on the same disc is Griffith’s other sound film THE STRUGGLE (1931), an intimate portrait of a man in the throes of alcoholism. STRUGGLE was mastered (in HD) from a 35mm archival print owned by the Rohauer collection.
One of Griffith’s only forays into comedy, SALLY OF THE SAWDUST (1925) stars W. C. Fields and is presented here, also mastered in High Definition, with a new score composed and performed by Donald Sosin.
Rounding out the D. W. GRIFFITH MASTERWORKS part 2 is the first ever DVD presentation of Griffith’s 1914 feature THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE (1914), based on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart. AVENGING was mastered in HD using material from the Rohauer collection and is accompanied by a rare Griffith’s 1909 Biograph short entitled EDGAR ALLEN POE.
The final DVD in the series is the 155-minute documentary D. W. GRIFFITH: FATHER OF FILM (1993). This definitive biography with numerous rare film clips and interviews with Griffith actors and production associates was meticulously researched and produced by leaders of the renaissance of silent film Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s Photoplay Productions. The film was unanimously acclaimed upon its first presentations on U.S. and British television (and briefly on VHS), after which it has been out of release and unavailable in any form.
Kino’s D.W. GRIFFITH COLLECTION 2 will prebook on October 21, 2008. Its street date is November 18.
Filmmaker D. W. Griffith was both a master and a pioneer. Responsible for unparalleled interventions in the history of film aesthetics, Griffith moved from Kentucky to California with the intention of becoming a successful playwright. After attempting to sell one of his scripts to Edison producer Edwin Porter (The Great Train Robbery), Griffith was hired as an extra in Porter’s Rescued From an Eagle’s Nest and as a result, decided to focus his career on filmmaking.
In 1908, Griffith began working at the Biograph Film Company. When the company’s main director, Wallace McCutcheon, grew ill, (and his son failed to deliver the results expected of him), Griffith took over the company’s direction. Between 1908 and 1913, Griffith produced over 450 short films and developed many of the cutting-edge cinematic techniques that would become a staple of his career and artistic contribution.
After five productive years with Biograph, Griffith left the company and joined the Mutual Film Corporation – mostly due to differences he had with the managers at Biograph, who were displeased with Griffith’s insistence on shooting feature-length films. But soon, Griffith was breaking box-office records with his legendary The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).
And more importantly, it was Griffith who established the cinematic lexicon that turned filmmaking into an art form and a language. Together with cinematographer and longtime collaborator G.W. Bitzer, Griffith perfected such cinematic devices as the flashback, the crosscutting and many other narrative strategies now taken for granted by filmmakers and audience members.
WAY DOWN EAST (1920)
D.W. Griffith’s penchant for Victorian melodrama reached its height of expression in WAY DOWN EAST. First performed in 1898, Lottie Blair Parker’s play was one of the most successful stageworks ever written, a theatrical chestnut, heavy with sentiment, that cried out for the touch of the master. Griffith captured the appeal of Parker’s original, while embossing it with devices borrowed from other popular melodramas, such as the climactic chase across an ice floe (inspired by stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
Lillian Gish stars as a small-town girl who is seduced, impregnated, and cast aside by Lennox Sanderson, a wealthy playboy (Lowell Sherman). To escape the shame of having a fatherless child, Anna changes her name and starts a new life in a small farming community, where she meets David, an icon of male virtue and decency (Richard Barthelmess). Their delicate happiness is threatened when Lennox arrives in town, and word of Anna’s unsavory past begins to spread through the community. This Kino International edition was mastered in HD from the Museum of Modern Art’s meticulous 35mm restoration of Griffith’s film (with the original color tints).
WAY DOWN EAST
US 1920 Color Tinted 149 Min. Full-frame (1.33:1)
Directed by D.W. Griffith / Screenplay by Anthony Paul Kelly
Based on the play by Lottie Blair Parker / Photographed by G.W. Bitzer and Hendrick Sartov
With Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Lowell Sherman, Creighton Hale, Burr McIntosh
Score compiled from historic photoplay music by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
Mastered in HD from a print of the Museum of Modern Art’s 35mm restoration, with original color tinting.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Score compiled from historic photoplay music, performed by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (2.0 Stereo)
- Excerpts from Lottie Blair Parker’s original play
- Film Clip: The ice floe sequence of the Edison Studio’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
- Image gallery
- Notes on the preparation of the music score
THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE (1914)
D.W. Griffith indulged his lifelong fondness for Edgar Allan Poe in this ambitious amalgam of the writer’s poetry and prose: “Annabel Lee” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” flavored with shades of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Conqueror Worm.” Poe’s tales are interwoven in one tragedy-laden narrative of young man (Henry B. Walthall) who yearns to escape from his overbearing, one-eyed uncle (Spottiswoode Aitken). After the nephew murders the ogre, he and his lover (Blanche Sweet) are wracked by guilt and tormented by nightmares, ghosts, and demonic entities that drive them to even more horrifying extremes.
Just as Poe cloaked his horrors in artful poetry and prose, so does Griffith filter the story’s macabre elements through a Victorian lens, gilding it with quaint symbolism without diminishing its impact. THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE is not only one of the earliest horror films ever made, it remains one of the most unsettling.
When asked, in 1925, to name the cinema’s greatest achievements, critic Gilbert Seldes called special attention to this film. “The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere,” he wrote in his book The Seven Lively Arts, “After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays of light.” Also on this DVD is Griffith’s rarely-seen 1909 short EDGAR ALLEN POE (sic), which dramatizes the tragic circumstances that inspired Poe’s “The Raven.”
THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE
Or, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’
US 1914 B&W 84 Min. Full-frame (1.33:1)
Written and directed by D.W. Griffith / Based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe
Photographed by G.W. Bitzer
With Henry B. Walthall, Blanche Sweet, Spottiswoode Aitken, George Siegmann
New Music Score by Martin Marks
Mastered in HD from a 35mm archive print from the Raymond Rohauer Collection
Plus EDGAR ALLEN POE (sic)
US 1909 B&W 7 Min. Full-frame (1.33:1)
Directed by D.W. Griffith
Screenplay by D.W. Griffith and Frank E. Woods
Photographed by G.W. Bitzer
With Herbert Yost, Linda Arvidson / Music composed and performed by Ben Model
Mastered in HD from a 35mm archive print From the Museum of Modern Art
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Piano score compiled and performed by music historian Martin Marks (2.0 Stereo)
- Griffith’s 1909 short Edgar Allen Poe (sic), Mastered in HD from a 35mm archive print From the Museum of Modern Art
- Notes on the preparation of the music score
ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930) / THE STRUGGLE (1931)
The silent cinema’s renowned pioneer, David Wark Griffith, directed only two sound features: ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930) and THE STRUGGLE (1931).
Returning to the historic era of his greatest success, Griffith paid homage to the sixteenth President in this moving drama starring Walter Huston (The Devil and Daniel Webster). Focusing on Lincoln’s personal tragedies, as well as his great accomplishments, Griffith’s film depicts the American icon with a sensitivity and grace rivaled only by John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.
A departure from the historical super-productions for which he was known, THE STRUGGLE was an intimate drama, shot on a low budget in rented studios and on public streets in the Bronx. Written by the husband-and-wife team that provided many of Griffith’s early scenarios, THE STRUGGLE stars Hal Skelly as an American everyman who falls victim to the debilitating affliction of alcoholism. No stranger to the destructive influence of drink, Griffith pulls no punches in dramatizing its potential horrors, especially in the terrifying climax in which Jimmie, tormented by delirium tremors, attacks his young daughter (Edna Hagan) in the hovel that was once their happy home.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN has been mastered in HD from the Museum of Modern Art’s 35mm restoration of Griffith’s historical epic. It includes brief scenes in which the audio tracks have not survived. Dialogue and music cues are provided via optional subtitles. THE STRUGGLE was remastered in HD from a 35mm archive print from the Raymond Rohauer Collection.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
US 1930 B&W 93 Min. Full-frame (1.20:1)
Produced and directed by D.W. Griffith
Screenplay by Stephen Vincent Benet and Gerrit Lloyd
Story by John W. Considine, Jr. / Photographed by Karl Struss
Production design: William Cameron Menzies
Photographed by G.W. Bitzer and Hendrick Sartov
With Walter Huston, Una Merkel, Kay Hammond
THE STRUGGLE
US 1931 B&W 93 Min. Full-frame (1.33:1)
Produced and directed by D.W. Griffith
Screenplay by Anita Loos and John Emerson
Photographed by Joseph Ruttenberg
With Hal Skelly, Zita Johann, Evelyn Baldwin
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Mastered in HD from 35mm archive prints
- Introduction to The Birth of a Nation, featuring Walter Huston and D.W. Griffith on the set of Abraham Lincoln.
- Original press materials for Abraham Lincoln
SALLY OF THE SAWDUST (1925)
In a fascinating departure from the austere moral drama in which he specialized, D.W. Griffith demonstrates his talent for warm-hearted comedy with SALLY OF THE SAWDUST.
Fresh from the Ziegfeld Follies, W.C. Fields made his second screen appearance as Professor Eustace McGargle, a lovably disreputable confidence man who becomes the unlikely guardian of an orphaned circus waif (Carol Dempster). Intending to return Sally to her grandparents, McGargle learns that her wealthy and esteemed grandfather (Erville Alderson) is a stern judge who harbors a deep contempt for shysters and show people. Faster than a sucker can say “three-card monte,” McGargle finds himself wanted by the police and chased by bootleggers, while trying to protect his cherished Sally, who has won the affection of a slumming socialite (Alfred Lunt).
SALLY provided Griffith ingenue Carol Dempster (whose work for the director is generally overshadowed by that of her predecessors, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish) with a delightful role: the spry, innocent and hot-tempered dancing girl wholly devoted to her criminal “Poppy.” At the same time, it showcases the comic juggling and dry wit that would make a legend of W.C. Fields (who remade the film in 1936 under the title of the original play).
SALLY OF THE SAWDUST
US 1925 B&W 113 Min. Full-frame (1.33:1)
Produced and directed by D.W. Griffith
Screenplay by Forrest Halsey
From the play “Poppy” by Dorothy Donnelly
Photographed by Harry Fischbeck
With W.C. Fields, Carol Dempster, Alfred Lunt
Music composed and performed by Donald Sosin
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Original theatrical trailer
- Image gallery
D.W. GRIFFITH: FATHER OF FILM (1993)
In this Emmy-nominated* three-part documentary, celebrated film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (Unknown Chaplin, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow) explore the life and career of a director widely regarded as the cinema’s first true pioneer: David Wark Griffith.
With rare documents and archival footage, interviews with his collaborators, disciples, and detractors, D.W. GRIFFITH: FATHER OF FILM observes the filmmaker’s Kentucky childhood, his struggles as a stage actor, his ascent to become the most influential figure in 1910s cinemas. Brownlow and Gill fearlessly examine Griffith’s notorious film The Birth of a Nation, recount the making of his colossal Intolerance, and detail the ways in which Griffith shaped screen language in his short films made for American Biograph. Beyond the pinnacles of fame, Brownlow and Gill recount Griffith’s tragic fate: his defiance of the studio system, his battles with alcoholism, his gradual fade into obscurity.
*Outstanding Informational Special, 1993
D.W. GRIFFITH: FATHER OF FILM
UK 1993 Color/B&W 155 Min.
Full-frame (1.33:1) Photoplay Productions
Written, produced and directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Narrated by Lindsay Anderson / Music by Carl Davis
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