Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Stagestruck Filmmaker:
D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre
Eileen Bowser
Publications
Publications
Publicaciones
David W. Griffith directing.
Historien du théâtre, collaborateur de
l’édition Griffith du BFI, David Mayer
nous livre ici un portrait du grand
cinéaste comme artiste plongé dans
le théâtre populaire du début du XX e
siècle.
Les premiers écrits sur le cinéma ont
fréquemment insisté sur les différences
entre théâtre et cinéma de manière
à prouver que ce dernier était une
forme d’art entièrement nouvelle,
correspondant à l’âge moderne. L’essai
de Nicholas Vardac (Stage to Screen,
1949) et, plus récemment, celui de
Ben Brewster et Lea Jacob (Theatre to
The Giornate del Cinema Muto, held in Italy each October, has now
completed more than a decade of The Griffith Project. This project,
dedicated to the showing of all of the master’s films, has resulted in a
remarkable film-by-film in-depth study by an international group of
scholars, published by the British Film Institute in 12 volumes and edited
by Paolo Cherchi Usai. On this solid ground the scholarship on D. W. Griffith
continues to expand. David Mayer, the author of Stagestruck Filmmaker,
contributed his expertise as a theater historian to The Griffith Project and
now offers us his view of Griffith as a filmmaker immersed in the popular
theater of the early 20th century.
Early writers on cinema often sought to
differentiate theater and cinema in order
to establish that the latter is an entirely
new art form of the modern age. The
never-ending debate on the relationship
of film and theater was addressed in 1949
by Nicholas Vardac, who argued in Stage
to Screen that theatrical trends in the
late 19th and early 20th century in the
direction of spectacle and illusionism led
to the formation of cinema because of its
superior capacity to exploit these qualities.
In more recent times, Ben Brewster and Lea
Jacobs’ Theatre to Cinema (1997) looked to
pictorialism in theater as a major influence
on mise-en-scène in cinema, especially in
the period when the feature film began
to arrive. David Mayer, an accomplished
theater historian, chose to write about just
one filmmaker, albeit a very important one, to show us how he was formed
by the popular theater of his youth, and influenced by it to the end of his
film career.
Mayer gives us a thorough description of the theater in America as it existed
during Griffith’s young days and as he might have witnessed it, a history
that will be useful to all film historians of that period, not only Griffith
scholars. He describes the origins and traces the routes of the popular
theater over the fast-spreading railroad lines in the late 19th and early 20th
century. In Kentucky, Louisville became an important railroad destination
and one of the active centers of theatrical life. Mayer speculates on the
plays, managers, and players Griffith may have known as an adolescent
in Louisville. He explores Griffith’s theatrical experiences and contacts
as he struggled with a none-too-successful acting career, and he also
describes Griffith’s little-known excursion into vaudeville and his efforts as
a playwright.
71 Journal of Film Preservation / 81 / 2009