D.W. Griffith Papers, 1897-1954 MFM 1384
D.W. Griffith is considered to be the most significant figure in the history and development of motion pictures. This collection includes over 50,000 pages. It covers the period from 1897, when he started as an actor, to 1954, when several of his colleagues shared their memories of Griffith. Among the materials included are screenplays, dialogues, synopses, cast and shot lists from filmed and proposed motion pictures, scripts written by Griffith and others, documentation of the formation of United Artists, financial reports, box office statements, payroll records, transcripts of oral interviews, and letters describing Griffith's personality and his creative techniques.
It also includes material from a number of Griffith's contemporaries such as Lionel Barrymore, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford, and Griffith's first wife, Linda Arvidson Griffith, and correspondence with many of the leading figures in the film industry such as Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst, and others.
Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" MFM 1184
Leni Riefenstahl (born 1902) was the most innovative film maker of the Nazi cinema and her powerful Nuremberg Rally film, "Triumph of the Will", 1935,
is perhaps the most effective visual propaganda for Nazism ever made. The brilliant cinematography, superb editing, and sense of spectacle are apparent.
The primary argument over the film has to do with its moral aspects and what it says about Nazism. The documents in this collection will provide students
of film and propaganda with an immense amount of material on the making of the film, but few definitive answers to the questions which have interested
all serious students of the subject. Part of "Research Collections in the Social History of Communications" series.
