But despite the ubiquity of Griffith in film scholarship, there remains something elusive about the director. In distinction from most other areas of film study which continue, I would argue, to be organized along authorially-defined lines, early cinema tends to be addressed in terms of topics. The exception to this tendency is, of course, D.W. Griffith.
The emergence in the 1970s of more rigorous academic inquiry into early cinema more or less dislodged Griffith from any patriarchal or quasi-mythical role the director may have once occupied. Contrary to Griffith’s own earlier, self-aggrandizing claims to the contrary, he did not ‘invent’ what we know call crosscutting, analytical editing or the close-up. And yet when early examples of those technical innovations are to be cited, the recourse is almost always to Griffith. No introductory film class would be complete without a discussion of crosscutting in reference to a screening of at least one of The Girl and Her Trust, The Lonely Villa or The Lonedale Operator. In a sense, then, the Griffith myth is denied and affirmed simultaneously.
Contrary to notions alluded to above about Griffith being old hat in the field of film study, there does remain work to be done on the director. Of Griffith’s twenty-nine feature films, only five or so have received sustained critical attention. And even in spite of the comprehensive study devoted to Griffith’s 450-some-odd Biograph shorts – particularly in the annals of the Griffith Project – aspects of this output are in need of revisiting.
In contradistinction to his proficiency in editing, or the development at Biograph of a refined acting style, Griffith’s staging techniques are often criticized – as shallow, lateral, overly theatrical, or simply uninteresting. On the subject of the development of cinematic staging in early cinema in his book On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell writes:
In this story Griffith no longer holds the starring role. Historians are now well aware of his lingering commitment to shots in which characters plunge across the frame lines. [While] he occasionally staged in depth…usually such shots provide brief pauses in what is essentially an editing-dominated approach; Griffith seems to have had little recourse to the fine-grained intershot choreography developed by his contemporaries (195-196).On the one hand, there is nothing particularly objectionable about Bordwell’s assessment of Griffith’s staging practices during his Biograph tenure. But on the other, does it not seem counterintuitive to say that a director who developed and utilized highly-refined systems for the deployment of other cinematographic properties like editing and acting would not have an equally refined system of cinematic staging? Often descriptions of Griffith’s staging focuses on what the director does not do, leaving the question of what he does do – however ‘uninteresting’ it may be – unanswered. Prompted by the identification of what appears to be an underdeveloped area of scholarship on Griffith’s Biograph period, then, we arrive at a rather modest question: how does Griffith stage the action before the camera?
There is an initial distinction to be made between Griffith’s treatment of exteriors and interiors; as we shall see, the staging strategies applied to each are sufficiently different so as to warrant separate attention.
In the vast majority of cases, Griffith stages and films outdoor shots on a diagonal. That is, scenes are not filmed straight on, but at an oblique angle so that the line of action recedes into the center of the frame.
An example of an early precedent for this staging arrangement can be found in Corner in Wheat (1909), where characters in exterior scenes exit from view either shallow left or right, giving the impression of ‘passing by’ the camera – a sense often aided by characters glancing or gesturing offscreen at departing characters. In subsequent films, however, this directional movement is motivated by diagonal staging. Consider the following examples from The Unchanging Sea (1910); instead of simple exiting from view, characters often follow a set path into or out of frame – walking along a sidewalk or row of houses (Figure 1) or along a path demarcated by the placement of other elements of the mise-en-scène (Figure 2).
Despite the advances in editing technique we can observe over the course of Griffith’s tenure at the Biograph Company, he remained reliant on his characters being frontally-staged – that is, facing (or at least ‘open to’) the camera – in order to help convey narrative information. This is especially evident in dialogue situations, because characters must stand rather unnaturally at an angle to each other, so as to have the semblance of facing each other while remaining ‘open’ to our view. Because characters are oftentimes already at an open angle, the ‘angular’ staging (and corresponding character movement) noted above helps to naturalized character frontality needed to convey narrative information. Consider this shot from The New York Hat (1912):
Due to the angular staging, we are able to see both Mary Pickford’s character Mollie and the hat without her having to either turn away from the window to face the camera or stand unnaturally to the side as she gazes at the expensive hat, as would be the case if the storefront was filmed straight on.In addition, this staging arrangement helps to ensure that characters remain open to the camera as they pass into or out of frame. The New York Hat features repeated shots of characters exiting through a gate outside of Mollie’s house. Again, character frontality is crucial to conveying narrative information, especially as emphasis is placed less on grand gesticulations and more on facial expression.
Other examples of diagonal exterior staging could seem to contradict the notion that Griffith did not stage in depth (Figures 4 and 5).
In actual fact, these examples point more to a needed qualification than a contradiction. Although the action in such scenes is staged in different planes, characters do not move between those planes. The main action still takes place in the foreground. It seems, then, that when Griffith is criticized for not staging in depth, what is really meant is that he does not stage action in depth – that is, the action does not move from the foreground to the background or vice versa.Joyce E. Jesionowski, in Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D.W. Griffith's Biograph Films, has suggested that Griffith believed that elaborations of diagonal movement slowed down the shot (77). I find this to be a reasonable proposition. A defining characteristic of the earlier ‘chase film’ genre was the principle that a space must be ‘exhausted’ by having all characters pass through the shot before a cut to another space could occur. Having characters run from background to foreground before a cut is made resulted in a slow pace – to which the more sophisticated editing employed by Griffith during his famous ‘races to the rescue’ was seen as a remedy.
With all of that said, it should be noted that this film analyst has been unable to locate any discussion of Griffith’s use of diagonal staging arrangements for exterior shots in existing scholarship on the director. Furthermore, no distinction is made in this extant work between exteriors and interiors when discussing staging and composition – an odd oversight, to be sure, given that a director would seem to have greater latitude when filming out of doors.
Griffith does not apply the diagonal staging noted in his outdoors shots to interior scenes. Instead, the typical Griffith interior, seen throughout his Biograph tenure is a shallow-staged ‘two-wall’ scene, where the back wall and one (but very seldom both) of the side walls are visible (Figures 6 and 7).
Although interiors are not staged with noteworthy depth, this not does mean that all of the action takes place laterally within the frame. Special note must be taken of where Griffith situates the entrances to interior spaces. Oftentimes entryways are located towards the rear of each set so as to allow space for an entering character to come forward into frame to where the main action is taking place. The following still from Corner in Wheat (Figure 8), where the 'ruined man' must struggle to the foreground, illustrates how forward movement also helps to justify character frontality. (The fact that a character would not turn back to greet another is admittedly still problematic).
Given that Griffith’s treatment of most interior scenes remains consistent throughout not only his Biograph films but well into his feature career, with characters remaining open to the camera, the notion that this kind of staging could be construed as unnatural likely did not vex him. That said, in certain instances – especially more elaborate or busy scenes – Griffith was forced to make certain adjustments to ensure scenes remained legible. The near-duplication in The Usurer (1910) of one scene in particular from Corner in Wheat provides us with an interesting opportunity to examine how the director refined his approach to interior mise-en-scène.Both films feature extended sequences where shots of the suffering poor are juxtaposed through editing with rich entrepreneurs as they enjoy lavish meals surrounded by adoring friends. In each case, the sheer number of characters on screen creates the potential for the main action to be lost in the flurry of activity. Griffith, then, must rely on staging to guide the viewer’s attention.
In Corner in Wheat, the table is arranged at screen left, extending back into the frame (Figure 9). While the intention of this staging is clear – to keep the Wheat King front and center, literally – the need for the King’s performance to be directed towards the camera (and therefore away from the crowd behind him) creates the strange effect of the King seemingly seated with his back to the rest of the diners. When he rises for a toast he turns back to face the crowd, but then returns (rather unnaturally) to his forward-oriented seated posture.The Usurer addresses this problem in an innovative way: by adding an additional table (Figure 10).
The tables are staged in an ‘L’ formation, with one table at screen left as in Corner in Wheat, but the other placed lengthwise across the front of the room/frame. The Usurer’s seat is at the inner junction between the two tables, carefully staged so that he is visible between two other diners who are seated with their backs to the camera. The furnishings, then, provide the necessary motivation for the Usurer’s front-facing physical orientation. While such an adjustment may seem relatively minor when compared to Griffith’s advances in editing technique, it still works towards achieving the same goal of increasing viewer comprehension.A larger shift we can observe along Griffith’s Biograph career is increasingly closer framing, going from shots depicting characters in full figure in 1909 to shots of characters from (about) the waist up in 1912. In Classical Hollywood Cinema, Kristin Thompson has noted that while Griffith was not the first to use closer framing, in his case it was largely the byproduct of a true Griffith innovation: a new acting method of sustained performance, centering on the face (190-191). She quotes Griffith describing the development of this new style:
It is this learning step by step that brought about the ‘close up.’ We were striving for real acting. When you saw only the small, full-length figures, it was necessary to have exaggerated acting, what might be called ‘physical’ acting, the waving of hands and so on. The close-up enabled us to reach real acting, restraint, acting that is a duplicate of real life (191).The change from the ‘physical’ style of embellished pantomime to more nuanced performance is one of the most striking changes we can observe in the Biograph films. But a potentially-problematic byproduct of Griffith’s use of closer framing is that the frame can no longer accommodate as many figures.
As Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have noted in Theatre to Cinema, stage space operates as a trapezium, where the playing space narrows from front to back, while in film the reverse is true, as the space widens at the back and narrows at the front (170-171). Charlie Keil has also pointed out, “[F]ilmed characters placed within the nearer reaches of the provided performance space could appear squeezed together by virtue of the inverted relationship between stage and film space” (Early American Cinema in Transition, 135).
Consider the following sequence from Corner in Wheat:
The What King and his men are placed at screen left and right, leaving a space in the center of the frame for the ruined man to enter and move to the foreground. When the ruined man is dismissed, the hole is easily filled by having the man at the King’s right move to his left. Contrast this with a scene from The New York Hat where the father confronts minister. After the father bursts into the study, he must barge his way through the assembled group to arrive at the foreground of the frame. While this may add to the tension of the scene, the secondary characters seem unnaturally constrained by the confines of the frame and so are grouped behind the main action, peering over the main characters’ shoulders.In earlier films with more distant framing, specific arrangements of the mise-en-scène – like tiered staging – are needed to achieve a crowded look (Figures 13 and 14).
Because Griffith later moves the camera closer without making adjustments to the depth of field, he must rely more heavily on deliberate character placement and movement.Another problem brought on by the closer framing relates to Griffith’s almost obsessive need to show exactly where characters are entering and exiting spaces from. Every interior space must have an entrance visible – usually only one, hence Griffith’s famous ‘two-wall’ sets. With some exceptions, characters are permitted to exit from frame on the side without a door, provided they are entering into an adjacent room in the same house where, after a cut, the entryway to the new room will be established. There are, however, instances where the narrative situation calls for two doors, or a door and a window, as in this scene from The Painted Lady (1912) (Figure 15):
This tends to create a very ‘cramped’ feeling. While analytical editing had obviously not developed to the degree that space could be rendered differently, this kind of scene provides a good illustration of some of the unintended byproducts of Griffith’s shallowly staged interiors.Even as Griffith elaborates his editing practice, he still relies on strict staging, particularly the integrity of the frame lines. Consider, for example, these successive shots from The New York Hat:
Although there are minor variances in camera angle in the second, closer shot, note how the second shot adheres to the right frame line established in the first shot. This maintenance of the frame line can be observed from 1911 until the end of Griffith’s Biograph tenure. Here is a later example, from The Mothering Heart (1913):
Contrast this with another scene from The New York Hat, where Mollie sits lower frame left and daydreams about the hat she has just seen at the store.
Unlike the earlier scene with Mollie at the mirror, here Griffith does not cut in for a closer view. Why?Here a consideration of Griffith’s staging practices helps illuminate the logic underlying his editing technique. Absent from this later scene is the father. This would seem to indicate that, at this stage of his career, Griffith viewed analytical editing – that is, editing within a scene – as a primarily isolating activity. In the above instance from The New York Hat, there is no recourse to a cut in because there are no other elements or characters within the frame from which Mollie needs to be isolated.
In the absence of some kind of larger, theoretical framing, the observations above risk being a somewhat localized study. These modest findings confirm the “narrator system” model developed by Tom Gunning in his seminal study of Griffith’s work at the Biograph Company, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film.
It should first be noted that, in terms of its broader applicability, I have reservations about Gunning’s model. Gunning posits the shift to narrative – and in particular the development of parallel editing – as a response to the desire to raise the social standing of film by expanding its appeal to the middle-class – a move which necessitated bringing the narrative structure of film more into line with the traditions of bourgeois representation.
Gunning’s approach owes a debt to Noël Burch, yet he has managed to escape much of the criticism directed at Burch’s work on early cinema – largely because Gunning is a better historian, and does a thorough job of contextualizing the shift to narrative in the historical circumstances of the medium’s development. We should, I think, be careful not to simply attribute what we see on screen to larger social or culture factors – be it a collective unconscious, hegemonic patriarchy or bourgeois ideology – especially in lieu of a consideration of more proximate factors affecting the production of films.
In the specific case of Griffith, however, I believe Gunning in fundamentally correct when he states that we sense the work of a narrator, who has as he says has “designs upon us” (26). While Gunning is most concerned with Griffith’s use of parallel editing, through which we most clearly sense the 'hand of the narrator,' I believe the observations noted in this post about Griffith’s staging practices can productively extend Gunning’s insights.
Not unlike parallel editing, Griffith’s staging shapes in a rather forceful way how we apprehend his films. The use of diagonal staging in exterior scenes, motivated by both camera position and specific arrangements of the mise-en-scene, in effect limits the possibilities of what can happen on a screen. Throughout his Biograph tenure, as he refines his editing practice, character position and movements are carefully controlled. Likewise, Griffith’s maintainance of frame-lines across cuts also bespeaks a rigid system that is designed to maintain a certain order by containing events within clearly-demarcated spatial boundaries.
The narrator system also has implications as Griffith’s career progresses. In “Weaving a Narrative: Economic Style and Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” Gunning notes how, in Griffith’s case, the hand of the narrator proved to be a heavy one, more a frustration than a guide for many viewers. He writes, “Already towards the end of his tenure at Biograph the trade journals…were finding his style too disjointed, too brutal” (346). The implication is that while the audience may, in fact, want a guide, an unobtrusive one is preferred – a fact which points towards the development of the continuity editing system associated with classical Hollywood.
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Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Cinema : Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gunning, Tom. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
---. “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1990) 346.
Jesionowski, Joyce E. Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Films. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.
Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.
