David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 â?? July 23, 1948) was an American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance (1916).
D. W. Griffith has been called the father of film grammar. Few scholars still hold that his "innovations" really began with him, but Griffith was a key figure in establishing the set of codes that have become the universal backbone of film language. He was particularly influential in popularizing "cross-cutting"â??using film editing to alternate between different events occurring at the same timeâ??in order to build suspense. Some claim, too, that he "invented" the close-up shot. That being said, he still used many elements from the "primitive" style of movie-making that predated classical Hollywood's continuity system, such as frontal staging, exaggerated gestures, minimal camera movement, and an absence of point of view shots.
He died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 on his way to a Hollywood hospital from the Knickerbocker Hotel where he had been living alone.