Related Articles
(Credits: Far Out / eBay / Ali Bakhtiari)
You know you’ve made it if you or your film work has been celebrated with its own special postage stamp.
In the UK at least, it’s perhaps the ultimate honour after being plastered on a bank note, which is typically long after you’re dead, and as of yet, has never featured an icon of cinema. But the next best thing is the humble postage stamp, be it Royal Mail or the United States Postal Service, unveiling the latest gallery of pop cultural stalwarts to be licked and sticked with reverence.
In 2014, Royal Mail launched the Great British Film Special Stamp collection, giving a nod to six key UK films alongside selections from the General Post Office Film Unit during the 1930s and ‘40s. Stepping up to the tall task of selecting six post-war movies that tower in the British film canon, Royal Mail plumped for RAF fantasy A Matter of Life and Death, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia historical epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey – a push considering Stanley Kubrick’s US nationality and its MGM production – Olympic drama Chariots of Fire, and topped off by two social comedies with Secrets & Lies and Bend It Like Beckham.
Two years previously, the Directors Guild of America had honoured the legacies of four titans from old Hollywood. With designs by Art Director Derry Noyes and illustrator Gary Kelley, Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, and Billy Wilder were all lionised as part of the USPS’ Great Film Directors Forever series, celebrating each filmmaker with their profile anchored by an iconic scene from their respective works.
To glean the first-ever filmmaker to boast their own postage adhesive, we have to reach to cinema’s roots, and take a look at one of the medium’s most foundational and controversial pioneers.
So, who was the first filmmaker to appear on a stamp?
In 1975, the USPS dedicated a commemorative ten-cent stamp in honour of silent filmmaker DW Griffith in celebration of the centenary of his birth.
Considered a pivotal pioneer in the art of narrative cinema and editing, Griffith made nearly 250 features before his death in 1948, including the enormously successful Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm. With assistance from Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Griffith helped establish United Artists in 1919, the production studio dedicated to catering to projects on the artist’s terms, a company still in operation to this day.
Yet, a questionable shroud will always mark his career concerning the 1915 feature The Birth of a Nation. Retrospectively praised for its innovative filmmaking techniques and a blockbuster winner at the time, Griffith’s adaptation of Thomas Dixon Jr’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan captured the novel’s overt racism, depicting the Klan in a romantic light, characterising African Americans as beastly savages complete with blackface performances, and pursuing a pro-Confederacy plot triggered critical backlash even upon its debut.
Such a mired history didn’t stop some of Hollywood’s biggest names from bestowing the USPS honour, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston present at Beverley Hills’ American Film Institute, as well as former silent star Lillian Gish, who had lobbied extensively for Griffith’s postage honour.
Related Topics
Source link
