I warn you again they were not great pictures except for The Avenging Conscience and—one you didn’t make—Cabiria. To each of these a poet contributed. (Peace, Mr Griffith; the poet in your case was E. A. Poe; and the warrior poet of Fiume contributed the scenario for the second.) Mr Griffith contrived in his picture to project both beauty and terror by combining Annabel Lee with The Telltale Heart. A sure instinct led him to disengage the vast emotion of longing and of lost love through an action of mystery and terror. (I think he made a happy ending somehow—by having the central portion of his story appear as a dream. How little it mattered since the real emotion came through the story.) The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere; it was felt. After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays of light. And if I may anticipate the end, let me compare it with a picture of 1922, a picturization as you call it, of Annabel Lee. It was all scenery and captions; it presented a detestable little boy and a pretty little girl doing æsthetic dancing along cliffs by the sea; one almost saw the Ocean View Hotel in the background. Mercilessly the stanzas appeared on the screen; but nothing was allowed to happen except a vulgar representation of calf love. I cannot bear to describe the disagreeable picture of grief at the end; I do not dare to think what you may now be preparing with a really great poem. The lesson is not merely one of taste; it is a question of knowing the camera, of realizing that you must project emotion by movement and by picture combined.
I am trying to trace for you the development of the serious moving picture as a bogus art, and I can’t do better than assure you that it was best before it was an “art” at all. (Or I can indicate that slap-stick comedy, which you despise, is not bogus, is a real, and valuable, and delightful entertainment.) I believe that you went out West because the perpetual sun of southern California made taking easy; there you discovered the lost romance of America, its Wild West and its pioneer days, its gold rush and its Indians. You had it in your hands, then, to make that past of ours alive; a small written literature and a remnant of oral tradition remained for you to work on. On the whole you did make a good beginning. You missed fine things, but you caught the simple ones; you presented the material directly, with appropriate sentiment. You relied on melodrama, which was the rightest thing you ever did. Combat and pursuit, the last-minute rescue, were the three items of your best pictures; and your cutting department, carefully alternating the fight between white men and red with the slow-starting, distant, approaching, arriving, victorious troops from the garrison appealed properly to our soundest instincts. You went into the bad-man period; you began to make an individual soldier, Indian, bandit, pioneer, renegade, the focus of your interest: still good because you related him to an active, living background. Dear Heaven! before you had filmed Bret Harte you had created legendary heroes of your own.
Meanwhile Mr Griffith, apparently insatiable, was developing small genre scenes of slum life while he thought of filming the tragic history of the South after the war. Other directors sought other fields—notably that of the serial adventure film. Since they made money for all concerned, you will not be surprised to hear these serials praised: The Exploits of Elaine, the whole Pearl White adventure, the thirty minutes of action closing on an impossible and unresolved climax were, of course, infinitely better pictures than your version of Mr Joseph Conrad’s Victory, your Humoreske, your Should a Wife Forgive?[28] They were extremely silly; they worked too closely on a scheme: getting out of last week’s predicament and into next week’s can hardly be called a “form.” But within their limitations they used the camera for all it was worth. It didn’t matter a bit that the perils were preposterous, that the flights and pursuits were all fakes composed by the speed of the projector. You were back in the days of Nick Carter and the Liberty Boys; you hadn’t heard of psychology, and drama, and art; you were developing the camera. You bored us when your effects didn’t come off and I’m afraid amused us a little even when they did. But you were on the right road.
There was very little acting in these films and in the Wild West exhibitions. There was a great deal of action. I can’t recall Pearl White registering a single time; I recall only movement, which was excellent. It was later that your acting developed; up to this time you were working with people who hadn’t succeeded in or were wholly ignorant of the technique of the stage; they moved before the camera gropingly at first, but gradually developing a technique suited to the camera and to nothing else. I am referring to days so far back that the old Biograph films used to be branded with the mark AB in a circle, and this mark occurred in the photographed sets to prevent stealing. In those days your actors and actresses were exceptionally naïve and creative. You were on the point of discovering mass and line in the handling of crowds, in the defile of a troop, in the movement of individuals. Mr Griffith had already discovered that four men running in opposite directions along the design of a figure 8 gave the effect of sixteen men—a discovery lightly comparable to that of Velasquez in the crossed spears of the Surrender of Breda. You would have done well to continue your experiments with nameless individuals and chaotic masses; but you couldn’t. You developed what you called personalities—and after that, actresses.
Before The Birth of a Nation was begun Mary Pickford had already left Griffith. I have heard that he vowed to make Mae Marsh a greater actress—as if she weren’t one from the start, as if acting mattered, as if Mary Pickford ever could or needed to act. Remember that in The Avenging Conscience at least four people: Spottiswood Aiken, Henry Walthall, Blanche Sweet, and another I cannot identify—the second villain—played superbly without acting. Conceive your own stupidity in not knowing what Vachel Lindsay discovered: that “our Mary” was literally “the Queen of my People,” a radiant, lovely, childlike girl, a beautiful figurehead, a symbol of all our sentimentality. Why did you allow her to become an actress? Why is everything associated with her later work so alien to beauty? You did not see her legend forming; you began to advertise her salary; you have, I believe unconsciously, tried to restore her now by giving her the palest rôle in all literature, that of Marguerite in Faust. You are ten years too late. In the same ten years Blanche Sweet has almost disappeared and Mae Marsh has not arrived; Gishes and Talmadges and Swansons and other fatalities have triumphed. You have taken over the stage and the opera; you have filmed Caruso and Al Jolson, too, for all I know. You now have acting and no playing.
This is a matter of capital importance and I am willing to come closer to a definition. Acting is the way of impersonating, of rendering character, of presenting action which is suitable to the stage; it has, in the first place, a specific relation to the size of the stage and to that of the auditorium; it has also a second important relation to the lines spoken. Good actors—they are few—will always suit the gesture to the utterance in the sense that their gesture will be on the beat of the words; failure to know this ruined several of John Barrymore’s soliloquies in Hamlet. Neither of these two primary and determinant circumstances affect the moving picture. It should be obvious that if good acting is adapted to the stage, nothing less than a miracle could make it also suitable to the cinema. The same thing is true of opera, which is in a desperate state because it failed to develop a type of representation adapted to musical instead of spoken expression. Opera and the pictures both needed “playing”—by which I cover other forms of representation, of impersonation, characterization, without identifying them. It is unlikely that opera and pictures require the same kind of playing; but neither of them can bear acting. Chaplin, by the way, is a player, not an actor—although we all think of him as an actor because the distinction is tardily made. I should say that Mae Marsh, too, was a player in The Birth. So was H. B. Warner in a war play called Shell 49 (I am not sure of the figure); and there have been others. I have never seen Conrad Veidt or Werner Kraus on the stage; in Caligari they were players, not actors. Possibly since Kraus is considered the greatest of German actors, he acted so well that he seemed to be playing. But that requires genius and the Gishes have no genius.
The emergence of Mary Pickford and the production of The Birth of a Nation make the years 1911–14 the critical time of the movies. Nearly all your absurdities began about this time, including your protest against the word movies as no longer suited to the dignity of your art. From the success of The Birth sprang the spectacle film which was intrinsically all right and only corrupted Griffith and the pictures because it was unintelligently handled thereafter. From the success of Mary Pickford came the whole tradition of the movie as a genteel intellectual entertainment. The better side is the spectacle and the fact that in 1922 the whole mastery of the spectacular film has passed out of your hands ought to be sufficient proof that you bungled somewhere. Or, to drive it home, what can you make of the circumstance that one of the very greatest successes, in America and abroad, was Nanook of the North, a spectacle film to which the producer and the artistic director contributed nothing—for it was a picture of actualities, made, according to rumour, in the interests of a fur-trading company? You will reply that my assertions are pure theory. It is true that I have never filmed a scenario in my life. But as a spectator I am the one who is hard headed and you the theorists. What I and several million others know is that something wrong crept into the spectacle film. We know absolutely that the overblown idea of Intolerance was foisted on the simple tale of The Mother and the Law, and that while single episodes of this stupendous picture were excellent, the whole failed of effect. In The Birth Mr Griffith had two stories with no perceptible internal relation, but with sufficient personal interest to carry; even here not one person in ten thousand saw the significance of the highfalutin title. But after the time of Intolerance Mr Griffith receded swiftly, and his latest pictures are merely lavish. It is of no significance that Mr Griffith treats Thomas Burke as though the latter were a great writer instead of a good scenario writer; the prettifying of Broken Blossoms was so consistent, and the fake acting such good fake, that the picture almost succeeded. Everywhere Mr Griffith now gives us excesses—everything is big: the crowds, the effects, the rainstorms, the ice floes, and everything is informed with an overwhelming dignity. He has long ago ceased to create beauty—only beautiful effects, like set pieces in fireworks. And he was the man destined by his curiosity, his honesty, his intelligence, to reach the heights of the moving picture.
It is a hard thing to say, but it is literally true that something in Mr Griffith has been corrupted and died—his imagination. Broken Blossoms was a last expiring flicker. Since then he has constructed well; I understand that his success has been great; I am not denying that Mr Griffith is the man to do Ben-Hur. But he has imagined nothing on a grand scale, nor has he created anything delicate or fine. People talk of The Birth as if the battle scenes were important; they were very good and a credit to Griffith, who directed, and to George Bitzer, who photographed them; the direction of the ride of the Klansmen was better, it had some imagination. And far better still was a moment earlier in the piece, when Walthall returned to the shattered Confederate home and Mae Marsh met him at the door, wearing raw cotton smudged to resemble ermine—brother and sister both pretending that they had forgotten their dead, that they didn’t care what happened. And then—for the honours of the scene went to Griffith, not even to the exquisite Mae Marsh—then there appeared from within the doorway the arm of their mother and with a gesture of unutterable loveliness it enlaced the boy’s shoulders and drew him tenderly into the house. To have omitted the tears, to have shown nothing but the arm in that single curve of beauty, required, in those days, high imagination. It was the emotional climax of the film; one felt from that moment that the rape and death of the little girl was already understood in the vast suffering sympathy of the mother. So much Mr Griffith never again accomplished; it was the one moment when he stood beside Chaplin as a creative artist—and it was ten years ago.
Of course if Griffith hasn’t come through there is hardly anything to hope for from the others. Mr Ince always beat him in advertized expenditure; Fox was always cheaper and easier and had Annette Kellerman and did The Village Blacksmith. The logical outcome of Griffithism is in the pictures he didn’t make: in When Knighthood Was in Flower and in Robin Hood, neither of which I could sit through. The lavishness of these films is appalling; the camera runs mad in everything but action, which dies a hundred deaths in as many minutes. Of what use are sets by Urban if the action which occurs in them is invisible to the naked eye? The old trick of using a crowd as a background and holding the interest in the individual has been lost; the trick of using the crowd as an individual hasn’t been found because we must have our love story. The spectacle film is slowly settling down to the level of the stereopticon slide.
Comparison with German films is inevitable. They are as much on the wrong track as we are; and the exception, Caligari, is defective because in a proper attempt to relieve the camera from the burden of recording actuality, the producers gave it the job of recording modern paintings for background. The acting was, however, playing; and the destruction of realism, even if it was accomplished by a questionable expedient, will have much to do with the future of the film. Yet even in the spectacle film the Germans managed to do something. Passion and Deception and the Pharaoh film and the film made out of Sumurun were not lavish. And in the manipulation of material (not of the instrument, where we know much more than they) there came occasionally flashes of the real thing. In Deception there was a scene where the courtyard had to be cleared of an angry mob. Every American producer has handled the parallel scene and every one in the same way, centring in the mêlée between civilians and police. What Lubitsch did was to form a single line of pike staffs and to show a solid mass of crowd—the feeling of hostility was projected in the opposition of line and mass. And slowly the space behind the pike staffs opened. The bright calm sunlight fell on a wider and widening strip of the courtyard. One was hardly aware of struggle; all one saw was that gradually broadening patch of open, uncontested space in the light. And suddenly one knew that the courtyard was cleared, one seemed to hear the faint murmur of the crowd outside, and then silence. I am lost in admiration of this simplicity which involves every correct principle of the æsthetics of the moving picture. The whole thing was done with movement and light—the movement massed and the light on the open space. That is the true, the imaginative camera technique, which we failed to develop.[29]