Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films

1 Pistols and Stamens: Gender and Genre in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms

 Pistols and Stamens Gender and Genre in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms Where better to begin this book than with the work of David Wark Griffith, often referred to in conventional histories of the cinema as “the father” of mainstream cinema? Griffith is usually cited as a major innovator of the narrative film, having “invented” such now standard techniques as the close-up, parallel editing, and expressive (“rembrandt”) lighting. His move from New York to Los Angeles after 1913, along with his stock company, was instrumental in establishing Hollywood as the geographical locus of what has become known as the classic narrative style, a style he was so central in codifying. Although the accuracy of this standard description has been challenged in more recent work on early cinema history, Griffith may be said to be a cinematic “father figure” in a more provocative sense, which is the way his films may be seen to address issues of gender representation that are central to that classic style he is often said to have sired. Griffith’s depiction of gender is rooted in his visual sense, as explained first and best by writer James Agee, for whom Griffith was a visual poet.|   | CHAPTER  For Agee, this accounted for both the director’s strengths and weaknesses. Griffith, he observed, had no remarkable power of intellect, or delicateness of soul; no subtlety; little restraint; little if any “taste,” whether to help his work or harm it; Lord knows (and be thanked) no cleverness; no fundamental capacity, once he had achieved his first astonishing development, for change or growth. . . . His sense of comedy was pathetically crude and numb. He had an exorbitant appetite for violence, for cruelty, and for the Siamese twin of cruelty, a kind of obsessive tenderness which at its worst was all but nauseating.1 Nevertheless, and in spite of these “handicaps,” Agee goes on to praise Griffith as “a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples.”2 Agee cites some of Griffith’s images, including the homecoming of the defeated hero in Birth of a Nation (1915) and the climactic chase on the ice floe in Way Down East (1920), which he sees as being shaped by the director’s instinctive ability to translate into visual terms feelings that reside in the audience’s collective unconscious. What Agee is getting at becomes clear when looking, for example, at the scene in Birth of a Nation to which he refers. When the Little Colonel returns to his devastated Southern home after the Civil War, the front door is at the right edge of the frame rather than, as one might expect, in the center; after a momentary, emotionally poignant delay, the door opens and the arms of his sister and mother reach out to embrace him as the shot fades to black. By composing the shot so that the specific detail of their faces are excluded, hidden behind the door at the side of the frame, Griffith manages to articulate a more general feeling of returning home—of being welcomed by “the bosom” of one’s family, as Mr. Peacock describes it in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Although Agee doesn’t comment on the gendered nature of the image, his essential point is that Griffith has managed in his visualization of the event to elevate it above and beyond a specific representation of the arrival home of this particular soldier. Griffith’s films on occasion overtly invite the audience to view his images in precisely this abstract, more generalized manner. Way Down East, for instance, begins with the introduction of Lillian Gish’s character with Pistols and Stamens |  intertitles explaining that “we call her ‘Anna’—we might have called her ‘Woman’” and that all the characters are “nowhere yet everywhere.” The most famous example is, of course, the repeated image in Intolerance (1916) of Gish rocking a cradle; the shot functions as a thematic linking device that connects the film’s four distinct narratives, each set in a different time and place. A reference to the transcendental vision of Walt Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Gish’s image in Intolerance never represents an actual, embodied...