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* Dickens himself witnessed a modern by-product of popular success—speculators: “At Brooklyn I am going to read in Mr. Ward Beecher’s chapel: the only building there available for the purpose. You must understand that Brooklyn is a kind of sleeping-place for New York, and is supposed to be a great place in the money way. We let the seats pew by pew! the pulpit is taken down for my screen and gas! and I appear out of the vestry in canonical form! . . . The sale of tickets there was an amazing scene. The noble army of speculators have now furnished (this is literally true, and I am quite serious) each man with a straw mattress, a little bag of bread and meat, two blankets, and a bottle of whisky. . . . It being severely cold at Brooklyn, they made an immense bonfire in the street—a narrow street of wooden houses—which the police turned out to extinguish. A general fight then took place; from which the people furthest off in the line rushed bleeding when they saw any chance of ousting others nearer the door, put their mattresses in the spots so gained, and held on by the iron rails. . . .
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* For demonstration purposes I have broken this beginning of the chapter into smaller pieces than did its author; the numbering is, of course, also mine.
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* A reference to the Ruttmann-Freund film, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (1927).
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* Close shots of heads and objects were not so rare in the pre-Griffith film as is generally assumed; close shots can be found used solely for novelty or trick purposes by such inventive pioneers as Méliés and the English “Brighton School” (as pointed out by Georges Sadoul).
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* Miss Barry had previously pointed out that “Edwin S. Porter in The Great Train Robbery had taken a vital step by introducing parallel action through a rough form of cross-cutting. . . .”
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* For this reason immediately after the facts on the circumstances and arrangement that brought success to the play of Way Down East in the ’nineties, I shall offer a description, in no less bold relief, of the scenic effects in the melodrama The Ninety and Nine, a success in the New York theater of 1902.
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* Elsewhere, William A. Brady has given more detail on Grismer’s contribution: “During the triai-and-error period at one time or another we had used every small town in the United States as dog for Way Down East, and no two of them ever saw the same version. . . . Grismer lived, slept and ate it. He certainly earned that credit-line which always ran in the program: ‘Elaborated by Joseph R. Grismer.’ Why, the mechanical snowstorm used in the third act, which had no small part in making the play a memorable success, was specially invented by him for the production and then patented. One of his inspirations was laying hands on a vaudeville actor named Harry Seamon, who had a smalltime hick act, breaking his routine into three parts and running him into Way Down East.”
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* In his accompanying review, Arthur Hornblow gives us some idea of how this effect was achieved: “This scene, which is the ‘sensation’ of the production, is one of the most realistic effects of machinery ever seen on any stage. . . . Tissue paper streamers, blown by concealed electric fans, on which brilliant ted and yellow lights play, represent the flames, while the motion of the on-rushing locomotive is simulated by revolving the forest background in an inverse direction.”
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* Sufficient evidence of this lies in the anecdote by John Phoenix in which Tushmaker’s new tooth-pulling machine “drew the old lady’s skeleton completely and entirely from her body, leaving her a mass of quivering jelly in her chair! Tushmaker took her home in a pillowcase. She lived seven years after that, and they called her the ‘India-Rubber Woman.’ She had suffered terribly with the rheumatism, but after this occurrence, never had a pain in her bones. The dentist kept them in a glass case . . .
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* In all instances the craftsmanship of Griffith remains almost un> altered in these films, springing as it does from profound sincerity and a full conviction in the rightness of their themes, but before all else I am noting the themes themselves and their ideological aims.
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* See “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” pages [>].
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* This is a term for those modern languages, preserving this character up to the present day, for example, the languages of the Chukchi, the Yukagirs and the Gilyaks. A full account for those of us especially interested in these languages may be found in Professor Meshchaninov’s work.
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* Griffith himself, in his famous announcement in The New York Dramatic Mirror of December 3, 1913, employed both designations: “The large or close-up figures. . . .” But it is characteristic that in habitual American film usage it should be the latter term, “close-up,” that has been retained.
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* This is Griffith’s editing of two Whitman phrases, actually twenty lines apart: “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking . . .” “. . . uniter of here and hereafter.”
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* It was Porter (again) who earlier explored, in film, this parallel thematic linking of unconnected stories. In The Kleptomaniac (1905), “The story told of two women, one poor and the other rich, who are caught shoplifting and are arrested. The rich one is freed; the poor one is jailed. The story’s effectiveness depended on the paralleling of the causes of the actions and fates of the two women.” (Jacobs) Griffith’s most ambitious pre-Intolerance trial of this multiple story form seems to have been made in Home, Sweet Home (1914).
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* Further analysis of this error can be found on [>].—EDITOR.
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* This motif was placed on a considerably higher stage of meaning—in an image of Hopelessness—as it was later used by Pudovkin in Mother in the scene of the conversation between the mother and son in the prison, interrupted by shots of a cockroach pushed back into the sticky mass by the sentry’s finger.
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* See The Film Sense, particularly Chapters II-IV.
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Film Form Page 31