238
PARTISAN REVIEW
cutting; or of novel categories of content, such as realism, psychology,
social significance, or the Civil War. But to see these films in this light is
to see them all wrong. Let me illustrate.
"Early in 1909 they"-Griffith and Bitzer his cameraman-"together
contrived a strikingly novel effect of light and shade in
Edgar Allan Poe,
and a firelight effect which was widely remarked in the otherwise primitive
and stilted
A Drunkard's Reformation."
(p. 16) But this "novel effect of
light and shade" is the
whole
of
Poe,
which is nothing but the fusion into
this chiaroscuro of the misunderstood poet, his suddenly appearing Raven,
his wife dying of starvation, as against the callous publishers in their
ordinary light; in fact this sad little picture is almost comic because it
concentrates so powerful an expression into such a tiny magnitude. Again,
that "widely remarked firelight effect" happens to be the
summation
of the
drunkard's reformation: his home rather than his vice, etc. To conceive
of these expressions as "technical innovations'' or, to use anothet of the
author's phrases, as "the development of screen syntax" is to make of
D. W. Griffith a tramp like, say, Mark Sandrich, who is also a great inno–
vator. For before illustrating further, let me draw the moral: How can
Miss Barry make such a silly error?
It is precisely because she is think–
ing, when she thinks of cinema, of all the Hollywood output which employs
such a warehouse of technical devices--yes, "introduced'' by Griffith and
others-with nothing whatever to say.
Let me cite one or two of her favorite phrases: "Here he hit upon a
new way of handling a tried device-the last-minute rescue-which was to
serve him well for the rest of his career." (16) "It was a device which had
seldom failed Griffith in the past and stood him in good stead now." (30).
"Whether as a study in realism, as an ancestor of the gangster films of
later decades, or as an exercise [sic!] in motion-picture composition
The
Musketeers of Pig Alley
is a remarkable piece. The photography is extra·
ordinary and the whole film predicts what was to come in the modern sec–
tion of
Intolerance."
(19) As if, that is, the documentary photography,
the carefully contrived chaos of the slum-alley, the gangster subject, and
the wonderful montage of the man-hunt sequence (="an exercise in com·
position") had no intrinsic connection, but were a congeries of "beauties";
but if you imagine you are to hear of the intrinsic connection in the
remarks on
Intolerance
of which this was a "forecast," you are sadly
deceived. In general, that is, the mode of criticism here is like those books
which tell of The Legacy of Egypt, as if the Egyptian culture consisted in
the invention of the sun-dial for English country gardens.
Broken Blossoms
is almost great; to my taste it is Griffith's most com·
plete work. Miss Barry's remarks on it are in her usual vein and of no
account, but let me indicate a few isolated appreciations of the picture
itself in order to bring out my main point, which is
the difference between
a film where every technical means is in intimate relation with the whole
expression, and our films where a bit of technique is a distracting short-cut
to convey indirectly some. picayune information by the way.
Consider, for
