George William Bitzer was an American cinematographer. He served as the principal cameraman at the Biograph studios for twenty years.
Background
George Bitzer was born on April 21, 1872, in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachussets, United States, to German immigrant parents, Johann Martin and Anne Marie (Schmidt) Bitzer. He was their second child and first of two sons. They baptized him Johann Gottlieb Wilhelm (recorded on his birth record as John William), but he adopted George William as his formal name, and throughout his career was known by his initials, G. W. , or the nickname "Billy. " Bitzer's father worked as a blacksmith and harnessmaker.
Education
Little is known about the boy's early life and education. At some point before his mid-twenties George moved to New York City where he attended night classes at Cooper Union.
Career
For some time George worked as an electrician in New York. In 1896 Bitzer joined the newly formed American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, a pioneer motion picture firm which produced films and manufactured cameras, projecting equipment, and flip-card viewing machines. He ran the camera when the company filmed presidential candidate William McKinley on the lawn of his home in Canton, Ohio, and was the projectionist at the first New York showing of Biograph motion pictures on October 12, 1896. In November 1899 Bitzer set up the lighting for the first successful artificially lighted indoor film, a record of the boxing match between Jim Jeffries and Tom Sharkey. After 1900 he became the principal cameraman at the Biograph studios, photographing films both for projection and for showing in the Mutoscope flip-card viewers.
The collaboration between D. W. Griffith and Bitzer, the most famous director-cameraman team in the history of American motion pictures, began in 1908 when Griffith gave up his acting career to become a director at Biograph. Over the next five years they made more than 300 one- and two-reel films together, culminating their Biograph careers with a four-reel epic, Judith of Bethulia, filmed in 1913 but not released until 1914. Leaving Biograph in 1913, they collaborated on the masterworks The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), the films which conveyed the mythic and moral possibilities of motion pictures to the American middle-class audience and firmly established movies as an American art and entertainment medium.
Commentators over the years have tried to separate the distinctive contributions of each man. Some have claimed that Griffith's reputation rests chiefly on Bitzer's technical skill, while others, more often, have asserted that Bitzer only reluctantly went along with Griffith's creative innovations. The recent availability of the Library of Congress paper-print collection of pre-1912 American films now makes it apparent that many technical innovations once attributed to Griffith, such as close-ups and special lighting techniques, were developed prior to 1908, partly in films photographed by Bitzer. Such findings take nothing away from Griffith's greatness, which lies in his imagination, his artistic seriousness, and his skill in visual composition and in creating atmosphere and dramatic tension. In Bitzer, Griffith found a brilliant technician who could realize his imaginative creations on film. Bitzer's chief contribution to motion picture technique was the development of the "iris, " a process of shading out portions of the rectangular motion picture frame to focus attention and fade in or out of a scene, a process used most extensively in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
During the 1920's relations between Bitzer and Griffith became strained when the director brought in younger cameramen to work alongside his old associate. Bitzer last worked for Griffith on Lady of the Pavements (1929). In 1926 he founded a union, the International Photographers of the Motion Picture Industry, in New York. When a local of the union was set up in Hollywood in 1929, Bitzer was blacklisted by the motion picture industry. During the depression he was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration in a project preparing film strips and recorded lectures. He was living at the Motion Picture Country Home in 1944 when he suffered a fatal heart attack in Los Angeles. He was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, Flushing, New York.
Achievements
George Bitzer was one of the most famous and most sought after cinematographer of the early cinema, he served as cameraman on 735 motion pictures from 1896 to 1933 and director of 3 films in 1902, 1903 and 1908. Some best known films he photographed are: "Broken Blossoms, " "Orphans of the Storm, " "The Birth of A Nation, " "Intolerance, " "Judith of Bethulia" and "The Fall of Babylon. "
Religion
In middle age Bitzer became a convert from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism.
Personality
Bitzer was a short, stocky man who wore a rumpled hat as he worked behind a motion picture camera.
Connections
Bitzer entered into a common-law marriage with Elinore Farrell for some twenty years. After that relationship was dissolved, he married Ethel Boddy on April 5, 1923. They had a son, Eden Griffith Joseph Bitzer.
