Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2006 Sommario / Contents

profondo, scoperta dell’inconscio, repressione dei ricordi e il
fenomeno dello spiritismo affiora anche nel film di Griffith, dove il
tema della comunicazione coi defunti non va letto come una semplice
riesumazione di superstizioni antiquate, ma come una personale e
attiva interazione con la contemporanea diffusione della psicologia.
Il lieto fine di The Greatest Question possiede un suo ingenuo fascino
ma è sicuramente al di sotto degli standard abituali di Griffith. E
tuttavia, questa storia di trascendenza che si risolve in una
celebrazione dei beni materiali presenta una certa ironia di stampo
prettamente americano. Michael Allen ha tracciato un interessante
parallelo tra la scoperta della ricchezza sotterranea (il giacimento di
petrolio sotto la fattoria degli Hilton) e il tema ricorrente della
sepoltura e della riesumazione (la servetta assassinata, l’annegamento
di John e la sua ricomparsa, la memoria sommersa di Nellie) ma la
facile soluzione finale dell’improvvisa scoperta della ricchezza suona
troppo “Beverly Hillbillies” per poterla prendere sul serio.
Pur senza raggiungere qui la profondità espressiva di Broken Blossom o
di True Heart Susie, Lillian Gish non è mai apparsa altrettanto
vividamente bella e affascinante, e, coi suoi boccoli e il suo cappello a
larga tesa, proietta esattamente l’innocenza e la tenacia richieste dal
suo personaggio di “Piccola signorina ubbidiente”. Negli sfumati primi
piani – in controluce e su sfondo scuro – che servono da ritratto
scontornato dell’attrice, Griffith e Bitzer (o queste riprese flou sono
opera, non accreditata, di Hendrick Sartov?) creano alcune delle
immagini più memorabili di questa erotica e tenera, dolce ma tenace
donna/bambina. – Tom Gunning [DWG Project # 588]
The Greatest Question remains one of Griffith’s most undeservedly
neglected feature films. It was one of several films that Griffith made quickly
in 1919 to fulfill contractual obligations, and it lacks the big budget of Way
Down East, the artistic trappings and publicity accorded to Broken
Blossoms, and most certainly, the epic historical ambitions of The Birth of
a Nation, Intolerance, or Orphans of the Storm. It decidedly belongs to
the intimate and pastoral Griffith, but unlike True Heart Susie or even The
White Rose, it has never garnered passionate partisans.Although the main
reason for its neglect lies in the lack of publicity build-up Griffith himself
accorded it, I would have to confess The Greatest Question does not show
the psychological complexity and formal perfection of narrative found in the
two other modest Griffith masterpieces, True Heart Susie and The White
Rose.
In contrast to the sustained tragedy of woman’s martyrdom found in these
films and Way Down East, The Greatest Question seems more like a
pastiche, very much in the 19th century melodramatic tradition, with stock
characters and situations, and alternations of low comedy and high drama,
and Griffith resolves it with the most hackneyed of happy endings. This
complaint may sound strange coming from a defender of the value of
melodrama like myself, but whereas Griffith uses these elements in the
other films to create social critique and nuanced characters, here one
senses them using him, as the film veers along with an almost dream-like
logic. But this is not all loss: if the film seems out of control at points,
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sometimes that dropping of logic or consistency of tone seems to lead
Griffith into moments of intense experimentation, direct anticipations of the
art cinema of the 1920s of Germany and the Soviet Union. For all its
weaknesses, The Greatest Question offers some of Griffith’s boldest
moments in the exploration of the portrayal of memory and cinematic
metaphor, even as the film confronts its eponymous “greatest question” –
the barrier between life and death.
But perhaps the strongest case for this film as a minor masterpiece
manqué comes from its richly visual pastoral style. Griffith and Bitzer never
achieved more rapturous imagery of winding summer lanes, rail fences, sundappled
rural brooks, bountiful orchards and fields – the “beauty of the
wind in the trees” that Griffith saw as central to cinematic style – than in
this film. True Heart Susie portrays the lonely desolation of small-town life,
while the rural imagery of Way Down East often teeters into the
monumental (the ice floes and cataract climax). Recalling their best work at
Biograph, in The Greatest Question Bitzer and Griffith capture a truly
idyllic landscape in such scenes as Gish (playing Nellie Jarvis) fording a
stream in her peddler’s wagon, or Gish and Bobby Harron (as Jimmy Hilton)
cavorting like an archetypal innocent couple, whose dawning awareness of
sexuality gives them energy and delight, rather than neuroses. (Contrast the
aggressive first smooch between Harron and Gish in The Greatest
Question, or the warm and truly affectionate embrace and kiss they share
as Nellie goes off into service, with the same actors’ agonized inability to
kiss in True Heart Susie, and the different tone of each film becomes
obvious.) Bitzer uses masterfully composed long shots frequently, nesting his
characters into this gentle landscape, and framing for carefully composed
background even in character-oriented medium shots (such as Nellie’s
farewell). Bitzer also carefully threads the heavily symbolic stream through
as many shots as possible, setting up a compositional as well as symbolic
motif that flows through the film.
If part of Griffith’s creativity lay in renewing melodramatic tradition
cinematically, The Greatest Question walks the line between simply
swallowing the clichés and bringing new perspectives to the old material.
The survival and transmutation of melodrama in the 20th century owes a
great deal to psychoanalysis, which seems to interiorize the Manichean
duality that melodrama projects onto the world. Griffith’s knowledge of
Freud at this point is uncertain (if not outright unlikely), but in his approach
to melodrama he anticipated Freud’s sense of the contending powers of
sexuality and repression.
In The Greatest Question Griffith confronted (some claim exploited) the
renewed interest in the great American metaphysical movement of
Spiritualism, which was having a resurgence after World War I due to the
desire to communicate with the war dead. Although Griffith continues to
pose the possibility of communication with the dead as a question, I do not
believe his tendency towards a positive answer indicates only an
opportunistic interest in capitalizing on current fashions (although Griffith
was undoubtedly doing that as well).Although more elaborate than previous
examples, the Spiritualist sequences in The Greatest Question rework
devices that play central roles in Griffith’s narrative style and editing
technique from the beginning.The relation in early psychoanalysis between
GRIFFITH