The Screen Art of William Shakespeare

A Comparison of the Technique of D. W. Griffith and the Only True Begetter of the Flashback

KENNETH MACGOWAN

"Look here, upon this picture, and on this."

IT is the year 2251 in Utopia No. 137. The State—which means, of course, the Board of Directors of the great social engineering corporation H. G. Wells & Self, Ltd., under whose direction the government of the British Isles was radically reorganized in 1943—the State is holding festival.

Utopia No. 137 is celebrating the tercentenary of the death of D. W. Griffith.

The climax of the celebration is the showing in all the State cinemas of a revival of The Birth of a Nation. Re-edited by the most distinguished authorities on cinematography in the State universities at Oxford and Cambridge, after years spent in the study and comparison of the prints preserved in the film libraries of Paris, New York, and Para, it is hailed as the greatest masterpiece of the greatest photoplay director in the history of the world.

Adapting Griffith

THE editors have done their work admirably. No inch of celluloid, no word unknown to the original scenario, has been added to the film. Yet in every possible way the work of this artist has been made as completely effective in 2251 as it would have been if Griffith had lived to utilize—as one of the editors puts it— "all the expedients, devices, and improvements which incessant study and continuous scientific discovery and invention have developed during the last three hundred years. . . . What I am sure Griffith would have done, what I am sure he would do if he were here today, that I have done."

It is impossible to detail all the feats of editing by which The Birth of a Nation has been made intelligible to the citizens of Utopia No. 137. A few must do. I cannot list all the eliminations of superfluous scenes, unpleasant episodes, anti-social action, but you may rest assured that, in the first half of the picture, the horror of the war scenes has been reduced to a minimum, and the whole curious fratricidal plot adequately rationalized in the lecture by the ideaphone which accompanies every presentation of a photoplay. Throughout the film, the long and tedious captions in which Griffith was forced to explain the lapse of time and the change in public and private mind, have naturally been removed, and their explanations conveyed instantaneously and naturally by the little machine which brings ideas directly to the minds of the waiting audience.

The most interesting improvements upon the presentation of the original film occur in the second half—the reels dealing with that curious and entirely legendary brotherhood of demons, the Ku Klux Klan. The crude moral concepts of an age when it was natural for the hero of a photoplay to use such a band for the accomplishment of good, are, of course, adequately explained on the ideaphone as the action goes forward. Alterations in the original order of scenes aid in this.

In the early versions, as any one who has consulted the film library in New York will recall, there are four stories running side by side in the awkward and illogical "flash-backs" of the primitive screen. One story pictures the Northern heroine at the mercy of the lustful' blacks. Another section of the narrative pictures the Southern heroine besieged in a cabin. Two other stories show the Klan riding to the rescue of the heroines.

The editors have boldly rearranged all this to meet the current developments in screen technique. They have separated the alternating scenes. They have gathered together all those taking place in the house of the blacks, all those in the cabin, and all the immense footage given over to the two rescuing parties. The editors show first the scenes of desperation in the cabin and carry them almost up to the point of the rescue. Then they throw upon the screen the wild ride of the Klan and the battle with the negroes surrounding the cabin. This culminates in the victory of the rescuers and the reunion of sub-hero and sub-heroine.

The ideaphone has meantime been impressing upon the audience that there are scenes yet to be shown in which the Northern heroine will suffer danger. These follow immediately: first the blacks besieging the girl's honor; then, as all seems lost, the triumphant ride of the other column of the Klan. By clever cutting and rearrangement, the sub-hero and sub-heroine are introduced into the girl's room immediately after the rescuing hero has taken her in his arms.

The result is the elimination of all the disjointed and confusing "flash-backs" so distasteful to a modern audience accustomed to the long crescendoes of continuous action now ruling our screen. And the shortening that results from this rearrangement brings the picture that once ran for three hours within the bare sixty minutes which, happily or unhappily, is the limit of a modern audience's attention in 2251...

Shakespeare Surviving Belasco

MAKE a few alterations in the foregoing, and you have a fair enough picture of what has been happening for a couple of hundred years to a certain great maker of entertainments who died in 1616. Read The Merchant of Venice, then see David Belasco's rearrangement of the play for David Warfield, and you may well wonder at the bounding and boundless vitality which has withstood centuries of butchering by actors, managers, and playwrights who thought they knew Shakespeare's business better than he. See Hamlet as Arthur Hopkins and Robert Edmond Jones have staged it for John Barrymore, and you may comprehend how swift and movie-wise were the mind and the technique of William Shakespeare

Crude as the movies have been—crude perhaps as Gammer Gurton's Needle or some other play of Shakespeare's boyhood—they have had an extraordinary effect on the dramatic mind of our time. They have played the principal part in breaking down the technique of three or four long acts which Ibsen fastened on the stage less than fifty years ago. As a result of their influence our playwrights frisk about in plays-within-plays, plays told backwards, plays with many scenes, dream-plays, murdermysteries, all manner of strange, free-running contraptions. Consider Johannes Kreisler, Secrets, The Last Warning, The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, clear back to The Poor Little Rich Girl, Seven Keys to Baldpate, On Trial. The trail of the movie is over them all. It marks William of Stratford. And it makes us understand him.

There are three very obvious and important features of motion picture technique which find their parallel in the dramaturgy of Shakespeare. They are the "descriptive title" or long printed account of a change of place and a lapse of time, the "flash-back" or parallel action, and the trick for filling up the passage of time between scene and scene.

The Bard as a Continuity Writer

SHAKESPEARE, like the movies, had no printed program. Hence, if he had to jump his story across a sea of water or a gulf of time he had to have a character named Chorus to inform the audience. (Unless, of course, he fell back on a signboard with the word "Africa" on it, as some still maintain.) Chorus is obviously enough the description caption. When the story of A Winter's Tale has to skip sixteen years, in comes old Time to prepare us to find Perdita a grown girl. As Henry V prepares and launches his bolt against France, Chorus keeps us informed of the progress of the army. Here are some of Shakespeare's "titles".

Now all the youth of England are on fire,

And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies ...

Linger your patience on, and we'll digest

The abuse of distance; force a play.

The sum is paid; the traitors are agreed;

The king is set from London; and the scene

Is now transported, gentles, to Southampton . . .

or—

Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies

In motion of no less celerity

Than that of thought . . . Follow, follow;

Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy,

And leave your England . . .

The Chorus speaks a prolog to Romeo and Juliet which almost rivals in explanatory moralizing some of the flubdub with which Griffith is want to introduce his stories of war, feud, or sadism.

Like most competent scenario writers, Shakespeare is ordinarily careful enough to select a story without great gaps of time, and skilful enough to tell it as a continuous narrative with action so arranged as to bridge any necessary changes of scene. Here we come upon devices exactly parallel on the Elizabethan stage and the photoplay screen. When, in a photoplay, the hero finishes a scene in a flat on West Fifty-third street, and must next be seen in an office on Broadway, the skilful scenario writer does not walk him out the door of the flat and smack in at the office door. That would strain our sense of time. Instead he shows us for a moment or two a different scene or the office with some other characters in action. Then the hero enters, and we take it for granted that during the slight interval he has made the journey.

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A SIMILAR continuity of time had to be established on the Shakespearean stage. There was no program to explain a passage of time, and Chorus could not be jumping in and out with announcements; moreover Shakespeare had almost no changeable scenery on his stage. You can see, therefore, how he was compelled, even more than the film writer, to arrange his exits and entrances to bridge the time taken up by small journeys. The actors who had just used this sunlit platform to tell you about an incident in Capulet's house could not go off the stage and return immediately without making you think that they were in the same place and that no time had passed. Examine Romeo and Juliet and you will find the means Shakespeare took to avoid the difficulty.

Begin at the conclusion of Act II. First there is a scene between Juliet and the Nurse in Capulet's orchard. Juliet goes out to meet Romeo at Friar Lawrence's cell. The next scene, the cell, begins with a dialogue between the friar and Romeo. After it has progressed long enough to create a sense of elapsed time, in comes Juliet. The next scene requires Romeo to appear in a public square and kill Tybalt. To bridge this jump in time and place, we first see Mercutio, Benvolio, and Tybalt. The next scene is given to Juliet and the Nurse. The next begins with Romeo and Friar Lawrence and the Nurse enters toward its close. This system of alternating the characters upon the stage goes on steadily throughout the play. It is followed in Hamlet and in all the other comedies and tragedies. Authorities find in all Elizabethan

drama hardly an infraction of the rule that a character may not leave the stage at the end of one scene and reenter immediately to begin another. It is movingpicture technique to the life.

This principle of alternation is applied by Shakespeare to whole scenes as well as to characters. Then it becomes the "flash-back". The sub-plots of his dramas are frequently handled in this fashion. No better parallel to the technique which Griffith almost invariably calls to his aid towards the close of a picture can be imagined than occurs in The Merchant of Venice. Here are two stories, the story of Shylock and Antonio, and the story of Portia and Bassanio. They begin together, for it is Bassanio's need of money to go fortune-hunting in Belmont that causes Antonio to borrow from the Jew. Then the stories separate and run abreast. In alternating scenes we see the Jew suffering, and gathering Antonio into his net, and we see Bassanio winning Portia. First Belmont, then Venice, then Belmont, then Venice, until at last the two stories meet in the court room, and Portia defeats the Jew. It is the condemned man on the scaffold in The Mother and the Law and the automobile racing to win his pardon. It is the hero of Hearts of the World battling to reach the heroine while she fights off the German villain.

It is, in fact, the attack on the Southern girl in The Birth of a Nation and the ride of the Klan to her rescue.

In the fulness of time—say a millennium or two—we may reasonably hope for some change in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. Will Griffith replace Baron Verulam as contender for the honor of writing Hamlet, or will Shakespeare be put forward as the "only true begetter" of The Birth of a Nation?