THE PICTURE OF CROWD SPLENDOR

Henceforth the reader will use his discretion as to when he will read the chapter and when he will go to the picture show to verify it.

The shoddiest silent drama may contain noble views of the sea.  This part is almost sure to be good.  It is a fundamental resource.

A special development of this aptitude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity, not metaphorically but literally:  the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving masses of people in balconies, hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged glowering strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in the marketplace.  Only Griffith and his close disciples can do these as well as almost any manager can reproduce the ocean.  Yet the sea of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to the Pacific, Atlantic, or Mediterranean.  It takes this new invention, the kinetoscope, to bring us these panoramic drama-elements.  By the law of compensation, while the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion, it is powerful in conveying the passions of masses of men.  Bernard Shaw, in a recent number of the Metropolitan, answered several questions in regard to the photoplay.  Here are two bits from his discourse:

“Strike the dialogue from Moliere’s Tartuffe, and what audience would bear its mere stage-business?  Imagine the scene in which Iago poisons Othello’s mind against Desdemona, conveyed in dumb show.  What becomes of the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles in the film?  Or between Shakespeare’s Lear and any one else’s Lear?  No, it seems to me that all the interest lies in the new opening for the mass of dramatic talent formerly disabled by incidental deficiencies of one sort or another that do not matter in the picture-theatre....”

“Failures of the spoken drama may become the stars of the picture palace.  And there are the authors with imagination, visualization and first-rate verbal gifts who can write novels and epics, but cannot for the life of them write plays.  Well, the film lends itself admirably to the succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically impracticable on the stage.  Paradise Lost would make a far better film than Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece, and Milton could not write an effective play.”

Note in especial what Shaw says about narrative, epic, and Paradise Lost.  He has in mind, no doubt, the pouring hosts of demons and angels.  This is one kind of a Crowd Picture.

There is another sort to be seen where George Beban impersonates The Italian in a film of that title, by Thomas H. Ince and G. Gardener Sullivan.  The first part, taken ostensibly in Venice, delineates the festival spirit of the people on the bridges and in gondolas.  It gives out the atmosphere of town-crowd happiness.  Then comes the vineyard, the crowd sentiment of a merry grape-harvest, then the massed emotion of many people embarking on an Atlantic liner telling good-by to their kindred on the piers, then the drama of arrival in New York.  The wonder of the steerage people pouring down their proper gangway is contrasted with the conventional at-home-ness of the first-class passengers above.  Then we behold the seething human cauldron of the East Side, then the jolly little wedding-dance, then the life of the East Side, from the policeman to the peanut-man, and including the bar tender, for the crowd is treated on two separate occasions.

It is hot weather.  The mobs of children follow the ice-wagon for chips of ice.  They besiege the fountain-end of the street-sprinkling wagon quite closely, rejoicing to have their clothes soaked.  They gather round the fire-plug that is turned on for their benefit, and again become wet as drowned rats.

Passing through these crowds are George Beban and Clara Williams as The Italian and his sweetheart.  They owe the force of their acting to the fact that they express each mass of humanity in turn.  Their child is born.  It does not flourish.  It represents in an acuter way another phase of the same child-struggle with the heat that the gamins indicate in their pursuit of the water-cart.

Then a deeper matter.  The hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America:  its natural southern gayety set in contrast to the drab East Side.  The gondolier becomes boot-black.  The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the suffering slum mother.  They are not specialized characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp in the Novels of Thackeray.

Omitting the last episode, the entrance into the house of Corrigan, The Italian is a strong piece of work.

Another kind of Crowd Picture is The Battle, an old Griffith Biograph, first issued in 1911, before Griffith’s name or that of any actor in films was advertised.  Blanche Sweet is the leading lady, and Charles H. West the leading man.  The psychology of a bevy of village lovers is conveyed in a lively sweet-hearting dance.  Then the boy and his comrades go forth to war.  The lines pass between hand-waving crowds of friends from the entire neighborhood.  These friends give the sense of patriotism in mass.  Then as the consequence of this feeling, as the special agents to express it, the soldiers are in battle.  By the fortunes of war the onset is unexpectedly near to the house where once was the dance.

The boy is at first a coward.  He enters the old familiar door.  He appeals to the girl to hide him, and for the time breaks her heart.  He goes forth a fugitive not only from battle, but from her terrible girlish anger.  But later he rallies.  He brings a train of powder wagons through fires built in his path by the enemy’s scouts.  He loses every one of his men, and all but the last wagon, which he drives himself.  His return with that ammunition saves the hard-fought day.

And through all this, glimpses of the battle are given with a splendor that only Griffith has attained.

Blanche Sweet stands as the representative of the bevy of girls in the house of the dance, and the whole body social of the village.  How the costumes flash and the handkerchiefs wave around her!  In the battle the hero represents the cowardice that all the men are resisting within themselves.  When he returns, he is the incarnation of the hardihood they have all hoped to display.  Only the girl knows he was first a failure.  The wounded general honors him as the hero above all.  Now she is radiant, she cannot help but be triumphant, though the side of the house is blown out by a shell and the dying are everywhere.

This one-reel work of art has been reissued of late by the Biograph Company.  It should be kept in the libraries of the Universities as a standard.  One-reel films are unfortunate in this sense that in order to see a favorite the student must wait through five other reels of a mixed programme that usually is bad.  That is the reason one-reel masterpieces seldom appear now.  The producer in a mood to make a special effort wants to feel that he has the entire evening, and that nothing before or after is going to be a bore or destroy the impression.  So at present the painstaking films are apt to be five or six reels of twenty minutes each.  These have the advantage that if they please at all, one can see them again at once without sitting through irrelevant slapstick work put there to fill out the time.  But now, having the whole evening to work in, the producer takes too much time for his good ideas.  I shall reiterate throughout this work the necessity for restraint.  A one hour programme is long enough for any one.  If the observer is pleased, he will sit it through again and take another hour.  There is not a good film in the world but is the better for being seen in immediate succession to itself.  Six-reel programmes are a weariness to the flesh.  The best of the old one-reel Biographs of Griffith contained more in twenty minutes than these ambitious incontinent six-reel displays give us in two hours.  It would pay a manager to hang out a sign:  “This show is only twenty minutes long, but it is Griffith’s great film ‘The Battle.’”

But I am digressing.  To continue the contrast between private passion in the theatre and crowd-passion in the photoplay, let us turn to Shaw again.  Consider his illustration of Iago, Othello, and Lear.  These parts, as he implies, would fall flat in motion pictures.  The minor situations of dramatic intensity might in many cases be built up.  The crisis would inevitably fail.  Iago and Othello and Lear, whatever their offices in their governments, are essentially private persons, individuals in extremis.  If you go to a motion picture and feel yourself suddenly gripped by the highest dramatic tension, as on the old stage, and reflect afterward that it was a fight between only two or three men in a room otherwise empty, stop to analyze what they stood for.  They were probably representatives of groups or races that had been pursuing each other earlier in the film.  Otherwise the conflict, however violent, appealed mainly to the sense of speed.

So, in The Birth of a Nation, which could better be called The Overthrow of Negro Rule, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff.  Finally the white girl Elsie Stoneman (impersonated by Lillian Gish) is rescued by the Ku Klux Klan from the mulatto politician, Silas Lynch (impersonated by George Seigmann).  The lady is brought forward as a typical helpless white maiden.  The white leader, Col.  Ben Cameron (impersonated by Henry B. Walthall), enters not as an individual, but as representing the whole Anglo-Saxon Niagara.  He has the mask of the Ku Klux Klan on his face till the crisis has passed.  The wrath of the Southerner against the blacks and their Northern organizers has been piled up through many previous scenes.  As a result this rescue is a real climax, something the photoplays that trace strictly personal hatreds cannot achieve.

The Birth of a Nation is a Crowd Picture in a triple sense.  On the films, as in the audience, it turns the crowd into a mob that is either for or against the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s poisonous hatred of the negro.

Griffith is a chameleon in interpreting his authors.  Wherever the scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad.  Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith, which is half the time, it is good.  The Reverend Thomas Dixon is a rather stagy Simon Legree:  in his avowed views a deal like the gentleman with the spiritual hydrophobia in the latter end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Unconsciously Mr. Dixon has done his best to prove that Legree was not a fictitious character.

Joel Chandler Harris, Harry Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern men in Mr. Griffith’s class.  I recommend their works to him as a better basis for future Southern scenarios.

The Birth of a Nation has been very properly denounced for its Simon Legree qualities by Francis Hackett, Jane Addams, and others.  But it is still true that it is a wonder in its Griffith sections.  In its handling of masses of men it further illustrates the principles that made notable the old one-reel Battle film described in the beginning of this chapter.  The Battle in the end is greater, because of its self-possession and concentration:  all packed into twenty minutes.

When, in The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (impersonated by Joseph Henabery) goes down before the assassin, it is a master-scene.  He falls as the representative of the government and a thousand high and noble crowd aspirations.  The mimic audience in the restored Ford’s Theatre rises in panic.  This crowd is interpreted in especial for us by the two young people in the seats nearest, and the freezing horror of the treason sweeps from the Ford’s Theatre audience to the real audience beyond them.  The real crowd touched with terror beholds its natural face in the glass.

Later come the pictures of the rioting negroes in the streets of the Southern town, mobs splendidly handled, tossing wildly and rhythmically like the sea.  Then is delineated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, of which we have already spoken.  For comment on the musical accompaniment to The Birth of a Nation, read the fourteenth chapter entitled “The Orchestra, Conversation and the Censorship.”

In the future development of motion pictures mob-movements of anger and joy will go through fanatical and provincial whirlwinds into great national movements of anger and joy.

A book by Gerald Stanley Lee that has a score of future scenarios in it, a book that might well be dipped into by the reader before he goes to such a play as The Italian or The Battle, is the work which bears the title of this chapter:  “Crowds.”

Mr. Lee is far from infallible in his remedies for factory and industrial relations.  But in sensitiveness to the flowing street of humanity he is indeed a man.  Listen to the names of some of the divisions of his book:  “Crowds and Machines; Letting the Crowds be Good; Letting the Crowds be Beautiful; Crowds and Heroes; Where are we Going?  The Crowd Scare; The Strike, an Invention for making Crowds Think; The Crowd’s Imagination about People; Speaking as One of the Crowd; Touching the Imagination of Crowds.”  Films in the spirit of these titles would help to make world-voters of us all.

The World State is indeed far away.  But as we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other’s eyes, in pictures and in fact.

A further discussion of this theme on other planes will be found in the eleventh chapter, entitled “Architecture-in-Motion,” and the fifteenth chapter, entitled “The Substitute for the Saloon.”