[In the following essay, Dorris looks back thoughtfully at Griffith's oeuvre.]

When the Museum of Modern Art announced its D. W. Griffith retrospective in the spring of 1965, I decided to attend the complete series. But I had no real idea of what I was letting myself in for. Like most filmgoers, I knew the legend of the shattered titan, living out the last years of his life as a virtual recluse. I had seen The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and been moved by the beauty, the dramatic sweep, and the emotional power of these remarkable films. But of Griffith's other work I knew nothing. I had no prejudice against silent films, having admired many of the classic Russian and German silents as well as a few French and American ones. But, with the exception of the Eisenstein films, I had rarely seen an extensive showing of a single director and never of one who produced mainly silent films. Therefore I was unprepared for what I discovered during those three months when at least twice a week I descended to the small theater in the basement of the museum.

Like any retrospective showing of an important figure, the Griffith cycle tested the art, the artist, and the audience. At times all were found wanting, but it remained a finely conceived tribute to a true artist, although too often it brought out flaws in the audience which were unconnected with the flaws in the artist. From it emerged, finally, an understanding of Griffith's art, still too often misunderstood, and a feeling of pity that such a man could be forced into silence and humiliation by the Hollywood studios and financiers; when he died in 1948, it had been seventeen years since he had completed his last film, The Struggle, which revealed his powers virtually unimpaired. What remains is the monument he created, the films themselves, for his greatness is to be found not only in the few famous ones—The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm—but in nearly all he touched.

Griffith remains one of the few masters of the film. From the often primitive one-reelers (technically and artistically primitive), the form he inherited from Edwin S. Porter, he created a style which transcended the anecdotal nature of the twelve-minute film. As he developed actors sensitized to his style, subtleties of detail, of characterization, and of form emerged. Between 1909 and 1913 he built the nucleus of a film repertory company—Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, Henry Walthall, Robert Harron—performers on whom he could experiment emotionally as his cameraman Billy Bitzer was experimenting technically. At the same time Griffith was also experimenting with cutting, creating the film as an artistic entity. Between The Lonely Villa, A Corner in Wheat, and The Usurer (1909-10) and The Lonedale Operator, The Goddess of Sagebrush Gulch, and The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1911-12), as his touch became surer, the films became more complex and emotionally richer. Eventually Griffith overcame most of the problems inherent in the one-reel form, creating suspense, humor, and pathos by his handling of the story and of his developing actors and by his manipulation of the techniques of film.

In these early films many of the traits of the later Griffith can be seen; suspense, humor, and pathos were to remain his stock-intrade. Most of his later films culminate in one version or another of the big chase, however transformed in Way Down East or Isn't Life Wonderful. Equally typical is a gentle, sometimes pastoral, humor, from the first intellectual's discovery of weapons in Man's Genesis (1911) to the warm picture of rural life in True Heart Susie (1919). Comedy of the Sennett or Chaplin variety was not Griffith's strength, but his gentler vein could be warm and effective. The pathos speaks for itself, growing from the deep emotionalism of the melodramatic tradition from which Griffith came (he had been both actor and playwright) and which he transformed. Another aspect of this is the idealism which at times leads Griffith to see his characters as Good or Evil, symbolic and often explicitly allegorical. Like the angels who transfigure a battlefield at the end of The Birth of a Nation and the pitchfork devil prodding damned souls in Dream Street (1921)—a film of Limehouse life in which Good is symbolized by the elder Tyrone Power as an itinerant street preacher and Evil by Morgan Wallace as a masked violinist—his fancy-dress allegories and visionary recreations of Christian symbols are often extremely literal. But they spring directly from his idealism and the deep view of emotion which it reflects and which he hoped to give visual form, moving from a narrative to a moral statement. Conventionality, naïveté, and literalness are the inevitable flaws, early and late, but they are usually suffused with a disarming sincerity.

One other significant aspect of Griffith's thought, seen early in its pristine condition, is a conventional tendency to view social ills as the primary result of individual actions. In A Corner in Wheat (1909) the prohibitive price of bread is the direct and sole result of financial manipulation by one greedy man, suitably and symbolically punished by suffocating in a wheat bin; in The Birth of a Nation Austin Stoneman's passion for his mulatto mistress leads to the excesses of Reconstruction; the scorned priest of Bel betrays Babylon in Intolerance; the British-Indian atrocities during the Revolution are exclusively attributed to the lascivious Walter Butler in America (1924); and out of personal pique Robespierre condemns the lovers—and by implication thousands of others—to the guillotine in Orphans of the Storm. The lovers' rescue by Danton suggests the other side of this individual view of history and social forces, which is perhaps seen most clearly in the warm treatment of Lincoln both in The Birth of a Nation and in the very late Abraham Lincoln (1930). Only Isn't Life Wonderful, of the social films, is free of this social-biographical simplification: when the starving workers steal the unfortunate lovers' first harvest, they cry, "Yes, beasts we are, beasts they have made us." Here Griffith rises to a maturity of outlook unexpected in his essentially non-intellectual art, suggesting the maturity of the developing artist.

Isn't Life Wonderful (1924), his picture of a family crushed by the inflation in Germany after World War I, is a late masterpiece, a superb work of social realism, almost documentary in its approach and power. Still it seems untypical of the usually more romantic Griffith. With his tendency to push warmth and emotion toward sentimentality and his often faltering comic interludes—Griffith's greatest faults—goes his distrust of adult physical passion, for which he too often substitutes coyness. But these flaws do not cancel out the emotional power of the great scenes and the exquisite pathos seen especially in the roles designed for Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh, superb actresses who brought out the best in Griffith as he did in them.

In his tendency to emotional excess, as in his equally typical emotional delicacy, his warmth, his ability to create and define character, and his superb feeling for fitting the exact detail and small personal scene into a sweeping action, in both his excess and restraint, virtues and flaws, Griffith is closely comparable to Dickens. Modern audiences seem to fear deep emotion, and anyone who is unwilling to overlook the sentimentality and the comic excesses typical of Dickens and Griffith, in order to find the emotional richness and subtlety beyond, is well advised to avoid both of them. Those who are willing to accept these conventional flaws are abundantly rewarded by the range and power of the world each creates. [This comparison is best explored by Eisenstein in his 1944 essay "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today" (reprinted in Film Form). His comment on the emotional power of the two masters is especially astute, as when speaking of Nancy in Oliver Twist: "By the way, it is characteristic for both Dickens and Griffith to have these sudden flashes of goodness in 'morally degraded' characters and, though these sentimental images verge on hokum, they are so faultlessly done that they work on the most skeptical readers and spectators!" Certainly this is true of Griffith, from the early Biograph films to his powerful last film, The Struggle (1931). Perhaps Eisenstein's own silent films are more readily acceptable to present-day audiences because he avoids the "sentimental images" which so often make audiences squeamish, however faultlessly done.]

Not all of Griffith's films are masterpieces. Like Dickens, he produced too much, perhaps too rapidly. But as also is the case with Dickens, from this profusion came some of his best work. In 1919 and 1920, at the peak of his career, he released ten films, from The Girl Who Stayed at Home, the last of his war films, to Way Down East, a spectacularly successful melodrama. In the first of these he combined two strands of plot, one involving M. France, an unreconstructed Southerner who has lived abroad since the Civil War, a charmingly conceived character who comes to terms with his country through the rescue of his granddaughter and himself by the AEF; the other involves the two sons of a rich American businessman, one son conventionally noble (he rescues and marries M. France's granddaughter), while the other is transformed from "lounge lizard" to war hero and with him transforms the chorus girl he loves. Among the most revealing scenes is one in which the second boy crawls across the battlefield to report the dangerous position of the small party led by his brother; this scene is crosscut with one of his fiancée being tempted by gifts from a former admirer. As she hesitates, the boy crawls. When she overcomes temptation, he reaches safety. This point is never made explicitly, but the emotional effect is the stronger for this restraint. The treatment is typical of the way Griffith transforms a film primarily intended to encourage the war effort (and officially supported by the government) into a work independent of propaganda in its richness, charm, and effectiveness. If less moving than Hearts of the World (1918), an earlier film exploring the horrors of war, and less gentle than True Heart Susie, which came soon after, The Girl Who Stayed at Home stands as a fine example of Griffith's craftsmanship and his ability to work creatively with his actors, especially Robert Harron and Clarine Seymour as the transformed lovers.

Even where the integration of plot fails to come off, the resulting parts can be highly effective. In The Greatest Question (1919) the scene in which the beloved son off at sea appears to his mother on the day he dies in action is a profoundly moving one. Such extrasensory experience may be an unfashionable subject now, although it was not following World War I, but I am unable to imagine how that scene could be improved upon or even done any differently without spoiling its simplicity and beauty. Although the Lillian Gish escape plot is largely unconnected with this whole aspect of the film, the effectiveness of each part remains. In later films these double plots are played down, so that, for example, the poor boy-rich girl subplot of The White Rose (1923) remains a convention and never interferes with the poor girl and rich, spoiled minister story which forms the main plot of this beautiful and moving relatively late film.

Although now most famous for the epic sweep, the vast panoramas, and the great battle scenes of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Orphans of the Storm—and properly famous, it might be added—Griffith's enduring power is also to be found in his individual emotional scenes. The mother's plea to a tired, awkward, gentle Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation, Mae Marsh's face as her baby is taken away from her in the modern story in Intolerance, and Lillian and Dorothy Gish, the two orphans in Orphans of the Storm, fearfully setting out for Paris and the great operation on the blind girl's eyes—these are also moments that remain.

These moments are usually held in a striking visual image, which is another aspect of Griffith's power: his ability to create a visual image which is beautiful in its own right while also embodying dramatic and emotional meaning. Perhaps the most celebrated single image in Griffith's work is the riding of the klan in The Birth of a Nation, the long line of white-clad horsemen galloping to the rescue of a small, embattled party. The ambiguities created by the second half of this film in the modern liberal spectator are crystallized in this scene; however much he loathes the klan, he is compelled by the hypnotic effect of suspense building in this rescue sequence to side with these towering figures as they fill the screen. The racial tensions generated by the whole film today are a belated tribute to Griffith's power, but nowhere more so than in this scene, which is so well suited to the silent screen. It is superbly visual and, when properly accompanied by music, all other sound is superfluous. One may regret that Griffith was unable to rise above the prejudices of his Kentucky background and of his age, but even The Birth of a Nation is suffused by the warmth and the deep humanity which he showed increasingly in such films as Broken Blossoms (with Richard Barthelmess as the gentle Chinese boy) and Isn 't Life Wonderful, not to speak of Intolerance.

Griffith's work consists almost entirely of silent films. The aesthetic of the silent film has often been argued. There was never, of course, a literally "silent" film, supported as it was by its piano or theater orchestra accompaniment, yet the modern filmgoer outside the purlieu of the Museum's invaluable Arthur Kleiner usually sees such films in total silence. Except at the Museum they are usually seen at a slightly faster speed ("sound speed") than was intended, making fast movements jerky. Coupled with the pomposity of some of the "titles"—especially if the subject is unsuited to the silent medium—the effect can be incongruous. For the large audiences at the Museum these incongruities apparently blocked an appreciation of Griffith's richly emotional art; only the two sound films (Abraham Lincoln and The Struggle) seemed to present no such obstacles. The failure of the audience lay in this breakdown of understanding and sympathy. Unfortunately this reaction is typical of the current approach to silent films.

Of course the failure may lie with those who take Griffith and silent films seriously. But the small group of serious admirers who attended despite the behavior of a vocal part of the audience was too consistently moved and too consistently in agreement to accept such an argument. To watch an artist develop and become aware of his medium was an illumination. To see the camera begin to move, the close-up and the panoramic shots devised and brought together to create a new kind of beauty, was more than a historical thrill. Griffith loved beauty, and his films are full of it, especially when seen on the original tinted stock with its suffused blues, greens, and gold. Even in Isn't Life Wonderful one finds a beauty in all its starkness. Part of the pathos of the late films lies in Griffith's attempts to preserve this beauty despite the interference with his films and the inadequacy of the stories forced on him by studios, Griffith in decline takes on a symbolic quality, for much of the pathos of this retrospective view lies in the sense of waste. At the height of his powers this protean artist was trapped by the financial pressures which turned Hollywood into a factory and stifled the few artists who emerged in American films, the von Stroheims and the Welleses. He tried to come to terms with this, but inevitably he was rejected. There is no indication that the recent Griffith festival was intended as an ironic allegory; Griffith himself probably wouldn't have been amused at that idea either, despite his fondness for allegory. And perhaps the audiences were laughing to keep from crying. One can only hope, finally, that all unawares they caught some of the beauty, the emotional power, and the humanity that made the unique art of D. W. Griffith.