The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  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.

  I found that the picture-makers were following as best they could the theory of the stage. A story was to be told in pictures, and it was told in regular stage progression; it was bad stage technique to repeat; it would be bad stage technique to have an actor show only his face; there are infinite numbers of things we do in pictures that would be absurdities on the stage, and I decided that to do with the camera only what was done on the stage was equally absurd.

  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 th
ree 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.

  Eisenstein found his inspiration in Griffith and made a conscious technique of what Griffith, with his intuitive practical sense for visual drama, had been practicing. For Eisenstein Intolerance seemed “a brilliant model of his method of montage.” This was a name for the distinctive feature of the new art, which the intellectual Eisenstein explained and demonstrated in his writing and his films. “Montage” (which did not come into the English language until 1929) from the French word for “assembly” meant bringing together film images not in chronological order but for their psychological and emotional stimulus. And it described the new role of the film editor. Eisenstein, with materialist bias, emphasized its origin in “engineering and electrical apparatus.” And he saw Griffith as the pioneer. “This was the montage whose foundation had been laid by American film-culture, but whose full, completed, conscious use and world recognition was established by our [Soviet] films.”

  In montage Eisenstein saw both the creation of the film art and a newly creative role for the spectator. He found a similarity to the Japanese ideogram that combined the character for “dog” with that for “mouth” to mean not “dog’s mouth” but “bark.” Similarly he noted that child + mouth = scream, bird + mouth = sing, water + eye = weep, etc. Thus, by juxtaposing concrete images in montage the moviemaker could lead the viewer to create his own abstractions. Eisenstein found montage similar to “the method of parallel action,” which Griffith had seen in Dickens. He too was amazed at “Dickens’s nearness to the characteristics of cinema in method, style, and especially in viewpoint and exposition.”

  In his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925), commissioned by the Communist Party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, Eisenstein gave classic form to his theory of montage. Minutely dissected and extravagantly praised, as late as 1958 it was acclaimed by an international poll of film critics as the best film ever made. A story of mutiny in the czarist navy against tyranny and filth, it produced the famous “Odessa steps sequence,” showing the massacre by imperial troops of innocent Russian civilians who had come to pay their respects to an assassinated leader of the mutiny. This became the classic textbook sequence of montage—a baby carriage rolling slowly down the steps over massacred bodies, past a pair of crushed eyeglasses, and blood-soaked arms and legs. Going far beyond Griffith in multiplying shots for montage, this film, which ran to only 86 minutes, contained 1,346 shots, while The Birth of a Nation, which ran 195 minutes, had only 1,375 shots. While it was predictably attacked by the Party as another example of bourgeois “formalism,” the film’s appeal was not confined to Russia. Its emotional antiestablishment message led it to be banned in some European countries and it had to be shown underground. “After seeing Potemkin” the famous theater director Max Reinhardt confessed that “the stage will have to give way to the cinema.”

  The new public art of film, in curious ways, would reunite the community that millennia before had seen ritual transformed into drama on the slopes of the Athenian Acropolis. As the film art grew, it multiplied puzzling elements in the mystery of creation. It became more and more uncertain who was creating what, from what, and for whom. In Shakespeare’s London, drama required a theater, of which only six would be flourishing. The live drama needed a stage, but the new art was conveyed in a machine that could project its message anywhere. The extent of this mystery was dazzling. By 1948 The Birth of a Nation had been seen by 150 million people all over the world.

  Cinema art became collaborative on a scale and in a manner never before imagined. Griffith observed that in The Birth of a Nation “from first to last we used from 30,000 to 35,000 people.” Producing a film resembled commanding and supplying an army more than any earlier kind of art. The set for Intolerance included a full-scale model of ancient Babylon rising three hundred feet aboveground on a scene that stretched across ten acres. With sixty principal players and eighteen thousand extras, it sometimes had a payroll of twenty thousand dollars a day. The commanders, besides Griffith, included eight assistant directors. The rough cut of the film ran for eight hours. There was a creating role, too, for the cinematographer and all who helped provide lighting, color, sound, and music. Reaching popular audiences never imagined for the opera, films provided vast audiences for composers and countless spectators for the dance, cr
eating new forms of musical drama. When sound came to film in the late 1920s the movies could vie with opera as a union of the arts, ironically satisfying Wagner’s hope for a Gesamtkunstwerk.

  To all its other charms, the movies, by the 1950s, added the intriguing question of who really was the “maker” of the hypnotic products of the new art. The brilliant French moviemaker and critic François Truffaut (1932–1984) insisted that the director was a new kind of “author” (auteur) in this modern audiovisual language. So, he said, the director (or auteur) really was the person who created the film, and so should be given the major credit. This plausible suggestion itself sparked a lively controversy over the “auteur” theory, which debated who if anyone should be considered the prime creator of the complex collaborative product.

  Over the actors, too, there came a new ambiguity and a new aura. Griffith had boasted “raising motion-picture acting to the higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.” Now that all spectators could see the actor’s face close up, it removed the temptations to mug, and encouraged a subtler, “more restrained” style of acting. But there was a colossal irony in what the new art did to these “more restrained” actors in the new art. Biograph had at first banned the names of actors from credits in their films, and insisted on their anonymity. But film gave a vivid unique personality to every actor as a person who could not be denied and became a magnet for its audience. By 1919 “movie star” had entered our written language for this new human phenomenon of awesome dimensions. The celebrity of movie actors overshadowed even that of eminent statesmen, baseball heroes, and notorious criminals. Gargantuan film creations became only vehicles for a Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, or Marilyn Monroe, whose off-screen lives became news.