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Quarterly Review of Film & Video
ISSN: 0146-0013 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gqrf19
Weaving a narrative: Style and economic
background in Griffith's biograph films
Tom Gunning
To cite this article: Tom Gunning (1981) Weaving a narrative: Style and economic
background in Griffith's biograph films, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 6:1, 11-25, DOI:
10.1080/10509208109361076
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208109361076
Published online: 05 Jun 2009.
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Weaving a Narrative:
Style and Economic
Background in Griffith's
Biograph Films
Tom Gunning
The spectre ofD. W. Griffith, the mythical "father" offilm as an art
form, haunts film history. All too often Griffith has been an excuse
for a lack ofscholarship on early film. To relieve film scholars of the
burden and anxiety of wading into the morass of anonymous or
little-known films that mark the early years ofthe cinema, Griffith
has been labeled asthe "beginning" offilm asan art form. Awhole
barrage oftechniques have been identified as Griffith "discoveries."
Orwhen this myth of actual invention could notbemaintained,
Griffith was seen asthe man who first gave these techniques
meaning, orused them inan artistic context. Aradical inversionof
this myth has also appeared. In this counter-myth, Griffith is seenas
the betrayer ofapurer idea offilm found in the work ofMelies and
Lumiere, asthe man who introduced the fatal element ofbourgeois
narrative, the Adam from whose fall film isyet to recover.
Likd anymyth of a father's role, both these approaches carry
something of the significance and paradox of Griffith's place in film
history. Yet some attempt to demythologize Griffith's contribution
is necessary, if only tohelp us understand the myth more fully. An
examination of the economic factors at the time of Griffith's
entrance into film shows the extent towhich they determined the
transformations of film form that appear in Griffith's first films.
Griffith's early work must beseen as aparadigm of the development
demanded by the new economic identity film was establishing,
rather than as the magical creation of asemimythical culture
12 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
hero. At the same time, Griffith's work appears curiously overdetermined,
fulfilling certain expectations and aspirations of the film
industry of the time, and yet also running into conflict withthem—
exceeding them. I feel that this excess created atension between
his work and the film industry as an economic entity that was to
pursue Griffith throughout his career. The way Griffith's early style
resulted from certain demands within film economics will be
shown by an examination of the film industry in 1908-1909 and the
treatment of one aspect of hisstyle—parallel editing—during these
years.We may alsofind within the useof parallel editing something
of the tension that would develop between Griffith and the very
conditions which allowed his film style to appear.
Griffith Films in Economic Context: The Years 1908-1909
Any close examination of the early period of film reveals its nonmonolithic
nature. The period from 1895 to 1915, that is, from
Lumiere to The Birth of a Nation, is not a uniform slice of film
history that can be labeled simply "early" or "primitive" film. Our
task must beto find the points of articulation within this period,the
breaks and reroutings in film practice. Practically every year in this
twenty-year period provides something of a milestone in the
development of cinema. But the years 1908-1909 are of a peculiar
nature worth defining. The changes that begin in these years mark
the nature of film until 1913,when other factors begin to dominate.
1908 is ayear not so much of innovation asof crystallization. It is
not the year of the first story film, or of the first full reel (1000-foot)
or the first film exchanges or nickelodeons. Rather, it is the year
when the film industry tried to knit all these developments into a
stable industry. Permanent film theaters, built for the showing of
films, had begun appearing in 1905. A large number of steady
theaters had allowed for the growth of film exchanges asameansof
distribution. The film of one-reel length had become common by
1906. And by 1908 the heads of the film industry saw economic
organization as a way to unite all these factors into an assured
profit-making system.
Theformation in December of 1908of the Motion PicturePatents
Company (MPCC) was to be the means of this stabilization. The
combine wasan agreement between the Edison Film Company and
the other principal American producing companies to end the
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 13
decade of lawsuits over patent infringements, by acknowledging
Edison's priority. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company
felt confident in the strength of its own patents (and the
financial support of the powerful Empire Trust Company) and held
back from joining the combine. However, at the end of 1908,
Biograph was admitted on an equal basis with Edison, and the
MPCC was officially formed.
The MPPC brought to the film industry the kind of organization
that had been dominating American business since before the turn
of the century. Industry had moved away from asystem of competition
between rival firms toward a variety of pooling agreements
and "trusts" which would limit competition. This process hajd
encountered opposition from the government, the strongest being
the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890. However, control of patents
seemed a way to circumvent those restrictions, and it was on this
basis that the MPPC was formed.
Control of patents was only a means to an and. The aim of the
MPPC was total control of the film industry in all its aspects. All of
the major American producing companies were included in the
group (as well as the American representatives of several foreign
companies: Pathe, Melies, Gaumont, and Eclipse). A few inconsequential
American firms and alarge number of European manufacturers
were excluded. To further sew up its control of the production
end of the industry, MPPC worked out acontract with Eastman
Kodak, the world's largest supplier of film stock, for exclusive use of
their film stock. With the company pool of patents, the MPPC
hoped to restrict the American use of any existent motion picture
camera.
In 1909 the MPPC abolished its exclusive contract with the Film
Service Association, an organization of independently owned
exchanges. Setting up its own distribution company, General Film
Company, it intended to exert control over this previously independent
aspect of the business. With its control over patents for
film projectors, it instituted a system of licenses and royalties that
extended its power over exhibitors. The film industry would be
organized horizontally and vertically under the control of the
MPPC.
Ultimately, the "Film Trust" (as it was called by its rivals) failed, for
a number of reasons. But what is important for our purposes is not
the economic defeat of the combine, but rather the desire in
1908-1909 to create a centralized, permanent, and stable industry.
14 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
The MPPC claimed its economic control of the film industry would
"uplift" the motion pictures, improving their content and the
means of exhibition. In July of 1909 The Moving Picture World
praised its success in this direction.1
If we look carefully behind the
Film Trust's rhetoric of reform, we discover a major purpose of the
MPCC—the wooing of a middle-class audience. In most film histories,
this phenomenon is assigned a later date. But it begins (as
Russell Merritt has pointed out2
) during Griffith's work at Biograph.
It is difficult to understand Griffith's early work without being
aware of this background.
The push to make film respectable (i.e. acceptable to the middle
class) opened on two basic fronts: censorship of film content, and
improvement of the theaters in which the films were shown. Both
of these issues had been inflammatory in the hands of anti-film
reformists. These groups had shown their ability to convince
authorities that films were an undersirable anti-social force when,
in December 1908,Mayor McClellan of New York City had ordered
all nickelodeons shut down as a threat to the city's physical and
moral well-being. To succeed in capturing a new audience, the
MPPC had to defuse the criticisms of the reform groups. In 1909The
People's Institute, aliberal-minded reform organization, set up the
National Board of Censorship in association with the MPPC. The
MPPC submitted all films made by its ten-member companies to
this board for review. This support of film censorship had two aims:
to "improve" film content and therefore attract a "better class" of
audience, and to keep censorship out of the hands of the police
and clergy who might deal more harshly with the films than the
producers wanted.
MPPC's drive to improve theaters centered on an issue now
almost forgotten—fear of the dark. The darkness of the motion
picture theater blackened film's image for the respectable classes.
In that darkness, anything could (and perhaps did) happen. Crawling
with real or imagined "mashers," the darkened theater was a
place a middle-class patron hesitated to enter (unless, of course, he
was a masher). The MPPC stressed the possibility of lighting setups
whereby the theater could be light enough to read a newspaper
while the film was projected.3
In an official announcement, the
MPPC declared "the light theater is one of the most desirable
changes that can be made toward the elevation of the motion
picture business."4
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 15
The MPPC did not single-handedly father this desire to elevate
film to the level of middle-class entertainment. The film trade
journals reflect this longing for middle-class respectability as well.
We find this in their discussion of the film theaters. The trade
journals encouraged exhibitors to cater to the creature comforts of
their customers, providing such things as iced water,5
comfortable
chairs, and proper ventilation.6
The Moving Picture World advised
against using sidewalk barkers for film shows, saying "this sort of
thing jars the nerves of refined people/'7
The terms "educational," "instructive/' or "a moral lesson"
appear again and again in the trade journals asajustification of the
film medium. The claim that entertainment was in fact educational
has long been an important ploy in American culture to justify (or
disguise) frivolous pastimes to a middle class still dominated by a
puritan ethic. The need for films whose outlook would be acceptable
to "refined people" became aconstant theme in trade journals
during this period. The National Board of Censorship addressed
itself to this issue, but the journals emphasized its finer points.
"Improve your pictures," said Nickelodeon, "and you will improve
the class of patrons who come to your theater."8
Moving Picture
World noted that Biograph's Confidence, afilm without a chase or
murder, would appeal to the "higher class" audience.9
Along with the drive to eliminate gruesome melodrama or vulgar
comedy, we find during this period a lobbying for the happy
ending as requisite for all films. This enforced optimism seems in
tune with the pursuit of a middle-class audience. An editorial in
Nickelodeon states,"We are living in ahappy, beautiful,virile age..
.. we do not want sighs or tears We are all seeking happiness—
whether through money or position or imagination. It is our privilege
to resent any attempt to force unhappy thoughts on us."10
The
Moving Picture World also sounded this theme, saying in one
review, "We object to being made sad in motion picture houses."11
All of this defines the years 1908-1909 as the origin of a unified
effort to attract the middle class to motion pictures, an effort that
extends over the whole span of Griffith's work at Biograph (1908-
1913). As Russell Merritt has pointed out, these are transition years,
when film was still catering to the working class, while wooing the
bourgeois.12
This is the context within Griffith's Biograph work
must be seen: aperiod of, on the one hand,the economic stabilization
of a large industry reaching a mass audience, and on the other
16 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
hand the decision of that industry that its ultimate stability lay in its
attaining social respectability.
Attracting a middle-class audience entailed more than lighting
the theater and brightening the content of the films. The narrative
structure of the films would have to be brought more in line with
the traditions of bourgeois representation. One of the clearest
signs of this is the films made in 1908-1909 based on famous plays,
novels, and poems. Before 1908,the primary sources for films seem
to have been vaudeville and burlesque sketches, fairy tales, comic
strips, and popular songs. These forms stressed spectacular effects
or physical action, rather than psychological motivation. Although
still in an elementary form, film now looked toward more respectable
narrative models and the problems they entailed.
Many of the adaptations that appeared were greeted with the
same complaints by trade journals: the audience did not understand
them.13
Film had not yet developed anarrative style suited to
the bourgeois traditions it wished to emulate. The emphasis of
earlier films had been on the technical mastery of magical effects
(as in the "trick" films of Melies and Pathe) and the creation of a
unified geography from shot to shot in the chase films. The need
now appeared for a series of film techniques that could articulate
the narrative elements and involve the audience in their unfolding.
Parallel editing, with its fracturing of the natural continuity of the
actions, is one of the most important of these new techniques and
the film technique with which the name of Griffith is most clearly
tied. Through parallel editing we sense the hand of the story-teller
as he moves us from place to place, weaving a new continuity of
narrative logic. The development of parallel editing can be seen
not simply as the product of Griffith's individual genius, but as a
response to the demand for a more complex narrative style. More
investigation is needed of the use of parallel editing by other
filmmakers during this period. It may be that what I have to say
about Griffith's style is that it is merely typical of film style of the
period. However, my preliminary investigation of other filmmakers
seems to indicate that Griffith's use of the technique exceeds that
of other filmmakers and has a larger variety of meanings. This
excess and variety of meanings may represent Griffith's movement
beyond the style demanded by the times.
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 17
Parallel Editing at Biograph: Meanings and Implications
In alecture at NYU, Noel Burch gave ahandy schema for describing
the editing of early film. He pointed out that there are three basic
spatial relations possible between any two shots. The first, which he
called alterity, is the movement from one location to an entirely
different one (for instance, in Porter's TheGreat Train Robbery, the
edit from the girl untying the telegraph operator in his office to the
interior of the dance hall). The next possibility—proximity—is an
edit from one space to a space very near yet different from it. This
obviously shades into alterity, but aclear example of it would be an
edit from a character opening a door in an interior to an exterior
shot of the character emerging from the door. Most shot/countershot
patterns would be examples of proximity. The third spatial
relation would be for a shot to include part of the space of the
preceding shot. The classical example of this would be acut-in to a
closeup of something previously seen in the preceding master shot
(e.g., the closeup of the wrench near the end of The Lonedale
Operator). The cut from such a closeup back to the master shot
would also be included in this category. Although Burch does not
use this term, I will call this spatial articulation overlap.
Parallel editing is a subclass of alterity. The traditional definition
of the term would be alterity with the qualification of simultaneous
time for the events within the shots. The classical examples of
parallel editing are sequences of shots which alternate from one
location, or group of characters, to another, with the indication
that the actions are occurring at the same time. Closely related to
this strict definition of parallel editing—and in Griffith's Biograph
films at points difficult to separate from it—are alternating patterns
of shots which do not necessarily happen simultaneously. (Christian
Metz's term "alternating syntagm" in his essay "Some Points in
the Semiotics of Cinema/' which would include both patterns,
might be useful here. However, Metz later separated the patterns
more completely into "parallel syntagm" and "alternating syn-
tagm."14
) The basic structure underlying much of Griffith's editing
at Biograph is this pattern of interweaving one location or action
with another, of interrupting one line of narrative development by
a separate one.
The history of parallel editing before 1908 still needs to be written.
Although isolated examples of it appear before 1908 (particularly
in European films), it is extremely rare in American films
18 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
before Griffith. Further research may reveal that the role of Griffith
in making it acommon element in film narrative will be hisstrongest
claim asone of the fathers of the narrative film style. Inanycase,
by 1909 Griffith structures parallel editing in such a way that the
pattern overrides the unfolding of action within individual shots.In
1908Griffith had already cut between two threads of actions (from
rescuers speeding to save victims from some imminent disaster,
such as a lynching about to take place, or a mechanically rigged
pistol about to go off) to build suspense. With TheDrive for Life
(1909), Griffith begins to place his edits so that they interrupt the
action at a crucial point, in the middle of a gesture. In this film a
woman scorned has sent her ex-lover's fiancee a box of poisoned
chocolates. The lover finds out and rushes off in a car to warn his
fiancee.Griffith cutsfrom the speeding automobile to the innocent
girl at home about to eat the chocolates. At the end of each shot of
the fiancee,she isin the middle of anaction: holding the chocolate
to her lips or opening her mouth. Of course when we cut back to
her,she hasn't eaten the chocolate (sheisinterrupted by hersisters,
or drops it, or merely kisses it). Griffith builds suspense, then, not
only by cutting away from the dangerous situation, but also by
placing his edit at a point where the action is incomplete. The
pattern of the editing overrides the natural unfolding of theaction.
The action's continuity is noticeably interrupted, its unity sliced
and its development suspended,bythe structure of the shots.One
senses,then,the intervention of the storyteller, the manipulator of
narrative signs, who directly invokes the audience's participation
by withholding—for a moment—the desired information.
Griffith used a structure similar to parallel editing in nonsuspensesequences
aswell. The most famous example of this isinA
Corner in Wheat(1909). In this film Griffith cuts from the financial
gain of the Wheat King to the suffering he causes farmers and the
poor. In this case the primary thrust of Griffith's editing is not
simultaneity (though that is not ruled out) but contrast (Metz's
"parallel syntagm"). This contrast pattern of editing, alternating
rich with poor, is found in a number of Griffith's Biograph films.
First sketched in The Song of the Shirt (1908),it also appears inThe
Usurer (1910),Gold IsNot All (1910),and One IsBusiness, the Other
Is Crime (1912). The interweaving in these films of rich and poor,
exploiters and exploited, isarticulated by pairs of shots that sharply
contrast. The death of apoverty-stricken woman is cut with bosses
eating heartily at a restaurant (The Songof the Shirt); The Wheat
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 19
King's lavish entertainment is contrasted with poor people unable
to buy bread (A Corner in Wheat); a poor couple plays with their
children while a rich woman's daughter dies (Gold Is Not All). The
intervention here of the storyteller allows the creation of a moral
voice, who not only involves the audience in reading the narrative
signs—recognizing the contrast—but also instructs them by causing
them to draw a moral conclusion.
It is interesting to note that, in The Usurer, a1910 near remake of
A Corner in Wheat, Griffith combines this contrast pattern with the
practice of suspending the outcome of an action by an edit. In one
shot we see Henry Walthall as a poor man ruined by the Usurer's
greed. He stands alone in his apartment, points a gun to his breast,
and shuts his eyes. We cut to the usurer at a lavish party raising his
glass. We return to Walthall staggering and falling dead on the
floor. The pattern here is very interesting. On the one hand we
have the structure, already established in the film, of contrasting
the evil joys of the rich with the miseries of the poor. In addition, we
have the intensification given by interrupting actions (both the
pistol shot and the Usurer's raised glass; in the shot following
Walthall's death we return to the usurer as he drinks). The editing
pattern (and particularly the ellipses of the actual firing of the gun,
which presumably occurs while we see the usurer raise his glass)
certainly seems to indicate simultaneity. The edit involves a degree
of suspense, but since no rescue is attempted this is not the main
effect of the edit. The ironic juxtaposition with its indication of
cause and effect becomes the principal meaning. Later in the film,
Griffith cuts from the usurer, accidentally locked in his own safe
and beginning to suffocate, to Walthall's dead body, underscoring
the irony.
In Griffith's later Biograph films, some form of alternating pattern
increasingly underlies the narrative form, even in cases that don't
involve suspense or contrast. In 1912 and 1913, the first two shots
frequently introduce two characters (or two groups of characters)
before they have actually met. The characters' stories will be intercut
in the opening sections of the film until a scene where they are
finally narratively linked. Such interweaving seems to be Griffith's
basic narrative schema. Griffith also further articulates its use for
dramatic effects. In A Woman Scorned (1911), Griffith uses interruption
of an action and contrast to accent an act of violence. A
doctor (Wilfred Lucas) has been lured to an apartment by agang of
thieves who knock him unconscious. As he falls, we cut on this
20 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
action to his wife and child at home sitting down to supper. In this
shot, the father's empty place at the table is prominent in the left
foreground. Although one might be dubious that this is intentional
(similar structuring of space across edits in other Biograph films
leads me to think that it is), it is worth pointing out that this empty
place occupies the same area of the frame that Lucas collapsed into
in the previous shot.
Later in the same film, Griffith enhances a contrast edit by presenting
two radically opposed but visually similar actions. He cuts
from the mother untying her daughter's shoes as she lies on her
bed to the thieves tying a gag on Lucas, who is also lying in bed. By
this kind of visual rhyming, Griffith develops a visual structure that
overlays and articulates the narrative action taking place in the
shots themselves. This elaboration of the formal elements of the
shots beyond the necessary narrative information is one of the
clearest examples of Griffith's tendency to make the storyteller
evident to the audience. The act of arranging the narrative information
becomes as important as simply conveying it.
During the Biograph period,Griffith's use of patterns of alternating
shots takes on several meanings, usually distinguishable from
each other, but at points shading into one another, as though not
yet moulded into rigid formulas. The meanings of parallel editing
patterns become particularly complex when they are used in relation
to the psychological development of characters. Very early in
his career appears a type of parallel editing based on the thoughts
of his characters. Here we can see Griffith using parallel editing to
provide one of the most basic desiderata of abourgeois narrative—
psychological motivation. Bythe intercutting of disparate locations
and characters within certain narrative contexts, Griffith creates,as
it were, a sort of psychological space. Significantly, its first use is in
an adaptation of a respected literary source, his 1908 version of
Tennyson's Enoch Arden, After Many Years.
The intercutting of the faithful wife at home with her distant
shipwrecked husband provides one of Griffith's first cuts on action.
As the husband on his desert island kisses his wife's locket, we cut
back to her standing on her porch, arms outstretched, asif yearning
for her absent husband; the splicing together of the gestures metaphorically
unites the characters across vast space. Later in the Biograph
period, Griffith's editing frequently joins characters separated
in space. The vehicle of these connections is often a prayer
(The Fugitive, The Broken Locket, TheLast Deal, A Pueblo Legend).
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 21
Many shots of this sort include a token of the absent person, a
locket or necklace, which the characters gaze at as they long for
reunion (Rose of Salem Town, The Broken Locket, After Many
Years). This pattern is often combined not only with an interrupted
action (like the kiss in After Many Years), but also with acontrast. In
The Fugitive, for instance, we cut from a mother praying, to her
son's death on the battlefield. The defining quality of the parallel
editing in these instances is its participation in the characters'
desires; the motive for the editing springs from their desire to cross
space and join their loved ones. Through the editing their emotional
union is stressed alongwith their physical separation.
There are films in which the expression of an emotional sympathy
between separated characters takes on anearly supernatural
overtone. This is especially true in those cuts where the simultaneity
of events is stressed. In both As It Is in Life (1910) and In Life's
Cycle (1910), Griffith cuts from a pair of lovers embracing to a male
relative of the girl far removed from the scene.The relatives (who in
both films disapprove of the girl's lover) suddenly look very disturbed
or shiver involuntarily. When we return in the following
shot to the couple of In Life's Cycle, the girl too suddenly looks
upset, as if aware of her brother's distant disapproval.
In Sunshine Sue (1910), Griffith expresses this type of emotional
connection over distances through composition as well as editing.
A beloved daughter (Marion Sunshine) is first introduced playing
the piano for her parents. Later in the film she is stranded, penniless,
in a big city. Getting ajob at a music store, she is preyed upon
by the store's manager. Upset, she leans against a piano in the left
foreground of the shot and weeps. Griffith cuts to her father in the
family parlor looking at apiano (which is associated with the daughter
from the first shot) and patting it fondly. Not only do both shots
contain pianos, both pianos occupy the left foreground of the
frame. Through this edit and the similar arrangement of space in
each shot, Griffith transfers the father's caress from the piano to his
distant daughter who occupies the same area of the frame in the
preceding shot.
Less dramatic than these shots of emotional union, but perhaps
more revealing of the psychological meanings Griffith derived
from parallel editing, is what I will call the "motive shot." An early
example of this kind of editing appears in A Salvation Army Lass
(1908). A tough (Harry Salter) has scorned his girlfriend's (Florence
Lawrence) attempt to dissuade him from joining a burglary with his
22 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
cronies, and has knocked her down. As he and his gang creep along
the edge of a building, he suddenly stops and looks off screen.
Griffith cuts to a brief shot of Lawrence still on the ground. In the
next shot we return to Salter, who changes his mind about the
burglary, hands his gun back to his companions, and leaves the
frame. The editing pattern articulates and explains Salter's decision.
It splits in two the moment when Salter changes his course of
action, interrupting it with a shot of the factor that causes the
change. The editing portrays a mental act and supplies a motive for
the action ("He thinks of his true love ").
However, it isthe double nature of this shot which reveals the still
fluid stage in the evolution of film syntax which characterizes
Griffith's Biograph films. The shot of Lawrence is not univocally
defined as a mental image, released from the objective space and
time of the diegesis. The use of parallel editing remains an intervention
of the storyteller who "points out" the character's motivation,
rather than assigning the shot unambiguously to the subjectivity of
the character. Salter's off-screen look could define the shot of
Lawrence as an awkward sort of point-of-view shot. Or we could
stress the simultaneity of the shot and see it as a strict parallel edit,
conveying the information of what is happening to Lawrence as
Salter sets off on the burglary. But since it neither offers new
narrative information (at most it tells us that Lawrence is still lying
there), nor develops asuspense situation, its articulation of Salter's
decision remains its primary effect.
This three-shot pattern frequently recurs in Griffith's Biograph
films to portray a decision by a character. Its appearance in A Plain
Song (1910) is typical. A girl (Mary Pickford) is leaving her aged
parents and running off with acarnival man.At the train station,she
sees a group of old people being taken off to the poor house.
Struck by the scene, Pickford stands motionless in the foreground.
Griffith cuts to her parents at home. We then return to Pickford, still
frozen in her previous position. The carnival man approaches with
the train tickets, but she turns away from him and runs home. Again
the interpolated shot of the parents articulates and motivates a
decision. In this case there is no possibility of its being a point-ofview
shot. Mary's frozen stance, asif she were in deep thought, also
stresses the psychological nature of the shot. We can find the same
pattern in The SandsO' Dee (1912). Mae Marsh has decided not to
keep an arranged meeting with an artist on the beach. She stands
motionless by her window. We cut to ashot of the artist wrapped in
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 23
ashawl,waiting at the beach. We cut back to Mae, who apparently
has changed her mind and climbs out her window to keep the
assignation.
I n both these instances, we must hesitate before we describe the
interpolated shot purely as a mental image. Pickford's parents are
waiting at home for her, and the artist is waiting on the beach for
Mae. The shot of the artist includes details that Mae could not
"imagine/' such as his paisley shawl. The shots therefore are also
parallel edits to events occurring at the same time. This dual role of
expressions of the characters' thoughts and parallel edits to autonomous
events shows the still pliable nature of Griffith's film syntax
at this point.
Interestingly, in 1913, we find Griffith modifying this pattern,
probably in order to present the interpolated shot more unequivocally
asamental image. In the opening of Death's Marathon (1913),
a clerk (Walter Miller) looks up from his work with a dreamy
expression. The next shot begins extremely underexposed and
then brightens in acamera-made "fade-in." We see agirl (Blanche
Sweet) seated on a bench in a garden facing the camera in a rather
static posture (this is her first appearance in the film). The shot fades
and we return to Miller, who rouses himself as if to shake off his
reverie and return to work. The use of fades and the actionless shot
of Sweet seem to signal the shot as Miller's mental image, rather
than a parallel edit which indicates that Sweet is sitting in a garden
at this precise moment. It is in this way that Griffith presents memories
in The Birth of aNation, by athoughtful look of acharacter and
an interpolated shot bracketed by fades. The fades signal an
entrance into another dimension, that of unequivocal mental
images. However, even this example is not an unambiguous image
of a single character's subjectivity. The three shots from Death's
Marathon just described are themselves bracketed by two shots of
Walthall, who plays a coworker of Miller. Walthall too is in love
with Sweet, and this rivalry forms the basic dynamic of the plot. At
the end of the first shot of Walthall he pauses. When we return to
him after the shots of Miller and Sweet, he too seems to be emerging
from adaydream. The shot of Sweet, then, could be interpreted
as a shared mental image. Again the pattern seems to be a gesture
of the storyteller unwilling to relinquish the authority of the image
to the subjectivity of any one character.
Griffith's use of parallel editing in the films at Biograph created
not only anarrative form, but aform of narration, astoryteller to tell
24 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES / Winter 1981
the story. Through parallel editing Griffith could create suspense
by interrupting action and delaying information, make moral
judgements, underscore characters' desires,and reveal motivation.
All of these techniques fulfilled essential conditions for a new
bourgeois narrative form, the rival of theater and the novel. However,the
process of fulfilling these demands does not explain away
all effects of the technique.The multiple meanings gained from this
one technique in different situations show something of its enormous
power and far-reaching implications. By breaking the continuity
of actions, by composingsimilarly frames that areseparated in
space, by interpolating shots in the middle of decisions, Griffith
both creates afissure in the continuity of the narrative and formsa
synthesis on a new level. Griffith's editing becomes a noticeable
force which suspends, interrupts, and yet knits together actions
within his narratives. What is sensed behind this narrative labor is
the storyteller. This invisible but sensed hand will reach its apogee
in Griffith's commercial disaster Intolerance. The "uniter of here
and hereafter" will prove an obstacle to much of his audience,a
frustration rather than a guide. Already towards the end of his
tenure at Biograph the trade journals (which had praised some of
his earlier films for their "high class" appeal) were finding his style
too disjoined, too brutal, and were complaining about the large
number of shots in Biograph films,the disorienting nature of their
editing.15
This kind of dissatisfaction may have had a role in the
tension between company executives and Griffith that led to his
leaving Biograph in 1913.
Increasingly in the feature era, the storyteller would blend indistinguishably
into the unfolding of the action of the narrative,
and Griffith's style would be found old-fashioned or clumsy. Writing
the history of this process and the many factors that contribute
to it—the rise of the studio style aspioneered by Ince, the imporance
of film stars, and a new economic organization of the film
industry—will require agreat deal of new research.Griffith's place
within that history iscomplex. But it isclear that Griffith's development
of parallel editing during the Biograph years opens atradition
that not only moves toward the invisible editing of the classical
Hollywood narrative, but also to (as he was the first to admit) the
radical understanding of montage in the films of Sergei Eisenstein.
TomGunning writeson film from New York City.
GUNNING / Weaving a Narrative 25
Notes
1. The Moving Picture World, Vol. 5, pp. 82, 84.
2. Russell, Merritt, "The Films of D. W. Griffith and Their Social Impact (1908-
1915)" unpublished PhD. dissertation, Harvard University, p. 196.
3. The Edison Kinetogram, October 15, 1909, p. 2.
4. The Moving Picture World, Vol. 4, p.631.
5. The Nickelodeon, Vol. 2, p. 5.
6. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 101.
7. The Moving Picture World, Vol. 5, p. 443.
8. The Nickelodeon, Vol. 2, p. 13.
9. The Moving Picture World, Vol. 4, p. 476.
10. The Nickelodeon, Vol. 2, p. 135.
11. The Moving Picture World, Vol. 5, p. 278.
12. Merritt, op. cit., pp. 196-198.
13. See. for example, the reviews of Edison's productions of Molnar's The Devil
and Halm's Ingomar in TheNew York Dramatic Mirror, September 19,1908, p. 9, and
The Moving Picture World, Vol. 3, p. 231, respectively.
14. Christian Metz, Film Language (New York, 1974), p. 104.
15. Samples of such reviews can be found in George Pratt,Spellbound in Darkness
(Greenwich, Connecticut, 1973), pp. 95-105.