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228 III. COMPOSITION
chase sequence in D. W. Griffith films. Griffith indulges in theatrical intrigues; for long stretches he is content with rendering, one by one, dramatic actions and situations which are highly complex units from a cinematic point of view. Yet beginning with The Lonely Villa,27 all his major films invariably conclude on a drawn-out chase which owes its particular thrill to the device of accelerated parallel cutting. While we are witnessing the agony of some innocent character doomed to death, we are at the same time permitted to watch the advance of his prospective rescuers, and these alternating scenes, or flashes of scenes, follow each other in ever shorter intervals until they ultimately merge, with the victim being redeemed. The Griffith chase dramatizes an intrinsically cinematic subject: objective physical movement.
More important, it is an ingenious attempt not only to extend theater into dimensions where material phenomena mean everything but to make the extension itself appear as an expression of the story's ideological climax. Griffith aspires to nothing less than to reconcile the requirements of the theater with those arising from the cinema's preference for physical reality and the flow of life. His attempt proves abortive, though. He does not, and cannot, succeed in bridging the gap between the theatrical and the cinematic narrative. True, his chases seem to transform ideological suspense into physical suspense without any friction; but upon closer inspection they represent an excess amount of the latter. Thus the "lastmin ute-rescue" in the ' 'modern story" of Intolerance is by no means a translation into cinematic terms of the conclusion at which the story itself arrives; rather, this finale captivates and thrills the spectator as a physical race between antagonistic forces. It provides sensations which do not really bear on, and bring out, the 'idea conception" of the story— the triumph of justice over the evil of intolerance. The Griffith chase is not so much the fulfillment of the story as a cinematically effective diversion from it. It drowns ideological suspense in physical excitement.28
Pygmalion The screen adaptation of Pygmalion is a case in point also. This film adds to Shaw's comedy a montage of recording machinery in close shots, a detailed depiction of Eliza's phonetic education, including her suffering under its ruthlessness, and the whole embassy ball episode replete with amusing trifles— sequences, all of which feature the physical life and the environment of the stage characters. What is the good of them? Since Shaw states everything he wants to impart in his play, they are certainly not needed to clarify his intentions. Yet there they are. And the embassy ball and the sequence of Higgins pouncing on Eliza arc easily the most impressive episodes of the film. Erwin Panofskv has it that "these two scenes, entirely absent from the play, and indeed