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5.8 In Le pickpocket mystifié (1911), a detective stands 5.9 ...and a cut enlarges it, along with his suspicious examining an identification notice... expression. (Compare Figs. 2.8—2.9.)
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A may be thinking of character B. Or Griffith may be suggesting some likeness or affinity between them. Or there may be a quasi-supernatural sense in which A is somehow seeing B. In A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), the mother and child look “at” the father in a distant locale.4 Griffith seems to have believed that this device signaled that A is thinking of B, but the power of the eyeline cues and the fact that B is usually shown in a situation that A cannot plausibly know about tend to make the cutaway seem more than merely a subjective insert. In any case, this “ruminative” eyeline cut, as Joyce Jesniowski calls it, did not become normalized within the mainstream Hollywood style.®
Griffith also developed a penchant for laying interior scenes out perpendicular to the camera. In his dollhouse-like sets, he would align side doors with the very edges of the shot and then fire characters across the framelines.66 A man hurries toward a door exactly on frame left. As he crosses the threshold, Griffith cuts to the adjacent room, forcing our eye to jump back to the right edge to pick up the man’s entrance. Griffith’s delight in multiplying and repeating these lateral cuts, prolonging movement by lining up rooms like railroad cars, yanking characters back and forth across the viewer’s sightline, was shared by few of his peers. Most directors preferred to stage interiors in depth, placing doors in the back wall and bringing the actors sedately to the front plane.
Without losing any of his renown, then, Griffith has begun to seem atypical. Gunning has argued that he is less the creator of Hollywood’s film language than a transitional director, redefining techniques created in the cinema of attractions for purposes of narrative integration.67 By 1914 or 1915, other directors were producing films that today seem more “forward-looking” than The Birth of a Nation. Smoothly staged and cut, Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration, Maurice Tourneur’s The Wishing Ring and Alias Jimmy Valentine, and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat look recognizably like the Hollywood movie we know, while Griffith’s masterpiece seems fairly idiosyncratic.®
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