The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (136 page)

Emerging and flourishing in America, land of conquest of space and time, film art was newly democratic and popular in the very age when literature was newly arcane. Within the first century, the art of film showed a novelty appropriate to the democratic New World, a reach and a versatility unlike any art before. No earlier art was so widely and so complexly collaborative, so dependent on the marriage of art and technology, or on the pleasure of the community.

Other arts—architecture since ancient Egypt and drama since classic Greece—have been communal, focusing the energies, hopes, and beliefs of many. But the art of film would be vastly public, and have the public as its patron. Its future was full of mystery and of promise suggested in the early twentieth century, when it suddenly became the most popular American art. The “movies” (which entered our written language about 1912) re-created all the world’s dimensions with bold abandon. Giving a new immortality to life in all times and places, its medium was the very antithesis of stone, the static material in which man from the beginning of history had tried to make his work immortal. Light, the unlikely medium of man’s newly created immortality, was the most elusive, most transient, most ephemeral of all phenomena. Recently revealed as “the pencil of nature” with the power to create durable images, light—when properly managed, captured, and focused in a camera and then in the human eye—had the power to make moving images that could be mistaken for the real world. The movies, it was said, had the power of “making us walk more confidently on the precarious ground of imagination.”

The novelties and mysteries of the new art were numerous—in its process
of creation, in its audience, in its powers to re-create the world, and to probe, create, and reveal the self.

The “motion” picture phenomenon was a discovery of a versatile and ingenious English doctor, Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), best remembered for his still-useful
Thesaurus
(1852). One day as he looked out through the Venetian blinds in his study, he noticed that the cart moving through the street seemed to be proceeding by jerks. He suspected that it was a series of stationary impressions joined together that gave the eye the impression of a cart in motion. In 1824 he offered the Royal Society his paper on “Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects.” So casually he had noted what would make possible the motion pictures. Sir John Herschel had observed it too when spinning a coin on a table he found it “possible to see both sides of the coin at once.” Inventors applied this phenomenon to toys. With pretentious names—Thaumatrope, Fantoscope, etc.—these gadgets viewed a series of still drawings of an object in motion placed on a disk and seen through a slit in another disk on the same axis. Thus the animated “moving picture” preceded photography.

With photography it became possible to make “moving pictures” of the natural world. But this first required images of objects in motion, which was not possible in the early days of photography. Then the most famous of these was made in 1877 by Eadweard Muybridge of a galloping horse to help Leland Stanford, governor of California, to win his bet that at some moment all four hooves of a galloping horse are off the earth. When the cumbersome glass plate was replaced by the celluloid film improved by George Eastman with perforations fitted on sprocket wheels, it was possible to make ten pictures a second from a single camera. In 1888 an Englishman, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, working in Thomas Edison’s laboratory made a Kinetograph and shot the first film on celluloid—
Fred Ott’s Sneeze
, of a worker in Edison’s factory. The first feasible projector, the Vitascope, was the work of Thomas Armat, but when bought out by Edison it was advertised as “Thomas A. Edison’s latest marvel.” By 1912 Edison boasted, “I am spending more than my income getting up a set of 6,000 films to teach the 19 million school children in the schools of the United States to do away entirely with books.”

In Europe, inventors were improving the apparatus for an audience dazzled by the mere spectacle of pictures in motion. The Lumière brothers impressed Parisians with their film of workers leaving a factory and a train arriving in a station. Among their spectators in 1895 was a professional magician, George Meliès (1861–1938), who saw the film’s magical promise. In the next fifteen years he made more than four hundred films, which exploited the camera with stop motion, slow motion, fade-out, and double exposure to show people being cut in two, turning into animals, or disappearing.
From trick shots he went on to simple narrative, filming
Cleopatra, Christ Walking on the Waters
(1899),
Red Riding Hood
(1901), and his renowned
A Trip to the Moon
(1902). But he kept the camera fixed like the eye of a spectator seated in the audience, and did not move it for long shots or close-ups. The unlucky Mellès was put out of business by pirates who sold copies of his works, and he ended his life selling newspapers in the Paris Métro.

By the opening of the twentieth century, the basic technology of the silent films had developed, but the art was yet to be created. Americans had their first glimpse of film art in the work of Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941), the uncelebrated pioneer of the movie narrative of suspense. After his discharge from the navy Porter worked as handyman and mechanic in Edison’s skylight studio on East Twenty-first Street in New York City. And he had the inspired idea—which now seems quite obvious—of using the camera not just to take photographs of actors on a stage but to put together moving picture “shots” of actions at different times and places to make a connected story. In what is called the first American documentary,
The Life of an American Fireman
(1903), he showed the dramatic possibilities of replacing the theatrical “scene” of actors on a stage by the “shot” created by the motion picture camera. In this six-minute film he brought together twenty separate shots (including stock footage from the Edison archive and staged scenes of a dramatic rescue from a burning building) by dissolves or cuts, to make a suspenseful story.

Porter himself made film history with the twelve minutes of
The Great Train Robbery
later that year. Using fourteen separate shots (not scenes), quickly shifting from one to another, without titles or dissolves, he left the spectator to connect this story of desperadoes who rob a mail train, shoot a passenger, and finally die in a shoot-out with the posse sent to pursue them. Conjuring with time, Porter showed his shots not necessarily in chronological order, and pioneered in “parallel editing,” which invited the viewer to understand the jumps back and forth in time. He demonstrated that the camera, unlike the theater, did not have to carry out each scene to its end. His success temporarily set the single reel (eight to ten minutes) as the standard length for American films. At the same time he liberated the movies from the studio by providing a model for the American Western, with action, pursuit, and outdoor glamour. The biggest box-office success in its day, it drew audiences for ten years.

While making
Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest
(1907), a hair-raising thriller of a baby snatched from a cradle by an eagle and then rescued by a brave mountaineer, Porter enlisted David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) to play the hero. A young man of limited experience and meager education, Griffith
had been born on a farm in rural Kentucky. His earliest memories were of “my father Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith of the Confederacy,” returning from the war, a wounded and beaten man, and of his father’s flamboyant gestures with his officer’s saber. Griffith’s whole life would be overcast by nostalgia for his idealized Old South. He happened into the theater as an actor in the Louisville theater, and pieced together a living as a book salesman for Brittanica, picking hops in California, with occasional roles in a traveling stock company. In his first film role at Biograph he had wrestled convincingly with a stuffed eagle manipulated by wires, and so came into the art that he would transform in the next decade. Obsessed by a past that never was, he became the shaper of an art that would reshape the American imagination.

From acting, Griffith moved into directing and at the Biograph Company in the next five years he directed more than four hundred films, most on one reel. In these gestation years of motion picture technique Griffith would liberate the movies from the theater.

Griffith proceeded to show what could be done with the new dramatic art.

When he left Biograph in 1913, his advertisement in
The New York Dramatic Mirror
described how his “innovations” had been “revolutionizing Motion Picture Drama and founding the modern technique of the art”—by “the large or close-up figures, distant views …, the ‘switchback,’ sustained suspense, the ‘fade-out,’ and restraint in expression, raising motion picture acting to the higher plain which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.” What he had done, in a word, was to lift the spectator out of his seat and put him among the actors, or at any other vantage point to serve the story. There was no longer a standard distance between the audience and the actor.

While Porter had gambled on the spectator’s ability to piece the movie “shots” together into a connected narrative, Griffith created a whole syntax. The movie viewer would soon be at home in a new language, adept at putting together a disconnected succession of close-ups, medium shots, panoramas, fade-ins, fade-outs, switchbacks, switchforwards, masked shots, iris-in shots, and the moving perspectives of tracking shots. The art of film, Griffith observed, “although a growth of only a few years, is boundless in
its scope, and endless in its possibilities. The whole world is its stage, and time without end its limitations.”

But his employers at Biograph were shocked when they saw his version of Tennyson’s
Enoch Arden
(
After Many Years
, 1908), with its parallel shots of Annie Lee at the seaside and of Enoch shipwrecked on a desert island, each thinking of the other. “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.” “Well,” Griffith replied, “doesn’t Dickens write that way?” “Yes, but that’s Dickens; that’s novel writing; that’s different.” “Oh, not so much,” Griffith retorted, “these are picture stories; not so different.” That very night he went home, reread one of Dickens’s novels, and came back next day to tell his employers they could either use his idea or dismiss him. Griffith had been led by the Vanguard Word to lift the spectator from his seat in the theater and put the camera into the consciousness of characters—and viewers.

The power of the new art was proved in
The Birth of a Nation
, in which film historians see Griffith’s creation of the grammar and syntax of the modern film. Its three hours on the screen pioneered the long feature film. And it was a box-office bonanza. Budgeted at $40,000 (four times the usual cost for a feature at the time), it finally came to $110,000, which included Griffith’s savings and investment by his friends. Within five years after its release in 1915 it would earn $15 million, thirty years later had grossed some $48 million, and it went on earning. Its popular success, despite a banal and vicious message, was an ominous sign of the hypnotic power of the technology of the new art to overwhelm its content. Taken from a play by a bigoted North Carolina minister, the movie told a nostalgic tale idealizing the Old South and the institution of slavery, extolling the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan in saving white Southerners from bestial Negroes and their white political accomplices, and exhorting against racial “pollution.”

Griffith had prophesied that “in less than ten years … the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.”
The Birth of a Nation
proved that there was substance in his grim prophecy. In the 1920s the film helped spark a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which reached a membership of five million by the 1940s, and it continued to be used for recruiting and indoctrination into the 1960s. Thorstein Veblen hailed the movie as a triumph of “concise misinformation.” Organized protests by enlightened citizens who labeled it “a deliberate attempt to humiliate ten million American citizens and portray them as nothing but beasts” and the refusal of eight states to license the film for exhibition did not prevent its spectacular box-office success.

Griffith himself tried to make the censorship of his film a patriotic issue, and cast himself as a martyr for “free speech” rather than for bad history.
He launched into another blockbuster film,
Intolerance
(1916), which outdid its predecessor in scale and use of his new film syntax to tell the story (in four scenes) of intolerance through the ages: Babylon falling from the “intolerance” of a priest, Christ forced to the Cross by intolerant Pharisees, the massacre of Huguenots by intolerant Catholics on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, and modern intolerance forcing poor women into prostitution and sending innocent men to the gallows. A single scene, of Belshazzar’s feast, cost $250,000, more than twice the whole budget of
The Birth of a Nation
. But the audience, put off by the abstract thread and shrieking polemics, did not share Griffith’s enthusiasm. The film was withdrawn from circulation after only twenty-two weeks and reedited into two separate films. At his death in 1948 Griffith was only a decayed celebrity, still paying off his debts on
Intolerance
.

Meanwhile, Griffith’s work had gathered influence abroad. On Lenin’s instructions it was widely shown in the Soviet Union. While Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) called himself a disciple of Griffith, his life and career could hardly have been more different. Born in Riga, Latvia, into a prosperous Christianized family of Jewish descent, Eisenstein had been a student of engineering in Petrograd when the Revolution approached in February 1917. He enlisted in the Red Army and in 1920 joined the Proletkult Theater producing plays in the new proletarian spirit. Eisenstein read widely, and had a talent for abstraction, which he cultivated in arcane Marxist disputes between Stanislavsky’s acting “method,” Meyerhold’s theory of “biomechanics,” and the vagaries of the futurist Mayakovsky, the “tireless one-man communist manifesto.” Eisenstein, saying it was like trying to perfect “a wooden plough” to imagine a theater independent of the Marxist “revolutionary framework,” elaborated his own mechanistic theory of film. The film, too, was admirably suited for his Marxist “collective hero,” since it was possible to accumulate many more people on the screen than on the stage, and he embraced the opportunity to produce mass epics.