Thursday, April 3, 2008

The Massacre (1914)

The Massacre (1914) - The Biograph title screen dates this film as 1912 - which is the year given on the package’s box. I have no idea whether these title screens are originals for the films, however. The Internet Movie Data Base lists The Massacre as 1914, following The Battle at Elderbush Gulch of 1913, and immediately preceding Griffith’s first full-length feature, Judith of Bethulia (1914). I have no way of knowing exactly which dating is correct, but I am inclined to believe the IMBD chronology. The Massacre, clocking in at half an hour (Judith would be a full hour’s length) seems to me to be Griffith’s largest, most ambitious project to date, and one can sense him straining at the bit to put bigger, more grandiose and complex stories up on the screen.

Of course there are the obvious parallels to Elderbush Gulch - both are two-reel films depicting skirmishes between white pioneers and Native Americans. Somehow, though, The Massacre feels quite a bit more accomplished than Elderbush Gulch, especially in the staging of the (relatively) enormous battle sequences that take up the bulk of the film.

It is difficult to say, actually, which film is the most ideologically - not to mention dramatically - interesting. Elderbush Gulch has the more original and compelling story, featuring the novelty of the plot line, and more time spent on developing character. That’s on the "White" side, anyway - the "Indian" side is depicted as ridiculously savage and brutal - the ritual "dog feast" seems intentionally designed to make the Indians seem freakish, as well as savage.

The Massacre, on the other hand, hands us a real moral ambiguity, if not an out-an-out statement of a more realistic morality. There are actually two "massacres" in the film. The first one is carried out by the U.S. army against a seemingly peaceful, sleeping Indian village. There is no attempt to give any background to this struggle, and no indictments of the Indians are thrown to the audience. They are simply attacked and killed, apparently for no good reason.

If Griffith does not make a case against the natives, I cannot say that he quite definitively makes a case against the American army, and the policy of genocide that he apparently quite understood.

He does do one thing that is quite special here - and I think that it is very telling. This may be as subtle as Griffith ever gets, but there is definitely a comparison/contrast used between two families - one white and one Indian. In earlier scenes, Griffith takes great care to highlight the love of the young couple going west (Charles West and Blanche Sweet), with special emphasis on their child. The long, loving close ups of this child are striking, as they are quite unusual for Griffith at this point. We are meant to be made very aware of the specialness, and the uniqueness of this babe, and consequently, to enter into a protective state of mind for him for the rest of the film.

Later, as the unwary Indians rest in their teepees, oblivious to the danger that surrounds them, Griffith gives us an interior shot of a young Indian woman with a lovely papoose on her back. Her husband, the Indian brave, enters the teepee and tenderly places his hand upon them both. There is nothing elaborately done in the way of drawing a parallel between the two families, but it is undeniably, and intentionally there.

Later, in the aftermath of the cavalry’s savage attack upon the village, Griffith shows us some remaining bodies in a stark composition. In the foreground lies the young woman, face down, her dead baby on her back.

This is a very shocking and moving image, and I find it remarkably unquestionable that Griffith should be arguing a kind of moral equivalency here, as early as 1914, well before the American cinematic myth of Indians as savages had been codified. But it had been codified in American literature and popular imagination - and Griffith certainly wished to draw a transcendent human perspective to the situation. That he did not take this theme any further is probably due to his not wishing the film to become a polemic, and wishing to get back to his own "settlers in peril" second half of the film, for which he would have been well aware that it was here that his audience’s concerns and sympathies would ultimately reside.

There is no mistaking, however, the especial effort on the director’s part to be morally even handed, even if his purpose is not explicitly condemning the acts of the U.S. government. In Griffith’s sensibility, all of this fighting is equally tragic - equally pathetic. (He will return to this concept with great moral force in The Birth of a Nation, where this Southern director will treat both Union and Confederate forces with an equality of respect - unfortunately, to call that film’s racial content problematic would be a massive understatement.)

As the family joins a wagon train under the supervision and protection of the army, they come in direct collision with the Indian chief’s plan for revenge. As the film reaches its climactic moment, Sweet sits, huddling over her precious babe in the center of a dwindling circle of dying soldiers and settlers, as the Indians rampage relentlessly until the group’s utter destruction.

When her husband, West, arrives with reinforcements, we see nothing remaining but a pile of bodies - an image that we post-Holocaust Westerners automatically associate with the outrages of the Nazi death camps. It is one of the most unnerving images yet put on the screen - but is it any more horrible than the dead Indian woman and her baby shown earlier? Griffith’s great theme, as he continues to expand it, is man’s inhumanity to man. And if he had kept his eye squarely on this vision, we would not have the problems that we do with him today.

However, The Massacre cannot have a purely tragic ending, and it is discovered that the man’s wife and child are alive underneath his rival’s (Wilfred Lucas) dead body - another depiction of selfless sacrifice. Still, as relieved as we are for the survival of Sweet and the beautiful little child, we cannot call this a "happy ending."

There has been too much devastation, too much destruction. And perhaps, most importantly, the survival of the white family does not remove the horror of the deaths of the Indian family. By playing to his audience, Griffith totters very close to the very racism that he was so blatantly trying to avoid.

But this is D.W. Griffith - and once again, D.W. Griffith is a very naive man. His vision and his character are impeccably admirable, and his humanist (and artist’s) sensibility) puts him in great intuitive touch with moral ambiguities that does transcend his vision far above the ordinary. But he does not seem capable of seeing the ironies of his art all the way through - he cannot seem to follow them completely to their logical conclusion.

On a technical and purely emotion level, the film is absolutely brilliant. High shots from hillsides of massive waves of swarming warriors on horseback both astound the audience and allow it to follow the direction and consequences of the action. By this point, I am quite certain that no one else in the world could have coordinated and captured such amazing, complex and terrifying action with such precision, realism and astounding rhythm. After more than 400 films, D.W. Griffith has reached an incomparable mastership of controlling this new medium, especially on a large scale. Try to imagine any director attempting such a similar feat at the time - or any director after him without having him for a model, and it is simply inconceivable.

Likewise, his careful treatment of individuals and small details are just as astonishingly beautiful and surprising. The Massacre features not only great performances from its primary characters, but develops several interesting minor characters that seem to inhabit their lives fully - gamblers, preachers, children, buckaroos with small, touching gestures. Some of these characters come into conflict, only to be drawn together by their common threat - and their common humanity. Heroes suddenly emerge who were scoundrels a few scenes before. Griffith is very sensitive to the human milieu, the entire panoply of different eccentricities that go into making mankind both unique and yet, ultimately, irreducibly equal.

There is no question that there is by this point a new major art form at work, and a great artist controlling and directing it. One last observation will make my point. A fat gambler sits in front of his wagon that is painted with a single Ace of Spades - suckering in other travelers wearily and desperately looking for fun and perhaps fortune under the desert skies. Later, at the last stand, this same man embraces the preacher who was earlier upbraiding him as he fires his gun in frantic defense of the group. When he is shot dead, the deck of cards he still holds begins tumbling out of his hand - leaving him clutching only the same Ace of Spades - the death card - as he expires.

Only cinema can provide poetic moments like this - images that go beyond words and beyond the explanation of their power.

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