From Theatre Magazine, June 1914, 311–12, 314, 316.
It has been quite the fashion to say that the motion picture profession (art if you prefer) is in its infancy. This is true, for no invention since the printing press has contained such possibilities for future development. But the implication that the business of making motion pictures is today of small moment is not true. If money talks, here are items which are convincing.
Several American directors are paid over twenty thousand dollars a year; a number over ten thousand. One has refused an offer which meant a salary in excess of that of the President of the United States. The owners, many of them starting with nothing, are millionaires several times over. Leading actors everywhere are paid from one hundred to three hundred dollars a week, and this— leading actors in the spoken drama please take notice— for fifty-two weeks a year. One girl, under twenty, has for some time been making a salary equal to that of a bank president.
It is not easy to comprehend the size of their audience. To say that ten million people a day go to picture shows in this country alone is to speak within the truth, but it is difficult to visualize such an audience. Just the effort is inspiring. It is not possible to estimate the world’s attendance, but it must run up to many millions more.
All this both causes and is caused by rapid development in the profession. Aside from purely mechanical improvements, numerous as they have been, the past few years has seen a progress in the art of pictures plays which has meant practically a new form of dramatic expression. This has been so largely the work of one person that to-day he stands the acknowledged leader.
Yet for a long time even the name of the producer who is revolutionizing motion pictures by his work for a company organized by himself was unknown except to the elect. And in fact, even now, in spite of the pressure of the public’s interest in the affairs of those who serve it, little is known of the man himself except his name. And yet to David Wark Griffith do motion pictures owe much of the wonderful artistic advance they have made in the past six years.
Mr. Griffith is peculiarly an inspiration to other directors, and the perfection of his technique is, of course, more keenly appreciated by them than by the larger audience, the public, which knows little of the means by which the effect it applauds is produced. By directors throughout the profession he is accorded first place, without question or quibbling; by the members of his company he is followed with a devotion that has knit them into an unsurpassed organization; and the public at large has responded to his work as it has to no other one man.
A boyhood bent for writing poetry, shared with youth the world over, was realized to the extent of one or two acceptances by leading magazines. He smiles at it now, and evidently sees no connection between that early ambition and his present work. But the writer, seeking to analyze his achievements, felt on hearing this that the keynote had been sounded.
In the last analysis, Mr. Griffith approaches the theme of a play essentially as a poet. The director who produced Pippa Passes, A Blot on the ’Scutcheon, Enoch Arden (the first two-reel photoplay), A Pueblo Legend, Man’s Genesis, The Wanderer,1 as he did, could be nothing less. Certainly his standard is far removed from the theatrical. Its jargon does not mark his speech nor do its confining traditions limit his method of plot development, vividly dramatic though that method is. Indeed, he denies that motion pictures can be served by looking to the current stage for inspiration.
“Moving pictures can get nothing from the legitimate stage,” he says, “because American directors and playwrights have nothing to offer. The former are, for the most part, conventional and care nothing for natural acting. They don’t know how to make use of even the material they have, limited as that is. Of course, there are a few, a very few exceptions. As for American playwrights, we can get our ideas from the same sources as they. We need to depend on the stage for our actors and actresses least of all. How many of them make you believe they are real human beings? No, they ‘act,’ that is, they use a lot of gestures and make a lot of sounds such as are never seen or heard anywhere else. For range and delicacy, the development of character, the quick transition from one mood to another, I don’t known an actress now on the American stage, I don’t care how great her reputation, who can begin to touch the work of some of the motion picture actresses. And I’ll give you the names if you want them.
“As far as the public is concerned, there is no real competition between the stage and the motion picture. It doesn’t exist. The latter makes an appeal which the former never has and never can hope to meet, not only because of its physical limitations, but because most of its managers, directors, and actors are bound by tradition. They don’t know human emotion. They don’t know human nature and they don’t care to find out about it. James A. Herne,2 who wrote plays with real people in them, is only just beginning to be rightly appreciated years after his death. Wonderful Mrs. Fiske is, of course, one of the exceptions, too.”
With this faith in the possibilities of the medium in which he works, it is hardly necessary to say that each of the several steps in the development of motion pictures which he has originated has enhanced their poetic and their natural as opposed to their theatric value. Each has served to bring them closer to Nature, further from the playhouse. This is the Alpha and Omega of his ambition. The poetic element which accompanies this advance is inevitable, but he seems quiet unconscious of it, or at least not to have analyzed it.
He traces his descent from a long line of Welsh and Irish patriots— the romantic daring Celtic type, which had ideals, and fought and died for them. Griffith is a name with which Welsh history fairly bristles, and there has been a David Wark from the time when it was “ap-Griffith” in the sturdy clans among the Welsh mountains to the present holder of the name. His immediate family have been Southerners for four generations, and he himself is a Kentuckian— the son of Brigadier-General Jacob Wark Griffith of the Confederate Army. With such a gallant heritage, it was only natural that the stage should have appealed to the romanticism and poetry of the Celt in him, and that these, combined with the executive, courage, and single-hearted devotion which inspired his ancestors in their various courses, should have brought him to his present development.
Eight years on the stage, during which time he also wrote for magazines and began a playwright’s career with a play produced by James K. Hackett, preceded his entrance into motion pictures, where he is now in his eighth year. He became a director of the Biograph Co. after a few months of acting, and Biograph photoplays soon began to show the effects of his eager originality.
He was the first director to set his scenes in the midst of great stretches of territory— with the characters standing out on the sky-line, barely to be seen in the distance, then sweeping down into the valleys below with a rush that stirs the imagination. There is an epic quality to work of this kind which is wonderfully effective, but Mr. Griffith employs it now but seldom, and then only in themes which would be hampered by any less dashing handling. His evolution has been steadily from crowds to individuals, and the next step carried it so far as to be revolutionary.
This was the introduction of the large figures. Not only was the illusion heightened by making the characters life-size or larger, but it permitted the use of quiet, slow, natural action and subtle expression— obviously a complete change in the technique of picture acting, without which picture plays could never have become what they are now. Stated concisely, it put a premium on brains and lessened the importance of muscular energy as a means of character interpretation.
Scarcely a month passes that a Griffith picture does not introduce some bit of action, novelty in the mechanics of photography or form of expression that makes his métier more flexible. Now it would be forest scenes which looked like one exquisite Corot after another. Or a device to raise suspense to the nth power, as when he introduced endless flash scenes. Again, and often, it was a device to heighten pathos or to bring out the lyrical quality of what would otherwise seem matter-of-fact, as in fading the scene to darkness, or opening black and lightening gradually. One can hardly credit the strength of the illusion created by this in some situations, such as the passing of a night of sorrow and the dawn of a new day. These are a few instances from many that might be listed.
Practically all of Mr. Griffith’s devices have been adopted or adapted by directors both in this country and abroad, so that wherever he may see a photoplay, by whomsoever made, the picture “fan” is looking at technique largely developed by this American producer.
Next in importance to the large figures is the pioneer work he is doing in releasing a film in whatever length may be necessary to tell the story properly. Only writers who have seen their plays stretched to the breaking point or hacked into a distorted jumble to fit the iron-bound measure of a thousand feet can appreciate what this will mean to the photoplay as a thing of logical development and construction.
As with themes, settings and camera work, so with the members of his company. He knows how to get the best results from his material, whether it is a temperamental actor or a strip of celluloid film. His company has been a real school for both actors and directors, and the list of well-known members of the profession who owe much to his training and influence would be impressive.
To see him at work in a location, correcting the last detail in the sweep of a battle scene, for example; or in the studio, molding a plot through the development of one or two characters (work vastly more difficult and to his liking) is to understand something of the reason of his success. He is keen, quick to praise, compelling, enthusiastic, and poised. Apparently, when things go wrong; when, let us say, a hundred supers ride furiously away in the wrong direction, out of earshot, it may seem to the careless observer that the Chief is pretty thoroughly perturbed about it, and the supers will certainly get that impression on their return. In reality it has not so much touched the surface of a poise as strongly entrenched as it is rare. Then, there is a sense of humor, truly Celtic in both its abundance and the aptness of its expression; and a memory so highly trained that he directs without manuscript or notes. To do that with the spoken drama, four acts played consecutively by a cast of fifteen or twenty, within the four walls of a theatre, is not so difficult. Just kindly think what it means with a play of three hundred scenes, all those in one setting being taken at one time, regardless of the numerical sequence, with two hundred actors scattered over several acres of land. To accomplish all this with due regard to the thousands of details involved is nothing less than marvelous.
As implied, the productions for which Mr. Griffith is responsible are, in the last analysis, poetic, but it is not poetry which is transcendental or which is satisfied with vague generalities concerning beauty and art. Like the greatest of the poets whose written word he has visualized, it is humanity which interests him. And, like that poet, in all that touches the human heart he finds material to his hand and interprets even the sordid and weak in human nature in the light of an idealism founded on understanding.
1. Pippa Passes or, The Song of Conscience, released October 4, 1909; A Blot on the ’Scutcheon, released January 29, 1912; Enoch Arden, released June 12 and June 15, 1911; A Pueblo Legend, released August 29, 1912; Man’s Genesis, released July 11, 1912; The Wanderer, released May 3, 1913.
2. James A. Herne (1839–1901) is best known for Hearts of Oak (1879) and Shore Acres (1892).