Mobile Endings:Screen Death, Early Narrative, and the Films of D. W. Griffith
This article looks at D. W. Griffith's early narrative films at Biograph Studios to trace the emergence of the death scene in American cinema, arguing that figures, objects, and vistas provide "registration," or confirmation on screen that dying has concluded. These human and nonhuman witnesses, in effect, represent death multiple times, indeed in multiple places, as a way to compensate for an encounter between the cinema camera and the dying body that is both incomplete and excessive.
In Behind the Scenes (1908), one of D. W. Griffith's first narrative shorts, Mrs. Bailey is forced by an unsympathetic theater manager to leave her sick daughter at home so that she can perform in his stage show. In the film's fourth shot, a doctor arrives home to tend to the child, setting up a contrast that Griffith twice reinforces by cutting between the onstage mother and her bedridden daughter. Placed between Mrs. Bailey's second stage dance and her return to the wings of the theater is a shot of the child's last twitching gesture—she goes limp in the arms of the doctor, who then places her in a recumbent pose, one hand at a time. In the next shot, Mrs. Bailey flings an arm toward off-screen left as though prescient of her daughter's death. Although she fears the moment is nigh, it has in fact already passed. When she does return home, the doctor tries to intercede, but she persists toward the girl. Mrs. Bailey's discovery and reaction form a staggered series of intense gestures: she pulls down the sheets to move closer, then talks to her daughter while stroking her hair and hand. Bending in for a kiss, she recoils in horror, shakes the doctor, then grabs her daughter's buoyant body and (rather violently) picks her up, shakes her, puts her down, flails about, then collapses over the body, only to rise up again flinging her hand through her hair, collapsing one last time over the body.
Although a death has occurred, its anticipation and confirmation are structured in relation to on-screen perception and touch. In other words, it does not fully happen until it is dramatically perceived by another figure. This appears contrary to the notion of death as a photographic instant or sudden commutative event, a notion that has underwritten recent important theorizations of the cinematic [End Page 90] image.1 Mrs. Bailey performs the physical expression of a psychological process—that of registering the fact of her daughter's death—to gratify the sense of an ending. Such figures that step in to register the end of life—I call them "registrants"—are found throughout Griffith's Biograph films. Their gestural impression confirms the end of dying rather than the still body. They mark a kind of mobile excess at work in the fundamental encounter between film narrative and the death moment. Writing after cinema's conversion to sound, Béla Balázs describes the movie "scene" as a synthesis of partial views rather than a lone embodied action: "What is done is not to break up into detail an already existent, already formed total picture, but to show a living, moving scene or landscape as a synthesis of sectional pictures." These pictures "merge in our consciousness into a total scene although they are not the parts of an existent immutable mosaic and could never be made into a total single picture."2 Popular wisdom would have it that a death scene purports to show the moment a distinguishable body perishes, but Balázs's priority of the synthetic whole over the "immutable mosaic" suggests additional pieces play into the impression of a moving death picture, pieces that build and join rather than deconstruct or anatomize.
Griffith's early films (1908-1913) have long been viewed as a crucible for later narrative technique; they indicate a progression toward a cinema of "narrative integration," as Tom Gunning calls it.3 They likewise allow us to look for origins of specific strategies for staging dying for the screen, a set of conventions that would prove perdurable for Hollywood filmmaking. There is certainly no paucity of deaths in Biograph shorts: Griffith's penchant for child fatality, his adoption of a Victorian sensibility and that era's popular representations of death, and his propensity for pathos-inducing events are well known. Less appreciated, though, is the formal innovation forged by the end of life. Rather than a single-shot occurrence, the death moment is accretive: it leans on other images before and after to organize perception—indeed, to inculcate the impression that the process of dying has come to an end. This article examines death's verification and emotional cadence in shots other than the ones that capture the death moment. What counts as the final gesture becomes ambiguous as other figures and objects carry into dramatic space the traces of a body that will move no longer in the story's world. Despite the film camera's unprecedented ability to show the act of dying as a process that takes place over time, Griffith's films picture closure within a visual field around one mortal body. Looking outside that body, the camera finds death more than once, and in more than one place.
Alternation, Death, and Melodramatic Timing.
Behind the Scenes stages the process of dying by cutting and unfolding several images. The fact of death, too, occurs diachronically. We think it will be too late when Mrs. Bailey arrives, but we do not know until she registers that the child is dead. Shots switch between possibility and certainty, [End Page 91] in which gestures of registration and not the dying body provide ultimate knowledge. In the Biograph shorts, the cut away from a bed (or a battlefield, or a mound of wheat, or wherever death is occurring) prepares us for the possibility of the registrant's late arrival. The diachronic fading of life and concomitant rescue attempt dictate that each shot heralds a successive image for comprehension. Here we can understand Balázs's insistence that the operations of montage produce not spatial continuity but an "architecture of time."4
But it is equally important that the films wait for the registrant to return before they conclude the impression of death, even if it seems to have happened already. This is all the more essential since dying is often represented through alternation. In Behind the Scenes, mother and daughter are separated, and their belated reunion concludes the film. Griffith's frequently repeated final image of mourning over the corpse—most often in a tableau of grief—underscores a temporality of late discovery that often illustrates ideas of social injustice.5 The greedy capitalist's death in A Corner in Wheat (1909) triples our vantage point. The wheat king's hand trembles from within the wheat pile that buries him before he is brought to the surface and grieved; his final gesture is also alternated with the frozen tableau of farmers protesting the bread prices his despotism has caused. What Gunning calls Griffith's "melancholic ending" is an object lesson in specific social constraints, as well as cinematic timing.6 In other words, the possibility of time running out is more than just a possibility. Indeed, in many instances, it does run out, and the perceived corpse at the end of the film is the evidence.
A number of Biograph films spring from or conclude with a character's late return to or arrival at home only to register that someone has died, which suggests that the temporality of narrative death is strongly connected to someone's late timing. This is no coincidence, for, as Linda Williams has suggested, "too late" is the temporality of the fantasy underwriting melodrama, perhaps the most popular of the "body genres" (along with horror and pornography) that provoke visceral reactions from spectators.7 Biograph scenarists favored scenarios with high "heart interest," and child suffering (and death) must have ranked high on any list of pathos-inducing events. Griffith himself was certainly steeped in Victorian traditions, including child death. But there is more to this timing than antecedents in sensibility. To better apprehend the structure of film melodrama's pathos, Williams builds on Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis's work on the temporality of fantasy. She suggests that the melodramatic film concerned with permanent separation and irreversible loss, especially the mother-daughter weepie, "endlessly repeats the trauma of our melancholic sense of the loss of origins."8 [End Page 92] Contrasting melodrama with pornography and horror, Williams concludes that the temporality of melodrama's pathos is that of "too late!" (as opposed to horror's "too early" and pornography's "on time").9 Although Williams at first restricts her examples of melodrama to the maternal subgenre, "too-lateness" suffuses reunions between variously gendered pairings of living and deceased, especially the late reunions that punctuate or end many Biograph films.
What is striking is the fundamentally late nature of the human encounter with mortality in these films, as if death could not be considered a powerful enough subject for film unless it triggered someone else's tardy recognition. Pairing the deceased with an on-screen observer who could have intervened (whether or not that reunion occurs too late) forms a motif in Griffith's Biograph films. In Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), a feeble mother (Clara Bracy) spasms and slides back to an inert seated position alone at home, but she remains part of the narrative until her daughter, the "Little Lady" (Lillian Gish, one of the busiest registrants in American silent film), returns to find her. In The House with Closed Shutters (1910), a daughter's death has been kept secret from the public and is finally registered at the film's end by her suitors, even though she has long been absent from the diegesis.
The problem with applying the temporality of the lost origins fantasy to all Biograph melodramas should be clear: in addition to painfully late reunions, we also call "melodramatic" those films that feature successful rushes to the rescue. Films like The Lonely Villa (1909) visualize the separation of husband and family across shots dangerously isolated from one another, connected only by machines—car, telephone. "Borrowing" a gypsy camp's wagon, the father manages to get back home in time to stop the perpetrators. The flip side of too late is in the nick of time, where rescue, or reconciliation, prevails. In either case, though, impending finitude increases with each cutaway. As Jacques Aumont has said, "In Griffith's cinema, 'partir c'est toujours mourir un peu' ('to leave is always to die a little') and leaving the scene signifies at least potentially the death of the character."10 Griffith uses the two-shot version of this effect to suspend outcomes and produce tableaux in which bodies are posed in arrangements. Ingomar, the Barbarian (1908) shows the barbarian's sword drawn over Parthenia's head, then cuts to Ingomar's rescue attempt and cuts back to Parthenia as the rescuer arrives to stop the fatal blow. Clearly, not all films that employ parallel editing end with irreversible loss. Hence Williams's reformulation of the temporality of melodrama in a later essay as "a dialectic of pathos and action—a give and take of 'too late' and 'in the nick of time.'"11 But Griffith's Biograph films do not balance too late with in the nick of time the way that a later film like Way Down East (1920) does, according to Williams.12 [End Page 93]
The effects of time in scenarios of failure, and the affect experienced by the spectator, are qualitatively different because loss of life is also a certain loss of screen energy: the film stops cutting and parallel editing comes to a halt. Balázs's "architecture in time" becomes frozen. The body's inertia stops the pulsation of cuts from gaining further momentum. One suspects that if parallel editing did not show failure every now and then, it would not be quite as thrilling in its depiction of a race against the clock. Griffith's films develop an ambivalent relationship to time, and death marks that ambivalence clearly.
Biograph films visualize dying through the pulse of crosscuts, encouraging us to reconsider Gunning's "narrator system"—a system of editing worked out in Griffith's films that supplied meaning to individual shots through the relations between and among them—as a kind of death technology, visualizing the purported moment of death as an occurrence in time.13 Considering this system as mechanical may stretch Gunning's concept, but doing so nonetheless points to the "vital" energy with which the cut animates screen figures. We can think of the narrator system as a machine of vital flow, staging life through the finitude of crosscuts. Cutting gives the shot a fingerlike touch, as if on a pulse. It recoils, stalling when the pulse cannot be felt. Editing controls dying more than embodied performance. Unlike the off-screen switch that induced fatal electrical jolts in earlier electrocution shorts like Edison's Execution of Czolgosz (1901) and Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), narrative editing controls the rate of dying through visible alternation. The final gesture materializes from the absent narrator's arrangement of the pieces, from elsewhere and not from the body's changes. Resorting to more than one image removes the burden from any one and allows the search for more or less "effective" images of the moment the death scene "peaks" in emotional force, or the moment a configuration of grief congeals. Several moving moments occur in Behind the Scenes, for instance, and both the daughter's final moments and the mother's late return painfully illustrate a world of disconnect.
Rich variety can be seen in the too-late scenarios. In Romance of a Jewess (1908), Ruth reconciles with her father on her deathbed just as her body gives out in front of him and her little girl; they both kiss her good-bye. But arriving on time to allay past misgivings (Ruth's father had abandoned her when she decided to marry a poor bookseller) makes too-lateness digestible, not obsolete.14 Earlier in the same film, Ruth's husband Solomon falls off the bookstore ladder to his death; she prods his body on the floor and reacts in horror with her mouth in an awestruck O. Ruth frantically runs out of the shop and brings back a doctor and other men. The doctor puts on his spectacles and bends down over the body, feels for Solomon's pulse and touches him on the head, then stands up and speaks. We know that it is a pronouncement of death because of [End Page 94] the bodies that move in reaction: Ruth covers her face, and another man takes his hat off and looks toward the floor. The scene's rising pathos, its ascent of grief, has not yet peaked: the woman convulsively hugs the body on the ground and raises both arms up to the ceiling before collapsing again. In Biograph films, such collapses rival death throes in number and force.
In The House with Closed Shutters, two deaths are registered, by objects more than by people. Charles leaves home to fight for the Confederacy but soon retreats a "drink-mad coward," running home to his mother. This leaves his sister to approach the front lines to protect the family's honor. Picking up the flag from the battlefield, she is killed. Her mother decides to keep this secret for fear of ignominy. She orders the servant to close the shutters, keeping her son and her secret locked away. Years later, two suitors arrive at the front door with flowers, believing her to still be grieving. In a fit of desperation, Charles flings open a window and, apparently, suffers a heart attack. The suitors enter and stare at the body that should have been dead for years. Following the mother's cue, they both take off their hats to honor the sister whose sacrifice is now belatedly acknowledged (Figure 1). It is a delayed registration that makes use of the recurrence of place (house), as well as objects (the windows, which go from open to shut to open). Although Charles dies "twice," both times it is registered through an object that commemorates his sister, in the absence of her body.
The suitors take off their hats to honor a previous death in D. W. Griffith's The House with Closed Shutters (Biograph, 1910).
Techniques of repetition more generally can be found in Griffith's films. One such technique is the use of a repeated image or composition to suggest sequential connections across images and, thus, across fictional time. What Drink Did (1909) concludes with a shot that invokes the opening one to illustrate the loss of a family member. In this object lesson on adult peer pressure, a father succumbs to his coworkers and begins drinking, staying past dinner at a saloon. Eventually, his daughter is sent to find him and bring him home, and in the saloon, she is accidentally shot by her father as he fights with another patron. The final image restages the opening interior shot of the family arranged around the table. In the end, only three remain, and they embrace one another in reconciliation. This arrangement of bodies condenses the moral lesson of the story in a single image. Repeated shots thus accrue meaning throughout a film, becoming deposits of narrative significance, as in the beach composition that is frequently revisited in The Unchanging Sea (1910) to show perpetual longing. Such shots are often death related, but they need not be. Sequential images allow these repetitions to mark temporal change.
The template for the Biograph death scene emerges as a formula that can be applied to subsequent fiction films. Typically, the death scene involves three stages: first, [End Page 95] an alternation between dying and some other event; next, confirmation of the body's absent vitals; and finally, the posthumous resumption of the narrative. Of course, much elaboration is needed. Not all the scenes indicate death as a somatic event. In And a Little Child Shall Lead Them (1909) and The Avenging Conscience (1914), for instance, it has already happened when the scene begins—part of the syuzhet rather than the fabula. The "body event"—the enacted slide or fall to the corpse pose—need not take place on screen for a shot or scene to be fundamentally "about" it, which is why it does not merit its own numerical iteration. And not all stages are granted equal importance or screen time. Increasingly in the early fiction film, the second phase, registration, lengthens in duration and increases in dramatic significance. It is not the static occurrence it would seem to be. If the slide to inertia and the arrest of cutting announces that death might have happened, a kind of stasis would seem to follow logically, offering a paralytic, photographic instant on screen. But this is not quite the case. Motion persists—both in and around the dead body, and through those figures that converge around it to react and pose. The corpse is still dynamic on screen; indeed, stillness is not easy to perform or to film. The tableau of grief struck by registrants offers not just a second look but also a second (and a third and a fourth and so on) death to elaborate on the first.
Tableau: Stillness and Repetition.
The gestures of registration and grief in Biograph films bring us to Roberta Pearson's model of histrionic acting as digital communication. Pearson explains how the histrionic acting style favored precise and predetermined poses and postures to express emotional states.15 Pearson has found this style inherently discontinuous, like digital time, wherein discrete numerical units express change, as opposed to the analogical communication of gestural speech, wherein the hands on a clock flow from one moment to the next.16 Given the tableau's oppositional structure, it is interesting that Pearson writes of the appearance of "opposition" in the histrionic code in terms of choices actors could make. These choices include the length of time a gesture might be held, the stress and speed of the body movement, and the distance of the arms from the core.17 Seeing the verisimilar code as composed of oppositional terms (e.g., short and long, fast and slow, far and near) allows Pearson to identify further this highly gestural acting as speech (the privileged lack for which silent cinema compensates), thus viewing actors' choices along a synchronic-diachronic axis. The move to what Pearson calls the "verisimilar" code is thus a move away from the speechlike precision of gestures to an acting style that allows for improvisation and flow. [End Page 96]
To be clear, neither the film corpse nor the tableau can be defined as simply "still." But they do allow us to consider the potential for stillness in the form of a suspended pause, a pause that does not end merely through embodied performance but also through editorial intervention. In other words, both the corpse and the tableau are transformed by the cinema. Traditionally, the stage tableau interrupted the action to produce a highly charged schematic opposition—illustrating a conflict not soon or easily resolved. By far the most common narrative motivation for tableaux was surprise or astonishment, often at fatal news. And dead bodies were specifically posed around; onlookers would stop to recapitulate the stillness of the corpse. Pearson argues for film's "modified tableau"—the dramatic pause continues in movies, although poses are not held nearly as long as they were on stage and are not followed by the strong effect of a curtain's close.18 It follows that the death tableau undergoes a similar adjustment. Indeed, the screen tableau of grief—or, for that matter, any movie recognition of fatality—is structured by the limits of the shot, an image with a curtailed rather than discontinuous photographic temporality.
To play dead is to strike a pose, and to register the corpse is to strike another. The second pose of recognition absorbs the static body that will not again move. The stillness of the registrant within the tableau repeats the slide to inertia of the actor dying— registrants fall, thrash about, or hold tight to other grievers before hugging or collapsing on top of the corpse. An unmoving body contrasts with the moving image in a way it does not contrast with movement on stage—and since we know the pictured corpse is not really still (because it is still played by a living actor), our gaze moves out to the second still figure. The significant action in a death scene would seem to be the body event, and confirmation would seem to be visible stillness, but the rhythmic "life force" of editing tells the story differently. Despite what can be spectacular performances of dying, there is an overwhelming sense that the camera is always either too early or too late to focus on the body's final gesture. It is too invested in other screen activity. Echoing Bazin, one might use the word asymptote here, because the stillness of death cannot speak for itself in the analog moving image; it must be spoken for by another body—still endowed with motion—that approaches the first to confirm for the spectator that it is, in fact, not breathing.19
Given this vagrant movement and the obvious fact that death is not audibly pronounced in silent pictures, the stillness of the registrant there speaks volumes. The tableau of grief reiterates stillness of the dead body and seems to naturalize such a pause and extend it longer than the body event. When in A Corner in Wheat the wheat king falls to his doom in the grain shaft and is then raised up on an elevator, the rest of the players gather around his body as it is laid out horizontally in the frame. The operator checks the dead man's vital signs through touch, and the crowd forms a tableau around him. Again, Griffith films death and registration separately, making clear [End Page 97] the different roles for each (Figures 2-3). Whereas the camera does not need to scrutinize the dying before it cuts away but merely has to prepare us for death as a possibility, the registrants take a rather lengthy pause to perform the same function. It is as if we do not believe that the wheat king is dying in the preceding shot, in which his hand pokes up through the wheat mound—we believe what other people believe for us. Our emotional center is not in the body that might stop for good but in the bodies that stop for the moment, to listen, touch, and react. The tableau is not a stop, a dead end, but rather a pause that draws attention to itself as halted movement, triggering in fact another mental operation in the spectator who savors this depiction of the character's having departed.
D. W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (Biograph, 1909) first shows apparent death.
A Corner in Wheat then shows registration (Biograph, 1909).
In addition to timing the tableau of grief in relation to the body event, Biograph films transform that tableau through detailed, "verisimilar" reactions. For example, in The Painted Lady (1912) we can see Blanche Sweet recoil from the body outside so earnestly that she leaves the shot; she literally jumps out of frame, so horrified is she by the idea that she has killed her suitor.20 Registration becomes quite powerful when the camera allows the actor's face to demonstrate the stages of recognition. A more deliberate setup for reaction will inspire memorable bits of acting, as in The Mothering Heart (1913) when the young wife (again, Lillian Gish) stares toward the camera, processing, shown through her facial gestures, her baby's death—a reaction that exaggerates her knowledge as a form of noncommunicated feeling, a melodramatic "text of muteness," to borrow Peter Brooks's language.21 Our only access to the corpse is through the mother's face; media for mute gestural speech, the face and body communicate [End Page 98] the strongest of feelings, often of helplessness and victimized passivity. Perhaps most memorably, Griffith extends the registration shot, composing the griever's face behind that of the dying figure in The Birth of a Nation (1915) as the Little Colonel kneels down by his sister Flora's body after she has jumped from the cliff. He stares out, roughly toward the camera, for ten seconds before embracing her. Then the shot ends.22 All these examples culminate in too-late embraces, moments of posthumous sorrow.
Some actors received particular acclaim for dying. For one, David Miles was praised for his portrayal of an unwanted lover who mistakes flowers for a gift from the engaged woman he loves in The Faded Lilies (1909). His last gesture received this glowing review in Moving Picture World: "The death scene is so realistic that the audience scarcely breathes when the man is passing through the mental agonies attendant upon his discovery of the deception which has been worked upon him and the physical agony of approaching death."23 He lifts up the flower and drops it while he topples over into a chair, suffering from an apparent heart attack. But registration provides the actor with an emotional spectrum—and time frame—that equals, if not surpasses, that of dying.
The tableau reminds us that the moving image can hover at the boundary between movement and stillness, between life and death, but it cannot quite cross over.24 Death qua stillness (as in Barthes's photographic rigor mortis) is problematic in film because motion filters stillness as the result of what does not change on screen.25 Consider Protazanov's The Departure of a Great Old Man (1912), in which the indexical footage of Tolstoy's corpse at his wake contains an interesting detail—a fly that can be detected silently buzzing around the room, an agent of motion that proves this is a moving, not a still, image of the still body.26 What goes for the corpse goes for the tableau; both embodied pauses run against the grain of the image. When characters seem to perish alone on screen before their vital signs are unfelt, something like an alarm goes off. The cut sends us away quickly to a would-be registrant, filling in any doubt left in the body's wake with the emotional certitude of loss.27 The film supplants the dead time of the body and recuperates, or revives, its narrative meaning in other movement, even [End Page 99] the movement into another pose. The poses struck in tableaux attribute to the corpse a stillness the medium has not yet achieved: the "dead" do not own stillness, but the living do, in the form of the long pause that absorbs what happens afterward.
The corpse, the frozen griever, the posed survivor—not one of these figures defines death as the opposite of motion. What we see as deathlike stillness is defined as a moving image that does not change, so stillness is predicated on mobility. Also, this stillness requires a stretch of durable time for it to be perceived on screen. The excess is temporal as well, for in the term still itself we find the double valence of movement and time. Still pertains to states of both physical being and temporal dilation. Screen "deadness" concerns us because, if expressed in terms of durée, it never ends.
I would like to underscore the general point here that it is often not the actor but the editing that formulates the final touches. In The Sealed Room (1909), Griffith demonstrates clearly that the single shot, and the actor's dying, are not enough. Here we know that there can be no movement between the locales—the whole point is that the vengeful king has sealed the door with bricks to the anteroom where his queen is enjoying a tryst with her young suitor. The cuts between the two sets are clearly motivated by a narration beyond the limits of the frame. Blocking the passage sets up asphyxiation in one room that someone next door, again out of eyeshot, seems to experience. In the final four shots, we see wife and suitor grabbing at their necks for air; husband adjusting his neck collar and taunting them by knocking on the wall; queen collapsing, upside down, over a chair with mouth ajar, as her suitor falls out of the lower frame; and husband declaring victory to the door. In this film, the rate of edits controls the pace of dying and leaves the sealed room before it is clear that the lovers have expired. To confirm the fatal ending, Griffith cuts to the king and does not return to the other room where the bodies lie crumpled. The cutaway stops parallel editing—that life force of the cut, that invisible finger that feels the absence of a pulse. The film registers death both through the king's reaction and also, and more importantly, through the way the final shot cancels out further images, suggesting that the end is ultimately not in the king's but the editor's hands.
Death is registered outside the body as the king declares victory to the door in The Sealed Room (Biograph, 1909).
In summary, the dying body is not the emotional center of screen death; the emotional center is the juxtaposition of that body with other moving figures that can touch it (or otherwise become aware of it, as in The Sealed Room) for us, through a kind of synesthesia. Griffith places death outside the body. To be sure, registration in actual experience involves mixing senses; detecting absent vitals combines sensory registers— what cannot be heard is rendered through sight, what cannot be seen through noise, what cannot be felt through sight and sound. Since melodrama is typified by the [End Page 100] pathetic death, it is inviting to look at the corpse as constituting a text of muteness itself, a body whose final gesture is communicated by others.28 It is not clear which body speaks muteness more loudly, though—the corpse's or the registrant's—and I tend to think of the registrant as communicating a louder silent pain. The search for peak points of stillness (death) brings in view the process that occupies the interim (dying), and vice versa, and dying does not conclude without external registration.
The corpse's stillness exceeds cinematic parameters. Once filmed as dead, there is no end to being dead. The frenzied movements around the corpse, however, remind us that the genealogy of the term tableau conjures up a mixture of movement and stillness. The word designates a still-image tradition, an embodied pose on stage, and re-creations of historical paintings, but it also refers to processional lines that connote familiar narrative movement, like certain sequences from the New Testament. Tableaux can likewise involve environmental mobility if outdoors. In any event, the tableau of grief constitutes an important moment in the development of American narrative film. Death as we know it in fiction films does not exist without registration. The registrant that strikes or falls into a still pose recapitulates the corpse viewed, and this indicates not only a mobile stillness but also a scene of death in which the beholder becomes internalized. The registrant figure is not optional or supplemental; it is requisite.29 What is more, the spectator identifies with that figure's spatial trajectory, and so the spectator doubles the dying act, too, and comes to be located within the scene. This internality becomes more pronounced when the registrant figure is not a human being at all, but an object, or plant, or piece of sky. For an example of this dispersed and disembodied registration, I turn to The Country Doctor (1909) for a fuller discussion.
Posthumous Motion.
At the end of The Country Doctor, Little Edith goes limp in her mother's arms while her father—called away to rescue another bedridden girl in another home—is trying to make it back in time. Her mother falls over the child's body in grief just before Dr. Harcourt arrives home too late. Feeling for a pulse, he recoils, eyes open in shock, disbelieving arms loosed. Harcourt nestles himself in his wife's bosom as they pose behind their daughter's recumbent corpse. The film could end here. But Griffith keeps looking for an image of closure. He chooses a panoramic shot that starts with the home's exterior and moves left across the still landscape of Stillwater. We have seen this landscape before. The coda reverses the film's opening shot that pans left to right across Stillwater, introducing us to the home and its bourgeois [End Page 101] inhabitants as they emerge together through the front door (Figure 5). Griffith's final shot concludes the death—and the film—outside the home; outside the family circle; and indeed, well out of sight of Edith's body (Figure 6).
The first shot of The Country Doctor, which ends here, introduces us to the film's bourgeois protagonists (Biograph, 1909).
The last shot of The Country Doctor begins where the first shot left off. Now, the empty space registers death (Biograph, 1909).
The film has stopped cutting and seems to be at rest. The inertia in this frame contrasts poignantly with the earlier parallel edits and the impending finitude of each cut. This would be a familiar too-late ending if the film finished with the tableau, but Griffith cuts instead to outside the house, now barren of exiting bodies, front door shut. This shot begins to pan left and reverses the opening one which both introduced us to the characters and moved us from a stand-alone attraction to narrative. Returning to the original shot—or semblance of that shot—raises a surfeit of possible meanings.30
For one thing, its transition away from a death in order to remember it qualifies this pan as a moving posthumous image, perhaps the first of its kind. As Jay Ruby explains, the nineteenth-century posthumous mourning portrait portrayed the dead infant or child as if alive, "with 'disguised' death symbols" such as "a willow tree in the background, or a wilted flower in the child's hand," although some paintings placed the figure in his or her former habitual environment, often the front lawn of the home.31 Griffith's second pan recalls the tradition of posthumous painting while fusing two other traditions, one theatrical and one cinematic: the theatrical tableau for dramatic highlighting and the panoramic shot. Of course, the shot only evokes the tableau, for it is not still and does not figure embodied stillness. However, the [End Page 102] very name of the valley—Stillwater—clinches the dilemma of cinema's momentum in death's aftermath. The lingered-over valley wants to play still, not only as a mnemonic figure for Edith but also as a reverberation of the stop induced by grief. It is a moving stillness. As a posthumous moving image, it departs from its theatrical, painterly, and photographic precedents to show an animate response to death, using cinematic flux to luxuriate in moving (on or away). Unlike the posthumous painting that would depict the deceased as still alive in his or her former environment, Griffith's pan takes Edith out of the picture; but like this previous tradition, the shot does bring a "disguised death sign," the closed door, into the former scene of habitation.32
The last shot also recalls the important use of the pan to introduce spectators to the enacted death in Execution of Czolgosz, endorsing that film's claims to authenticity by combining fake electrocution with the actuality footage taken outside the prison and thus outside the body event.33 Instead of reassuring the spectator of the camera's whereabouts, Griffith's pan turns to an image of nature for the purpose of pathos. This shot does not picture a recognizable human form. Thus Griffith moves from the histrionic and verisimilar bodily performances of actors to the emotional resonance of a landscape emptied out of such performances. We have seen bodies emote, gesture, and play still, but their drama is markedly contrasted with this final shot of human absence. The landscape unfurls through the narrator-editor's hands, but it does not contain embodied action.
The Country Doctor's repeated opening pan recalls other uses of repetition for spectator engagement and gives the film a classic circular structure, what Gunning calls an "aria de capo."34 Consider this three-part format: characters emerge from nature, one of them dies, and they "return" to nature. Genesis 3:19 comes to mind: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." The common burial invocation also invites an element of hysteron proteron, effect leading the cause, thus challenging Deleuze's notion that causality remains untroubled in Griffith's cinema. The pan generates its response, the second shot, which makes room for a second cycle, another trip around. Circles repeat.35 Here, the final gesture marks a mobility that exceeds any clear punctual moment. [End Page 103]
To whose gaze can we ascribe this final shot? Recall how in Behind the Scenes the death shot drew attention to a figure outside the frame. In The Sealed Room, we never "see" the death because it is registered in another room. Aptly titled, these films refer us to spaces with limited access as the places where dying occurs. What Scott Simmon has called Griffith's "death-haunted pan" belongs to the larger tradition of registering death for spectator knowledge, but it goes beyond registration by marking a time unclear in relation to the body.36 This last trait counts as a fascinating part of the narrator system. The image belongs to the story tradition, to be sure, but it points to an order of shot relations that can be glimpsed beyond, or behind, the story. Edith's death is marked not on her body but as visible difference within the fictional environment. Only the spectator has eyes for this earlier image, so its repetition nearly directly addresses his or her own experience of the film—it emanates from outside the place-holding bodies. On the one hand, the circle intimates repetition and transcendence; on the other hand, the pan shows the mark death makes in the diegesis.
It may seem like a spectacular case, but posthumous motion, whether shot from a moving or static camera, has become a staple for the movie death scene. What I call posthumous motion may be defined as the use of the cut to visualize another image— usually one that reframes the body, or else infuses part of the environment—to extend the scene after the death moment has apparently occurred, that is, after registration. Whether or not the camera is itself moving, the image is. Prolonging the scene's visual elements to wait for a shot of diegetic change becomes conventional because it allows a character's death to conjoin characters, other lines of action, and even other locales, thus making good on the medium's visible flux for purposes of expiration. Seen in various form throughout American film history, it has become one of the more interpretive shots in genre films, often indicating the solemn passage of time—medium close-ups of flowers or shots of wreaths, low-angle shots of the sky or trees, and funeral processions come to mind. If death evades focused cinematic concentration, then this supplemental release of energy, this slow and consequential expiration of screen focus, becomes an essential element. Even the freeze-frame images of bodies frozen prior to destruction that appear in the 1960s in films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) recall the tableau's rigid but still moving energy.37 The freeze-frame is indebted to the tableau as much as is posthumous motion.
This is certainly not the only time Griffith would explore shots in which the body is out of sight to picture death's environmental traces. In The Sands of Dee (1912), a seaside-dwelling farmer's daughter falls for a painter who dumps her when his wife reappears, and she flees to the sea after her disciplinary father kicks her out of the home. In the final shots, Griffith stages her exit from the film as a visible recess into the medium shots of the sea, taken from the shore. First, she is running across the frame and sea vista, then she is lying immobile on a rock while waves crash about. A piece of [End Page 104] clothing is left behind and picked up by a worried former suitor. He runs after her, but the following shot is of the water only, lapping onto the shore. This nonfigural image is followed by the Charles Kingsley text from the eponymous poem: "The creeping tide came up the sand, and o'er and o'er the sand, and round and round the sand, and never home came she." Cut briefly to a body washing ashore, back home to worried parents, then back to her rescuer who is dragging her body out of the tide and into her parents' arms. The four bodies form a death tableau by the water while Mary's arm dangles buoyantly in the middle. They end the shot, but the scene is unfinished. Subsequently, two boatmen who "hear her call the cattle home across the sands of Dee" stand peering off-screen right at the sea. The reverse extreme long shot depicts a white-clad female figure on rocks gesturing to her mouth. The angle at which the boatmen look runs opposite to previous angles at the sea and at Mary.
Different types of posthumous motion produce different affects. There are instances, for example in The Country Doctor, where the concluding shot echoes previous images. Posthumous motion as a repetitive trope can be categorized into roughly three types. Griffith's last image rhymes with the first but is not that image and is not meant to "revive" it. Let us call this renewal. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat returns to the image of a wheat field after the wheat king's death, only the second time we see a lone farmer framed in the distance rather than several. Thus, it renews that image after an important death, echoing the composition of Millet's painting The Sower.38 The Country Doctor adds a variation in that it introduces the idea of reversal, not just repetition. Second, there is the shot or shots that revert back to film images from earlier in the story, extracting and replaying them. The image repeated posthumously may include the person who has now departed. Let us call this image posthumous replay; such an image may or may not provide a clear loop that ties end to beginning. Replay intimates hysteron proteron generally, but images may specifically echo or repeat others. A third category involves repetition with a difference—a shot that seems diegetic but is not exactly what we saw. We might call this the retrofit replay—retrofitted, that is, to produce closure in someone's absence. All three types are employed in a posthumous shadow. This imagery stages our last encounter outside the body, beyond beholders, to provide a kind of confirmation that no diegetic character is capable of performing—leaning on transcendence, repetitive posthumous motion tends to frame death within a higher order of important instants, reviving earlier ones or recuperating lost ones.
That higher order wants illumination. Death is prior to the concluding pan and generates it, which means that the entire structure of The Country Doctor is concerned with Edith's death. The film allows us to see the significance of a shot's relation to the whole. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the psychology of film perception comes to mind here, especially his point that the phenomenology of perception is holistic, supported by what is not seen or immanent in the current cognitive act. "The objects behind my back," he writes, "are present, they count for me, just as the ground which I do not see continues nonetheless to be present beneath the figure which partially hides it." Merleau-Ponty appreciates both the frame's inner relations as well as the selection of what to show and what to hide, valorizing film's melodic structure, the "tempo of [End Page 105] the narrative," and the "choice of perspectives." The movie signifies itself as a whole consisting of parts relating to one another, thus its meaning cannot be glimpsed by isolating one shot, nor can the whole be perceived at any one moment. Each image remains open to the influence of the whole system, creating "not a sum total of images but a temporal gestalt."39 The Country Doctor's final image reveals an emptiness lurking behind the fullness of the first. Griffith thus suggests that death changes the diegetic whole.
Concluding the film with a shot renewed also underscores the traditional attempt to find the right mnemonic for commemoration. As a posthumous memory image, the pan reminds us of the creation of mnemonic placeholders in the ancient art of memory, as Frances Yates explains.40 In the surviving Roman text on memory known as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, an anonymous speaker instructs the rhetor on how to memorize speeches by placing words and phrases within a specific place, such as a house, with different loci, such as doorways. Deposited at the loci, they can be later retrieved by the speaker in various orders. Here, Edith, or perhaps the entire Harcourt family, are deposited in the landscape so that they might be remembered in their absence. The film offers up its own memory image of the Harcourts, returning to their "origins." When it externalizes or disembodies death within space, and particularly as it repeats and alters sections of a movie in a commemorative act, posthumous motion moves film in a direction different from rapid visible change, that "blizzard of photographs" that according to Siegfried Kracauer bombards the spectator in a conveyor belt of views allowing for no introspection.41
Although the pan functions as a mnemonic, it also has the extraordinary characteristic of representing a moment of perception beyond that enjoyed by the screen human, for no one in the film sees or appears in this shot. We do not know how much time has transpired between the final two images. Furthermore, the time of the last image is of interest with respect to the previous image. The pan visualizes a life's end as unfurling, stretching over time and space. We may read this final shot "thematically," as an element of poetic naturalism. It may indeed be a statement about the relationship between human beings and the natural world, suggesting that we may not be at the center of vibrant life. The panning shot is in this sense an image of unlived time, an image that indicates no clear temporal duration, no obvious beginning or ending, for its start has already occurred, and its ending is not envisaged by the screen on which it is pictured. So much for photographic death: Griffith found and exploited a mobile sign as one of cinema's great gifts to the repository of death imagery. [End Page 106]
Scott Combs is Assistant Professor of Film and English at St. John's University in Queens, New York. His book Death-watch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Footnotes
1. See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2007).
2. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character Growth of a New Art Form, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 52.
3. See Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
4. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 52.
5. Gunning concludes his remarks on Behind the Scenes in this way: "Mourning over a dead body is almost as frequent an ending for Griffith's early Biograph films as the happy re-united family. Perhaps Griffith saw sorrow as a primary means to audience empathy and involvement in the film." See Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Griffith Project, vol. 1, Films Produced 1907-1908 (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 98.
6. The phrase appears in Gunning's discussion of Griffith's The Girl and Her Outlaw, but it recurs throughout essays in The Griffith Project.
7. Linda Williams first theorizes this concept in "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess," Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991), 2-13.
8. Ibid., 10-11.
9. Ibid., 11.
10. Jacques Aumont, "Griffith—The Frame, the Figure," trans. Judith Ayling and Thomas Elsaesser in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, with Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 354.
11. Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 69.
12. Ibid., 72-75.
13. The concept of the narrator system is developed in Gunning's D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 25-28.
14. Linda Williams makes a similar point about The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), a film likewise positioned at the threshold of a medial shift—this time, to the sound film. Jakie Rabinowitz makes it back to his father's synagogue to sing the Kol Nidre. His father, the cantor, hears him and peacefully passes away. Williams writes that Jakie sings "just 'in time' to make his father die happy but 'too late' to save him from death." Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 153.
15. Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially 21-23, 32-38.
16. Although one might object to this clear-cut division, I believe we are encouraged to view the two as opposite ends of a spectrum. Many films include examples of both kinds of gesture, and the point seems to be that we can look at Biograph acting along a spectrum between histrionic and verisimilar.
17. Pearson writes, "The histrionic code is always marked by a resemblance to digital communication and a limited lexicon, but performers had to choose the time, stress and speed, and direction of their gestures. And since the performance of gesture could vary, an actor could use various combinations of oppositions to suit the movements to the nature and intensity of the character's state of mind." Eloquent Gestures, 27.
18. Ibid., 39.
19. For example, see Bazin's key essays on Italian neorealism, particularly his essay on De Sica's Umberto D (1951), which he concludes with the following: "De Sica and [scriptwriter] Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it." Bazin, What Is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2:82.
20. This early "reaction shot" does not break the tableau framing throughout the film. The cut follows Sweet from one tableau to the next, connecting the room where she drops her protective shawl to the loss of her former identity. In fact, the anteroom functions as a portal onto the horror in the other room and as a pivotal place between the desire to run away and the desire to take care of things herself (the first time to shoot the intruder, and the second time to remove his mask). This is not to take away from the performance but actually seems to celebrate it. Russell Merritt rightly praises Sweet's verisimilar reaction in The Griffith Project, vol. 6, Films Produced in 1912, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: British Film Institute, 2008), 155-156.
21. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), especially 68-73 on gestural acting.
22. But not the scene. The colonel carries her body home and lays it out on a couch: one by one mother, sister, and father enter the room to register the body. Griffith seems to even dim the lights of the room as if to enshroud the family in a private darkness. And then the intertitle "And none grieved more than these" leads to a brief shot of the faithful slaves, one crying, the other sitting with his head on his fist. Griffith uses the death to confirm his vision of the union of whites and their former oppressed.
23. Review of The Faded Lilies, Moving Picture World, June 26, 1909, 872.
24. The static images that underlie the illusion of motion can be called forth in the freeze-frame and other such evocations of the photogram. See Stewart's discussion of the freeze-frame, which he punningly calls the "frieze frame" to get at the impossibility of film revealing its frames, in Between Film and Screen, 132-134.
25. Barthes suggests that the materiality and stillness of the photographic image reinforce its marking of the past as present in the form of a visible instant. This instant is mirrored by the click of the camera's button: "Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into the literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print." See Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 92.
26. I would like to thank Anne Nesbet for pointing this film out to me, and for her reference to the caesura of the sailor's death in Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), a related instance of an apparent end that makes room for future movement, a revolution consisting of stasis and change.
27. Special-effects deaths in later classical and postclassical cinema remove some doubt but are nonetheless influenced by this tradition of confirming change outside the body, or beyond what the viewer can see in the body.
28. "The 'text of muteness' can be considered to include mute tableau and gesture . . . and the mute role," writes Brooks, thus alluding to the preponderance of mute characters in both text and play that must gesture to speak aloud the verities of their moral dilemmas (The Melodramatic Imagination, 56). The corpse plays a mute role, of course, but the immediacy of the registrant's gestural response to apparent death points to the mute condition of witnessing death in silent film.
29. In his reading of Charles Wilson Peale's 1772 mortuary painting Rachel Weeping, Jay Ruby acknowledges the custom of portraying the dead child with grieving parents. The mother's face confirms that the baby is not in a state of repose: "It is the mother's facial expression which clearly indicates that the child is dead." Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 33.
30. I say "semblance" because it is, of course, not a mere reversal of the first shot. For one thing, the door is closed, and the family does not walk backward into the house. Also, the first shot contains a moment of editing, for a lawn mower is unwittingly recorded, forcing Griffith to shoot the second half of the shot and splice it to the first. However, the effect is very much to repeat the image we have seen, and it is important that repetition occurs as an explicit reversal.
31. See Ruby's work on mourning photography in Secure the Shadow, especially on the posthumous mourning painting, 36-49.
32. Ibid., 41. It was Phoebe Lloyd who first pointed out the posthumous portrait as distinct from other mourning images in "Posthumous Mourning Portraiture," in A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong (Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980), 71-87.
33. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 187.
34. Gunning, in Usai, The Griffith Project, vol. 2, 165.
35. Hysteron proteron becomes a crucial possibility of cinematic reversal in the face of death that Peggy Phelan claims, upon viewing Tom Joslin's death from AIDS in his 1991 documentary Silverlake Life: The View from Here, offers a healing recourse to the problem of a particularly effaced death: "The end of a filmmaker's life is not the end of his film. In the transference enacted across the body of the film, the making of the film, like the making of the memory of the filmmaker's life, continues in the unfolding present. For that continuity to continue, the filmmaker's filmic body, the film itself, must be replayed, revised, reprojected." See Peggy Phelan, "Dying Man with a Movie Camera," GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 4 (1995): 387-388. Such claims are made in liberating tones about film's actual ability to reverse the effects of time (the "filmic body" lives on), so there is some degree of disavowal about film's ability to show the change left behind in the world in someone's absence.
36. Scott Simmon in Usai, The Griffith Project, vol. 1, 144.
37. Stewart calls attention to this freeze-frame: "The embryonic (photograph) is there as the cellular (cinematic photogram), the origin implicit in the increment. Death breaks the chain of succession, its totalizing force in such contexts transforming the photographic increment to a mark of cessation." Or, we might say, a mark of future cessation, since there is no cut to an additional image posited later in the pre-posthumous "friezes" that end Butch Cassidy and Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). See Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 49.
38. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, 248.
39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Film and the New Psychology," in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). This particular essay was written in 1945 and evokes the phenomenological thrust of postwar writings on cinema. This may smack of Eisenstein's theory of montage, but Merleau-Ponty's guide is Pudovkin, for whom continuity was essential.
40. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1-27.
41. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 58.
