Film Essays, With A Lecture . Non-Indifferent Nature: Film .

200FILM FORM.DICKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAYA.,a Ia a terrifying butcher m meTteacher who was .mvltetht. p y ho ended the film career thusica-the late L? Wo e lew erformance as "Kat" in Allbegun with his mcomparaP.he Western Front.Iso .Qwet on tfthetic old men are a qUIteThese striking fi 0noble and slighdy onein the Dickens tradioon; and fragile maidens; and these. nal figures of sorrow an. IIdimenslO . odd characters. They are esp Cla yrural gossips an sundryh hthem briefly, in epISodes. cing in Dickens w en e usesVJncon' ""] is that.be noticed about [Pec"",w,The only other thing to else in the novels, the best figures arehere, as almost everyw.here Ito do Dickens's characters arethey have e a s t ·I .at their best w henthut of his stories. Bumb e ISperfect as long as he can k cal -:;:'tisentrustedto him. . sdivine nnw a dark and prac d' nothing. but he is quite unMicawber is noble when he IS omg U . h H'eep.on na. Similarly.convincing when he IS spJ;mg. th story the story is the worstwhile Pecksnitf is the best thing m e ,. in pecksniff.'.thing., .,d with the same believability,Free of this limitaoon, an. di figures into those fascI;eople, in which his screenfith's characte.rs gr w f: fgnating and fintshed lffiag"Well," said Mr. Griffith, "doesn't Dickens write that way?""Yes, but that's Dickens; that's novel writing; that's different.""Oh, not so muc these are picture stories; not so different." 8SY;:'eseti::Gn -is so rich.,ail about this, let us rather returnInstead of gom mto detrowth of that second side oftheto that more obVlous fact- hi ga magician of tempo andGriffith·s creative craf surprising to find themontage; a side for whlc It IS therr-:same Victo an source. d to his employers the novelty of aWhen Griffith prop .f Enocb Arden (Afterk" f his first versIOn 0parallel "cut-b acor . th discussion that took place, ashisMany Years, 1908), t . IS th in her reminiscences of.recorded by Linda ArvidsonBiograph days:h . Annie Lee waitesred a scene s owmghriffith sogg to be followed by a scene f En When Mr. Ging for her husband s r .t was altogether too dtstractmg.cast away on a desert lS""':d, I ing about like that? The people"How can you tell a story Jump.won't know what it's about."201.\!But, to speak quite frankly, all astonishment on this subjectand the apparent unexpectedness of such statements can beascribed only to our-:-ignorance of Dickens.All of us read him in childhood, gulped him down greedily,without reaIizing that much of his irresistibility lay not onlyin his capture of detail in the childhoods of his heroes, but alsoin that spontaneous. childlike skill for story-telling, equallytypical for Dickens and for the American cinema. which sosurely and delicately plays upon the infantile traits in its audience. We were even less concerned with the technique ofDickens's composition: for us this was non-existent-but captivated by the effects of this technique, we feverishly followedhis characters from page to page, watching his characters nowbeing rubbed from view at the most critical moment, then seeing them return afresh between the separate links of the parallel secondary plot.As children, we paid no attention to the mechanics of this.As adults. we rarely re-read his novels. And becoming filmworkers, we never found time to glance beneath the covers ofthese novels in order to figure out what exactly had captivatedus in these novels and with what means these incredibly manypaged volumes had chained our attention so irresistibly.Apparently Griffith was more perceptive .But before disclosing what the steady gaze of the Americanfilm-maker may have caught sight of on Dickens's pages, Iwish to recall what David Wark Griffith himself representedto us. the young Soviet film-makers of the 'twenties.To say it simply and without equivocation: a revelation.Try to remember our early days. in those first years of theOctober socialist revolution. The fires At the Heartbsides ofour native film-producers had burnt out, the Nava's Charms. Nl7Ua', Chamu (by Sologub) and At the He.htide. two pre-Revo-lutionary Russian :films, as is also Forget the HellNh. The names that, follow are of the male and female film stars of this period.-mITOR.

10!FILM FORMDICKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAYhis-f h'd tions had lost their power over us and, wo err:rro c Irs "Forget the hearth," Khudoleyev andpen g t o g kypa pMaximov had departed to oblivion; Ver:-Ruruch, Po onshid L' nko to expatnKholodnaya to the grave; Mozhuk n an ISeati eoun Soviet cinema was gathering the experience offirst experiments (Vertov), of first. fhat .(Kuleshov)t .unsystemanc v e n t u r e s , 10 preparation or ,recedented explosion in the second half of the . enues,Ph'tmature, ongmal art,wenlwas to become an independent,.d' t I aining world recogrutlOn.days a tangle of theroO ected on our screens. From out 0 t IS. . " d'films and new ones that attempted to mamtam tra I. u:I ,nand new films that could not yet be call d Soviet, and o.' fil that had been iroported pronuscuously, ororelghntownd ms 0 If dusty shelves-two main streams began tobroug! g reality, ofrevo IuuonaryIm;.:eth s: a yk ).wi:e V e % a ': : em he one side there was the cinema of our neighbor, pos M sticism, decadence, dismal fantasy followerevolution of 1923, and he:reen was qnick to reflect this mood. Nosferatu the ".lrlnp:Te,. warm'ng Shadows, the mysticenmThe Street the mystenousdf. I Dr Mabuse the Glrlnbler,· reaching out towar s us romlOa.achieved the limits of horror, showing us a futureIi d ru'ght crowded with sinister shadows andourscreens,as an unre eve a h :::'t%'Y f t e unsuccessfulcriroes. . . .ures of over-fluid dissolves, ofThe chaos of multiple expos . f the later 'twenties (asas more characterIStiC 0spIit screens, wf Soul t) but earlier Gerof this' tendency. In the::no::; : Pn:' r : : SaOhi t.' b F W Murnau' Die StTasse (19 1 3), Nosteratu (19 21 ), directed y (' .,. directed' by Arthur Robison;F 'tz Lan.directed by Karl Grune; Scbiltten. 19 1 3,Dr. Mabus , der Spieler ('9)" ! dir:dt dy %'h Rob!n; Gebeimnisset Looping tbe Loop ('9,8, rrecteiner Seele ('9,6), directed by G. W. Pabst.,20 3over-use of these devices was also reflected the confusion andchaos of post-war Gennany.All these tendencies of mood and method had been foreshadowed in one of the earliest and most famous of these films,The Cabinet of Dr. Ca/igari (1920), this barbaric carnival ofthe destruction of the healthy human infancy of our art, thiscommon grave for nonnal cinema origins, this combination ofsilent hysteria, particolored canvases, daubed flats, paintedfaces, and the unnatural broken gestures and actions of monstrous chimaeras.Expressionism left barely a trace on our cinema. This.painted, hypnotic "St. Sebastian\of Cinema" was too alien tothe young, robust spirit and body of the rising class.It is interesting that during those years inadequacies in thefield of film technique played a positive role. They helpedto restrain from a false step those whose enthusiasm might havepulled them in this dubious direction. Neither the dimensionsof our studios, nor our lighting equipment, nor the materialsavailable .to us for make-up, costumes, or setting, gave us thepossibility to heap onto the screen similar phantasmagoria. Butit was chiefly another thing that held us back: our spirit urgedus towards life-amidst the people, into the surging actualityof a regenerating country. Expressionism passed into theformative history of our cinema as a powerful factor-of repulsion.There was the role of another film-factor that appeared,dashing along in such films as The Gray Shadow, The Houseof Hate, The Mark of Zorro.· There was in these films a world,stirring and incomprehensible, but neither repulsive nor alien.On the contrary-it was captivating and attractive, in its ownway engaging the attention of young and future film-makers,exactly as the young and fut11le engineers of the tiroe wereattracted by the speciroens of engineering techniques unknown Tbe House of Hate (1918), a serial directed by George Seitz, withPearl White; The Mark of ZO"O (19"), directed by Fred Niblo, withDouglas Fairbanks. The American film released in Russia as The GrayShadO'W has not been identified.-EDITOR.

FILM FORMto US, sent from that same unknown, distant land across theocean.What enthralled us was not only these films, it was alsotheir possibilities. Just as it was the possibilities in a tractor tomake collective cultivation of the fields a reality, it was theboundless temperament and tempo of these amazing (andamazingly useless!) works from an unknown countty that ledus to muse on the posst'bilities of a profound, intelligent, classdirected use of this wonderful tooLThe most thrilling figure against this background was Griffith, for it was in his works that the cinema made itself feltas more than an entertainment or pastime. The brilliant newmethods of the American cinema were united in him with aprofound emotion of stoty, with human acting, with laughterand tearS, and all this was done with an astonishing ability topreserve all that gleam of a filmically dynamic holiday, whichhad been captured in The Gray SbadO'W and The MllTk ofZorro and The House of Hate. That the cinema could be incomparably greater, and that this was to be the basic task ofthe budding Soviet cinema-these were sketched for us inGriffith's creative work, and found ever new confirmation inhis films.Our heightened curiosity of those years in ,ConstTUCtiO'Tl Il1ldmethod swiftly discerned wherein lay the most powerful affective factors in this great American's films. This was in a hitheno unfamiliar province, bearing a name that was familiar tous, not in the field of art, but in that of engineering and electrical apparatus, first touching an in its most advanced section-in cinematography. This province, this method, this principle of building and construction was mtmtage.This was the montage whose foundations had been laid byAmerican film-culture, but whose full, completed, conscioususe and world recognition was established by our films. Montage, the rise of which will be forever linked with the nameof Griffith. Montage, which played a most vital role in thecreative work of Griffith and brought him his most glorioussuccesses.DICKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAY105Griffith arrived at it through the method of parallel action.And, essentially, it was on this that he came to a standstilL Butwe mustn't run ahead. Let us examine the question of howmon ge came to Griffith or-how Griffith came to montage. ;iriffith arrived at montage through the method of parallelacoon, and he was led to the idea of parallel action byDickens!'To this fact. Griffith himself has testified, according toA. B. Walkl':Y' m The. !imes of London, for April .6, '9lZ,on the occasIOn of a VISIt by the director to London. WritesMr. Walkley:He [Griffith] is a pioneer, by his own admission rather than aninventor. That is t? say, he as open",! up n paths in FilmL":,,d, un er th gwdance of Ideas supplied to him from outside.His best Ideas, It appears, have come to him from Dickens, whohas always been his favorite author. . Dickens inspired MrGriffith th an i.dea, and his employers (mere "business" men;were horrified at It; but, says Mr. Griffith, "I went home re-readone of J?ickens's novels, and came back next day to telltheycould eIther make use of my idea or dismiss me.". M . Griffith found the idea to which he clung thus heroicallym DIckens. That was as luck would have it, for he might havefound the same idea almost anywhere. Newton deduced the lawof gravitation from the fall of an apple; but a pear or a plumwould have done just as well. The idea is merely that of a "break"in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group. People who write the long and crowdednovels that ickens. did, espec y when they are published inparts, find this practtce a cODveruence. You will meet with it inThackeray, George .Eli07 Trollo e, Meredith, Hardy, and, 1 suppose, every other V,ctorIan novelist. Mr. Griffith might havef?und e same practice not onl in Dumas per., who cared preC10 little about form, but also m great artists like Tolstoy, Turgeruev, and Balza B t, as a matter of fact, it was not in any ofthese others, but m DIckens that he found it; and it is significantof the predominant influence of Dickens that he should be quotedas an authority for a device which is rcally common to fiction atlarge.them

206FILM FORMEven a superficial acquaintance with the work of the greatEnglish novelist is enough to persuade one that Dickens mayhave given and did give to cinematography far more guidancethan that which led to the montage of parallel action alone.Dickens's nearness to the characteristics of cinema in method,style, and especially in viewpoint and exposition, is indeedamazing. And it may be that in the nature of exactly thesecharacteristics, in.their communiry both for Dickens and forcinema, there lies a portion of the secret of that mass successwhich they both, apart from themes and plots, brought andstill bring to the particular qualiry of such exposition and suchwriting.What were the novels of Dickens for his contemporaries,for his readers? There is one answer: they bore the same relation to them that the film bears to the same strata in our time.They compelled the reader to live with the same passions.They appealed to the same good and sentimental elements asdoes the film (at least on the surface); they alike shudderbefore vice,· they alike mill the extraordinary, the unusual,the fantastic, from boring, prosaic and everyday existence.And they clothe this common and prosaic existence in theirspecial vision.illumined by this light, refracted from the land of fictionback to life, this commonness took on a romantic air, and boredpeople were grateful to the author for giving them the countenances of potentially romantic figures.This partially accounts for the close attachment to the novelsof Dickens and, similarly, to films. It was from this that theuniversal success of his novels derived. In an essay on Dickens,Stefan Zweig opens with this description of his populariry: As late as April 17, 1944, Griffith still considered this the chiefsocial function of film-making. An interviewer f.rom the Los AngelesTimes asked hin4 "What is a good picture?" Griffith replied, "Onethat makes the public forget its troubles. Also, a good picture tends tomake folks think a little, without letting them suspect that they arebeing inspired to think. In one respect, nearly all plctures are good inthat they show the triumph of good over evil." This is what OsbertSitwell, in reference to Dickens, called the nVirtue v. Vice Cup-TieFinal."DICKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAY207The love Dickens's contemporaries lavished upon the creator ofPickwick is not to be assessed by accoun", given in books andbiographies. Love lives and breathes only in the spoken word. Toget an adequate idea of the intensity of this love, one must catch(as I once caught) an Englishman old enough to have youthfulmemories of the days when Dickens was still alive. Preferably itshould be someone who finds it hard even now to speak of him asCharles Dickens, choosing, rather, to use the affectionate nicknameof "Boz." The emotion, tinged with melancholy, which these oldreminiscences ca l up, gives us of a younger generation some ink-ling of the enthusiasm that inspired the heam of thousands whenthe monthly instalments in their blue covers (great rarities, now)arrived at English homes. At such times, myoid Dickensian toldme, people would walk a long way to meet the posonan when afresh number was due, so impatient were they to read what Bezhad to tell. . How could they be expected to wait patiendyuntil the lener·carrier, lumbering along on an old nag, wouldarrive with the solution of these burning problems? When theappointed hour came round, old and young would saUy forth,walking two miles and more to the post office merely to have theissue sooner. On the way home they would start reading, thosewho had not the luck of holding the book looking over the shoulder of the more fortunate mortal; others would set about readingaloud as they walked; only persons with a genius for self-sacrificewould defer a purely personal gratification, and would scurryback to share the treasure with wife and child.In every villag , in every town, in the whole of the British Isles,and far beyond, away in the remotest parts of the earth wherethe English-speaking nations had gone to settle and colonize,Charles Dickens was loved. People loved him from the first moment when (through the medium of print) they made his acquaintance until his dying day. . . .'Dickens's tours as a reader gave final proof of public affection for him, both at home and abroad. By nine o'clock onthe morning that tickets for his lecture course were placed onsale in N ew York, there were two lines of buyers, each morethan three-quarters of a mile in length:The tickets for the course were all sold before noon. Membersof families relieved each other in the queues; waiters flew across

FILM FORMDICKENS, GRIFFITH, AND THE FILM TODAYthe streets and squares from the neighboring restaurant, to serveparties who were taking their breakfast in the open December air;while excited men offered five and ten dollars for the mere permission to exchange places with other persons standing nearerthe head of the line! sketched gallery of immortal Pickwicks, Dombeys, F agins,Tackletons, and others.Just because it never occurred to his biographers to connectDickens with the cinema, they provide us with unusually objective evidence, directly linking the importance of Dickens'sobservation with our medium.208Isn't this atmosphere similar to that of Chaplin's tour thr6ughEurope, or the triumphant visit to Moscow of "Doug" and"Mary," or the excited anticipation

the cinematographic principle and the ideogram a dialectic approach to film form the filmic fourth dimension . methods of montage a course in treatment film language film form: new problems the structure of the film achievem:ent dickens, griffith, and th