Pioneering:
Griffith, Ince and the Western as Art and Commerce

While "Broncho Billy" Anderson proved himself the most significant performer of the period, establishing the look, mannerisms and, most importantly, the thematics of the screen cowboy, laudits for direction must go to David Wark Griffith. To be known later as the father of the American studio picture, Griffith directed many notable 1-reel Westerns between 1908 and 1913 while working at Biograph. Of these perhaps The Last Drop of Water (1911), Fighting Blood (1911), and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913) remain most exemplary. Superior productions all, they were well-edited, exciting genre pieces with panoramic scope and more than a sprinkling of thematic depth or poetry.

While it is tempting to see in the early Westerns of Griffith a bigotry later confirmed by his landmark production Birth of a Nation (1915), it is important to note that Griffith was one of the first directors to openly sympathize with the Native American. Films such as The Indian Runner’s Romance (1909), The Redman’s View (1909), and A Pueblo Legend (1912) explicitly deal with the suffering wrought by white-invaders on Indian tribes, reversing the established myth of Manifest Destiny.

Thomas H. Ince, though less a creative/artistic force than his contemporary Griffith, nevertheless maintained an important role in early film history as one of the first filmmakers to successfully realize an ordered system of labor division within the industry. Working initially as a Western director for Bison 101, Ince moved on to the supervisory role of "director general," overseeing the production of many quality genre entries shot on location in Southern California. As director, his Westerns are marked by a certain off-beat quality, perfectly illustrating the elasticity of the genre and its ability to revise or invert the "official history" of the migration west. In The Heart of an Indian (1912), for example, the cold-blooded massacre of an Indian encampment by white settlers precedes the revisionism of The Searchers (1956) by more than four decades. However, the sentiments of the above film -- and others such as The Invaders (1912) -- are contradicted by many other Ince pictures, including Custer’s Last Raid (1912) and The Battle of Gettysburg (1913), which offer more conformist versions of American history.