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Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films

University of California Press

Amuse yourself with a little armchair time travel. Your companion is an imaginary New York City lawyer by the name of Josiah Evans, a man with a civic conscience who belongs to several progressive reform organizations. It's an unusually hot evening in the spring of 1909, Josiah's wife Lydia has taken the children to visit her parents in Connecticut, and he has taken to the Manhattan streets, seeking fresh air and distractions. Barely paying attention to his progress, he wanders down Broadway, past the expensive ladies' stores, and eventually finds himself on the Bowery in front of the Electric Theatre, a storefront picture show festooned with luridly colored posters.

Josiah has seen moving pictures, though not recently. A few years ago, before his marriage, he had occasionally visited Koster and Bial's Music Hall in search of light amusement. He was even there on that memorable night in April 1896, when Edison's marvelous Vitascope premiered. But in the last few years these new "nickelodeons" have been springing up like mushrooms on every street corner. Although Josiah has not paid a great deal of attention to the rapid growth of this new industry, he is aware that some of his friends, who belong to organizations such as the People's Institute and the Women's Municipal League, are quite concerned about the effect of moving pictures on the susceptible immigrants and workers. They argue constantly about whether this form of entertainment should be dismissed as a "cheap amusement" like the dance hall and the penny arcade or embraced as something with real potential for social or moral uplift. At the end of last year, Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., persuaded of the deleterious nature of the moving pictures, caused considerable controversy by revoking the licenses of more than five hundred of these storefront theatres.

Well, why not see what all the fuss is about? Giving in to the impulse, Josiah hands his nickel to the woman in the box office and walks in. He pauses to permit his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting and immediately begins to understand why some of his stuffier acquaintances talk about the nickelodeon as a blight on the landscape. More than two hundred people, men, women, and children, Italians, Chinese, and Russian Jews, are crammed elbow to elbow in a small, badly ventilated, darkened room, illuminated only by the flickering pictures projected at the front. what a ripe breeding ground for physical and moral contagion!

The picture ends, the lights come up, and Josiah finds a seat in the back, as close as he can get to the exit. When he has settled himself as comfortably as possible on his hard wooden chair, a young woman steps in front of the screen and warbles a sentimental ballad accompanied by a series of crudely colored, vulgar, magic-lantern slides not at all like the exquisitely rendered fairy-tale slides that his children enjoy at home. A Westerntaken, he warrants, just west of the Hudsonand a comic chase follow the song. All fail to impress him. The picture flickers, the actors move first like frenzied puppets and then like drugged, underwater swimmers, and a torrential downpour of scratches obscures every scene. The pianist thumps her badly tuned instrument with total disregard for the story, playing a lively rag for a tragic leave-taking and a funeral march during the chase.

After a pause, there appears on the screen an engraved image of an eagle perched over the words "American Mutual and Biograph Company." The audience is watching A Drunkard's Reformation , the tale of a young husband and father who has fallen prey to the evils of drink. Coming home intoxicated, he smashes crockery, yells at his innocent young daughter, and speaks harshly to his pretty wife until she persuades him to accompany the child to the theatre. There, the father sees a temperance melodrama and, ashamed, renounces his wicked ways. The film ends happily with the little family sitting serenely by the hearth in the glow of the fire.

Josiah enjoys the moving picture because the players remind him of the blood-and-thunder stage melodramas (some just like the play that the young father sees in the film) that he used to sneak in to see as a kid. The acting of the young wife as she depicts her misery and desperation particularly affects him. She collapses into her chair and rests her head on her arms, which are extended straight out in front of her on the table. Then, in an agony of despair, she sinks to her knees and prays, her arms fully extended upward at about a forty-five degree angle. In those cheap melodramas he had so enjoyed as a youth, he saw many an actress appeal to heaven in just such a manner. Emerging into the twilight, Josiah thought that, though he had benefited from his experience by gaining a fuller understanding of the problem of the nickelodeon, he was not likely to contract the "moving picture habit."

The years pass. One evening, shortly before the Christmas of 1912, Josiah

A Drunkard's Reformation:  The despairing wife.

finishes work a little earlier than usual and decides to pay a visit to the nickelodeonit will be a welcome relief from the preholiday uproar at home. Since 1909, the moving pictures have become a familiar part of his life. though he still hasn't actually seen very many of them. Lydia has become involved in the activities of the National Board of Censorship, the group of private citizens sponsored by the People's Institute who pass on the suitability of new moving picture shows. She spends a couple of afternoons a month watching moving pictures with the review board and even subscribes to journals such as The Moving Picture World, The New York Dramatic Mirror , and the new Motion Picture Story Magazine . She says she needs to keep herself informed about the industry, but Josiah suspects she reads these magazines for pleasure as well. And he himself has stolen the occasional peek.

He goes to the Rialto Theatre on 14th Street, which just recently changed its programming from vaudeville to moving pictures and is conveniently near his Fifth Avenue office. The Rialto is certainly very different from the crowded, smelly, storefront theatre he went to a few years earlier. He buys his ticket, and a uniformed attendant ushers him to his plushly upholstered seat. Looking around, he sees that the clientele has also changed. Although there are still a number of patrons who seem to be recent immigrants and/or working people, women and children of his own class, who seem to be taking a break from their Christmas shopping, form a significant part of the audience.

The lights dim, though the room is not nearly as dark as the nickelodeon had been, and the program begins. To Josiah's delight, the Biograph Company's eagle again appears on the screen, heralding what will undoubtedly be an enjoyable picture, for Lydia and many of her friends believe that this company's films are among the finest made by the American manufacturers. As Josiah watches this Biograph, titled Brutality , he notices similarities between it and the moving picture he had seen on his memorable trip to the...