A Companion to D. W. Griffith

Charles Keil

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118341223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The most comprehensive volume on one of the most controversial directors in American film history

A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers an exhaustive look at the first acknowledged auteur of the cinema and provides an authoritative account of the director's life, work, and lasting filmic legacy.

The text explores how Griffith's style and status advanced along with cinema's own development during the years when narrative became the dominant mode, when the short gave way to the feature, and when film became the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment. Griffith was at the centre of each of these changes: though a contested figure, he remains vital to any understanding of how cinema moved from nickelodeon fixture to a national pastime, playing a significant role in the cultural ethos of America.

With the renewed interest in Griffith's contributions to the film industry, A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers a scholarly look at a career that spanned more than 25 years. The editor, a leading scholar on D.W. Griffith, and the expert contributors collectively offer a unique account of one of the monumental figures in film studies.

• Presents the most authoritative, complete account of the director's life, work, and lasting legacy
• Builds on the recent resurgence in the director's scholarly and popular reputation
• Edited by a leading authority on D.W. Griffith, who has published extensively on this controversial director
• Offers the most up-to-date, singularly comprehensive volume on one of the monumental figures in film studies

Part One
Griffith Redux

1
Disciplinary Descent: Film Studies, Families, and the Origins of Narrative Cinema

Jennifer M. Bean

Griffith… is to the various histories of the cinema what Abraham is to the Bible – the necessary Patriarch

(Aumont 1990: 348)

The laws governing inheritance are for the most part unknown

(Darwin 1996: 39)

What differentiates one period or phase of film history from another? How small or large must the differences be in order to determine where one element or stage leaves off and another begins? These are questions that any discipline must ask if it is to reflect on its historical parameters, which means that disciplinary knowledge is intrinsically bound to the construction of “families,” to the process of retrospectively organizing observable phenomena into what Charles Darwin calls “genera, families, sub‐families” (1996: 562). What is intriguing from the perspective of Euro‐American film historical discourse is the apparently irreducible equation linking the origins – the originality – of a properly narrative cinema to the Biograph films of D.W. Griffith (1908–1913), and beyond that to the metaphorical and ideological values associated with the nuclear family unit.¹

When Jacques Aumont describes Griffith as the “necessary Patriarch” of cinema’s “various histories,” he refers to a critical genealogy that relentlessly reiterates Griffith’s name as the signature stamp of narrative cinema’s artistic and cultural patrimony, even while the core or essence of what that patrimony means has altered over time. But even as we repeat Griffith’s name as the bastion of our field’s secular theology (the canon!), other more revolutionary alterations are currently on the rise. Indeed, given the broader reach of archival and historiographic methods emerging in the digital age, the rash of encyclopedias and reference tools now being written, and a roaring wave of insightful work from scholars of varying political, regional, and aesthetic perspectives, it seems clear that we have only just begun to explore the films and figures that constitute narrative cinema’s ascendance and ongoing transformations in the early to mid‐1910s. As Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (2004) observe in their introduction to the fine collection, American Cinema’s Transitional Era: “The sheer diversity of changes experienced by the American film industry and within American filmgoing culture during these years [1907–1915] renders any attempt to encompass such developments within a uniform historical narrative problematic at best” (2). Anticipation mounts as newly restored or discovered prints mock revered critical assumptions, raising questions that remain as yet unanswered, the ultimate question being whether a positivist film history will ever again be possible or desirable. Then again, in the midst of such intellectual ferment and vitalizing possibilities, the most immediate question becomes quite simply: in the face of a substantial body of work about the man and his films, why write on D.W. Griffith again?

I have two contrary attitudes or inclinations. On one hand, I am firmly committed to the necessity of writing a new film history, of redrawing the cultural and aesthetic lineages of narrative cinema in accordance with whatever “genera, families, sub‐families” one seeks to organize and classify and why. At the same time, I consider it imperative to move cautiously toward revisionist conclusions in an intellectual moment as volatile as ours, to remain wary of writing in reaction to, or against, an assumed critical norm, lest we run the risk of too quickly replacing bad old truisms with equally problematic new ones.

In rendering with some precision the role Griffith’s name and films have played in our field’s critical legacy, I do not aim to provide a comprehensive survey. Instead, I will sketch the diverse inflections this particular name and group of films have undergone when viewed through the lens of various critical categories. From classical to revisionist historical discourse, from structuralism’s imperatives to genre studies, we find a sort of disciplinary descent, a series of perspectives through which the name, “D.W. Griffith,” and its correlate, “the origins of narrative cinema,” undergo constant modification

Before proceeding, let me clarify that the myth of origins is always just that: a myth. Any claim for a discernible, locatable “first” or moment of beginning inevitably eclipses the complexity of overlapping and often competing elements and forces necessary to galvanize change. At the same time, I agree with Gilles Deleuze (1997) that the creation of a new concept (Darwinian evolution, for instance) can be marked by a proper name that serves to locate a generalized origin but does not limit its use or value: a concept begins by becoming visible and may therefore be attributed a proper name, the name of its most recognizable or marketable inventor. The meanings associated with that concept, however, depend on the uses to which it is put, the variables that develop out of or through it. Insofar as this volume puts the meaning of the name “D.W. Griffith” to new and future uses, then my effort here is retrospective – a study of this name’s descent by modification.

The rise of the mythical father and the fall of the realist text

One can certainly find an historical basis in the status ascribed to David Wark Griffith, who postulated himself as a film artist/author sine qua non in 1913. Shortly after he left the Biograph Company (where he had been working as a “director” for five years), Griffith placed an advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror, blowing his own horn, so to speak, for “revolutionizing Motion Picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.” Listing in particular “[t]he large or closeup figures, distant views as represented first in Ramona, the ‘switchback,’ sustained suspense, the ‘fade out,’ and restraint of expression,” Griffith also lists over 100 film titles, retrospectively “crediting” himself as director in an era when credits as such rarely appeared onscreen (Jacobs 1968: 117). The novelty suggested by this attribution to the individual self as the site of creativity zooms into focus when one considers a similar commentary published in the same journal in 1912. Ascribing inventiveness of artistic techniques to the Biograph Company qua company, one anonymous reporter pronounced:

Biograph’s influence on picture production has been important. It was the first company… in America to present acting of the restrained artistic type, and the first to produce quiet drama and pure comedy. It was the first to attempt fading light effects. It was the first to employ alternating flashes of simultaneous action in working up suspense (qtd in Jacobs 1968: 117).

Leaving aside this writer’s qualifying emphasis on national location (“in America”), the nigh‐uncanny resemblance this list bears to Griffith’s broadsheet reveals that the consideration of acting style, lighting effects, or suspenseful editing techniques was hardly new to the discourse surrounding cinema in 1913. Remarkably new, however, was Griffith’s loud claim to individual creativity and originality.

In other words, Griffith’s 1913 posting heralds the origins of the “author function” in film historical discourse, a critical function that Michel Foucault (1980) describes as “result[ing] from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author… [in which] we speak of an individual’s ‘profundity’ or ‘creative’ power” (127). To speak of a film author, especially one working in a commercial context, most often involves a humanistic operation employed to elevate the individual’s films above the grimy morass of the marketplace, to efface the rude machinery of production. That this civilizing gesture often summons familial metaphors proves particularly intriguing, although hardly unique to film studies. As Roland Barthes (1977) reminds us, the conception of the Author as a figure of originality and creativity, a figure designed to ensure the homogeneity and unity of a text, emerges in post‐Middle Age culture as a crucial tenet in the growing emphasis on individuality, privacy, and selfhood in the Western world. That the historical construction of selfhood as such is buttressed by a positivism that finds its epitome in capitalist society, the same society that invents and privileges the nuclear family unit, generates a set of interrelated issues that emerges in the common, now naturalized use of parental – or more specifically, paternal – analogies for speaking of authorship. As he observes:

The Author, when believed in… is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child (Barthes 1977: 145; last emphasis mine).

Barthes’s assessment of authorship as a figuration of paternity attains acute visibility in classical film historical discourse, which rapidly enshrined Griffith as “the father of classical narrative cinema and inventor of narrative filmmaking” (Elsaesser and Barker 1990: 293). In Terry Ramsaye’s 1926 history of American cinema, A Million and One Nights, for instance, we find “Griffith Evolves Screen Syntax,” a chapter dedicated to Griffith’s years at Biograph, in which the biological idiom of evolutionary growth images the cinema as a child maturing under Griffith’s tutelage: “The motion picture spent the years up to 1908 learning its letters. Now, with Griffith it was studying screen grammar and pictorial rhetoric” (508). By reprinting in part Griffith’s Dramatic Mirror posting (636), Ramsaye’s account initiates a line of descent embellished in Lewis Jacobs’s 1939 study, The Rise of the American Film, which reproduced the 1913 ad in full (1968: 117). Passed from the self‐professed progenitor of Motion Picture Art to the founding “fathers,” so to speak, of American film history, Griffith’s legacy crossed the Atlantic in 1951, gaining pride of place in George Sadoul’s Histoire générale du cinema and shimmering...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Griffith Redux
• Part Two: Style in the Biograph Era
• Part Three: Imagery and Intermediality
• Part Four: Gender and Progressivism
• Part Five: Revisiting Failed Features
• Part Six: Reception at Home and Abroad
• Index
• End User License Agreement