The pioneer film historian George C. Pratt called 1909 Griffith’s miracle year and it is hard to disagree. He began working for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1908 at the time of its challenge to the Edison Company for dominance of the American film industry. In 1909 this rivalry became a union as the two largest American production companies agreed to pool patents and form a new corporation, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), with the intention of dominating, if not completely controlling, filmmaking in the USA. Biograph increased its production and Griffith was in charge of all the films to be released in 1909, more than two a week (all in all, he directed some 142 titles this year, most of them one reelers approximately 15-16 minutes long.)

While there are certainly some minor films and a few outright clunkers in this group, the general level of quality is astonishing. Griffith had discovered the powers of parallel editing in 1908, but in 1909 he truly explored its diverse uses from suspense, to political commentary, to psychological exploration. But if editing supplied Griffith’s major narrative tool, his attention to the image, to composition and lyrical beauty expanded as well. The Country Doctor is perhaps his 1909 masterpiece in bringing these elements together. Parallel editing between the doctor’s rich household and the hovel of his poor patient expresses social contrast. Crosscutting also creates suspense as the doctor is torn between treating his own sick daughter and his duty to his poor patient. The lyrical use of a springtime landscape conveys the felicity of the doctor’s family at the beginning of the film, while the circular form given to the whole film by a pair of matching pans (one to the right, one to the left) encloses the film with a sense of ironic balance. The use of the seascape with its stormy horizon in Lines of White upon a Sullen Sea marks a new awareness of composition (lacking in his earlier sea drama After Many Years in 1908) in creating an emotional story.

Griffith aspired to literary poetry in his version of Robert Browning’s poetic drama Pippa Passes, which compresses the contrasting stories beyond believability, but which also shows a circular form in opening at Pippa’s bedside at dawn and closing as she heads to bed at night. The opening dawn sequence manages a truly ambitious play of artificial light that shows Griffith’s sophistication in staging. Likewise his adaptation of Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth, while lacking the close-up Sergei Eisenstein imagined Dickens might inspire, nonetheless is filled with detail of costuming and props and a truly psychological use of shadow as the husband broods before the fireplace about his wife’s possible infidelity.

The Red Man’s View like Griffith’s 1909 masterpiece (shown in another program of the Cinema Ritrovato) A Corner in Wheat, tackles a social issue, here the treatment of Native Americans, shown clearly as victims of white aggression and greed. The recurring motif of the single file line of Native Americans driven from their homelands, becomes both a visual motif and a narrative spine for the film.

Tom Gunning