Chapter VIII - Mainly About D.W. Griffith
No volume on the subject of directing would be complete without the mention of D.W. Griffith. And yet it is utterly impossible to deal with D.W. Griffith in any comprehensive way. The producer of the first great picture The Birth of a Nation, the man who strove for something beyond the times in Intolerance, the artist who made Hearts of the World and the masterly technician who stands sponsor for Way Down East, is singularly hard to approach from any ordinary viewpoint.
There is no doubt that D.W. Griffith at intervals gives just cause to the commentators who place him at the top of the list of all directors. But at the same time he often does the most ordinary of things on the screen. In one picture he is an artist and in the next he appears in the light of a producer of hack pieces of motion picture film.
The reason, no doubt, is that Mr. Griffith is a business man as well as an artist. He sinks an unusually large amount of money in a picture such as Hearts of the World and then realizes that, while the returns from such a subject are slowly accruing, he must needs turn out a few pot-boilers to keep the wolf from the door. Thus Hearts of the World was followed by two or three shorter and less pretentious war pictures of commonplace variety.
Mr. Griffith is constantly exasperating people by such mixed proceedings and just when his long-suffering public has decided to forsake him forever and turn to more consistent directors and producers, he startles the world again with another masterpiece.
His latest picture, for instance, Orphans of the Storm, has proven an artistic success from almost every viewpoint, and has been quite capable of disposing of the bad taste left in the collective mouths of critical audiences by his recent Dream Street.
One of the most interesting things about Mr. Griffith to the lay mind is that he never uses the usual continuity that the majority of directors employ. He has his story clearly in his mind before he starts work. He has something of a subconscious realization of how many different scenes ought to be embraced in each episode and he sets about his work accordingly.
This might not seem so difficult as it really is if Mr. Griffith employed the deMille method of directing his pictures in continuity, beginning with scene No. 1 and proceeding numerically onward. But Mr. Griffith sails right along using one setting or scene after another without much regard for continuity. He takes the number of shots required in each setting and scene with but slight assistance from notes and memoranda.
He works in the following order: A scene may represent a room in a country home. A son is saying goodbye to his mother; he is either going away to war or going to the city to make good. There is, of course, a tearful parting. Now the average director will refer to his script and note that the scenario writer has given him, say, twelve different shots, including close-ups, long shots and semi-closeups in which to get the "goodbye" scene over and done with.
Mr. Griffith, on the other hand, will refer to no script of any kind, he will merely go about taking the sequence of scenes as they occur on the screen. There may be first a tearful closeup of the mother, then a closeup of the boy, nervous, happy, sad. Then a shot of both of them embracing and the son pulling away. Then a wider shot showing the son about to make his exit, but turning and coming back to say a last farewell to the mother. And so on and so forth. The action itself will suggest other scenes to Mr. Griffith.
Of course there are many other directors who work in the same way in some respects. Such a simple sequence as related above can be accomplished by any director without recourse to an elaborate continuity. But the majority of directors, even though they don't refer to a continuity minutely with respect to such sequences, have one handy so that they can refer to it in times when the complications of the story begin to pile up.
To draw a clearer parallel, the usual director is like a motorist who has carefully studied his road map before setting out on a journey and who refers to it time and again during the trip, specially when he comes to a cross roads. Mr. Griffith never studies a road map. He just jumps into his car and starts going. When he comes to a crossing he takes the road that seems the best to him. Sometimes this road is the wrong one. More often it is right. But at least Mr. Griffith has had the fun of exploring without really knowing what is coming next. As a consequence, his experiences even though at times poor with respect to picture technique, are never tedious but always refreshing.
Mr. Griffith explains his aversions to a cut-and-dried continuity by saying that he doesn't want other people to think out his story for him. Rather he prefers to think it out himself. He believes that the man who works directly from a continuity is merely carrying out the plans of the scenario writer. It doesn't take any great exertion, he believes, to successfully carry out these ideas if they are good ideas. On the other hand when he himself sets to work without a continuity he has the added joy of creating something as he goes along. He is not working from some other person's brain but from his own.
Mr. Griffith's method of working has its advantages and, under certain circumstances, it would have its grave disadvantages. Mr. Griffith, being his own employer, can take all the time he wishes on the making of his productions. A director working on a schedule that makes some consideration of time would be quite at a loss in working without a script. The chances are he would become hopelessly involved before he got halfway through and wonder what he was producing. And this time schedule would not permit the director to sit down and puzzle himself out of his predicament for hours and hours the way Mr. Griffith does. And then, even if it did permit him so to do, the chances are again that he might not come out of the predicament with all the loose ends of his story neatly assorted the way Mr. Griffith does. After all, there is only one Griffith and attempting to apply his methods to other directors is something like walking and walking around a block and wondering why you never get farther up town.
Times were, in the days of the old Biograph and Fine Arts companies, that Mr. Griffith had a number of directors working under his supervision. A number of these men, notably Chet Withey, Edward Dillon and the Franklin brothers have made marks for themselves with other companies, working somewhat on the Griffith method but usually with a continuity to guide them.
I know of one director who worked with Mr. Griffith long ago and who is still boasting of his association with him (for working with D.W., you see, grants one as much prestige in the picture world as having an ancestor that came over on the Mayflower gives one in the social world), but who has not yet made a good picture since he left his former chief.
Among other boasts this director includes the one that he never used a continuity when producing a picture. I happened to be up at his studio one day when he was involved in the production of a particularly difficult and heavy dramatic sequence of action. There were a number of players at work on a large setting and each one of them had an important part.
This director worked along fairly smoothly up to a certain point and then suddenly stopped. He was lost. Didn't know what came next. But rather than admit it to his company he sat staring at them for fully half an hour, then proceeded to pace the studio floor in great agitation "seeking for the missing idea." He then announced that he would retire to his private office and think the matter over quietly. About five minutes later he emerged with all his ideas straightened out. Of course, to the gullible, his disappearing act had been the signal for a great inspiration but in reality, as I found out afterwards, he had gone into his office and referred to the continuity of the story which he had carefully secreted in his desk all the time.
The director's vanity would never permit him to admit this in public. He chose to be regarded as another Griffith. Unhappily for him his completed picture proved that he was far from another Griffith or even a second-rate one. Really Mr. Griffith has a lot to answer for in this matter. Either he or the vanity of the men who formerly worked with him has to be blamed. And as Mr. Griffith is a concrete object we might as well blame him.
The realization has dawned on the writer that this chapter is totally inadequate in giving any description of Mr. Griffith, apart from the small information that he works without a manuscript. Such, however, seems doomed to be the case. One cannot dissect Mr. Griffith, take him apart and explain this piece and that. This because he is considerably an artist and no real artist can tell exactly how he works and give the processes by which he achieves certain effects.
A painter will begin work on a fresh canvass by putting daubs of color here, there and everywhere. The layman doesn't know what in the deuce he is up to. But in the finished product these early daubs of color count largely in the effect created by the whole mass. Even the artist himself cannot explain concisely and clearly the why and wherefore of every daub he applied early in his creation.
So it is with Mr. Griffith. He probably could not explain his method of working himself. He goes ahead on his creation, putting a stroke here and another there. The why and wherefore of them are things undefinable. Perhaps when his picture is finished he can give you the whys and wherefores but the chances are that he can't. He only knows that he has striven for something and either succeeded or failed in the achievement of his ambition.
And so it is with other directors, after all is said and done. Some of the methods of other directors as set down earlier in these chapters are merely ideas, small gleanings; but in themselves alone they are no more responsible for the successes of these directors than are their names.
Chapter IX - Mountains and Molehills
The foregoing words on D. W. Griffith have brought to mind the matter of motion picture spectacles, those pictures telling a personal story before a background of masses of people and monstrous settings. There is small doubt but that the spectacle is the most difficult of all motion pictures to produce. Mr. Griffith has succeeded most often with such subjects, perhaps because he has attempted them more often. Rex Ingram succeeded admirably well in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and no doubt will succeed again when he tries further, as he most surely will.
Many others have succeeded too, and many have failed, the chief reason for the failures being, it appears, that the spectacle idea appealed to the director in capital letters while he forgot all about the personal element of the story. No spectacle, no matter how grand and glittering and gorgeous, no matter how heavily peopled with costumed supernumeraries, no matter how thickly smeared with money and elaborate "art" can succeed if the director forgets about his personal story in the bigness of his background. He must be able to step from the mountain to the molehill with agility and with such delicacy of touch that he doesn't smash the molehill by treading on it as if it were the mountain.
As an example of this appreciation of both the spectacular and personal elements of story, no better picture can be found than Mr. Griffith's Hearts of the World, his story of the European war. He brought before the eye all the horrible realities of the battle field, used them to dramatic purpose time and again. And yet in the midst of all this spectacular action he never for once lost sight of the personal element in the story, this element represented on the battlefield by Robert Harron who played the part of the young soldier. How many people who saw Hearts of the World can forget the scene in the shell hole in which the center of attention were the young soldier and the dying negro? This was one of the most remarkable of the personal, intimate touches in the picture and yet the very next moment the spectator was plunged back into the mass horror of the tremendous conflict.
This was only an instance of many. In the last scenes which looked forward to the armistice parade in Paris (looked forward to it with an uncanny amount of judgment), soldiers and, citizens were seen going mad with joy in the streets of the city. A thrilling sight in itself were these mass scenes, showing thousands of people nearly breaking their own and their friends' necks with unrestrained joy at peace come at last.
But even in the midst of all these scenes of thrilling revelry the four principal characters of the picture were introduced rejoicing too. And the glimpses shown of them brought the thrills of the big scenes to a tremendous emotional climax.
It would seem a simple matter for the clear-thinking director to produce a spectacular picture at the same time keeping his finger on the pulse of the intimate, personal story that gives color and reality to the bigness of his backgrounds. But it is more often the case than not that the director who tackles a spectacle forgets his story in the mad rush for sweeping effect. As a consequence he loses his grip on the interest of his audience.
How many pictures could be named in which just mass scene after mass scene appeared on the screen, containing no dramatic purpose, no interest aside from their sheer spectacular value (an interest that soon dies if not fostered with glimpses of the personal story), just mass scene after mass scene until the spectator begins to wonder what in thunder the whole thing means? It seems offhand that any number of such pictures could be named.
But if the director keeps his senses about him he never loses sight of the little things of the spectacle, they are as vitally important as the mass action itself.
It might be appropriate to mention the recent German pictures in this connection. The German picture director is noted for the production of spectacular features. In some respects he surpasses the American director, namely in the artistry of his big scenes and the effective manner in which he handles large numbers of people but on the other hand the German director has the fault of overlooking the personal story in his eagerness to get the spectacular effects.
This fact is particularly noticeable in German pictures when they first come to this country. Of course the pictures first have to pass through the hands of experts. The titles are translated and revised to fit the styles the American public has long since expressed itself satisfied with. But more important, much that the German director left in has to be cut out. Pictures made in Germany and shown here as five or six or seven reel features very often run eight or nine or ten reels when they first are imported here. And in these extra reels which the American cutters painlessly remove from here, there and everywhere in the long stretch of the film, are mob scenes used just because they are mob scenes. Mob scene follows mob scene, until each scene has no particular meaning, the mass effects grow tiresome and the spectator longs for a glimpse of the story forgotten so long ago by the director. The American cutter is able to eliminate much of these superfluous scenes but he can not give the intimate story the prominence that was denied it in the beginning by the German director.
Probably the reason why so many directors neglect this personal element in their spectacles is because of the fact that several years ago a big scene, that is a scene containing a few dozen or a few hundred people, was supposed to impress audiences with the fact that a lot of money had been spent on the picture and that therefore, because a lot of money was spent on it, it was a work of merit.
"Here," a director used to say when he had doubt in the value of the story he was working on, "Give me a big ball room set and a hundred people in evening clothes and I'll give this picture real class."
The argument sounds particularly false and unsound today as it was all the time. But the motion picture directors of today, a great many of them at least, still seem to think that a picture can be made good by throwing a lot of money away on lavish settings, and settings containing a lot of people, even though they fail to regard the personal element of the story in a serious light, even though they fail to make this element convincing and real.
Some of the biggest directors in the business have this idea, strange as it may seem. These fellows, believing themselves secure, take delight in poking fun at Mr. Griffith because he will stop a spectacular scene now and then to show a youngster playing with kittens. Mr. Griffith may have been inclined to pay too much attention to kittens and puppies at one time in his career but he was headed along on the right track and those who laughed at these scenes of his were then and there switched off to the wrong track.
Peter Milne, "Motion Picture Directing," (1922, New York: Falk Publishing Co., Inc.), pages 70-89.
© 1997, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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