1.12 – The paste and the piercing
Or; a splenectomy for D. W. Griffith (1915-1916)
Can you say anything meaningful about a filmmaker as loathed-prickled-stressfully admired as D. W. G.? When so much has already been said; when so much sensitivity is required. I wrote a first version of this entry that thickly ladled out its context and padded itself out. It didn’t work. I went for it again; this time more disjointedly—careening from point to point. I think it works better; leaving the Big Picture to other treatments. This time, I’m writing just about D. W. Griffith’s two “longest” years: 1915 and 1916. For those paying attention, D. W. G. has already appeared in this history; he’ll probably appear again.
There are three taut strings. The camera is angled down at them, only several feet away. Three pale hands hover above the strings; each clasping a sharp and waiting razor. When all three strings are cut the gallows’ trapdoor will slam open, plunging “The Boy” to his death. We are witnessing an execution; or the preamble to one.
Robert Harron played “The Boy”. He had a pencil moustache and a quick frown. Later—apropos of nothing; or everything—Harron fatally shot himself in a New York hotel room. This was 1920, only a few years after his starring role. Bleeding out, he made a call to hotel reception; seeking assistance. “I’m in a devil of a fix”.1
We are very close to the end of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1915). The strings will only not be sliced should “The Dear One”, his lover (played by Mae Marsh)—who is now racing across dale and valley carrying with her the identity of the “true” murderer—arrive at the prison before it’s too late. To render the virtuous truth. To save his life.
D. W. G. plays this tension for all it’s worth. He cuts between them; flashing his two-sided coin—or is it a blade? It is part and parcel of his message of justice and love and virtue and forgiveness. The “intolerance” of his film is bitter; it crushes the innocent.
For D. W. G., these three cords—the executioner’s cords—aren’t just “keys”. They are tuned musical strings. His film might as well be plucking them.
In fact, didn’t Jean Louis Schefer write that the silent cinema “has never been able to be a silent cinema”?2 It whispers. It has a structuring, musical rhythm. If images succeed each other as notes succeed each other then doesn’t this movement represent its own kind of harmony—or at least a sense of counterpoint? D. W. G. thought so.
The careening, blue-lit carriage of a Babylonian chariot. The violent crescendo of a violent pogrom of French Huguenots. Griffith cuts between them, and the sequencing of this cutting—which is at first leisurely, almost incidental—speeds up. It acquires a feverish alliteration. Babylon, Paris, Judea, America. Flames gut the harem of Belshazzar. Knives and wetted blades flash through linen and lace. Much of the time, with Intolerance, death and violence are the wages of injustice; and they are never far away.
For D. W. G. it’s all a matter of speeding the counterpoint up. Faster, quicker, more mobile. Intensifying. His critics called it incoherent (we’ll get to that), un-unified. But isn’t it just so exciting? It’s certainly disjointed. But isn’t that what he wanted?
The walls of Babylon are being sundered; great machines of war are tearing it apart. Griffith cuts back, a visual metronome, to the arc-lit shrouded face of Lilian Gish. Mae Marsh trembles, her thin wrists, her puckered face. Miriam Cooper—“The Friendless One”—fires a pistol through a tenement’s scabby window; fatally striking the body of her bullying lover. He is already assaulting Marsh. The Boy, Harron, will take the fall; he’ll hang for it. These things are connected. Why? Because Griffith is telling us they are; because he is showing us they are.
These tensions flex and strain and snap across the surface of Intolerance; almost as if Griffith is wrestling it to the floor. This is a big film; he must be panting and heaving. The lines of tension bite into its body, yanking it around.
In the space of two years, D. W. G. would refine the still frenetic-diffuse language of cinema. 1915, 1916. From his hands there emerged technical and well-understood phrases that, repeated, almost like a mantra, obtained a kind of unassailable concreteness in how we write and think about film.
1915, 1916. Two years in which the nascent industrial cinema turned itself inside out. The Birth of a Nation threw its lot in with racial panic, a cynical-severe autopsy of Reconstruction told through the leery, forgetful lens of US capital-culture on the cusp of their entry to another pulverising war. It abhors war. He says as much.3 But even more deeply it prickles its nose at the white panic of miscegenation. In this it becomes bilious; daubing black paint on its face and dolling out fantasias of violence against “white innocence”. There’s a wild, preening desperation to it. It is why such furore rose around the film. Mayors were petitioned, letters were written. The NAACP came out to cease its production. D. W. G. had sundered America. His film is giddy and stupid.
He was preening, of course, and hurt; and the big, monolithic tale of Intolerance—which came after Birth of a Nation, remember—wasn’t really that interested in its purported humanism. D. W. G. saw himself as the victim of his critic’s “intolerance”. Paul McEwan has slyly shown how the truculent filmmaker rarely broke cover about this most nefarious production. In 1915, he made the defiant claim that its story was “based upon truth in every detail”. Years later, in 1930, more ruminative, talking to the actor Walter Huston in an awkwardly-staged interview, muses that he “thinks” the film is true; pausing, “Truth? What is the truth?” There is a crumb of doubt.4 He was about to choke on it.
With Intolerance, a “long” year later, he made his plea against injustice. Because he was “treated badly”; because butter wouldn’t-couldn’t melt in his mouth. &Etc. His film was an artistic achievement and a wild popular success; it was also a pernicious artefact of vile racism and ethno-nationalist bombast. D. W. G.’s “truth”—that thing he felt so certain of and then doubted—might be found in the mix and muddle of these things.
For Manny Farber he was “the revolutionary Griffith”. He was “half tory and half culture bug”; possessed of a “practical genius”. Farber was writing two years apart. He came back to D. W. G. many, many times.5
Through these brief pell mell years in the American cinematic experiment, D. W. G. was ironing things out; just as he was boxing and shadow-boxing with his own critics and ideals. Egomaniac or “Master”? Both, probably.
There was parallel editing, which we also call “cross cutting”; continuity editing; masking, close-ups, emotional storyteling. David Wark Griffith—or so it is typically understood—brought these things to the cinema where they hadn’t previously existed; as if he was one of Méliès’ magicians. It is wizardly. There is the intimation of Jacques Rancière’s “problematic alignment” of the many tripped-up functions of the image in modernity. D. W. G. brought this crisis-contradiction machine to a head.
The insert and the close-up. It’s true that they were already present in the grammatology of cinema. They’d been seared into nitrate by industrious Brightonians many years before. Englishmen, in fact. Ok. But D. W. G. refined the instrument; making its intrusion less a condition of its own novelty—done because it could be done—than a necessary narrative instrument. Done because it needed to be done, because it advanced or complicated the story he wanted to tell.
The iris blinks around Cooper’s regretful face. D. W. G’s film is big when it needs to be big—just think of those barnstorming depictions of Babylon; with their teeming ant-colonies of extras—and tight when it presses in. He is singling her out for her guilt. It’ll come to be important. Later. These radical proximities—lens to face—collapsed the gap between spectator and actor; complicating the camera equipment itself as a thrumming mystical-material bridge. It drilled light into the human condition; for the first time, you were really being invited by film to look inside the actor’s invisible psyche.
After all, D. W. G. was a moralist—and film was his illuminating sedge. The Birth of a Nation opens with a “plea for the art of the motion picture”. It speaks of the need to show “the dark side of wrong” so that we may “illuminate the bright side of virtue”. Intolerance—produced after The Birth of a Nation’s troubled, wretched apercu—goes further. In it, D. W. G. makes greater lunging pleas to his audience. With both films, we’re not trusted “simply” to witness (or, better, to be subject to) moving images. First we need to understand why D. W. G. is showing them to us. There is a nervous-thin-skinned trembling behind this. The horror of being misunderstood; the diabolism of being misrepresented.
The gentle, funny dancing of Elsie’s feet behind the garden’s curtain—scooping a white cat into her arms—&Etc how she trips running to her brothers. Intimacies of softness.
How “The Mountain Girl”—Constance Talmadge—“sells” herself on the husband market—the chest-thumping of a naive fool, or a holy fool—and where she strikes her chest an arrow will later pierce it. Foreshadowing.
D. W. was getting-inching-industrializing toward a certain maturity for the “new” cinema. He saw a place for continuity editing—sewing actions together in such a way that they felt less fitful than flowing.
Here, Henry B. Walthall and Elmer Clifton’s characters walk across a cotton field. They are friends; for now. First there are a number of slaves (D. W. G., cynically, never shows them as anything other than smiling and happy; he also never calls them “slaves”). They are kept to the rear of the spatial field. The “masters” arrive, the slave owners. Young dullard pimps (though D. W. doesn’t think of them like this). There’s a close-up of a bushel, one young white man plucks a flower from it, a close-up of the flower in his fingers; and now his body moves from frame to frame—away from his compatriot.
Now, in conversation, Griffith cuts between them; both standing in their own clump of cotton, in their separate frames. This is “shot reverse shot”. Benjamin Cameron (a southerner) looks to the left. Phil Stoneman (a northerner) looks to the right. Their eyes match—drawing an invisible thread between both of these parallel, alternating shots. Cameron walks further away, deeper into the cotton field. D. W. G. “irises” his departure—winking him out. The thread has snapped—and with it the invisible unity of their friendship. Love, and war and racial violence will get between them now.
D. W. G. knew that he didn’t need to spell it out. It was softer than that. He could imply it. In fact, the images of his film—how they contaminate, bleed and separate—could tell the story for him. Both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance practiced this newfound logic; both to lesser and greater success.
But there are darker smudgier things in the weft of his 1915 spleen. We are not going to pass over them. The “irregular” black Union troops who raid the South Carolina town, burning and pillaging; their uniforms torn and hanging off their bodies. D. W. G. is at pains to dehumanize them, to distance them. How maliciously he shoots them—and their “premiere”, the politician Lynch (played by Geroge Siegmann). D. W. G. is telling us that the races have their place.
Years have passed. Decades; a whole century. Griffith remains “the most reviled and detested film director in history, with the possible exception of Leni Riefenstahl”. John Steinle wrote this in 2006. It is a long and propulsive and thorny historiography, printed in the pages of Senses of Cinema. It is hosted under their “great directors” vertical. W. D. G., Steinle argues, abandoned the subtlety of his earlier Biograph productions. It was mugging and overdone and hysterical. Becoming larger, increasingly swollen, more afraid, it also began to unravel. It’s true, so far as it goes; but the scale was delirious. He was swallowed by it willingly.
Tom Gunning knew that D. W. G. had opened a sluice to something new and different; establishing a previously unseen voyeurism between performer and camera. Now there was a “relationship [based on] an understanding of the camera, and therefore the cinema spectator, as a powerful voyeur with the ability to penetrate into the character’s most private reaches”. This realisation—stewed and stewarded during his Biograph years—made hay for the primacy of the insert, the previously “thrown-away” gesture. Lilian Gish frustratedly flicking a switch into a stand of bushes; Mae Marsh pressing her fingers into a doorframe, on the other side of which Robert Harron also presses; the plucking of a flower from a field—and all that this entails and signifies.
Quick aside. You also forget how violently D. W. G. wielded his knife. Lens hoods that, at first, in The Birth of a Nation, “irised” the image were, by the time of Intolerance, used to “carve” the frame into ever more angular and discordant shapes. These “masks” draw our attention, yes; but they do more than this. They intensify and derange our feelings toward what we’re seeing. When Babylon falls, he captured the tumbling of a soldier’s body from the walls with a vertically masked “strip”; drawing strange mental comparisons with Richard Drew’s unforgettable photograph from 9/11, “The Falling Man”. D. W. G. would pass the masked baton to Abel Gance. Eventually, angling for nostalgia, Orson Welles would pluck the device from cinematic forgetting.6
Intolerance was called “fatuous” and “grotesque” just as it was felt to be revolutionary. Eisenstein bulged his eyes, lauded it, critiqued it; how it was missing a “unifying” image—how it so desperately needed a stronger appreciation for the mechanics of editing. Later, Eisenstein would propose his own solution to this problematic.
Mae Marsh lifting her daughter’s fallen hat, her fingers reaching toward it—her daughter has been carted away by the women’s temperance movement, a grave misunderstanding—tucking her body against the night wall of the home where her daughter has been taken to, confronting a tumulus of institutional authority she cannot breach. The softness of the clothing; the hardness of the wall. These scenes draw soft, sensitive lines between themselves. They tug and snag. Isn’t he so good in these quiet somber sensitive moments?
But isn’t he also so good when there is clashing and scale and thrown-open spectacle? That Babylonian dolly shot tunnels its way through heaps and cash and piles of bodies. The set would be gutted with flames. Eventually. There is sufficient detail in the image that you can squint and pick out the smallest instances of bodies, jewellery, swords, fabrics, dishes of rose petals softening in water. It is lurid-gigantism. It is so obviously in love with Pastrone’s Cabiria (1913), a film that gave D. W. G. “permission” to accelerate and accentuate.
But, what exactly happened to the unfamiliar-untutored-inexperienced eye when it was subjected to these helter-skelter images, these propulsive images, these collapsing-boundary images? It must have felt like a kind of violence. They moved so quickly and discordantly. Most people hadn’t experienced something like this before. Not outside of a war, an automobile crash, an industrial accident.
The “obliteration of the boundaries [between] the living and the dead, the animal and the mineral, all alike merged in the density [of] the pictorial paste”. Rancière again. This blurring-billowing-out gigantism of D. W. G.—how he encompasses-swallows everything in his accelerating path—is “one of the central forms in the historical imaginary of horror and monstrosity”. These are the words of Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, writing about architecture. But it so easily applies to the grit-texture-scale of D. W. G., too. Enlarged to the point of incontinence; it spills its parts and sprays effluvia everywhere. It “releases that which should be kept inside”.7
In its fullest obliterations, D. W. G.’s tempera-texture is almost abstract. It falls apart. The burning of Babylon. Look at it! Riot and trauma; but then a piercing image plucks the gloom, singling an instance out—salvaging it with the insert and the close-up. A hand gripping a stone; a defiant weapon. The billowing gunsmoke clouds of an American battlefield; and then the tangled bodies of the fallen. Here are the consequences.
What D. W. G. really did—at his best—was to mediate between the paste and the piercing of it.
It’s a cruel tragedy that, before dying, Harron had been, according to The New York Times, “moved into [a] prison ward at Bellevue after policeman place[d] him under arrest”. This was on the basis of firearms charges. He died soon after.
In fact, when D. W. G. released his propagandistic Hearts of the World in 1917, he confided his militaristic guilt to Lilian Gish; who quotes him as saying, “War is the villain, not any particular people.”
Here, I’m citing from Paul McEwan’s The Birth of a Nation (BFI Film Classics), originally published in 2015. Google preview is here.
I’m referring to Farber’s review of The Third Man (published in 1950) and his later essay “Blame the audience” from 1952. They’re both collected and printed together in Negative Space. Artforum has the specifics on this particular volume.
I’m indebted to David Bordwell, as usual, for making the Griffith–Gance–Welles connection here. Page 186 of his Film Art: an introduction gives a useful gloss over the history and use of the effect.