Man's Genesis (1912)

A "psychological comedy founded on Darwin's theory of the Genesis of Man," as the film's subtitle puts it, about a scrawny but intelligent caveman called Weak Hands (Robert Harron), whose romance with the beautiful Lily White (Mae Marsh) is threatened by the big, burly Brute Force (Wilfred Lucas). Setting out to win back his lost love, Weak Hands conceives of the first weapon to defeat his opponent, attaching a sharp rock to a stick which he uses as a club to bludgeon Brute Force to death. Brains win out over brawn. The whole "caveman" gimmick is framed as a flashback device, bookended by modern day segments in which a grandfather preaches the importance of non-violence to his grandson after he catches the boy antagonizing his sister with a stick (his message of non-violence would seem to be contradicted by the outcome of his story, but no matter).

As the description indicates, it's very heavy-handed and blunt in its storytelling and characterizations, and contains none of the technical innovations that mark Griffith's most interesting work from this period. It seems that by 1912, he was clearly reaching the limitations of narrative filmmaking within the one- and two-reel format. Griffith was quoted as comparing the production methods at Biograph to "grinding out sausages", a furious rate of production which of course allowed him to learn much and make great strides in a short period of time, but which has its inevitable drawbacks that become clear in an uninspired effort like this. His "pet project" during his last days at Biograph was the four-reel JUDITH OF BETHULIA, which pointed the way to the large-scale epics on which he'd soon embark. MAN'S GENESIS feels like Griffith going through the motions.

The film is available for viewing at the Internet Archive.

Book Review: "The Films of D.W. Griffith" by Scott Simmon

A superb survey of the types of films Griffith was making during his creatively fertile tenure at Biograph, Scott Simmon's "The Films of D.W. Griffith" (Cambridge University Press, 1993) is rich in analysis and scope. After a chapter situating Griffith within both American culture and film history, Simmon devotes four chapters to specific themes within Griffith's work: the urban spaces of his city dramas, the role of female characters in the "woman's pictures", family honor in The Birth of a Nation and other Civil War pictures, and, finally, the role of film as a tool of reform, in relation to Intolerance.

In dealing with Griffith's overwhelming 450-plus film output, Simmon takes a wise approach in discussing one representative film per each year of his Biograph period (1908-1913). This allows for a thoughtful examination, not only in terms of the themes Simmon discusses, but how Griffith's approach to those themes changed or remained consistent over the first five years of his directorial career. Included is a convenient listing of all the titles Simmon discusses in the book, which provides a good starting point for readers to study this vast period of Griffith's career in greater detail. Thankfully, Griffith is unique among early filmmakers in that nearly all of his output (with the exception of maybe ten or so films) survives, making it easier to have something closer to a comprehensive survey of his work than is possible for other filmmakers of the era.

A Child of the Ghetto (1910)

One-reel melodrama, one of hundreds directed by D.W. Griffith during his time at the Biograph company. The plot is fairly simple: a young Jewish girl, living and struggling to find work in the crowded conditions of New York's Lower East Side, is falsely accused of theft. She eludes the police by riding a streetcar out to the country, where she meets a kindly young farmer who takes her in. By coincidence, the policeman and his friend head out to the country to do some fishing on the weekend, and end up stopping at the farmhouse where the girl is now hiding. The policeman recognizes her, but, after taking a long look at her, has a change of heart and decides to let her go.

As Scott Simmon notes in "The Films of D.W. Griffith", the film plays on the commonly-explored contrast between the poverty and squalor of the big city, and the idyllic, pastoral country. Griffith's use of contrasting locations is handled effectively enough, but what makes the film really remarkable is the shot (reproduced above) taken on Rivington St. in New York, apparently with a concealed camera. The actor playing the policeman (George Nichols) moves about the actual crowd, with the young boy on the right reacting to the "officer's" presence after he has passed by.

Griffith's impeccable eye for detail and composition resulted in some impressive re-creations of urban street scenes noted for their high degree of realism, in such film as The Musketeers of Pig Alley and Intolerance. Here, though, Griffith uses the real thing -- and it creates a powerful moment of authenticity that breathes with life.

"Young Indiana Jones" and D.W. Griffith

One of the delights of George Lucas' Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was that its creators had an obvious love of the movies that was apparent throughout the series, which was unusually cinematic for a television program at that time. One of the later made-for-TV movies, Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies (1994) was built entirely around Indy's brush with silent era Hollywood, being tasked by Irving Thalberg to keep Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives from going over-budget, and joining John Ford and his company on location during the shooting of a Western. This episode was clearly made by people with a real knowledge of the historical figures, places and films of old Hollywood.

But earlier in the series, in the first two-part episode that aired in 1992, there is another silent film reference to be found. The episode, "The Curse of the Jackal", involved Indy traveling south of the border on spring break from college, and getting mixed up with Pancho Villa and his troops. In one scene, following a violent raid, the revolutionaries attend a movie to unwind. Indy is on hand to provide translation of the subtitles for the men, who are moved to tears by the tender love story, set against the backdrop of the Civil War, that is unfolding on screen before them in flickering, black and white images accompanied by a tinkling piano.

The movie is D.W. Griffith's The Battle, which he made for the Biograph company in 1911 and was one of a number of films the director made dealing with the subject of the Civil War. The actors in the shot above are Charles West, a leading man at Biograph who would continue acting in bit parts until 1940; and Blanche Sweet, who was a favorite leading lady of Griffith's during this period, appearing in such films as The Massacre and Judith of Bethulia.

The premise of The Battle involves a young soldier in the Union army who is separated from his girlfriend when he is called to march into war. During the fighting, he becomes panic-stricken, deserts his fellow soldiers, and seeks refuge in the girl's house. She laughs at him and brands him a coward, but when the boy sees his comrades facing almost certain defeat at the hands of the enemy, he summons up the courage to go back to fight, commandeering a supply wagon and delivering the troops with the ammunition they need to win the battle. In the end, he is reunited with the girl and recognized for his bravery.

Overall, it is a fairly routine melodrama, one of many of its kind that Griffith turned out during this period of his career. It is mainly of interest for some well-staged battle scenes that play like a kind of warm-up for The Birth of a Nation. I had seen the clip of the film used in the Young Indiana Jones episode years before I saw the actual film in its entirety; when I finally did, I recognized it instantly, and was reminded of the attention to historical detail that made the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles such a rewarding program to watch.

I wonder if Pancho Villa and his men ever actually saw the film?

The Curtain Pole (1909)

Early American slapstick comedy, directed by D.W. Griffith and starring future comedy producer Mack Sennett as a French dandy who goes in search of a new curtain pole to replace the one he has broken. Transporting the pole back through the streets, he proceeds to wreck everything in his path, causing the irate townspeople to give chase.

It is an atypical effort for Griffith, and a rather impersonal one, being just one of the many short subjects he directed for Biograph during this time (and shot on the streets of Fort Lee, NJ). While it demonstrates his penchant for rousing chase sequences, the staging and editing feel loose and rather clumsy compared to his best dramatic efforts of the period, though are certainly moments of effective slapstick (mostly involving Sennett in a runaway carriage). Clearly inspired by the French chase comedies of the Pathe company, it is mainly of interest now as a forerunner of the kind of screen comedy that its star would perfect at Keystone a few years later.

As it is in Life (1910)

AS IT IS IN LIFE is one of the hundreds of films directed by D.W. Griffith in that incredibly rich and innovative period of his tenure at Biograph, from 1908 to 1913. It is also one of the most singularly beautiful works he created during this time, demonstrating his especially sophisticated use of depth and movement within the frame.

The story itself is unremarkable: a poor father finds work at a pigeon farm, after being forced to beg and explaining that he has a daughter to feed. He is reunited with an old sweetheart, whom he intends to marry. Upon realizing that he can't support both a wife and a child, he sacrifices the relationship in order to take care of his daughter.

Years later, the daughter returns home from school and greets her aging, worn father, vowing to care for him in his old age. However, when she falls in love with a young man, it tears her relationship with her father apart. Feeling broken and betrayed, the father goes away. Later the boy and girl are married, and the girl - now a mother - is reunited with her father, who rejoices over his new grandchild.

With its conventional plot, AS IT IS IN LIFE would not be held in particularly high regard today for its narrative advances or character development. It is, however, remarkable for its use of a location, in this case the California Pigeon Farm, which Griffith uses to visually breathtaking effect. Indeed, the film seems to have been built around the fact that Griffith and company had access to film at the pigeon farm. With its seemingly hundreds of birds flying and fluttering around in the background, Griffith achieves a total sense of movement within these shots.

Similar to reports that audiences at the first Lumiere screenings in 1895 were as impressed with the moving foliage in the background as they were with the foreground action, AS IT IS IN LIFE is most interesting for its use of background motion. The pigeons add a real sense of depth to each shot as well, as we see them grouped from the foreground all the way in to the background.

There is a recurring image that is particularly effective. It is repeated twice, to show the passage of time. It occurs for the first time when the father and his young daughter are walking together on the grounds of the pigeon farm, with the father pushing a wheelbarrow full of seed. The birds flutter and fly out of their way. This is repeated later in the film, when the daughter, now grown, has returned from school, and walks alongside her father as before. Both times, the relationship between the two actors and the pigeons takes on a strong sense of proportion, allowing them to interact rather than keeping the birds merely as background figures.

Given that it was released in 1910, which was the year that Griffith first took his company to film in Los Angeles, AS IT IS IN LIFE represents the almost immediate opportunity that Griffith and others spotted in Southern California as a filming location. Although using rural New York, New Jersey and Connecticut was still certainly a viable option in 1910, this film is evidence of the potential that Los Angeles offered to the fledgling medium.

D.W. Griffith at Biograph

The first of my Deep Discount orders arrived the other day-the Griffith Biograph set from the "Masterworks" collection. Needless to say, I've been spending every free minute I have going through the films. I realize that this collection represents a kind of "best of" Griffith's work, but I still can't get past how inventively he was staging his shots even at this early point. I actually started with "The Adventures of Dollie" (presented as a bonus film as the quality of the short, mastered from the paper print, is evidently below Kino's usual standards). The depth and space that Griffith brings to the shots is really astounding to me. I know other filmmakers were doing similar things at the time, but I've simply not seen anything quite like it in other films of 1908. The framing allows for so much information within the shot, but not by lining the actors up in front of the camera, but rather by placing them in different spaces and distances in the shot. I also watched "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" so far, which I have been wanting to see for years. What struck me more than anything here was the illusion of documentary realism Griffith achieved. I've read that the film may not have even been shot in New York's Lower East Side after all, but rather in Fort Lee, New Jersey. If that's the case, it's all the more impressive what a convincing depiction Griffith manages to create here. His use of background extras was especially notable, each going about their business in the background in realistic spaces to create an utterly believable environment for the story to play out in.

Hearts of the World

"God help the nation that begins another war of conquest or meddling!" So reads the opening title of this rarely-seen but incredibly powerful war drama produced, written and directed by D.W. Griffith in 1918.

The beauty and power of Griffith's moving 1918 anti-war epic is in his focus on the individuals touched by war. Griffith is not so much interested in telling us a story as such, but rather in conveying great themes and ideas through characters who represent good and evil through their actions toward each other. Here, he focuses on Marie Stephenson (played to perfection by Lillian Gish), a French girl in love with an American, Douglas Gordon Hamilton (Robert Harron), an aspring writer living in France with his parents and three younger brothers. Griffith takes his time setting up peaceful, serene shots of the French village, emphasizing the wide array of people, each with their distinct traits. We also meet the "Little Disturber" (a typically feisty Griffith heroine, played very well by Dorothy Gish), who will later play a very important role in the film's climax. There are charming domestic scenes, not unlike those of the Cameron household in "The Birth of a Nation", which emphasizes the importance of home and family to these characters, the destruction of which later on is portrayed in devastating detail.

Marie meets Douglas in his garden one morning, as she is playing with geese wandering around in the back yard. (We see another one of Griffith's favorite visual touches-the female protagonist playing with animals, usually geese or ducks.) The two become romantically involved, and are engaged to be married when war is declared, just after Douglas has received a letter from a publisher interested in his new manuscript. Douglas enlists in the military, however, (a title describes his decision to defend France as "land good enough to live in is good enough to fight for") and in an absolutely heart-wrenching scene, Marie packs up her clothes, including the wedding gown she never got to wear, putting her dreams away. Griffith's emotional manipulation still works very well, because I confess I found myself moved to tears during this scene. It's so effective because of Gish's complete and utter conviction in playing the role. Watching the film, we don't see an actress playing a part. Gish manages to convince us that she, herself, is making these sacrifices. And Harron's beautifully understated performance is one of the finest from this period. He conveys a sadness in his eyes that reminds me of Laurence Olivier's performance in William Wyler's "Carrie" (another film that left me emotionally devastated). His scenes with the younger brothers, especially the youngest-who worships the ground he walks on-are especially moving and even unsettling, because it conveys so well how, if anything were to happen to Harron during the war, it would tear the family apart.

The remainder of the film is handled in a quite interesting manner. Griffith alternates scenes taken at the front, with scenes of the people back home. He is going after no particular narrative drive here, but rather to heighten the emotional intensity and connection with the characters-as-people by focusing in great detail on their lives. There are some particularly devastating shots of the small town being bombed out, with villagers fleeing in panic, and shots of the geese we saw earlier in the film swimming through a lake which erupts with explosions from shells.

At this point, I have to admit I found the film difficult to handle emotionally. I've never been so moved by the depiction of war on-screen as I was by this film, although there are a few moments in other films that have come close. I decided to keep watching, because at this point I was also reminded of just how compelling and gripping Griffith manages to make every one of these characters, so that you quite literally feel that you want to know what happens to them, for better or worse.

Douglas decides to come in to the town to meet with Marie at the local inn. He makes his way through a German trench, disguising himself as a German soldier, and manages to make his way to town.

Griffith does introduce the film's "heavy", a German named Von Strohm, played to perfection by George Siegmann (who surely played some of the most truly vile and despicable villains of the silent screen). Siegmann is a fine actor who brings a genuine sense of menace to his performances. Here, he sets up shop in a local tavern in the village, in which Marie and the "Little Disturber" are both working. Incidentally, it's interesting to point out that Erich von Stroheim delivers a brief but effective performance as Von Strohm's aide. Just in these very brief scenes, Stroheim infuses his character with a very real villainy that would have perhaps been better suited to the Von Strohm character than Siegmann's broad performance.

Douglas arrives at the inn, which is infested with German soldiers and officers looking for him. The "Little Disturber" detains Von Strohm while Marie and Douglas hole up in one of the deserted rooms at the top of the inn after Marie kills a German officer. Von Strohm eventually locates them and is determined to kill them both himself. Here we begin a typical Griffith climax, with a proverbial "ride to the rescue", here represented by the progressing French and British forces moving in to reclaim the town. Marie and Douglas debate whether or not to take their own lives as they are sure death is coming. The troops arrive just in time, however, and the "Little Disturber" saves the two by throwing a grenade into the gathering of German officers right outside the door. With the town now back under the control of the Allies, Marie and Douglas are married.

His film has an immediacy lacking in many war pictures, which is heightened by a short prologue of behind-the-scenes footage of Griffith visiting the trenches, where he shot second unit footage for the film, newsreel-style. It's difficult to imagine any American filmmaker undertaking such a project today. In the prologue, we see Griffith personally shooting scenes in a trench while shells pass overhead. The picture was clearly made for the war effort, and the ending seems to overlook the fact that, despite the temporary glory of reclaiming the town, the impacts of the war will continue to be felt for many decades. We can forgive it's rather overly-optimistic ending, however, because Griffith has laid out his real message of the brutal and horrific effects of fighting on every day people in the preceding two hours of the film.

The film is not discussed as often as Griffith's other major work from this period, falling between the epic "Intolerance" and the sublime "Broken Blossoms", the film's mix of intimate character drama against an epic background is an interesting approach that only heightens its power to move, even close to a century after it was made. It's message is, of course, timeless.

Griffith was an artist the likes of which the cinema has not quite yet seen again. That is because everyone is still, in one way or another, working in his "shadow", so to speak. The models of filmmaking that he perfected, and the grammar of screen language that he gave us, are still so prevalent that it's impossible to fully divorce "contemporary" filmmaking, as it exists now, from what Griffith was doing in 1918. His vision extended beyond the medium itself, launching a fledgling technology into an art form to stand alongside the other arts. "Hearts of the World", a relatively minor Griffith film, compared to his better-known works, is a testament to that vision.

The copy of "Hearts of the World" that I viewed derived from a Killiam Shows print, available on VHS from Republic Pictures Home Video. This copy contains tinting and a nice piano score by William Perry. The restoration was performed by Karl Malkames. This video edition contains the original newsreel prologue, showing Griffith at work in the trenches and meeting with Prime Minister David Lloyd George. While the video itself is out of print, copies can probably still be located online or through independent outlets.