The Silent Oscars: 1915—Part One

The Birth Of A Nation—A Deeply Flawed, Would-Be Masterpiece
Introduction
Not entirely by coincidence, my series on the early silent era has arrived at the year 1915 on the day of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. What better time then to review the most notorious Civil War film in history, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which premiered in the United States on February 8, 1915.

The Birth of a Nation was the most celebrated film of its era. Critics gushed in their praise, audiences gladly lined up to pay $2 to see it at a time when the average ticket cost a nickel, and when it played at the White House, President Woodrow Wilson was moved to comment, "It was like writing history with lightning."

It was the top grossing film of the silent era, with estimates of its box office take ranging from $10 million to $16 million during its initial run, more than twice that of any other silent film. With its budget of $250,000, The Birth of a Nation still ranks as one of the twenty most profitable films in history.

It's also, in my opinion, the most controversial movie ever made. The film includes sequences—for example, Ku Klux Klansmen riding to the rescue of white women being raped by actors wearing blackface—that are so grotesque in their depictions of race and their distortions of history that you can't believe that you are seeing them. In 1915, its exhibition sparked protests in cities across the nation. Riots broke out in Boston and Philadelphia, and it was banned outright in Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. After allowing the film's premiere in Los Angeles, city leaders banned it there as well. And even where it did play, Griffith was forced to make cuts to get the film past local censors.

The reaction so stung Griffith, he spent the rest of his life apologizing, both through his films and in private.

While films such as Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ generated controversy at the time of their release, can you imagine anyone turning out to protest them a hundred years from now? Yet nearly a hundred years after its release, The Birth of a Nation still generates controversy. In 2000 and 2004, plans to show the film were cancelled after complaints, and as recently as last year in Rome, New York, the film's exhibition drew a crowd of protesters that included the city's mayor.

Let's Pretend—For A Moment
Reviewing The Birth of a Nation is never an easy task and I suspect many film critics and historians secretly (and not so secretly) wish they could just skip right over it and talk about something else. The film's reputation as being virulently racist is well deserved; and its story and its views on race are inextricably linked—every character on the screen is defined by their race and their attitudes about race and most are motivated by racial animus. So to review the movie without reviewing its racism and its distortions of history—always touchy subjects—is impossible

I won't shirk my duty, I promise, but nevertheless, let's pretend, for a moment, that we're visitors from another planet, and that issues of race and history are lost on us.

The Birth of a Nation tells the story of two families, one Northern, the other Southern, torn apart by war and its aftermath; and of a nation torn apart by the "peculiar institution," slavery. Beginning in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln and running through the end of post-war Reconstruction (1865-1877), the movie covers the major events of the era—the South's secession from the Union, the resulting civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, the assassination of Lincoln, the chaotic post-war attempts to ensure the civil rights of newly-freed slaves, and finally, the white backlash that led to a century of segregation.

In the foreground of all this history is a simple love triangle involving an abolitionist senator's daughter (Lillian Gish); the senator's protegee, a free black (George Siegmann in blackface) who will eventually be named lieutenant governor of an unnamed Southern state; and a former Confederate officer (Henry Walthall) who remains unreconciled to the South's defeat. As the film builds to a climax, the senator's daughter rejects the black politician's proposal of marriage, he reacts by unleashing his wrath on whites everywhere, and the Confederate officer forms the Ku Klux Klan and rides to the rescue.

The movie is split into two halves—war and peace—and when it focuses on the former, it excels. The battle scenes play like Matthew Brady's photographs brought to life and those sequences must have seemed like a time machine to audiences in 1915. Indeed, they still rank high on a short list of well-staged combat scenes.

Also worthy of high praise is Griffith's staging of Lincoln's assassination, as well as the film's sets, cinematography, costumes and film editing, all unsurpassed in their day.

The problem with the film lies in its second half, the depiction of the post-war peace. Not only is it racist and an unforgivable distortion of history—a point we'll get to in a moment—it's also essentially ludicrous, because as the film presents it, the fate of the entire post-war South, indeed, the nation, pivots on the rival ambitions of two men—the former Confederate officer and the black lieutenant governor—to get into Lillian Gish's underpants.

The Birth of a Nation was not the first film to reduce complex historical issues to a simple question of who's humping who (although come to think of it, it may well have been), but that the fate of a nation could come down to a romantic obsession with the freakishly coy Gish—who in one scene flinches from a man's smile the way another woman might flinch from a blow—is preposterous.

The casting of Gish should have been the film's greatest strength. She was, as I've said before, the finest actress of the silent era, and her performances in Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and The Wind are as good as any ever essayed on film. But great as she was, Helen of Troy she was not, and while two men's obsession with Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara—essentially a modern flapper in a hoop skirt—could turn Gone With The Wind into one of the greatest romances ever made, Griffith's idealized conception of Gish as a virginal 19th century dishrag was old-fashioned even by 1915's terms.

Thus, without war or the saintly Lincoln or a compelling romance to carry the film's second half, The Birth of a Nation depends purely on its racial politics—and the action related thereto—to supply its forward momentum. And there's the rub: if you don't bring an inate fear of blacks into the theater with you, if the thought of blacks voting, owning property, marrying whomever they want and even, gee whiz, running the country doesn't inherently scare the pants off you, the last ninety minutes becomes unbearably tedious.

I have to admit that even though I'm a veteran of over 600 silent movies, once The Birth of a Nation reached its second half, I found my eyelids growing heavy.

So let's talk about the film's racial politics.

Race And Racism
There's no sidestepping the racism at the heart of The Birth of a Nation, and watching it and claiming not to have an opinion is like saying you only read Playboy for the interviews—you're either a fool or a liar. (Turn-ons: movie bloggers, Netflix. Turn-offs: pan-and-scan.)

There are two types of racism on display in The Birth of a Nation. One you might call "common practice racism," that is to say, the sort of racism that arose from the habitual practices of the day. The use of white actors in blackface, for example, is a prime example. Studios of that era believed that audiences—and maybe more to the point, state and local censorship boards—would object to seeing blacks and whites together on screen, particularly where, as here, violence or sex was involved. So what were clearly white actors in blackface makeup were substituted for black actors.

Too, racial minorities commonly served in film as comic relief, and were most often portrayed—when they were portrayed at all—as ignorant, fearful and subservient clowns. You'll see plenty of that here and while I've argued in the past and will argue again in the future that to ignore every image or performance that a modern audience might find objectionable today would be to present a history of film even more lily white than it already was, I won't pretend that such depictions in The Birth of a Nation aren't as bad as you're ever likely to see.

But ultimately, it's the film's second type of racism, what I'd call "propagandist racism," that is so deeply troubling. For the racism of The Birth of a Nation was not merely an unfortunate, unintentional side effect of the early 20th century's societal ills—it was the point. Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, on which the movie was based, was an unapologetic exercise in white supremacist propaganda, stacking the deck against blacks to foment rage in its intended white audience and garner support for segregationist policies.

The Birth Of A Nation turns history on its head, telling us that after the Civil War a "helpless white minority" lived under the boot heel of black oppression and that the United States didn't become a nation, indivisible, once again until all white people, Northerner and Southerner, Unionist and Confederate, abolitionist and ex-slaveholder, rallied together to combat the single biggest threat to civilization—black men with equal rights.

The film is a white supremacist's wet dream. As history, it's ridiculous. The landed, slave-owning gentry that had led the South out of the Union and into the Civil War may have feared losing its iron-grip on power after the war, but it never feared losing its right to exist; whereas the reality for freed slaves was that their most basic freedoms—to vote, to own property, to walk down the street without fear of being murdered at the whim of a white man—were fragile at best and easily taken away again. The notion that the Klan was the only thing standing between civilization and a marauding hoard of rape-hungry blacks is not only racist, it's a bald-faced lie.

And don't get me started on its views of the Civil War's causes, which are fanciful if by no means unique—meddling abolitionist firebrands, motivated by naked ambition, pious naivete and interracial lust, launch a pre-emptive and unconstitutional war to impose their radical racial views on a peaceful, idyllic South, upsetting the delicate, harmonious balance between benevolent plantation owners and their loyal, contented slaves

In reality, Southern slave owners were more than happy for the federal government to intervene to quash state's rights when it acted in favor of slavery. (I refer you, for example, to the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court's Dred Scot decision and the Missouri Compromise, among other historical events.) The foundations of secession, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens said in his famous Cornerstone Speech, "are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

That later some would say the South seceded for any other reason than to preserve slavery would have come as a great surprise to the men who led it out of the Union.

Admittedly, the South presented in Gone With The Wind isn't any more accurate, but that movie never purports to explain the war or its aftermath except in terms of their colossal inconvenience to Scarlett O'Hara. If she could have bedded Ashley Wilkes by freeing all the slaves she would have done it, and if she could have bedded him without freeing any slave she would have done that. Everything else is irrelevant.

Here, race and racism are pretty much the only point. That Griffith saw the film's source material only as a rousing tale that reminded him of the folksy stories his Confederate grandfather used to tell on the front porch of their rural Kentucky home is a testament to just what a blinkered existence the man led. He was a workaholic who lived only to make movies and he rarely walked beyond the narrow limits of the studio except to shoot yet another movie on location.

Well, he's dead now and has thus paid the ultimate price for his sins. No point in my piling on. He wouldn't feel it anyway.

You, on the other hand, have no excuses. Watch The Birth of a Nation if you want—I've seen it three times—but don't kid yourself as to what you're watching.

The Film's Legacy
One of the most cherished myths of film history (or perhaps just its laziest) is that The Birth of a Nation represented a revolution in filmmaking technique, that with it Griffith invented the feature film, basic editing techniques such as cross-cutting, camera shots such as the close up, and above all, exciting action sequences and chase scenes.

As Roger Ebert has written, "[A]udiences in 1915 were witnessing the invention of intercutting in a chase scene. Nothing like it had ever been seen before: Parallel action building to a suspense climax. Do you think they were thinking about blackface? They were thrilled out of their minds."

Except he was wrong. As I have written previously (here), when I traced the evolution of film technique between 1906 and 1914, audiences had not only seen everything Ebert is describing, they had seen it enough that Mack Sennett felt comfortable spoofing it in a Keystone Kop comedy made two years before Griffith directed The Birth Of A Nation, with Mabel Normand barricaded in her house, fending off "burglars" who turn out to be her parents while the world's most inept policeman tries to ride to the rescue in a balky automobile. You don't spoof what you've never seen; you only spoof what you've seen so many times that humor arises from subverting the expectations of the audience. (See it here.)

Ebert's misunderstanding is not unique and I shouldn't pick on him—his was the common (mis)perception among film historians for decades. The error is understandable: until recently, very few films made prior to 1915 were available, and when your film library skips the entire decade following The Great Train Robbery (1903), The Birth of a Nation tends to look more startlingly innovative than it really is.

The fact is, while audiences responded to Griffith's film in record numbers, what they weren't doing, at least not for the first time, was seeing the groundbreaking technical breakthroughs that tend to justify The Birth Of A Nation's reputation as a great film. Yes, all those techniques were there, and yes, Griffith put them all together in epic form to tell the most rousing story yet told. But cross-cutting, close-ups, battle scenes—they were already staples of Griffith's filmmaking style, techniques he had developed while making some five hundred shorts for Biograph between 1908 and 1913.

And if you've seen any of those feature-length films I wrote about yesterday (here), you know that these techniques were shared by directors the world over as well.

Which is not to say that The Birth of a Nation wasn't important. It was a huge box office hit at a time when the jury was still out on the commercial viability of the feature-length film. After its release, there was never again a question about whether an audience would pay to sit through a long-form film.

Even more importantly, The Birth of a Nation woke audiences and critics alike to the reality that motion pictures weren't just a novelty, but were in fact an artistic medium, one that would turn out to be the most important of the 20th century. The film's reception inspired a generation of filmmakers, and as a result, we are blessed now with feature films from Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and many others who publicly acknowledged a debt to D.W. Griffith.

Maybe that's not everything that's been claimed for The Birth of a Nation, but it's not nothing either.

To Watch Or Not To Watch
I've been tough on The Birth of a Nation. It's a film a critic needs to be tough on. But I haven't answered the essential question: should you see it?

The answer, as always, is it depends.

As I mentioned earlier, I've watched The Birth of a Nation three times, and my reaction has been different every time. On the first viewing, I think my reaction was the typical one—I was appalled by the film's racist propaganda. The second time through, I was able to see both the power of the film's action sequences and the tedium of its romantic triangle.

But then I watched it a third time, and found that after I had peeled back the racism, after I had peeled back the tedium, what I was watching was the tragedy of American apartheid—"Jim Crow," we called it—as told through the imperfect, unwitting eyes of a triumphant white racist. Why, that's almost Faulkneresque, an Absalom, Absalom on film, if you will, albeit without the genius of William Faulkner's language or his insight standing between you and the deeply-flawed man narrating the story. That Griffith didn't understand the implications of what he was saying doesn't make the tale any less tragic. It's a little like listening to some ignorant blowhard tell a long story all the time not realizing he's the villain of the piece. You listen to him with a queasy look on your face and think, "You dumb bastard," but his blindness doesn't stop you from seeing glimmers of the underlying truth.

Ultimately, Griffith isn't Faulkner and what you're left with is a deeply-flawed would-be masterpiece. If you've never seen a silent movie before, for crying out loud, don't start with this one. It's hard enough to decipher the unfamiliar storytelling techniques of silent film without also having to struggle with the film's racism.

But if you're an amateur film historian, silent film fanatic, budding critic, Civil War buff, or want to get a sense of just how deeply interwoven the issue of race is with America's national character, then the answer is yes, you should eventually see The Birth of a Nation—once you've become well-enough versed in American history to separate the fact from the nonsense.

And if you're a Saturday night movie fan with only a limited interest in silent movies? I'd say there are a lot of other movies you should see first. Click here for my silent movie starter set, see those, then branch out.

To continue to Part Two, a review of the best movie(s) of 1915, Les Vampires, click here.

The Silent Oscars: 1906-1914—Part Five

[To read previous parts of this essay, click the highlighted link: 1, 2, 3, 4a, 4b]

The Birth of The Feature Film
Tentative Steps
After the release of Edwin Porter's classic short film The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the motion picture industry evolved rapidly, but until D.W. Griffith developed a film "language" that made complex storytelling possible (read about that effort here), the change was primarily a matter of quantity, not quality.

In the United States, thousands of nickelodeons—theaters where patrons paid a nickle to watch the latest movie—sprang up nationwide, and with them came a need for something to show in them. Maybe that explains why so many of the early studio moguls—Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers—got their start in the industry not as filmmakers but as theater owners.

The interest of these theater-owners-turned-movie-makers was almost purely about profit, and art only entered into the equation as a means to increase ticket sales. Which is okay with me. I mean, why, for example, should Adolph Zukor, who immigrated to the United States with $40 in his pocket, give away what little money he had in order to entertain and enlighten theatergoers for free? He opened a theater to put food on the table and, I can assure you, nobody else was going to do it, at least not without the same motive in mind.

But the result was a flood of derivative and undistinguished hackwork, and when Porter (and his boss, Thomas Edison) flinched from the high-risk-high-reward proposition of The Great Train Robbery and retreated back into the safe, bland product they had produced before, American theaters saw little else. By 1914 directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett would arrive on the scene and along with Griffith catapult American studios to a commercial dominance they have yet to relinguish. But until that time, it was the ambition and artistry of foreign studios that largely defined cinema.

While the best and most successful of the foreign filmmakers during this era were the "entertainers"—Georges Méliès, Max Linder—a handful of filmmakers aspired to tell more complex stories. But intentions aren't the same as results, and while you'll find plenty of adaptations of Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, theater productions and the Bible, these films amounted to little more than densely-worded intertitle cards accompanied by a handful of moving pictures.

Directors needed both a technique to tell stories in a purely visual way, and more elbow room than a single reel (eight-to-twelve minutes) of film could afford. Griffith would eventually solve the first problem. The feature-length film would solve the other.

What qualifies as the first feature-length film depends on what you think of as a feature film. In 1903, French movie-makers Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca directed a series of interrelated short films covering events in the life of Christ, from the annunciation through the resurrection and ascension. At a time when individual theater owners had more control over the product shown on the screen than the studio that produced it, La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ a.k.a. The Passion Play was sometimes exhibited edited together into a single 44-minute film.

And then there was Alice Guy Blaché who covered the same subject in a single, 33-minute film, La vie du Christ, a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ. Guy is one of the more interesting figures of the early silent era—the first woman director in history, she started as a secretary at Gaumont, wrote film scenarios because she had access to a typewriter and became a director because the studio had more cameras than people who knew how to operate them. She later emigrated to the United States and founded her own studio at Fort Lee, New Jersey, at that time the hub of the American film industry. Of the 350 films she directed during her career, La vie du Christ remains one of her best known.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now defines a "feature" as a film over forty minutes in duration. By those terms, most film historians cite Australia's The Story Of The Kelly Gang as the first feature-length film. Released in 1906, The Kelly Gang clocked in at a then-astounding 70 minutes. Written and directed by Charles Tait, the film tells the story of Ned Kelly, an Irish-Australian bushranger who battled British authority and was eventually hanged for his trouble. The film was thought lost until one reel turned up in a Melbourne garbage dump; in 2006, additional footage was discovered in the UK, bringing the restored total to 17 minutes. What's left plays like an extended-length version of The Great Train Robbery—no knock, I assure you.


Europe Takes The Lead
It was the Italians, though, who proved most willing to experiment with the long-form film. Italian filmmakers had come late to the party, with the country not producing its first fiction film until 1905. To distinguish their product from the French films that dominated the early marketplace, they focused on subjects with a distinctly Italian flavor, such as the country's recent unification, well-known historical events such as the last days of Pompeii, and notorious figures from Rome's glory days such as Nero and Messalina.

The first of the feature-length Italian films was an adaptation of Dante's epic poem about a man's journey through hell, 1911's L'Inferno. Over three years in the making, L'Inferno was a spectacle in the tradition of Méliès, Segundo de Chomón and Wladyslaw Starewicz, mixing imaginative costumes, set designs and special effects to create unforgettable visual images.

"[F]ilm historians have overemphasised early silent cinema's technical innovations over its imagistic brilliance," the author of Film: Ab Initio wrote recently. "For there are four or five scenes in this film which are as breathtaking as any I have encountered in cinema." (If you haven't checked out Film: Ab Initio, you really should—it's an audacious project, proposing to watch every major film from the beginning of time in chronological order—and I can tell you from my own personal experience that when you watch movies that way, you see things you would have otherwise missed.)

The film was a blockbuster, taking in more than $2 million at the box office, and encouraged the Italians to continue experimenting with the long form. Between 1911 and 1914, when they would make their single greatest contribution to the silent era, Cabiria, Italian studios released a dozen feature-length films, more than any other country during that period.

Throughout the era, directors explored new methods for telling stories on film—Lois Weber's use of split-screen, tracking and extreme close-ups in Suspense, Harold Shaw and Dorothy Shore's successful in-camera effects in The Land Beyond the Sunset, and of course D.W. Griffith's own experiments in The Musketeers of Pig Alley—and as they did, their output began to resemble what we now think of motion pictures. These innovations reached a critical mass in 1913 and seemingly overnight, directors the world over adopted these new camera and editing techniques as the industry-wide standard.

"[T]hat year," film historian David Bordwell has written, "seemed to be when filmmakers in several countries simultaneously seized upon what they had already learned of technique and pushed their knowledge to higher levels of expressivity."

Once directors had solved the matter of how to tell stories, longer, more complex movies began turning up everywhere—Russia, France, Germany, the United States. In fact, as many feature-length films hit theaters in 1913 alone as had been produced in the entire decade that proceeded it—more than fifty in all.

Among these features were films by some of the most important directors of the silent era. Victor Sjöström and Yevgeni Bauer, for example, were pioneers of Sweden and Russia cinema, respectively (I'll write more about them in the future). Both produced films that in later years would probably have been derided as "women's pictures" (or worse, "chick flicks"). Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm is a tragic look at a woman forced to give up her children after her husband's sudden death leaves her destitute. Bauer's Twilight of a Woman's Soul also focuses on a woman, but while she may be an aristocrat, her life is no happier—raped while volunteering at a homeless shelter, she is shunned by her fiance, a Russian prince.

Although neither film is the director's best—Sjöström would go on to direct The Outlaw and His Wife, The Phantom Carriage and The Wind, while Bauer would direct The Dying Swan before his untimely death in 1917—both made effective use of visual storytelling for the first time in their careers.

One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism. His film serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).

We'll talk more about him when I reach 1915.

The best of the feature-length films released in 1913 was probably Der Student von Prag (a.k.a. A Bargain With Satan, the first noteworthy film to emerge from the fledgling German film industry. Paul Wegener (with an assist behind the camera from Stellan Rye) directed and starred in this adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story about a university student who sells his soul to the devil to win the love of a beautiful woman. On a limited budget Wegener and Rye created one of the first convincing horror films, establishing a tradition that would later give us The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Faust and Metropolis. Rye died in the fighting during World War I, but Wegener went on to direct one of the classics of silent German cinema, Der Golem in 1920, and continued to act and direct until his death in 1948.

The most influential film of 1913, however, was one that didn't even make into the theaters until the following year. Giovanni Pastrone's epic Cabiria was a landmark achievement in style and spectacle, and the first truly great long-form film. The culimination of the long-form movement in Italy, Cabiria took two years to film and boasted mammoth sets and elaborate special effects. Its epic scope influenced Griffith's Intolerance and anticipated the pomp of De Mille's later Bible and history spectacles.

"The film was made with limitless scope and ambition," Roger Ebert wrote for his Great Movies series, "with towering sets and thousands of extras, with stunts that (because they were actually performed by stuntmen) have an impact lost in these days of visual effects."

Set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage—a subject of great interest to Italian audiences on the eve of World War I—Cabiria is an epic on a grand scale, tracing the life of young woman from childhood to early adulthood against the backdrop of Rome's struggle to establish an empire of its own. The movie opens with the spectacular eruption of Sicily's Mt. Etna, and boasts a tracking shot of refugees trekking across the face of the erupting volcano that rivals any image previously filmed.

"For Cabiria," wrote Cole Smithey, the self-styled "smartest film critic in the world, "Pastrone pioneered the use of deep-focus filming and the since-ubiquitous 'tracking-shot'—two years before D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation would employ similar techniques."

The movie includes kidnappings, piracy, ritual sacrifices, slave revolts and even Hannibal and his elephants. It also introduced the "Maciste" character—the Herculean hero played here by Bartolomeo Pagano in a star-making performance, and later by such actors as Steve Reeves—who proved so popular in low budget sword-and-sandal films between 1914 and the 1970s.

Even though the finished film wouldn't premiere in theaters until April 1914, word of Pastrone's project leaked out of Italy and directors worldwide scrambled to make their own long-form films.

The Americans At Last
According to Turner Classic Movies' series Moguls and Movie Stars, the first American producer to see the value in feature-length films was Adolph Zukor, the self-same Adolph Zukor who started life with $40 and limitless ambition. He believed that movie-makers shouldn't limit themselves to ten-minute shorts and the working class audiences that patronized them, but should instead aim for the same quality, prestige—and paying customers—as the theater productions running on New York's Broadway.

To that end, in 1912 Zukor obtained the distribution rights to Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth, a 45-minute film about the life of Britain's Queen Elizabeth I. Starring Sarah Bernhardt, the film's success in America allowed Zukor to found his own studio, Famous Players, and commit the company to producing six feature-length pictures a year.

Meanwhile, in 1913, Carl Laemmle a German immigrant who owned a chain of nickelodeons in Chicago, embarked on a feature-length project of his own. Seeking to cash in on the then-current scandal of forced prostitution among the newly-arrived immigrant population of New York City, Traffic In Souls was a sensation upon its release, earning $500,000 on its $25,000 investment and encouraged Laemmle to found Universal Studios.

"[A]bout twenty minutes into Traffic in Souls, [cinematographer Henry Alder] Leach does something extraordinary," writes Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy. "He anticipates action, panning the camera from William Powers standing on the shore to Flora Nason and Vera Hansey, two in a crowd of passengers on a ferry pulling into a dock. It was a planned, choreographed shot, one hat predicted the future of cinematography."

Traffic in Souls is preserved in the National Film Archive. (It was the first film to inspire a "novelization," the practice of turning a film into a book.)

That same year, vaudeville performer Jesse Lasky teamed up with struggling Broadway playwright Cecil B. DeMille to found the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Company. Reluctantly bankrolled by Lasky's brother-in-law, Samuel Goldwyn, Lasky and DeMille set out to make a feature-length film version of the stageplay The Squaw Man—an audacious undertaking consider that none of them had ever made a movie before.

The Squaw Man is the story of a British aristocrat who find success in the American west after being falsely accused of embezzlement. Lasky and DeMille insisted on filming on location and headed west to film it. The pair stopped initially in Flagstaff, Arizona, but DeMille envisioned open spaces rather than the mountainous, heavily-forested terrain around Flagstaff, so they journeyed on to Los Angeles where they scouted filming locations and settled on a sleepy village named Hollywood.

Legend has it that DeMille and Lasky set up shop in a barn, but legend neglects to mention that the barn already housed a complete movie studio before they got there.

Nevertheless, The Squaw Man was the first feature filmed in Hollywood. It's reception at the box office encouraged both Lasky and DeMille, with the former eventually merging with Zukor's Famous Players to found Paramount Pictures, while the latter went on to become one of the most successful producer-directors in Hollywood history.

Perhaps the most important of the early American feature films was D.W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia. Filmed in 1913 but released a year later thanks to a contract dispute between Griffith and his employer, the Biograph Company, Judith is one of the earliest examples of what is known as "classical continuity editing" or "classical Hollywood narrative"—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.

Already the most influential director in the world, Griffith's development of classical continuity editing would become the industry standard by 1917 and is the single most common editing style in use by film and television directors today.

The film proved to be pivotal for Griffith, not, however, because it was a financial success. Judith was expensive and Biograph balked at financing additional feature films.

Biograph, wrote Lillian Gish later, "thought that a movie that long would hurt [the audience's] eyes."

Rather than settling for his paymasters' limited artistic vision, Griffith left and joined the Mutual Film Company. There, he directed his second feature-length film, The Avenging Conscience (1914). Not as well known as Judith of Bethulia but perhaps even better, The Avenging Conscience was based on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and is a taut psychological drama involving love, obsession, murder and finally madness. Griffith's technical expertise is on full display here, with parallel compositions used to convey parallel emotions, and an increasingly frantic cutting style that anticipates Eisenstein's use of montage a decade later.

With two feature films under his belt, Griffith was ready to tackle the biggest project of his career, The Birth of a Nation, the most lucrative and most controversial film of the entire silent era.

Finally, I'll mention Mack Sennett and the first feature-length comedy in movie history, Tillie's Punctured Romance. I've previously written at some length about Tillie here, but I would like to point out that the film's enormous box office appeal further underscored the commercial viability of the long form.

Shorts and features would continue to compete with each other on an equal footing until the 1920s when comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd began making feature films—not, ironically, because their short comedies weren't as popular as feature films, quite the opposite actually, but because theater owners paid rental fees based on the length of the film. By the time talkies arrived in theaters in the late 1920s, feature films had thoroughly eclipsed shorts, and would dominate the artistic and commercial landscape for decades to come.

The Comedy Stylings Of Segundo de Chomón

So what has the Monkey been up to recently, other than posting trivia questions straight out of TCM's Now Playing? Working on another of those mammoth essays, this one about early silent comedy, from its beginning around 1890 up to 1914. So far from the era I've watched one hundred sixty-eight comedy shorts and counting. Some are funny, but most of them, I can emphatically assure you, are not.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with any of that. Instead, this post harkens back to Part Two of my essay covering the films of 1906-1914, specifically the paragraph I wrote about Segundo de Chomón, a.k.a. "the Spanish Méliès." Chomón specialized in trick photography and surreal optical effects. Here's one, Le théâtre de Bob from 1906, that relies on stop-action animation and hand-tinted frames.

Just part of our continuing effort here at the Monkey to load you up with useless information ...


El teatro electrico de Bob
Uploaded by informatenlared. - See more comedy videos.

The Silent Oscars: 1906-1914—Part Two

[To read part one of this essay, click here.]

Documentaries and Animation
● In the years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and D.W. Griffith's first film in 1908, the most interesting films were documentaries. Although in form, they more resemble "newsreels" than what we now think of as documentaries, these short films provided audiences of the time a window into people and places they might otherwise have never seen and continue to offer an insight into the era for historians.

● The first great documentarians were the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who I wrote about at some length in a previous post. Their forays into documentary film making were more in the nature of experiments with their newly-invented camera, mostly recording scenes from the world around them although they did occasionally film newsworthy events, such as the arrival of delegates to a conference on photography in 1895. The Lumière brothers abandoned movies altogether in 1900, famously declaring "the cinema is an invention without any future."

● One of the first American docum- entarians was G.W. "Billy" Bitzer. Better known now as D.W. Griffith's cinematographer, Bitzer began his career making film shorts, first collaborating with W.K.L. Dickson after the latter left Thomas Edison's lab, then later at the American Mutoscope Company, the forerunner of Biograph. Bitzer filmed hundreds of shorts, such as Film Registry title Westinghouse Works and Arrival of Immigrants at Ellis Island. In 2003, the International Cinematographers Guild named Bitzer one of the ten most influential cinematographers of all time.

● Footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake proved once and for all the power of the new film medium. Perhaps the most interesting of the many shorts emerging from the disaster is A Trip Down Market Street Before The Fire, which by happenstance was filmed four days before the San Francisco earthquake. Coupled with footage shot at the same locations immediately after the earthquake, the devastation is still shocking. Imagine what it must have been like to see this footage in 1906, the first time in history the public could bear witness to a catastrophe that had happened a world away. (I encourage you to click the fullscreen function when you watch this.)



● A pair of feature-length documentaries from 1914 show the diverging approaches to the form. In the Land of the War Canoes, Edwin S. Curtis used staged re-enactments and fictional events to show the life of an aboriginal tribe in British Columbia, aiming more for entertainment than veracity. That same year Vilhjálmur Stefánsson brought back actual footage of his own disastrous expedition to the Arctic. (I'd tell you that the latter style of documentary eventually won out, but the fact is documentarians such as Michael Moore stage events for the camera to this day.)

● The fields of animation and stop-action photography also made significant strides during the pre-Griffith film era.

● Émile Cohl was a well-known caricaturist working in Paris who got into the motion picture business when he spotted a movie poster design obviously stolen from one of his drawings. To placate Cohl, the management of the Gaumont Film Company (the oldest studio in the world) offered him a job on the spot, mostly turning out short animation sequences for insertion into live-action films. In 1908, Cohl drew and directed a two-minute film, Fantasmagorie, believed to be the first all-animated film in history. [But see the discussion in the comments section where Matthew Blanchette and I agree that the distinction should go to Charles-Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot. ]

● In America, J. Stuart Blackton took an early stab at animation with such shorts as The Enchanted Drawing and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, a series of faces chalked up on a canvas and a blackboard, respectively, but it was Winsor McCay who earned the title as America's first great animator. Already a successful newspaper cartoonist, McCay was inspired by his son's cartoon "flip" book to turn four thousand ink drawings based on his comic strip "Little Nemo" into a film cartoon.



After the success of Little Nemo, McCay signed with the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain where he continued with his work in the field of animation. In 1914, he produced his most famous character, Gertie The Dinosaur, often credited as the first anthropomorphic cartoon character. McCay toured with the country with the film, "interacting" with Gertie in front of the audience, using a whip to coax her out from behind an outcropping of rock and even feeding her an apple.

● Known as the "Spanish Méliès," Segundo de Chomón special- ized in surreal optical effects films. Working in France for Pathé, Chomón successfully combined miniatures and live-action, pioneered hand-tinted film and invented the "film dolly" which allowed complex tracking shots. As a director, he was known for his trick photography—for example, building one short (The Electric Hotel around a suitcase that unpacked itself, and another (Les Kiriki) around a troupe of Japanese acrobats who perform impossible stunts. Later he provided the special effects work in important feature-length films such as Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance's Napoleon.

● For my money, though, the best of these early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz (he later changed his name to Ladislas Starevich when he moved to France). Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.

The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:



Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.

[To continue to Part Three, click here.]

The Silent Oscars: 1906-1914—Part One

[To read the first entry in this series, The Silent Oscars: 1888-1905, click here.]

Must-See Movies: The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906); A Corner in Wheat (1909); The Country Doctor (1909); The Lonely Villa (1909); Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (1911); The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912); Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (1912); The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912); An Unseen Enemy (1912); Suspense (1913); Cabiria (1914); Judith of Bethulia (1914); Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)
Recommended Films: Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend (1906); Le théâtre de Bob (1906); A Trip Down Market Street (1906); Fantasmagorie (1908); Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow (1909); Afgrunden (1910); The Lonedale Operator (1911); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (1911); The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913); Der Student von Prag (1913); Fantômas (1913-14); Ingeborg Holm (1913); Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913); The Avenging Conscience: or "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1914); The Rounders (1914)
Of Interest La vie du Christ a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906); Swords and Hearts (1911); Richard III (1912); The Bangville Police (1913); Traffic in Souls (1913); Gertie The Dinosaur (1914); The Squaw Man (1914)

● The twelve years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth Of A Nation (1915)—what the blog Film: Ab Initio calls "cinema's forgotten decade"—might be the least known years in all of movie history. Yet it was during these years that movies developed from a novelty into the most popular art form of the 20th century:

» D.W. Griffith took basic techniques introduced by his contemporaries and used them in ways so imaginative, he virtually invented the "language" of film we now take for granted.

» Speaking of language, a new concept entered the lexicon—"movie star"—with audiences for the first time flocking to theaters to see specific performers, among them Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Lillian Gish.

» And the idea of what constituted a movie evolved from brief, simplistic snippets viewed through coin-operated "peep shows" to ambitious, feature-length projects with complex storylines and characters.

● It's often difficult to discern evolution as it is occurring. It's especially difficult to see when the evidence remained squirreled away in studio vaults for half a century while critics and public relations men spun up easy to grasp narratives of film's history that sold tickets but did little to describe the true events. Fortunately, historians such as Kevin Brownlow and David Bordwell, among others, have devoted their careers to setting the record straight; and blogs such as 100 Years of Movies, Alt Film Guide, the aforementioned Film: Ab Initio, and others, have taken on the task of watching these early films and reporting on their efforts in thoughtful essay form.

And then there are crazy people like me who try to swallow the entire decade in one, 170+ movie sitting and boil it all down to a single, indigestible post.

● All of the movies on my must-see list (and many, many more) are now readily available to view. (I've only seen the first episode of the twenty-part serial The Perils Of Pauline, else it would make the list as well.) I can tell you from personal experience, if you watch movies in chronological order starting with those two-second fragments from Louis Le Prince in 1888 and work your way forward, film techniques so commonplace now as to be invisible to a modern fan will jump off the screen and you'll find yourself saying aloud, "Thank you, D.W. Griffith, for rescuing me from yet another static, single-shot movie where the actors mill around like ants."

D.W. Griffith and the Invention of a Film Language

● Speaking of David Wark Griffith, he was born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith and Mary Perkins. He had aspirations of being a Broadway playwright, took small acting parts in movies for the money then switched to directing when he discovered it paid better. He directed his first movie, the twelve-minute short The Adventures of Dollie, in 1908 working from instructions written out on a single sheet of shirt cardboard by his cinematographer G.W. "Billy" Bitzer.

Over the course of the following five years, Griffith directed just shy of five hundred movies, mostly for the Biograph Company located in New York City.

● Like every other director of that era, Griffith wrestled with the problem of narrative—how to tell a story in a silent medium—but whereas other directors simply parroted the techniques that worked on stage and wound up with actors in togas milling around in front of painted backdrops, Griffith seemed to understand from the outset that film presented its own unique set of problems and opportunities. By composing his actors within the frame, by relying on revealing actions rather than words and, especially, by juxtaposing images and events through editing, Griffith was able to create within his audience an emotional involvement in his stories.

● A trio of short films from 1909 illustrate Griffith's gift at composing the frame, staging action, and creating suspense with pacing and editing.

» One of five Griffith films preserved in the National Film Registry, A Corner In Wheat is overpraised (to my mind) for being the first "message" picture, but its use of composition is masterful. Lone figures confined to the corner of the screen, overwhelmed by empty vistas, conveying through image alone the desperation the characters feel, could have come straight from an Edward Hopper painting—except that A Corner In Wheat pre-dates Hopper's breakthrough as an artist by some fifteen years.


» The Country Doctor opens with a panning shot which if you'd just watched 100+ movies from the years that preceded it, believe me, jumps off the screen with its technical sophistication. Starting with a long shot of a valley, then panning to a house on a hill to focus on a family already emerging to walk forward until they stand in medium shot, Griffith establishes with a single uninterrupted camera movement both the story's setting and the identity and socio-economic status of its characters, the sort of camera shot we take for granted now but which pretty much didn't exist before him.



That only a year into his career as a director, he concluded the tragic story with a mirror of that opening shot, panning from the now-empty house as the film ends to that same long shot of the valley, underscores just how quickly he raced ahead of his competitors in using film to convey emotion.

» Griffith didn't invent intercutting (a.k.a. cross-cutting)—the use of editing to alternate between two locations, usually to show simultaneous action—but he took it farther than anyone before him, using it not just to, say, show a key prop or establish a location, but to create a narrative flow and a sense of anticipation that was sorely lacking in early movies. In the thriller The Lonely Villa thieves break into a secluded country home and terrorize a woman and her children while her husband and the police race to their rescue. Griffith cuts back and forth between three points of view to create genuine suspense—will the would-be rescuers arrive in time to save the day?—an editing technique still used to this day.



(Griffith would return to this theme time and again, most memorably in 1911 with The Lonedale Operator and in what is perhaps the most controversial sequence of The Birth Of A Nation, where the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of Lillian Gish's virginity.)

● Griffith continued to develop new approaches to film storytelling throughout his career at Biograph.

» For example, in 1911's two-part short Enoch Arden—a wife stands on the shore waiting for her husband's return from the sea while at that moment the husband is shipwrecked and washed ashore on a tropic island—Griffith uses cutting not just to show the same action from different points of view as in The Lonely Villa, or even to establish that the action is simultaneous, but to show parallel storylines linked only by the emotional resonance between them. Griffith cuts back and forth between the two storylines—the shipwrecked sailor, the wife who waits—for the remainder of the film, showing the analogous plights of the castaway and his (presumed) widow as they each struggle to survive.

(By the way, I suggest that if you watch the copy of Enoch Arden I've embedded here, you mute the sound—the accompanying soundtrack doesn't fit the mood in the least.)



» The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (1912) (you can see it here) is credited with being the first gangster movie and while its story of a thug who robs the husband of the woman he fancies is well worth watching in its own right, the film is remarkable for another startling leap in film technique, in this case the likely invention of what is now called "follow-focus"—the practice of having the camera operator keeping moving actors in focus while allowing the background to go out of focus. At a time when cameramen prided themselves on keeping the entire frame in focus, Griffith's longtime cinematographer Billy Bitzer was reluctant to follow Griffith's direction in this instance and only acceded to his request after Griffith took him to an art museum to look at paintings where the foreground subjects were in sharper focus than the background. (Indeed, Griffith got many of his ideas while strolling through New York's museums.)


» Another of Griffith's innovations was the use of the iris shot, which Tim Dirks defines as "an earlier cinematographic technique or wipe effect, in the form of an expanding or diminishing circle, in which a part of the screen is blacked out so that only a portion of the image can be seen by the viewer." The iris shot was typically used to open or close scenes, and to focus the viewer's attention on a single character or action, but in more sophisticated instances (again, credit Griffith) it could be used to link characters thematically.


» Griffith also pushed his actors to adopt a more subtle acting style, eschewing the dramatic poses of the stage for something more reserved, which he thought played more effectively on the screen. The change was incremental, and sometimes you can see both styles in the same scene, but when compared to other films of the era, the difference is striking. Among those actors who worked with Griffith at Biograph were Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, her sister Dorothy, Henry Walthall, Mae Marsh, Harry Carey, Mack Sennett, Donald Crisp, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge and Florence Turner.


● That we take Griffith's storytelling techniques for granted now—that every movie made in the last one hundred years has repeated these same tricks as a matter of routine—is a testament to just how innovative and influential he really was.

● In 1914, Griffith made his first feature-length film, Judith of Bethulia. Based on a book from the biblical apocrypha, Judith is the story of a beautiful young widow who sacrifices her own sense of virtue to seduce the leader of an invading army and save her people. Aside from its place in film history as one of the earliest feature-length films produced in America (the rest of world had been producing feature films since 1906), Judith of Bethulia features an early example of what is known as "classical continuity editing" or "classical Hollywood narrative"—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.

A good example comes early in the film. Griffith starts with a wide shot of seated figures threshing wheat, holding on them until Robert Harron enters the screen from the left—


and crosses to the far right where he sees something in the distance.


Griffith then cuts to a medium shot of Mae Marsh at a well, back to a wide shot to establish where she is in relation to her surroundings, then to the medium shot again to show Marsh's face as she struggles with the water jug. Griffith cuts back to the wide shot as Robert Harron enters from the left then cuts on his act of helping Marsh to a medium two-shot so you can see Marsh's face as she reacts to his kindness—


then finishes the scene with a wide shot as the couple walks off the screen, holding on the empty screen until someone else enters to draw water at the well. (You can watch Judith of Bethulia in its entirety here.)

The use of classical continuity editing—as opposed to the then-typical practice of having all the actors remain on screen in the same full shot throughout the scene, what David Bordwell calls the "tableau" style—became the industry standard by 1917, but its use in Judith of Bethulia was very advanced for its day and, again, I have to tell you that after plowing through more than two hundred movies made before 1915, all of them using the same tableau set-up, to suddenly see such sophisticated compositions and editing, well, the effect is startling. And a relief.

Although a critical success, Judith of Bethulia was extremely expensive to film and Biograph declined to finance Griffith's further ambitions in this direction. As a result, Griffith struck out on his own, taking his film crew and troop of actors with him. Within a year, Griffith would film The Birth of a Nation, the most lucrative film of the early silent era; Biograph was out of the film business by 1916.

● By ignoring this era of film history, critics have wound up overstating the significance of The Birth Of A Nation as a revolution in film technique. Every technique Griffith supposedly invented in The Birth of a Nation, he had already developed and mastered during his years at Biograph Studios. Likewise, because that film's racism wound up overshadowing his entire career, casual film fans have undervalued Griffith's impact as an artist and innovator.

● Ultimately, Griffith's reward for showing the world how to tell stories on film was to find himself left behind by filmmakers who used his techniques to tell better stories. To a great degree, this was his own fault. As you watch Griffith develop a film language, you can also see him develop the bad habits that would ultimately cost him his audience—his reverence for an outdated Victorian value system, his obsession with female virtue, particularly when Lillian Gish takes over the lead acting chores from Mary Pickford, and an appalling tendency in his Civil War films to sentimentalize, or worse justify, America's brutal system of racial apartheid—vices which have not only dated badly in our 21st century eyes, but which began to alienate audiences as early as the end of the First World War.

[Click here to continue to Part Two.]