1—
Introduction
Amuse yourself with a little armchair time travel. Your companion is an imaginary New York City lawyer by the name of Josiah Evans, a man with a civic conscience who belongs to several progressive reform organizations. It's an unusually hot evening in the spring of 1909, Josiah's wife Lydia has taken the children to visit her parents in Connecticut, and he has taken to the Manhattan streets, seeking fresh air and distractions. Barely paying attention to his progress, he wanders down Broadway, past the expensive ladies' stores, and eventually finds himself on the Bowery in front of the Electric Theatre, a storefront picture show festooned with luridly colored posters.
Josiah has seen moving pictures, though not recently. A few years ago, before his marriage, he had occasionally visited Koster and Bial's Music Hall in search of light amusement. He was even there on that memorable night in April 1896, when Edison's marvelous Vitascope premiered. But in the last few years these new "nickelodeons" have been springing up like mushrooms on every street corner. Although Josiah has not paid a great deal of attention to the rapid growth of this new industry, he is aware that some of his friends, who belong to organizations such as the People's Institute and the Women's Municipal League, are quite concerned about the effect of moving pictures on the susceptible immigrants and workers. They argue constantly about whether this form of entertainment should be dismissed as a "cheap amusement" like the dance hall and the penny arcade or embraced as something with real potential for social or moral uplift. At the end of last year, Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., persuaded of the deleterious nature of the moving pictures, caused considerable controversy by revoking the licenses of more than five hundred of these storefront theatres.
Well, why not see what all the fuss is about? Giving in to the impulse, Josiah hands his nickel to the woman in the box office and walks in. He pauses to permit his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting and immediately begins to understand why some of his stuffier acquaintances talk about the nickelodeon as a blight on the landscape. More than two hundred people, men, women, and children, Italians, Chinese, and Russian Jews, are crammed elbow to elbow in a small, badly ventilated, darkened room, illuminated only by the flickering pictures projected at the front. what a ripe breeding ground for physical and moral contagion!
The picture ends, the lights come up, and Josiah finds a seat in the back, as close as he can get to the exit. When he has settled himself as comfortably as possible on his hard wooden chair, a young woman steps in front of the screen and warbles a sentimental ballad accompanied by a series of crudely colored, vulgar, magic-lantern slides not at all like the exquisitely rendered fairy-tale slides that his children enjoy at home. A Western—taken, he warrants, just west of the Hudson—and a comic chase follow the song. All fail to impress him. The picture flickers, the actors move first like frenzied puppets and then like drugged, underwater swimmers, and a torrential downpour of scratches obscures every scene. The pianist thumps her badly tuned instrument with total disregard for the story, playing a lively rag for a tragic leave-taking and a funeral march during the chase.
After a pause, there appears on the screen an engraved image of an eagle perched over the words "American Mutual and Biograph Company." The audience is watching A Drunkard's Reformation , the tale of a young husband and father who has fallen prey to the evils of drink. Coming home intoxicated, he smashes crockery, yells at his innocent young daughter, and speaks harshly to his pretty wife until she persuades him to accompany the child to the theatre. There, the father sees a temperance melodrama and, ashamed, renounces his wicked ways. The film ends happily with the little family sitting serenely by the hearth in the glow of the fire.
Josiah enjoys the moving picture because the players remind him of the blood-and-thunder stage melodramas (some just like the play that the young father sees in the film) that he used to sneak in to see as a kid. The acting of the young wife as she depicts her misery and desperation particularly affects him. She collapses into her chair and rests her head on her arms, which are extended straight out in front of her on the table. Then, in an agony of despair, she sinks to her knees and prays, her arms fully extended upward at about a forty-five degree angle. In those cheap melodramas he had so enjoyed as a youth, he saw many an actress appeal to heaven in just such a manner. Emerging into the twilight, Josiah thought that, though he had benefited from his experience by gaining a fuller understanding of the problem of the nickelodeon, he was not likely to contract the "moving picture habit."
The years pass. One evening, shortly before the Christmas of 1912, Josiah
A Drunkard's Reformation: The despairing wife.
finishes work a little earlier than usual and decides to pay a visit to the nickelodeon—it will be a welcome relief from the preholiday uproar at home. Since 1909, the moving pictures have become a familiar part of his life. though he still hasn't actually seen very many of them. Lydia has become involved in the activities of the National Board of Censorship, the group of private citizens sponsored by the People's Institute who pass on the suitability of new moving picture shows. She spends a couple of afternoons a month watching moving pictures with the review board and even subscribes to journals such as The Moving Picture World, The New York Dramatic Mirror , and the new Motion Picture Story Magazine . She says she needs to keep herself informed about the industry, but Josiah suspects she reads these magazines for pleasure as well. And he himself has stolen the occasional peek.
He goes to the Rialto Theatre on 14th Street, which just recently changed its programming from vaudeville to moving pictures and is conveniently near his Fifth Avenue office. The Rialto is certainly very different from the crowded, smelly, storefront theatre he went to a few years earlier. He buys his ticket, and a uniformed attendant ushers him to his plushly upholstered seat. Looking around, he sees that the clientele has also changed. Although there are still a number of patrons who seem to be recent immigrants and/or working people, women and children of his own class, who seem to be taking a break from their Christmas shopping, form a significant part of the audience.
The lights dim, though the room is not nearly as dark as the nickelodeon had been, and the program begins. To Josiah's delight, the Biograph Company's eagle again appears on the screen, heralding what will undoubtedly be an enjoyable picture, for Lydia and many of her friends believe that this company's films are among the finest made by the American manufacturers. As Josiah watches this Biograph, titled Brutality , he notices similarities between it and the moving picture he had seen on his memorable trip to the Bowery. This time, a decent young man takes to drink after marrying his sweetheart, and
Brutality: The despairing wife.
their idyllic home life quickly deteriorates. Finally, in a reprise of A Drunkard's Reformation , the couple attends a vaudeville show that features a temperance melodrama, and the husband swears off liquor.
But this moving picture does not remind him of the blood-and-thunder melodramas of his youth. The acting is the equal of Mr. Gillette's in Sherlock Holmes or even of that in the Belasco play he and Lydia had attended last night. Particularly impressive is the young wife's despairing reaction to her husband's harsh treatment and abandonment. After he leaves for the saloon, the wife walks back to the dining-room table covered with the debris of their evening meal. She sits down, bows her head, and begins to collect the dishes. She looks up, compresses her lips, pauses, then begins to gather the dishes once again. Once more she pauses, raises her hand to her mouth, glances down to her side, and slumps a little in her chair. Slumping a little more, she begins to cry. How differently this actress portrays her grief from her counterpart in A Drunkard's Reformation . A lot has changed in those three-and-a-half years since his first visit to a nickelodeon.[1]
The Purpose of the Book
Our imaginary companion, though acquainted with the cinema primarily vicariously, nonetheless was astute enough to note the striking differences in the portrayals of despair by the wives in A Drunkard's Reformation (Biograph, 1909) and Brutality (Biograph, 1912). The years between the appearances of these two films saw a major transformation in cinematic acting. Not just at Biograph but at every American studio, actors moved from a performance style heavily influenced by theatrical melodrama to a style allied to "realist" movements in literature and the theatre.
To avoid confusion, I should at the outset indicate precisely how I shall use the term performance .[2] I wish to adopt the excellent definition offered by Richard Dyer:
Performance is what the performer does in addition to the actions/functions she or he performs in the plot and the lines she or he is given to say. Performance is how the action/function is done, how the lines are said.
The signs of performance are: facial expression; voice; gestures (principally of hands and arms, but also of any limb, e.g. neck, leg); body posture (how someone is standing or sitting); body movement (movement of the whole body, including how someone stands up or sits down, how they walk, run, etc.).[3]
Until recently, with a few exceptions to be mentioned below, film scholars have neglected the study of performance in this limited sense, concentrating instead on such other cinematic codes as narrative, mise-en-scène, and editing.[4] Neither classical or contemporary film theory nor historical inquiries into specific national cinemas have provided the means to assess the contribution that actors and their performances make to a film's overall meaning. A central component of cinema as text and cinema as institution has been widely ignored and, when not ignored, undertheorized.
This book examines acting styles in the American cinema between 1908 and 1913, years that film historians have come to designate as part of the transitional period, that is, the period between the "early" or "primitive" cinema (1894-1907) and the standardization of representational practices in 1917. Rather than attempting to account for the hundreds of films made during this period, I shall look instead, for reasons to be enumerated below, at the Biograph films made by D. W. Griffith. By focusing on Griffith's Biograph films made during the transitional years, I hope to trace the emergence of a performance style that came to dominate the classical Hollywood cinema and, by extension, world cinema.
Between the years 1905 and 1913, changes in film content, exhibition venues, and even the audiences pointed toward the increasing "respectability" of the cinema. Since the mid-1970s film historians have paid a great deal of attention to the pre-1917 or pre-classical Hollywood cinema, much of their work centering on the important modifications in both textual signifying practices and conditions of production and reception that led to film's changing social status.[5] Through focusing on one signifying practice, performance, this book may further our understanding of a crucial period in the history of the American cinema, during which film, once a cheap amusement patronized primarily by immigrant laborers in urban centers, changed into an acceptable mass entertainment patronized weekly by millions of Americans of all classes. This book is thus addressed to early cinema historians as well as all those interested in cinematic performance.
Related Works
Although film scholars have recently paid increasing attention to both acting/performance and stardom, only two books, Charles Affron's Star Acting
and James Naremore's Acting in the Cinema , deal specifically with "what the performer does in addition to the actions/functions she or he performs in the plot and the lines she or he is given to say," though both, because they examine famous actors, also touch on issues of stardom.[6]
Affron's book examines three of Hollywood's most glittering stars—Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, and Bette Davis. His analysis of their key films contains extensive and detailed descriptions, supplemented by numerous frame enlargements, of actors' gestures, movements, and facial expressions. Although Affron asserts that his purpose is "to illustrate certain techniques for the analysis of star acting, and how we perceive star acting in context," he explicitly disavows any attempt at general theorization: "It would be absurd to derive a stylistics of screen acting from three stars, or from any number of stars for that matter."[7] He predicates his method upon humanist faith in the unique individuality of both stars and scholars, hence overtly valorizing the "essential distinctness" of each of his stars and covertly valorizing his own judgments and appreciations, all of which leaves me wondering precisely how we might go about deriving a stylistics of screen acting that would enable us to transcend the unique individuality of stars and scholars.[8]
Naremore's Acting in the Cinema represents a major step beyond Affron's idiosyncratic musings. In the first section of his book, Naremore reflects on a host of complex issues with which any generally applicable theory of performance must come to terms, including such difficult problems as distinguishing performance from everyday life, defining performance space, and distinguishing between "actor" and "character." Although Naremore probably would not claim to have resolved these problems, he does give them more intelligent and sustained attention than any previous analyst, thereby producing the most theoretically insightful and sophisticated book yet on acting per se and laying a firm foundation for subsequent scholarship. The last two-thirds of Naremore's book may be seen, in part, as an attempt to derive a "stylistics of screen acting" from what Affron would term a "number of stars." Naremore discusses Gish in True Heart Susie , Chaplin in The Gold Rush , Dietrich in Morocco , Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces , Hepburn in Holiday , Brando in On the Waterfront , and Grant in North by Northwest , as well as the ensemble acting in Rear Window and The King of Comedy . And here Naremore's book suffers from the same failing as Affron's: it presents assessments of individual performances predicated mostly on textual analysis and the judgments of the analyst and uninformed by the larger social, historical context.
Two other books, though not focused mainly on performance, present historical perspectives that make them directly relevant to this project. Richard Dyer's admirable Stars , mentioned above, presents the definition of performance that I have adopted here, which usefully restricts the area of investigation and encourages description rather than evaluation. Such description can, however, be judgmentally weighted. Moreover, simple description cannot tell
us how the performance signs function within the overall meaning of the text, that is, how the actor conveys meaning. Assessment of the meaning of performance requires not only description but interpretation, as Dyer himself well knows.
Although Dyer addresses himself only briefly to film acting, as opposed to stardom, his insistence on the acknowledgement of culturally and historically specific codes provides a necessary first principle for further investigation. Dyer's performance signs (facial expression, voice, gestures, body posture, and body movement) are all extremely complex and ambiguous, potentially subject to multiple interpretations if inquiry is limited to the interaction between texts and analysts. Reducing this ambiguity requires applying extra-and intertextual knowledge, as well as some notion of reception, to contextualize textual analysis. As Dyer says, "The signification of a given performance sign is determined by its place within culturally and historically specific codes."[9]
Tom Gunning, a leading member of the new coterie of early film scholars that has emerged in the past fifteen years or so, has written an invaluable study of the first two years of D. W. Griffith's career at Biograph.[10] Gunning presents a thoroughgoing, detailed, and reliable textual analysis of the early Biographs, charting the many transformations in signifying practices that occurred in 1908 and 1909. He also attempts to correlate these textual transformations with simultaneous changes in film industry organization, constructing his argument with painstaking research and copious detail.
Gunning does, at several points in this massive work, discuss acting and the different kinds of performance styles used by actors in the Griffith Biographs. As we might hope to see in an early film scholar, he displays sensitivity to bygone cultural codes and begins his first sustained consideration of acting by immediately correcting a common misperception: "All too often modern critics dismiss melodramatic acting (and the acting in early films) as wild undisciplined overplaying. Rather it was a conscious system of conventional signs for portraying characters' emotions."[11] At a later point he briefly addresses the change from the "melodramatic" style, which he argues characterizes early Biograph performances, to the "more naturalistic performance style in the acting of the later films."[12]
In subsequent chapters I shall have frequent occasion to refer to Gunning's work, which forms such an important prelude to my own project, but, for the moment, I merely wish to question his terminology. Consider the two films seen by our imaginary New York City lawyer, A Drunkard's Reformation , released in April 1909 and starring Linda Arvidson as the wife and Arthur Johnson as the husband, and Brutality , released in December 1912, with Mae Marsh and Walter Miller playing the couple. Gunning, and many others, would probably characterize Arvidson's depiction of despair as melodramatic and Marsh's as naturalistic. Yet such characterizations cannot adequately ei-
ther describe or account for the major transformation in cinematic acting represented by the contrast between these two performances.
Even by the nickelodeon period (1908–1913) the adjectives "melodramatic," "naturalistic," and "realistic" had been so indiscriminately applied to such greatly diverse theatrical styles and performers as to lose any precise meaning, and the intervening decades have added to their numerous connotations. After encountering these terms in their various guises, one begins to feel like Alice trying to converse with Humpty Dumpty, who tells her: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."[13]
The concepts of realism and naturalism have had wide currency in dramatic criticism since Shakespeare's time at least. To quote Hamlet's advice to the players: "O'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." Phrases from this speech crop up again and again in nineteenth-century dramatic criticism to support myriad and often contradictory positions. In the next chapter, we will look at some of the various nineteenth-century meanings of realism and naturalism in both literary and dramatic contexts.
While the ideas of realism and naturalism are venerable, the word melodrama and its adjectival form melodramatic are of more recent vintage. Initially, melodrama and melodramatic referred to a theatrical form that originated in late-eighteenth-century France and became extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. Although various sub-genres, such as the gothic and the domestic, emerged and disappeared over the years, certain elements remained constant. Plots centered around imperiled virtue, black villainy, and fantastic coincidences that allowed the former to triumph over the latter. Heightened emotion and exciting situations mattered far more than coherent narrative progression. Stock figures of no psychological depth inhabited these improbable plots: most importantly, the pure heroine, the gallant hero, and the dastardly villain.
With the decline of melodrama's widespread appeal at the end of the century and its relegation to the inexpensive theatres frequented by the working classes, melodramatic became a term of opprobrium, with negative connotations that have persisted to this day. In film studies, however, the concept of melodrama has become increasingly fashionable, film scholars applying "melodramatic" to such diverse phenomena as The Birth of a Nation , the 1940s woman's film, Fassbinder's oeuvre, soap operas, and the latest network miniseries. Such widespread and indiscriminate usage has rendered the term all but meaningless.[14] In dealing with the transition in acting styles between 1908 and 1913, then, one must jettison the kind of imprecise terminology used by Gunning.
This discussion of the work of Affron, Naremore, Dyer, and Gunning points to two primary requisites in any study of performance. First, any such study
should avoid devolving into idiosyncratic analyses of the scholar's favorite actors predicated on personal biases. In other words, a more broadly applicable analysis of performance necessitates augmenting textual analysis with other methodologies that, in a sense, correct for personal bias. Second, broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the text and thus contextualizing one's own preferences requires constant awareness of the cultural and historical specificity of performance codes and of the implicit judgments inherent in familiar descriptive terms such as melodramatic and naturalistic.
Affron and Naremore's tendency to fall back on their own unsubstantiated perceptions, a failing that characterizes most writing to date on cinematic acting, is not unexpected in light of John Thompson's observation that "normative considerations are absolutely basic to the cinema . . . as an institution." Yet "the dream of a non-normative, descriptive-analytic discourse on the cinema arises not only out of the desire for truth but from a wish to escape the tedium and frivolity of the judgmental."
Clearly, film scholars can never entirely escape the "frivolity of the judgmental." Nor should we profess that we have, for such a claim would reek of social scientific positivism. While we must realize that we remain creatures of our own historical moment, such a realization carries us a good distance along the road toward the development of historically sensitive approaches to the analysis of performance styles, which might approach a "non-normative, descriptive-analytic discourse."
As Thompson again points out:
Performance norms present as clear a case of cultural relativity as could be asked for. Not only the experience of non-Western performance traditions, not only the accessibility of sufficiently detailed descriptions of acting in our own culture in previous centuries, but even the short history of the sound cinema illustrates how one framework's good is another's alien, stiff, laughable.[15]
The study of cinematic performance demands that we not depend upon our own aesthetic judgments, which we tacitly deem eternal and unchanging. Rather, we must acknowledge history by attempting to understand the aesthetic standards of another time and place, of a culture very different from our own. As I shall suggest below, the adducing of intertextual evidence provides one route of access to these forgotten aesthetic standards.
We cannot easily arrive at a method for analyzing performance that simultaneously transcends personal preferences and deals with a rich and complex historical context. Indeed, the difficulties inherent in such a task have dictated the narrow focus of this project on films made by one director at one studio during one five-year period. Yet I believe that the narrowness of the focus does not preclude the wider application of the pluralistic methodological approach suggested in this book.
Why Griffith? Why the Transitional Period?
My membership in a generation of film scholars trained to debunk auteurism, as well as in a coterie of early film historians who have contested Griffith's position as the founder of modern "film language" may make my decision to rely here on Griffith and the Griffith Biographs seem strange and, perhaps, even wrongheaded. But while this book is ultimately more concerned with acting than with Griffith, there are compelling reasons, having to do both with Griffith/Biograph and the changes in the film industry circa 1908–1913, for choosing the Griffith films to exemplify the transition in acting style.
As early as 1910, Frank Woods, Spectator of The New York Dramatic Mirror , had written of the Biograph director's "striking aptitude for taking raw acting material and molding it into finished and polished form."[16] Woods could not mention Griffith by name, because Biograph continued to insist that its employees remain nameless long after other studios had begun publicizing both actors and production staff. Freed from this cloak of anonymity after his departure from the Biograph Company in 1913, D. W. Griffith took out a full page advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror touting himself as the "producer of all great Biograph successes," responsible for "revolutionizing Motion Picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art." The advertisement listed, as one of Griffith's major accomplishments, "restraint in expression, raising motion picture acting to the higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art."[17] This advertisement heralded the start of an intensive campaign for personal recognition. The single-handed creation of a new and uniquely cinematic acting style figured largely in the myth of the great director that Griffith enthusiastically fostered. In interviews after the Mirror advertisement (published under such revealing titles as "The Man Who Made the Movies" and "The Genius of the Movies") writers eagerly collaborated in Griffith's self-promotion, crediting him with a profound impact on film acting. "It was Mr. Griffith who made moving pictures real, who insisted that actors act naturally."[18] Griffith was said to have invented the close-up, or at least to have brought the camera close enough to permit this "natural" acting:
David W. Griffith was the first to bring the camera close enough to the face to catch the natural play of expression. Actors no longer rely on the waving of arms and legs for the interpretation of character and plot. So far reaching were the results of this innovation that it may be considered the most important single contribution ever made to pictures outside of mechanical invention.[19]
Griffith was also said to have taught a new generation of actors the "restraint in expression" necessary to a new style of film performance:
They [the actors] do not suggest the stage, and the result of their molding is a distinctive type of acting—as taught in the Griffith school, and for naturalness seldom approached elsewhere. Of course, it has conventions of its own, but they are not the conventions of screen emotions. Sweeping gestures, fainting on slight provocation, falling on arms of chairs to weep, and kindred actions that may be seen on the screen everyday, though seldom in life, give place to restraint. Grief, joy, love, jealousy . . . are registered by facial expressions, tentative movements and sometimes the immobility that follows emotions of stunning power.[20]
Among the press, both trade and popular, the consensus seems to have been that Griffith had greatly influenced film performance and all but single-handedly originated the new style. This perception certainly stemmed in part from Griffith's effective public relations, but many people, both within and outside the film industry, believed that Griffith and his actors had developed a performance style uniquely suited to the new medium of moving pictures. The unprecedented and unparalleled success of The Birth of a Nation probably ensured that the Griffith acting style became even more influential than during the Biograph years. Even today, when film scholars adamantly resist the great-man theory of film history, a prominent scholar still credits the Biograph director with "a true Griffith innovation, the new acting style."[21]
Further evidence for the impact of the Griffith Biograph's upon film acting comes from the trade press commentary on the films themselves. Griffith's first Biograph film, The Adventures of Dollie , was released in July 1908. By the next spring, the trade press had begun to agree that Biograph acting was some of the best, if not the best, to be found on the screen. Phrases such as "natural touches," "excellence," "splendid," and "superb" occur again and again with regard to Biograph acting. In a lengthy review of Lady Helen's Escapade, The Moving Picture World stated that "the Biograph Company . . . in the last few weeks, have by common consent placed themselves at the very head of American film manufacturers, alike for the technical and dramatic quality of their pictures."[22] Lest there be any doubt as to what was meant by dramatic , the World a month later asserted that any Biograph film "is one in which one is almost sure to see good acting."[23] Soon the New York Dramatic Mirror decided that Biograph acting was not only good but the best: "The Biograph Company at present is producing a better general average of dramatic pantomime than any other company in America."[24]
According to Lux Graphicus, a pseudonymous columnist for The Moving Picture World , the picture-going public as well as journalists recognized and responded to the excellence of Biograph performance. "They worship that silent Biograph heroine and know that the handsome leading man will always give good acting." The writer's account of his visit to the Bijou Dream to see The Way of Man , released in late June 1909, provides a rare glimpse at the reactions of a nickelodeon audience:
The title appeared and there was a sudden hush . . . and the people leaned forward expectantly . . . a man on my left who had been interjecting criticism, muttered to himself, "Now we shall see something good" . . . I saw interest and expectancy in every face. . . . "Why," said the man on my left, "you can see them thinking." This man unconsciously voiced the feeling of the entire house. We saw the three leading characters thinking. We were conscious of aught else. . . . Now this picture held the attention of the audience right up to the very last foot of film.[25]
Aside from Griffith's and the Biographs' leading role in the acting transition, compelling pragmatic reasons also dictate the choice of this particular studio's output. Our knowledge of the majority of films made between 1908 and 1913 derives from advertisements and reviews in the trade press, for a great many of the films themselves have been lost. The products of the Biograph studio are the major exception; virtually all the films made during Griffith's tenure survive, either in the paper prints deposited at the Library of Congress for copyright purposes or in some other form.[26] This almost-complete run of films provides a unique record of day-to-day and month-to-month changes in performance style. Although these films constitute an invaluable resource, the lack of a comparable record from another studio limits our ability to generalize: strictly speaking, all conclusions are drawn with regard to the Biographs only, though, as I have argued above, these films seem to have had a major impact on film acting at other studios.[27]
In addition to the films themselves, the amount of written material about Griffith and the Biographs, both primary and secondary, far surpasses that available for any other director or studio of the time.[28] Thirty-six reels of microfilm photographed from the Griffith Collection at the Museum of Modern Art contain many interviews with Biograph actors as well as an unedited version of the memoirs of Billy Bitzer, Griffith's longtime cameraman. All of the Biograph Bulletins (which advertised the company's product to film distributors and exhibitors) have been collected and published.[29] Several autobiographies supplement these primary sources.[30] Of the numerous secondary sources two stand out, the first Gunning's, and the second the production records and cast lists in D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company .[31]
All the above does not, of course, justify the valorization of Griffith as the "Great Director" and the concomitant dismissal of early film as "pre-Griffith" cinema. One can defend the decision to study film performance between the years 1908 and 1913 on historical grounds completely unrelated to the presence of David Wark Griffith at 11 East 14th Street. The year 1908 saw the culmination of many significant changes in both film texts and film industry, which established the basic pattern for the nickelodeon era. By 1913, the year that Griffith left Biograph to strike out on his own, the nickelodeon era had virtually come to a close.
By 1908 the fictional narrative or story film was the major product of the
American film industry. Controversy typical of scholarship on the early cinema exists concerning the exact point at which the story film became dominant. Robert C. Allen locates the shift in the years 1907 and 1908: "A dramatic change occurred in American motion picture production: in one year narrative forms of cinema (comedy and dramatic) all but eclipsed documentary forms in volume of production." Allen notes that in 1908 story films constituted 96 percent of output.[32] More important, from my perspective, the percentage of dramatic films (as opposed to comedies and actualities) increased from 17 percent in 1907 to 66 percent in 1908.[33] Charles Musser argues that Allen's methodology is fundamentally flawed in its reliance on "quantification of subject by title."[34] Instead of counting titles, Musser presents data about the quantity of actual film footage, both negative feet and print feet, statistics that he claims much better reflect what people were really watching. Actuality titles outnumber fiction titles, but the latter seem to have been both longer and more popular. Musser concludes that "from the summer of 1904 onward, story films were made in substantial quantities and consistently outsold actualities that companies like Edison continued to produce, although with decreasing frequency."[35] Allen has acknowledged that Musser "corrects my use of incomplete data in computing the number of narrative films made during a given period."[36] But the implications of the statistics remain at issue. Did, as Musser asserts, the fiction film give rise to the nickelodeon, or did, as Allen asserts, the nickelodeon give rise to the fiction film? Fortunately, for my purposes, the advent of the fiction film, and its relation to the nickelodeon, does not matter as much as the narrative structure of the fiction film, which did indeed undergo a transformation circa 1907-1908. Gunning argues that in the early Biographs changes in editing, camerawork, composition, and other systems of meaning contributed to the formation of a "narrator system" that subordinates all these other elements to the need to tell a story. For example, Griffith incorporated into his early films some of the "special effects," such as stop motion, used in Biograph trick films, not as "the central attraction" to be "admired for its mechanical virtuosity and the wonder it creates, but as a way to develop narrative logic or characterization."[37]
The development of "narrative logic or characterization" through internal means was a relatively new strategy in 1908. As Musser has shown, prior to 1907, most film narratives were not self-sufficient, leading film manufacturers and exhibitors to employ a variety of devices to effect narrative coherence: intertextuality, redundancy (e.g., the chase), sound effects, and lectures.[38] But increasing demands for films from the rapidly proliferating nickelodeons created a desire among the manufacturers for "production efficiency and maximum profits."[39] The old system of representation was inadequate to these needs, and a new system arose based on strict linear temporality and the use of parallel editing and matching action.[40] Internally coherent narratives pred-
icated on new modes of representation are linked, Gunning suggests, to an increasing psychologization and individuation of film characters: "The approach to characterization in the narrator-system asserts its hold on story through an expression of psychology, by which I mean the portrayal of interior states, such as memories or strong emotions, which are then seen as motivation for the action of characters."[41] I argue below, in Chapter 4, for a strong connection between the psychologized character and the transition in performance style.
The dominance of the fiction film, with emerging internally coherent narratives and rudimentary psychologization, coincides, as Richard deCordova has shown, with increasing journalistic attention to the actor and film performance: "Before 1907 there was no discourse on the film actor. Textual productivity was focused elsewhere, for the most part on the apparatus itself, on its magical abilities and its capacity to reproduce the real."[42] By 1907 journalists acknowledged the existence of film actors, but only insofar as their actions were important to the construction of a coherent narrative. Prior to 1908, deCordova observes, "acting was a profession associated with the legitimate stage, and the contention that people acted in films was neither immediately apparent nor altogether unproblematic."[43] Not until 1908 did the press begin to talk of film acting as an "art" worthy of comparison with the legitimate stage.[44]
Musser's work on the status of film actors complements deCordova's. Though he dates the fiction film from 1904, he says that a group of professional motion-picture actors did not become established until 1908. Prior to 1908, film studios had hired theatrical actors, who often kept their moving-picture work secret. Around 1907 the film manufacturers began to hire actors on a regular basis, developing the stock companies characteristic of the nickelodeon period.[45]
The emergence of internally coherent narratives centered on individuated characters combined with the development of resident stock companies makes 1908 an important year in the history of film performance. Instead of simply chasing their colleagues from shot to shot or reenacting topical incidents, actors must have begun to think about the characters they were portraying. Having a stable cast and the time to rehearse before the actual shooting, the director could help the actors in the construction of their characters. But 1908 is notable for changes not only in the films and the mode of production but also in the entire structure of the film industry.
By this year the film exchanges and the nickelodeons had wrested control of distribution and exhibition from the production companies and were consequently, from the producers' perspective, garnering too large a proportion of the profits. Led by the Edison and Biograph studios, the producers attempted to redress the balance, forming (along with six other companies) the Motion Picture Patents Company, or, as it was popularly known, the Trust.
The Trust derived its powers from pooling patents on film stock, cameras, and projectors. Film exchanges (the middlemen in the distribution chain), which were governed by the cartel's standards, now had to rent films rather than buy them outright, and only licensed exhibitors, who paid a weekly royalty on their patented projectors, could rent Trust films from the exchanges.
Aside from hoping to rationalize distribution and exhibition and improve their profit margin, the producers formed their cartel in response to increasing calls for censorship and regulation of exhibition sites. When films ceased to be a scientific and educational novelty and became primarily an amusement—and worse yet, in some eyes, an amusement for the "lower classes"—various sectors of the society predictably began to advocate government control of film content. The nickelodeons' reputation as dark, dirty, and immoral exacerbated the problem. When on Christmas Eve of 1908 New York City Mayor McClellan ordered all the nickelodeons closed, only a court injunction prevented him from keeping them closed. This near-crisis led the industry to help form the National Board of Censorship, an independent body that reviewed films before their release, recommending cuts and even suppressing some films entirely. The contemporary debate about the social function of entertainment, which partially accounts for the formation of both the Trust and the Board of Censorship, also relates to the shift in performance style, as will be discussed in Chapter 7.
By 1913 the nickelodeon era drew to a close, as several trends soon culminated in the film form and industry organization of the classical Hollywood cinema, different in many significant respects from the earlier period on which this book focuses. By this year, the Motion Picture Patents Company was in decline, as was the nickelodeon. More important, in terms of performance style, the short fifteen-minute films of the nickelodeon era had given way to the longer "feature film," and the star system came close to full flower.
Although the Motion Picture Patents Company was not declared illegal until 1915, by 1913 the rise of the "independents" had thoroughly undermined the Trust's power. Many of these independents, headed by such entrepreneurs as William Fox and Carl Laemmle, had already established organizations that would form the nucleus of the Hollywood industry. The year 1913 also saw the appearance of the picture palaces, a standard of lavishness that had been emerging for several years. Magnificent organs and even full orchestras replaced the badly tuned piano of the old nickelodeons, and elaborate stage shows replaced the amateur singers. Perhaps of more consequence for the industry, middle-class men, women, and children now frequented the picture shows they had once despised as unsuitable for decent society. Film was well on its way to becoming a mass medium.
Although American film manufacturers had, as early as 1909, experimented with longer films consisting of three to five fifteen-minute reels, the entire film lasting from thirty minutes to a little over an hour, the distribution
system for the most part prevented screening the separate reels in one showing. In 1912 and 1913 many foreign multi-reelers, such as Sarah Bernhardt's Queen Elizabeth and the Italian Quo Vadis, were being shown as "feature" films, a development with which American producers felt forced to keep pace. The advent of the feature film had profound implications for both the rationalization of studio production practices and narrative structure, the latter, in turn, affecting performance style, since signifying practices are mutually interdependent.[46] As Kristin Thompson suggests, the feature film promoted the new acting style by "allowing, even encouraging, more time for character development."[47] I would add that the feature film, with its greater character development, modified, but did not fundamentally alter, the acting style of 1913.
From roughly 1909 to 1912, according to Richard deCordova, film actors were discussed in the press as "picture personalities." The actor's personality was seen as coinciding with that of her or his film characters: "The site of interest was the personality of the player as presented on film . There was thus a kind of restriction of knowledge about the players to the textuality of the films they were in."[48] By 1913, with the emergence of the star system, the press began to discuss actors' private lives, the people they "really were" off the silver screen. "In a very short period of time," deCordova notes, "the journalistic apparatus that supported the star system became geared toward producing an endless stream of information about the private lives of the stars."[49] The intertextual framework for the reception of actors and acting thus expanded considerably, seriously complicating any analysis of performance. Both the shift to the feature film, with its concomitant changes in narrative structure, and the advent of the star system, with the expansion of the intertextual framework, make 1913 an appropriate cutoff date for this investigation.
The Plan of the Book
As I said above, any study of performance that aspires to more than personal idiosyncracy must correct for personal bias by augmenting textual analysis with other methodologies and must also remain constantly aware of the cultural and historical specificity of performance codes. This book, then, takes a pluralistic methodological approach, looking at the transformation of performance style in the Griffith Biographs as the result of a complexly overdetermined interaction among text, intertext, and context. Close textual analysis of both performance style and narrative structure is combined first with intertextual evidence concerning performance style in the nineteenth-century theatre and the reception of cinematic performance in the trade press and second with contextual evidence concerning the cultural position of the film medium during the period.
The next two chapters attempt to ground the discussion of Biograph performance style firmly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 2 draws on intertextual evidence concerning the performance styles of the nineteenth-century stage to develop a terminology and a descriptive methodology that strive to escape both my own unsubstantiated perceptions and the aesthetic judgments of late-twentieth-century culture. Chapter 2 thus sets forth a diachronic, semiotic model of performance, predicated on historical inter-textual evidence, that enables the close textual analysis of chapter 3 to trace the gradual changes in acting taking place over the five years Griffith spent at the Biograph Company.
The remainder of the book then attempts to account for this transformation. Chapter 4 contains a close analysis of some key films, exploring the interaction among performance, narrative, and other textual signifying practices. Chapters 5 and 6 look at Griffith and his actors, taking what might be called a modified auteurist perspective. Chapter 7 first examines trade press discourse, showing that the transformation in performance was industrywide and hence contextualizes the Griffith Biographs within the film industry as a whole. The chapter also connects the shift in performance style to the overall shift in film's cultural status. The performance style emerging in the Griffith Biographs, then, can be seen as an aspect of the film industry's very complicated response to a perception of imminent crisis.