The Bible on Silent Film : Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema 9781107504004, 9781107042605

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THE BIBLE ON SILENT FILM

Between the advent of motion pictures in the 1890s and the close of the ‘silent’ era at the end of the 1920s, many of the longest, most expensive and most watched films on both sides of the Atlantic drew upon biblical traditions. David J. Shepherd traces the evolution of the biblical film through the silent era, asking why the Bible attracted early filmmakers, how biblical films were indebted to other interpretive traditions, and how these films were received. Drawing upon rarely seen archival footage and early landmark films of directors such as Louis Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Michael Curtiz and Cecil B. DeMille, this history treats well-known biblical stars including Joseph, Moses, David and Jesus, along with lesser-known biblical subjects such as Jael, Judith and Jephthah’s daughter. This book will be of great interest to students of biblical studies, Jewish studies and film studies. david j. shepherd is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester. He is the editor of Images of the Word: Hollywood’s Bible and Beyond (2008).

THE BIBLE ON SILENT FILM Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema

DAVID J. SHEPHERD

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107042605 © David J. Shepherd, 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Shepherd, David J., 1972– The Bible on silent film : spectacle, story and scripture in the early cinema / David J. Shepherd. pages cm isbn 978-1-107-04260-5 (hardback) 1. Bible films – History and criticism. 2. Silent films – Religious aspects. 3. Bible – In motion pictures. I. Title. pn1995.9.b53s54 2013 791.430 682–dc23 2013013360 isbn 978-1-107-04260-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page vi x xii 1

Introduction 1

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

11

2

‘See this great sight’: spectacle and miracle

35

3

‘That my wonders may be multiplied’: Blackton and elaboration

61

4

‘How are the mighty fallen’: Feuillade and tragedy

95

5

‘All the country wept aloud’: Andréani and melodrama

123

6

‘The top of it reached to heaven’: Griffith, analogy and scale

157

7

‘She came close to his bed’: vamps and other leading ladies

197

8

‘But Pharaoh hardened his heart’: Exodus and Egypt

227

9

‘The end of these wonders?’: the triumph of spectacle

259 291 295 300 311 313

Afterword Filmography Bibliography Scripture index General index

v

Figures

1.1 Findung Mosis (Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, 1851). 1.2 Sketch of ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’ tableau from the Höritz Passion play. Zdeněk Štábla, Queries Concerning the Hořice Passion Film (Prague: Film Institute, 1971), illustrations. 2.1 The burning bush. La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905). Courtesy of the BFI. 2.2 The Burning Bush (Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, 1851). 2.3 The glorification of Moses. La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905). Courtesy of the BFI. 2.4 Moses Coming Down from Mount Sinai (Gustave Doré, 1866). 3.1 A synoptic comparison of the biblical narrative, La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905) and The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10). 3.2 Pharaoh’s daughter and her maids plead for Pharaoh to spare the Hebrew infants. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 3.3 Miriam aids a woman as her child is taken by an Egyptian. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 3.4 Jocheved’s anguished prayer. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

vi

page 26 27 48 49 58 60 74

77 78 81

List of figures 3.5 Miriam (frame left) observes as Pharaoh’s daughter and her maidservants delight in the discovery of Moses. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 3.6 Shot length, reel 1, The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10). 4.1 Stacia Napierkowska’s ‘Dancer’ delights the King in Le Festin de Balthazar (Gaumont, 1910). 4.2 Circle vignette of Delilah’s greed in Les Sept pêchés capitaux: L’Avarice (Gaumont, 1910). Courtesy of the BFI. 4.3 The death of Pharaoh’s firstborn. L’Exode (Gaumont, 1910). Courtesy of the BFI. 4.4 The tragedy of Egypt; Pharaoh accuses Moses, who looks to the heavens with the dead firstborn of Egypt in the foreground. L’Exode (Gaumont, 1910). Courtesy of the BFI. 4.5 The Death of the Firstborn (Alma-Tadema, 1872). 5.1 Jocheved, Aaron and Miriam comfort Amram, who despairs at the threat to the infant Moses (frame left). Moïse sauvé des eaux (Pathé, 1911). Courtesy of the BFI. 5.2 The family looks on in horror as the Egyptian soldier prepares to strike. Moïse sauvé des eaux (Pathé, 1911). Courtesy of the BFI. 5.3 Cain addresses the viewer, gesturing in his anger toward Abel. Caïn et Abel (Pathé, 1911). Courtesy of the BFI. 5.4 Hammer in one hand, peg in the other, Jael prepares to kill the sleeping Sisera. Jaël et Sisera (Pathé, 1911). Courtesy of the BFI. 5.5 On location in Egypt, a courtier bows before the palanquin of the veiled Queen of Sheba; in the foreground, musicians supply some local flavour. La Reine de Saba (Pathé, 1913). Courtesy of the BFI. 5.6 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba become intimate. La Reine de Saba (Pathé, 1913). Courtesy of the BFI. 6.1 Jesus on the Way of the Cross, threatened by a member of the Jewish mob. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916).

vii

83 86 102 107 114

115 120 129 131 138 142

145 148 175

viii

List of figures

6.2 Belshazzar’s Great Hall. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916). Courtesy of Stephen Ness. 6.3 Belshazzar’s chariot atop the walls of Babylon; below, the image of Ishtar approaches the city gate. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916). 6.4 Belshazzar in the arms of his Princess Beloved, oblivious to the orgiastic dancing of the women visible through the doorway. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916). 7.1 Theda Bara, the consummate vamp, in the title role of Salomé (Fox, 1918) (Wikimedia commons). 7.2 Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba (Fox, 1921). 7.3 Making the most of ‘Egyptomania’. Publicity poster for The Shepherd King (Fox, 1923). 7.4 Lot’s wife Sarah revels in her powers of seduction. Sodom und Gomorrha (Sascha-Film, 1922). 7.5 The angel heralds the explosive destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom und Gomorrha (SaschaFilm, 1922). 8.1 Detail of Israel in Egypt (Poynter, 1867). 8.2 The spectacle of the Word on Sinai. The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1923). 8.3 Miriam on display. The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1923). 8.4 The Egyptians swallowed by the return of the Red Sea. Die Sklavenkönigin/The Moon of Israel (SaschaFilm, 1924). 8.5 Seti and Merapi. Die Sklavenkönigin/The Moon of Israel (Sascha-Film, 1924). 9.1 Cataclysm at the crucifixion. The King of Kings (Pathé Exchange, 1927). 9.2 Christ appears after his resurrection. The King of Kings (Pathé Exchange, 1927). 9.3 Japheth as a well-muscled Samson. Noah’s Ark (Warner Brothers, 1928).

178 179 182 201 204 210 220 222 230 233 235 253 255 270 273 281

List of figures 9.4 A miniature Noah receives divine instructions both illuminated and alight while the bush smoulders in the foreground to the left of the frame. Noah’s Ark (Warner Brothers, 1928). 9.5 The inundation of Akkad. Noah’s Ark (Warner Brothers, 1928).

ix

282 284

Acknowledgements

That the research for this book has occupied me in fits and starts for the better part of a decade explains in part why the debts of gratitude I owe are so numerous and sizeable. Thanks are due first to my colleagues in the department of Theology and Religious Studies for their friendship and encouragement over these past two years and to the Faculty and the University here in Chester for its willingness to invest in primary research in the humanities. Without the funding which I received from the University to visit various archives, this book could not have been written. For their expert guidance and genuine interest in my project I wish to thank Charles Silver and others at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Josie Walters-Johnston and the rest of the staff at the Motion Picture Reading Room at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Equally indispensable has been the patient assistance of Laurent Bismuth, Daniel Brémaud and Elodie Gilbert during my time at the Archives françaises du film at Bois D’Arcy and the expertise and the professionalism of Laure Marchaut, Monique Faulhaber and the staff of the iconothèque and archives at the Cinémathèque Française in Bercy. I also wish to express my gratitude to Agnès Bertola for allowing me online access to various digitised films in the collection of the Gaumont Pathé Archives. Closer to home, and indeed at some points virtually a home away from home, the British Film Institute at Stephen Street and latterly the Southbank Centre have made the sometimes onerous task of archival research a pleasure. In particular I wish to thank Kathleen Dixon and Steve Tollervey for ensuring a steady supply of precisely the films I needed and for bearing with my technical ineptitude. Most of all at the BFI, I wish to acknowledge the tireless and often very tangible support I received from the most excellent Bryony Dixon, whose willingness to go the extra mile in promoting the BFI’s wonderful collection of silent film is an inspiration. Also inspiring and worthy of note here was the flurry of emails I received from various members of GRAFICS in response to a query I had the temerity to send x

Acknowledgements

xi

in the direction of André Gaudreault. I trust that some of them will find something of interest in the fruit of my labours. My thanks to Laura Morris and Anna Lowe at Cambridge University Press for enduring my endless dithering and swithering and especially to Noel Robson and my colleague here at the University of Chester, Andy Davies, for making the illustrations much better than they might otherwise have been. The best of the images which appear here do so thanks to the generosity of Stephen Ness, whose enthusiasm for the subject was a pleasant surprise. Finally, I wish to register my appreciation to my wife Hilda and my lovely daughters, Anna, Sophie and Sarah for their patience as I packed my bags and set off in search of silent treasures. Earlier drafts of some of the material appearing in this book were presented as papers and/or published as essays. Elements of chapter 2 and 3 were presented in the Scripture and Film section of the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio and later published as ‘Prolonging “The Life of Moses”: from spectacle to story in the Early Cinema’, in D. Shepherd (ed.), Images of the Word: Hollywood’s Bible and Beyond (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), pp. 11–38. Sections of chapters 4 and 5 were presented (under the title of ‘Children at Risk: Exodus and Anxiety in the Early French Cinema’) in the Scripture and Film section of the 2011 meeting in San Francisco. A portion of chapter 8 was read at the Transformations of Antiquity Symposium, Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 March 2011 and later published as ‘“An Orgy Sunday School Children Can Watch”: The Spectacle of Sex and the Seduction of Spectacle in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923)’, in Maria Wyke and Pantelis Michelakis (eds.), The Ancient World in the Silent Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 262–74

Abbreviations

AMPAS AFF ASV BFI BFR Bio BYU CF C-J DMA ESM ESR FI FJS FRB FRL GPA ITG LOC MOMA MPW NJDH NRSV NYC NYDM NYH Var VB

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archives Françaises du Film American Standard Version British Film Institute Cinemateca Brasileira National Film Archive (Rio de Janeiro) The Bioscope Brigham Young University Cinémathèque Française Ciné-Journal DeMille Archives Filmoteca Española (Madrid) George Eastman House Film Index Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé (www.fondationjeromeseydoux-pathe.com/) AFF (Bois D’Arcy) Lobster Films Gaumont Pathé Archives Cineteca Friuli (Gemona) Library of Congress Museum of Modern Art (New York) Moving Picture World New Jersey Digital Highway (www.njdigitalhighway.org/) New Revised Standard Version New York Clipper New York Dramatic Mirror New York Herald Variety Vitagraph Bulletin xii

Introduction

As she continued praying before the LORD, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying silently; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought she was drunk. So Eli said to her, ‘How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.’ But Hannah answered, ‘No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD.’

1 Samuel 1:12–15 NRSV

In the first chapter of the first book of Samuel, the aging priest Eli observes the woman Hannah at prayer from his seat by the doorpost of the old temple at Shiloh. Seeing that Hannah speaks but makes no sound, Eli deduces that something is wrong – there is evidently something amiss, something irregular and problematic in speaking which is silent. That the problem which prompts Hannah’s silent speech is not her drunkenness as he assumes, but rather a deep distress is discovered by the priest only after he has drawn his erroneous conclusion. In doing so, Eli unwittingly highlights a further and more telling complication: the silence requires interpretation. The particular silence which this book claims to interpret relates to the representation of the Bible in the first three decades of the cinema. While we will see that the earliest biblical films were rarely truly silent, the complications of a medium in which ‘only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard’ should not be underestimated. Such complications may be to blame, at least in part, for the silence of previous scholarship on the history of the early biblical film – a silence which has been the primary prompt for the present book.1

1

According to the basic distinction drawn first by A. Bach, ‘Cracking the Production Code: Watching Biblical Scholars Read Films’, Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 7 (1999), 11–34, and affirmed recently in A. Reinhartz (ed.), Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films (London and New York: Routledge,

1

2

The Bible on Silent Film

It would be misleading of course to suggest that the scholarly silence on our subject has been complete.2 However, while an early essay by Ronald Holloway explored the early silent cinema’s fascination with the ancient narratives associated with Jesus, his invitation to attend to the Jesus films of the silent period has by and large not been taken up by students of religion.3 In considering the cause of this undoubtedly benign neglect, one might point to the challenges of accessing silent films held in national and institutional archives (about which more below), but it is also clear that the allure and hegemony of Hollywood’s ‘Bible’ and the sound era have proven difficult to resist.4 With biblical and religious studies only attending in passing to the ‘Jesus’ of the silent period, the pioneering work has largely been left to scholars of the early cinema, not least those who contributed to the seminal collection in the early 1990s: Une invention du diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion.5 In offering a series of meticulously researched perspectives on the earliest silent films of the Passion and Life of Christ, this volume should have paved the way for a systematic account of the cinematic representation of gospel traditions up to the end of the silent era. Two decades on, however, a full account of the silent ‘Jesus’ tradition has yet to be undertaken and the same may be said of the wider story of the silent biblical film, even if, as we will see, initial soundings have been taken.

2

3

4

5

2013), our interest is in the ‘Bible on film’ (i.e. films self-conciously depicting biblical narratives) rather than the ‘Bible in film’ (i.e. films disclosing biblical influence in the shape of references, motifs and themes). C. B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) is discussed by Richard Stern, Clayton Jefford and Guerric Debona, Savior on the Silver Screen (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1999), pp. 29–60, and Barnes Tatum, Jesus at the Movies: a Guide to the First Hundred Years (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2004), pp. 47–60, the latter of whom also offers a brief analysis of the Judaean story in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), pp. 35–46, and Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross (1912), pp. 27–34. Overviews which stop short of extensive analysis of the earliest films are offered by Roy Kinnard and Tim Davis, Divine Images: A History of Jesus on the Screen (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), Reinhold Zwick, Evangelienrezeption im Jesusfilm: Ein Beitrag zur intermedialen Wirkungsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments, Studien zur Theologie und Praxis der Seelsorge 25 (Würzburg: Seelsorge/Echter, 1997), and Pamela Grace, The Religious Film: Christianity and the Hagiopic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 16–20. Ronald Holloway, Beyond the Image: Approaches to the Religious Dimension in the Cinema (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1977), pp. 45–59, offers a readable overview, though detailed analysis of the films themselves is beyond its purview. While the focus of Adele Reinhartz, Jesus of Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) is largely on later films, she includes Der Galiläer (1921), INRI (1923) and Intolerance (1916) in her discussion at various points. See also Caroline van der Stichele, ‘Silent Saviours: Representations of Jesus’ Passion in Early Cinema’, in Maria Wyke and Pantelis Michelakis, The Ancient World in the Silent Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 169–88. Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning (eds.), Une invention du diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion/An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema (Lausanne/Quebec: Payot; Lausanne: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992). For still earlier discussion see the essays in Michel Estève (ed.), Études cinématographiques 2 (1961), nos. 10–11.

Introduction

3

Facilitated by the important if inevitably limited cataloguing of Campbell and Pitts,6 discussion of the genre of the biblical film features in various studies which emerged in the 1980s and ’90s. While illustrated surveys of the ancient world in the cinema understandably reference and catalogue the biblical film, their comprehensiveness necessarily precludes any sustained analysis of particular biblical films – including those of the silent era.7 Specific reflection on the genre of the biblical film was stimulated in the early nineties, first by Gerald Forshey, who offers a wide-ranging interrogation of the cultural, social and historical resonances of American biblical and religious spectaculars – though, again, only of the sound era.8 Bruce Babington and Peter Evans’ clearer focus on the ‘biblical epic’ and theorising of spectacle represents a significant advance.9 Yet, again, their treatment of the silent era is extremely selective and does not, in any case, extend earlier than Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914), a limitation which in turn prevents a contextualisation of the emergence and development of the biblical epic whose primarily later history they attempt to chronicle. Happily, various biblical films from the silent period have attracted the attention of those whose interests are only partially or tangentially related to the ‘biblical’ film per se. Richard Abel’s exploration of modes of representation in the French cinema up to 1914 helpfully situates various ‘biblical’ films within the wider context of the development of a national cinema.10 Given the importance of French companies such as Gaumont and PathéFrères in the early history of the biblical film, Abel’s contribution should not be underestimated, yet a purely national focus prevents his history from describing the evolution of a genre shaped also by the early cinema of America. Moreover, the magisterial scope of Abel’s work and the sheer 6 7

8 9 10

Richard H. Cambell and M. R. Pitts, The Bible on Film: A Checklist (1897–1980) (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1981). Both Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge, Keegan and Paul, 1984), and Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema (Yale University Press, 2001) mention in passing a variety of silent films in their respective surveys of films based on the Old and New Testaments. Only DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923), p. 30, and Curtiz’ Noah’s Ark (1928–9), pp. 27–8, are discussed in any depth by Elley, while Solomon restricts fuller treatment to the latter film along with DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) and the various silent versions of Ben Hur. For the most comprehensive cataloguing of the ancient world in the silent cinema see Hervé Dumont, L’Antiquité au cinéma: Vérités, légendes et manipulations (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2009), and for the most recent analysis see Maria Wyke and Pantelis Michelakis (eds.), The Ancient World in the Silent Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Gerald Forshey, American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars (Westport: Praeger, 1992). Bruce Babington and Peter Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (Manchester University Press, 1993). Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

4

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volume of genres he explores do not permit him to linger on even the French ‘biblical film’ at any length or to trace the development of it in its own right. Mention must be made here of the excellent work of Uricchio and Pearson on the ‘Quality’ films produced by Vitagraph, which includes an illuminating study of Blackton’s Life of Moses (1909–10).11 Their consideration of the conditions of production and reception of The Life of Moses alongside other ‘Quality’ films based on historical and literary subjects allows Uricchio and Pearson to draw important conclusions – not least about the way in which Vitagraph deployed such films in an attempt to legitimate their films and the American cinema in general as a respectable medium. As valuable as Uricchio and Pearson’s study is, their more general focus on Vitagraph does not permit a detailed interpretation of the The Life of Moses itself nor an appreciation of how it relates to even the other biblical films produced by Vitagraph, let alone those of other firms during the same period. Given Cecil B. DeMille’s legacy in the genre of the biblical epic, it is unsurprising that his biblical offerings in the silent era have also attracted analysis from various quarters, whether as part of a study of DeMille’s oeuvre12 or in the case of The Ten Commandments (1923) as part of the story of Moses’ reception in the literature and art of Western culture.13 Such treatments well illustrate (and indeed serve to interrogate) the blurred boundaries and important contiguities of cultural reception through time and across various media. However, insofar as such studies seek to interpret particular expressions of the ‘Silent Bible’, an under-developed understanding of cinematic precursors and the biblical genre during the silent era (especially in its earliest phases) inevitably leaves such analyses wanting. It is into this scholarly silence, no less deafening for being partial, that this book attempts to speak, in chronicling the inception and evolution of the biblical film before the final advent of sound in the cinema. An explanation of how this history will be told begins with reflection on Babington and Evans’ theorising of Hollywood’s ‘biblical epic’ of the ’50s as indissolubly and fatally associated with notions of ‘spectacle’.14 On the basis 11 12 13

14

William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton University Press, 1993). See, for instance, Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Brian Britt, Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text (London: T&T Clark International/ Continuum, 2004) discusses The Life of Moses (1909–10) and The Ten Commandments (1923) in passing and Die Sklavenkönigin/Moon over Israel (1924) at slightly greater length. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 64.

Introduction

5

of both the films themselves and the discourse surrounding them, Babington and Evans suggest that spectacle is disseminated in the genre of the biblical epic by various means, including the spectacle of: scale (e.g. size of cast, scenic architecture, running length), opulence (the visual splendour of costumes, fabrics etc. and gifts/offerings etc.), indulgence (as manifest in the ‘feast/orgy’ with its display of the physical appetites, culinary and sexual), the cult (worship both orthodox and heterodox, especially of foreign gods), destruction (especially massive scenic collapse) and the miraculous (e.g. acts of God such as the parting of the Red Sea).15 While the spectacle of the biblical epic reaches its zenith in the middle of the twentieth century, Babington and Evans are quick to acknowledge its origins at the dawn of the cinema: Like other genres, the Biblical Epic has a complex prehistory, both precinematic and cinematic. In treating nothing earlier than D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914) we bypass the importance of religious subjects in the primitive cinema. But our emphasis is on the mature narratives of the Hollywood cinema, rather than progress toward them.16

While Babington and Evans’ passing-over of the pre-history of the ‘biblical epic’ itself offers an obvious inducement to consider the significance of spectacle in the biblical films of the silent period, it is by no means the only incentive. Additional encouragement is furnished by a growing recognition of the importance of ‘spectacle’ in scholarship on the early cinema more generally. Since it was proposed more than two decades ago, Gunning and Gaudreault’s now classic conceptualisation of the early cinema as a ‘cinema of attractions’ – in which the tendency to show or display the spectacular is pervasive – remains integral to the analysis of the earliest cinema.17 Unsurprisingly, subsequent analysis has complicated the assumption of a simple and linear evolution from the ‘showing’ of spectacle in the earliest cinema to the ‘telling’ of story in an increasingly narrative cinema of the later silent period. Thus, on one hand, Charles Musser has identified narratival aspects of the cinema of attractions created by the intertextuality of early film 15 17

This inventory depends on, but also revises, that offered in ibid., pp. 64–5. 16 Ibid., p. 4. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62, and André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, ‘Le Cinéma des premiers temps: Un défi a l’histoire du cinéma’, in Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault and Michel Marie (eds.), Histoire de cinéma. Nouvelles approches (Paris: Sorbonne, 1989), pp. 49–63. For reprints (and translations) of these and other seminal articles and a re-evaluation of the concepts associated with the ‘cinema of attraction(s)’ see Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (University of Amsterdam, 2007).

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The Bible on Silent Film

programmes.18 On the other, Richard Abel’s analysis of French cinema (1896– 1914) demonstrates the recurrence of various aspects of the ‘cinema of attractions’ in particular film genres being produced in France long after 1904. Indeed, Gunning’s own suggestion that the ‘cinema of attractions’ (with its attendant ‘spectacle’) continues to resurface in particular genres, despite the long-established hegemony of narrative cinema, continues to be explored.19 If, as Abel has suggested, biblical films of the earliest cinema were strongly associated with a cinema of ‘spectacle’20 and the biblical epic of the 1950s displays an equally noteworthy dependence on various species of ‘spectacle’ some half a century later, various questions may be seen to arise, including: what is the relationship between the biblical film and notions of spectacle during the silent cinema and how did this relationship change and evolve throughout the period? How, if at all, do particular species of spectacle wax and wane within particular phases of the Bible’s realisation in the silent era of the cinema? Without assuming a linear and uncomplicated progression from spectacle to story in the early cinema, what is the relationship between the ‘showing’ of biblical spectacle and the ‘telling’ of biblical story in the silent cinema? In hermeneutical terms, to the extent that films of the silent cinema tell the biblical story rather than assume it, in what ways (mediated and unmediated) do they interpret the biblical text? Indeed, given the long history of both the Bible’s ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ over two millennia, to what extent do pre-cinematic visual and theatrical interpretations (especially those of the nineteenth century) shape the earliest biblical cinematic ‘spectacles’? More particularly, how do these precursors anticipate and shape the admixture of the visual and the verbal (e.g. intertitles, accompanying oral lecture) in the Bible of the silent cinema? Moreover, how are earlier biblical films reflected, refracted and responded to by later biblical films given the competitive, transnational nature of the silent cinema from its very infancy? Finally, recognising that biblical films were produced alongside a wide variety of genres promoted as such within the industry, to what extent is the interplay of story and spectacle within the 18

19

20

See, for instance, Charles Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity’, Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 1 (1994), 203–32, and ‘A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s’, in Strauven, Reloaded, pp. 159–80. On the dialectical interplay of attractions and narrativity, see also Tom Gunning, ‘Attractions and Narrative Integration’, Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Los Angeles, 23 May 1991. Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, 57. See, for instance, the essays in parts 4 and 5 of Strauven, Reloaded, many of which develop Gunning’s original connection of the cinema of attractions with the avant-garde. Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 82, 156.

Introduction

7

biblical film shaped by generic influences which are in turn reflective of trends in the wider cinema? In attempting to offer answers to such questions, this study must necessarily and primarily have recourse to the filmic texts themselves. Given the dearth of biblical films in some subsequent periods of film history, the sheer volume of production, particularly during the first fifteen years of the cinema, may be pleasantly surprising to some. At last count well over 120 films depicting biblical narratives were produced in Europe and America, between 1897 and 1927/8.21 While this conservative estimate reflects the author’s own communication with various film archives and the combing of catalogues, the FIAF ‘Treasures’ database and other relevant sources, the lamentable lack of precision reflects the absence until now of any systematic cataloguing of ‘biblical films’ in the silent era and the consequent likelihood that more films shall yet come to light. Even a conservative estimate, however, is sufficient to demonstrate the difficulty of undertaking an exhaustive survey of the field. While the reader is directed to Hervé Dumont’s work22 or an eventual webbased resource for the fullest current list of films relating to the Bible, the intention in the present work has been to include a sufficient number and range of biblical films to allow a fully fledged account of the evolution of the genre in the silent era to be offered. Because the development of the biblical film was, from its inception, no less international than the evolution of the cinema itself, this book necessarily draws upon films produced by a wide range of national cinemas. While we endeavour to consider the contributions of the national cinemas of Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary at their points of greatest influence on the development of the biblical film, the primacy of films produced in France and America in what follows reflects the importance of their respective national cinemas in the evolution of the cinema generally and the biblical film in particular. Likewise certain studios, such as Pathé-Frères, feature more prominently than some others in our study, as do certain directors. Indeed, with some exceptions, this study focuses on directors whose interest and situation allowed them to make more than one biblical film. This is so, for the simple reason that in most cases, it was these directors’ films which most fully exemplify and illustrate the evolution of the genre which they most helped to shape. Of these directors’ films only Griffith’s and DeMille’s are widely accessible thanks to commercial distribution. As a result, the viewing of films for 21 22

Such conservative estimates are supported by the initial cataloguing found in Campbell and Pitts, The Bible on Film and subsequent surveys by the author. Dumont, L’Antiquité.

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The Bible on Silent Film

this study was facilitated by means of prints in major archives including: Museum of Modern Art (New York), Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), British Film Institute (London), Archives Françaises du Film, Cinémathèque Française and the Gaumont Pathé Archives (all in Paris). Because some archival copies reflect early exhibitors’ well-documented practice of editing and otherwise altering prints which came into their possession, multiple copies of the same film have been viewed whenever this has been possible. Sadly, as is common in films of this period, the beginnings and endings of some of the prints which have been preserved do show evidence of alteration or indeed excision – a fact which will be noted in the discussion where relevant. The fact that many of the films which feature in this book are not often or easily viewed and have never been the subject of critical scrutiny will hopefully justify the decision to provide fuller descriptions of some films than might otherwise be expected. For the same reason, we have endeavoured to furnish our description and analysis with appropriate illustrations, most of which have been drawn from the films themselves, rather than harvested from the collections of production stills which are more widely available for the later films. In addition to the films, which form the primary object of our scrutiny, this study draws upon copyright deposit descriptions, studio production catalogues as well as advertisements, reviews and other references to biblical films and the practice of their exhibition found in the trade and popular press on both sides of the Atlantic. Such documentation as is provided here does not pretend to offer a full account of the conditions of production and reception of the biblical film, which in any case remains well beyond the purview of the present study. What such documentation does do, however, is shed some light on the interplay of story and spectacle in the biblical film, as it was perceived and projected both within and beyond the film industry. Indeed, for those biblical films thought to be lost and unlikely ever to be found, it is only thanks to such documentation that our study can account for them at all. Given this study’s primary focus on the films and indeed on those films produced by mainstream commercial producers, it may be read profitably alongside Terrence Lindvall’s excellent work on the Church’s relationship to and engagement with the cinema in the silent era (see The Silents of God (2001) and Sanctuary Cinema (2007)). Much like the biblical narrative itself, this history of the biblical film is populated by a great cast of characters drawn from across the Christian canon which stretches from the first Adam to the Last. That the figure of Christ enjoys a ‘starring’ role at various points in our study is hardly surprising, even if what is offered here still falls short of a comprehensive

Introduction

9

account of Christ on silent film. That Moses and the narrative tradition he bestrides should play an equal, if not more prominent, part in our study is perhaps less expected and thus more deserving of explanation. Less trammelled than the Christ film by the constraints of piety and blessed with an abundance of narrative material suited to cinematic adaptation, the Moses/ Exodus tradition proved sufficiently popular to attract filmmakers of very different stripes throughout the silent era, uniquely suiting it to furnish evidence for the evolution of the biblical film throughout this period. In keeping with its subject, this history of the evolution of the biblical film is offered in general chronological order from 1897 through to the advent of sound in the biblical film in 1928. Because the cinema is no more disposed than most other historical subjects to respect the hard and fast periods construed by historians, our history of the biblical film is offered in a series of chapters whose partially overlapping temporal horizons reflect the production history itself. That over the course of these chapters the reader is regularly required to cross the Atlantic is likewise a reflection of the thoroughly international nature of the moving picture industry from its inception. The decision to begin with the biblical film’s birth rather than an account of its gestation or indeed ante-natal development is one taken for particular reasons. It will become clear in what follows that the representation of the Bible on silent film (both generally and in the case of individual films) has much in common with – and in many cases has been directly influenced by – the Bible’s representation in a variety of other artistic traditions. As we will see, such traditions include the visual arts, especially the tradition of Western art which culminates in the neo-classical and orientalising paintings and illustrated bibles of the nineteenth century. Influential also are the ‘magic lantern’ shows whose lectures and projections of such images and photographic views of the ‘Holy Land’ on screens served as one forerunner of the biblical film. Alongside such visual representations of the Bible, the depiction of biblical episodes and characters in the performing arts was also influential. This includes, as we will see, the tradition of biblical tragedy inaugurated by Jean Racine in the French theatre, the musical traditions of oratoria exemplified in the work of composers such as Handel, as well as nineteenth-century articulations of the medieval liturgical dramatic tradition associated with a production such as the one offered at Oberammergau and even adaptations of biblical stories for the modern (i.e. early twentiethcentury) theatre. Novelistic adaptations too will be seen to play their part in shaping the evolution of the biblical film. Yet to devote a chapter to such matters seemed inappropriate on several counts. First, a single chapter would prove entirely unequal to the task of chronicling this phenomenon

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The Bible on Silent Film

in the nineteenth century alone, let alone the several others which would need to be treated. Moreover, we will see that the influence of these traditions on the cinema is extremely variable, with certain artists or traditions influencing particular types of biblical films at particular times. Finally, to preface a history of the biblical film with a chapter devoted to such influences might create the erroneous impression that non-cinematic interpretations were largely eclipsed by the advent of the cinema. As we will see, however, such interpretations continued to be produced alongside the cinema and in the case of modern theatrical adaptations and novelistic treatments, continued to shape in significant ways the cinema’s own rendering of biblical traditions. For this reason, we have preferred to deal with such influences as and when their influence on the relevant biblical films is most manifest as the history of the biblical film is unfolded. This is equally true of the biblical text itself, whose general citation in the King James Version (and where relevant, the French Bible ‘De Sacy’) in this study reflects the continuing popularity of these older versions in the early twentieth century despite the emergence of the KJV’s intended successor, the Revised Version, at the end of the nineteenth century. By way of anticipation, our account of the biblical film is divided into nine chapters, the first of which explores the genesis of the genre in the earliest Passion films which emerged on both sides of the Atlantic prior to the turn of the century. A second charts the emergence of Old Testament characters as cinematic subjects in their own right alongside the more fully orbed Passion films produced by Pathé-Frères. The third chapter follows the cinematic and narrative evolution of the genre in America in the films of its leading early producer Vitagraph and its most prominent director, Stuart Blackton. In the book’s fourth and fifth chapters, we return to France to explore the biblical tragedies of Gaumont’s Louis Feuillade and the domestic melodramas mined from the biblical tradition by Pathé’s Henri Andréani, before we re-cross the Atlantic in the company of the Italian historical films which propelled D. W. Griffith to realise his own particular vision of the biblical film. The seventh chapter is occupied with the development of the biblical femme fatale in the post-war films of Fox and the biblical films which emerged from Austria in the early 1920s. The analysis of the subsequent films of Cecil B. DeMille and Michael Curtiz in the penultimate and final chapters allows for the drawing of various conclusions regarding the history of the genre as a whole and its curious fate at the end of the silent era. In an afterword, we offer some final reflections on the argument of the book and prospects for further research.

chapter 1

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

The Gospel of John’s insistence that ‘in the beginning was the Word’ might easily be applied to the genesis of the cinema, for it was not long after the advent of moving pictures that Christ first appeared on screen.1 While the precise production dates of the earliest Passion films cannot be fixed with absolute certainty, a review of the available evidence suggests that the summer of 1897 was a seminal season. If George Sadoul’s account and tentative dating can be trusted, it was at the beginning of that summer that Albert Kirchner, or Léar as he become known, directed a film in twelve scenes of the Passion of the Christ. Early in the spring of 1897, Frère Bazile, a priest and professor of the Institut Saint-Nicholas of Vaugirard, had involved his students in staging – in the open air of the rue JeanGoujon – a programme of tableaux vivants drawn from the life of Christ. The entrepreneurial Léar – until then a purveyor of projectors and erotic films such as Le Coucher de la mariée (1896) – was inspired by news of Bazile’s success, and collaborated with the latter on a series of less controversial comedies that summer. However, when the idea of committing the Passion of Christ to film was put forward, Bazile’s employers – the directors of Vaugirard – baulked at the notion of entrusting so sacred a subject to so profane a medium as film. Instead, the opportunity was seized by La Bonne Presse, a Catholic organisation devoted to stemming the tide of secularism in France first through the publication of newspapers and then through programmes of magic lantern and film projection. With the newly reformed films of Léar and Bazile already featuring prominently in the Presse’s projection programme, Guillaume Michel Coissac – the director of its visual education department (and later cinema historian) – commissioned Léar to film a Passion of the Christ, which the latter proceeded to do 1

Whether the cinema’s inception dates from the Lumières’ public programme of projections in December 1898 remains a subject of continuing debate and is not crucial for our purposes.

11

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The Bible on Silent Film

in a vacant lot on the rue Félicien-David in Paris.2 The film included the following tableaux:3 1. The Birth of Christ 2. Jesus at the Synagogue 3. Jesus blessing the little children 4. Jesus raises the son of the widow 5. Entering Jerusalem 6. The Last Supper 7. The agony in Gethsemane and betrayal of Judas 8. Jesus before Pilate (the second time) and His condemnation 9. The Way of the Cross 10. The Crucifixion 11. The Descent from the Cross 12. The Resurrection This first effort at representing a biblical narrative in moving pictures is instructive in several respects. First, even on the basis of the admittedly limited details surrounding the film’s genesis, we can observe that the initial impetus and requisite funding for the production were furnished by an organisation, La Bonne Presse, whose primary vested interest in the cinema was ostensibly religious education, rather than economic profit per se. Thus, whereas subsequent exploitation of the subject of the Passion may be explained with reference to commercial demand, the impetus for the Bonne Presse’s production must ostensibly be located in the desire to use moving pictures to excite renewed interest in the Christian tradition’s central religious narrative. The open-air dramatisations of the Passion on the rue de Jean-Goujon and at the Fête des Invalides offered both evidence of the public appetite for the spectacle of enacted scripture and a readymade cast of players. Whether or not these open-air stagings also supplied or influenced the precise selection of scenes featuring in Léar’s film is unclear, but the presumably limited film footage at his disposal suggests that the choice of scenes – far fewer than would be found in subsequent productions – could not have been haphazard.

2

3

Coissac’s low estimation of his own production is quoted by G. Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, II: Les Pionniers du cinéma (de Méliès à Pathé) 1897–1909 (Paris: Les Éditions DeNoël, 1947), p. 306 (author’s translation): ‘[It was] played by a cast of hams who had depicted the same subject in tableaux vivants at the Fête des Invalides . . . indescribable spectacle, ridiculous pantomime’. C. Musser, ‘Les Passions et les mystères de la Passion aux États-Unis (1880–1900)’, in Cosandey et al., Une Invention du diable?, pp.177–8, whose inclusion of a table of scenes included in various Passion films facilitates the comparison undertaken here.

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

13

Indeed, the narrative composition of Léar’s abridgement is instructive: the nativity narrative is represented by a single scene, a tableau of the birth itself, shorn of the subsequent flight to Egypt, etc.; scenes from the life and ministry of Jesus are limited to an appearance at the synagogue and two tableaux which focus on children – a popular subject in the early cinema;4 Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem atop the donkey establishes the location for what follows, while the adulation and adoration of the crowd models a pious response to the messiah-king.5 The visually iconic status of the Last Supper ensures its inclusion, while the scenes of the agony of Christ and betrayal of Judas are conflated, perhaps due to the need for narrative economy. In comparison with subsequent versions, the extent of Léar’s abridgment of the Passion itself is most obvious in his depiction of the trial of Jesus. In moving directly from Judas’ betrayal to Jesus’ second appearance before Pilate, Léar passes over: the arrest of Jesus, his trial before Caiaphas, the denials of Peter, Jesus’ first appearance before Pilate, and then subsequently before Herod – some or all of which are included in later cinematic versions of the (Life and/or) Passion of Christ. Thus in Léar’s abridgement, the gradual unfolding of the trial narrative and the suspense it generates are elided in favour of a single scene with Pilate which facilitates the resumption of the public spectacle of the Passion: the way of the cross, the crucifixion, and the descent from the cross. Unsurprisingly, Léar concludes with the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection and the empty tomb but fails to include a scene of Jesus’ burial. This latter scene was to appear in almost all subsequent Passion films, including one shot later that same summer, nearly a thousand kilometres to the east, in the shadow of the Giant Mountains of Bohemia. Interestingly for our purposes, this Bohemian Passion would also include brief cameo appearances by various figures of the Old Testament – the first in the history of the cinema. Passion plays had featured in German-speaking lands since the thirteenth century with various cycles of the passio becoming associated with different regions. Unlike the Corpus Christi plays – which the Passion plays otherwise resemble – they were not connected to specific liturgical celebrations or seasons but, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, might run at other times of the year for several hours per day over the course of up to seven

4 5

According to H. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), p. 83, Gaumont’s Louis Feuillade told one director: ‘if you want to sell a film, hire a child or a dog’. This detail is visible from the photographic still preserved by the Cinémathèque Française.

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The Bible on Silent Film

days.6 While the Passion plays subsequently dwindled and indeed virtually disappeared in areas most impacted by the Reformation, such as RheinlandHesse, the plays seem to have persisted well into the seventeenth century, and in rare cases beyond, particularly in regions where the Catholic Church was less easily dislodged, including the Tyrol, Schwabia and some parts of Switzerland. It is thus hardly surprising that the best-known survivor of the German-speaking Passion play tradition at the end of the nineteenth century was to be found in Oberammergau, where Schwabia meets the Tyrol. Among the few Passion plays being staged elsewhere at the end of the nineteenth century, one belonged to the Bohemian town of Höritz/Hořice, where it had been revived in the early nineteenth century. Here too, though, there is evidence that the 1816 text adapted by a local linen weaver, Paul Gröllhesl, had its roots in a seventeenth-century text inherited from Cistercians in the region.7 The Höritz play apparently thrived during the 1830s, with a local parish priest, Father Bruno, coaxing performances of ever-increasing earnestness from his amateur peasant performers. By the 1850s, female roles such as Mary and Veronica were being played by women, attempts at historical costuming were being made and in the 1880s a theatre group took over and the production began to tour beyond Höritz. With the extension of the Budweis/Salnau rail line to Höritz in 1891, the German League for the Bohemian Woods saw in the play an opportunity to encourage ethnic German tourism to the area.8 The League agreed to fund both the production costs and the construction of a 2,000-seat theatre on a hill above the town in time for the production in the summer of 1893. Despite some critical reviews, the production opened to general acclaim and quickly gained a reputation and an audience far beyond the locality, drawing both German and foreign tourists in addition to the local gentry. So popular was the revitalised play that it was repeated each summer up until 1896, when the audience included the great and good of Hapsburg society, including no less eminent a guest than the ill-fated Crown Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Also in the audience that summer was the American agent for 6

7 8

For an accessible summary of research on German Passion plays (primarily in German) see M. J. Heintzelman, ‘Passion Plays’, in J. Jeep (ed.), Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 296–9. For a history of the text of the play see J. J. Ammann, Das Passionsspiel des Böhmerwaldes: Neubearbeitet auf Grund der alten Ueberlieferungen (Krumau, 1892). For the history of the play in the context of competing Czech and German nationalist claims to this contested region in the late nineteenth century, see P. Judson, ‘The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire’, in P. Judson and M. Rozenblit (eds.), Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 89–106.

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

15

the Lumière Brothers, W. D. Hurd. Evidently impressed by what he saw, Hurd persuaded the League and the people of Höritz to stage a production of the play to be filmed the following summer, despite a decision that there would be no public performance in 1897.9 On his return to New York, Hurd apparently sold the film rights to the theatre impresarios Klaw and Erlanger, who, the following summer, sent William ‘Doc’ Freeman, Hurd’s successor in Lumière’s New York office, to Höritz to shoot the film.10 Having originally styled itself as the ‘Oberammergau of the Bohemian Woods’,11 the Höritz production’s meteoric rise over the course of successive summers (1893–6) persuaded the Americans that it would be a satisfactory and more easily secured replacement for the better-known Bavarian play, which would not be staged again until 1900. What Höritz had in common with the Oberammergau play was not only the Passion narrative at the heart of all such plays, but also a textual tradition which extended well beyond the Passion proper. Included within these plays’ dramatic structure was not only the birth and life of Christ, but Old Testament scenes of the sort which had featured in various medieval German Passion play traditions, including, for instance, the cycle associated with Luzerne.12 Indeed, much as the Heidelberg medieval cycle intercalates the Passion narrative with various Old Testament-type scenes which prefigure the events of the Passion,13 so too Daisenberger’s Oberammergau text, which had been the standard since 1860 (and remained little changed in 1890), references the Old Testament throughout the drama by means of tableaux or scenes such as: the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve, in which the tree of Paradise which brings guilt prefigures the redemption of the tree of the cross – also represented by a tableau; Joseph’s brothers’ plan to dispense with him, prefiguring the Sanhedrin’s plot to dispose of Jesus; the departure of Tobit and the Bride’s lament of her lost bridegroom from the Song of Songs, both of which anticipate the parting at Bethany; the rejection of Vashti from the book of Esther, exemplifying the destruction of Jerusalem; and the sale of 9

10 11 12

13

Z. Štábla, Queries Concerning the Hořice Passion Film (Prague: Film Institute, 1971), p. 12, draws this conclusion from his observation of the diminished attendance figures when the public production resumed in 1898 and the consequent decision that year to proceed on a quinquennial basis thereafter. ‘Passion Play’, NYH (1 February 1898). Whether Hurd himself or someone else by that name was involved in the actual shooting of the film in 1897 is unclear. (See Štábla, Queries, p. 15). As per the official guide to the 1893 production; see Judson, ‘The Bohemian Oberammergau’, n. 30. See Heintzelman, ‘Passion plays’ and L. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 167. By the nineteenth century, the Oberammergau play had been revised numerous times but only the addition of classical choruses significantly differentiates the Oberammergau play from its German medieval ancestors. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe, p. 66.

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Joseph by his brothers, prefiguring the price paid to Judas for betraying Jesus, etc.14 Unsurprisingly, given the medieval appreciation of its typological significance, Moses and the Exodus tradition also featured amongst the Old Testament tableaux of the 1890 Oberammergau production, with the sacramental bread and wine of the last supper (e.g. Matthew 26) prefigured by the manna from Heaven (Exodus 16) and grapes from Eshcol (Numbers 13),15 the salvation offered by the crucifixion (e.g. John 3) prefigured by Moses’ lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness (Numbers 21)16 and Christ’s passing through death to life (e.g. Matthew 28) being anticipated by the Israelites’ passing through the Red Sea (Exodus 14). The primarily typological value of these and other Old Testament episodes in Daisenberger’s Oberammergau text ensures that their canonical order in the Old Testament narrative is subordinated to the primacy of the Passion narrative itself. Thus, while in the Old Testament narrative the Israelites pass through the sea (Exodus 14) long before Moses raises up the serpent (Numbers 21), the order of these scenes is reversed in the Oberammergau Passion in order to conform to the order of the New Testament scenes they prefigure: first Jesus’ crucifixion and then his resurrection. On the basis of the published texts, it is clear that the place of the Old Testament tableaux within the dramatic structure in Höritz differed significantly from that found at Oberammergau.17 In Höritz, the Old Testament scenes beginning with Creation and the Fall were offered seriatim in the morning along with episodes from the life of Christ – all of which were properly prefatory to the Passion play itself, which was then performed in the afternoon.18 While, as

14

15

16 18

A list of Old Testament tableaux may be extracted from the complete text of the production translated by M. F. Drew, The Passion Play at Oberammergau (London: Burns and Oates, 1881). A catalogue of their typological significance is offered by F. W. Farrar, The Passion Play at Oberammergau 1890 (London: William Heinemann, 1890). For discussion of the Old Testament tableaux from the vantage point of contemporary concerns relating to anti-Semitism see J. Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Random House, 2001). Whereas Oberammergau prefigures the Eucharistic wine with the grapes of Eshcol, this scene from Numbers 13 is typically seen as a type of the crucifixion. The Eucharistic interpretation of the manna is found in the Tirolian Passion Play associated with Lucerne (I 143; see Muir, The Biblical Drama, p. 215), where Moses bringing water from the Rock (Exodus 17) also prefigures the Eucharistic wine. This latter interpretation draws upon the tradition found already in the New Testament (‘They did all drink of the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ’ (1 Corinthians 10:4)) which is in turn reflected in the pictorial tradition in the catacombs of Domitilla in Rome. Cf. also, however, the portrayal of the episode in the Jewish synagogue at Dura Europos. See Muir, The Biblical Drama, p. 79. 17 Štábla, Queries, p. 19. Judson, ‘Bohemian Oberammergau’, p. 97.

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

17

we will see, such a structure does not preclude the typological function of particular Old Testament scenes, the prefatory use of them does allow for a retention of the order and coherence of the Old Testament narrative itself, which was thoroughly subverted in the Oberammergau productions. With the Bohemian play having been performed the previous three summer seasons (1894–6), Höritz was able to offer the American filmmakers the full fruits of their labours: actors, props, costumes and the sets themselves – some of which were built, but most of which consisted of painted canvasses designed under the supervision of the Viennese painter Franz Schallud.19 As at Oberammergau, the Höritz ‘Passion’ play consisted of a combination of dramatic scenes (with scripted dialogue) and tableaux vivants (‘living pictures’) – in which the silent acting was accompanied by the choirmaster’s narration. While the latter tableaux vivants might be shot with little adaptation, the impossibility of recording scripted dialogue required that various dramatic scenes essential to the narrative (including, e.g., the betrayal of Judas) be transformed into ‘tableaux’ for the purposes of the film production.20 Moreover, with the live production of the Passion typically occupying a full day, the American filmmakers were required to be selective, even if they did have 5,000 feet (1,524 m) of film to devote to the subject as was later claimed in the press at the film’s opening.21 Indeed, while the advance press promised that as many as fifty scenes would be shown, reviews from the time suggest that not all the scenes which had been shot (see below) were included among those shown at the premiere at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on 22 November 1873 and in the exhibitions immediately thereafter:22 1. Street in Höritz 2. The Stone Cutters at Work in the Quarries 3. Peasants working in the Fields 4. Peasants dancing at a Wedding23 19 21

22

23

Štábla, Queries, p. 19. 20 Ibid. Philadelphia Record (21 November 1897). While impossible to verify, such a total is fully within the realm of possibility given that the thirty scenes listed in the American Mutoscope and Biograph catalogue supplement (1) for 1903 run to a total of 700 m. In advance of the screening, the Philadelphia Public Ledger (20 November 1897) lists the number of scenes as fifty before revising its estimate the following day to ‘nearly fifty’. The Ledger’s review itself (23 November 1897) suggests a further reduction: ‘Eight pictures showing different scenes in and around Höritz . . . ten scenes from representations by the peasants at their theatre, illustrative of scenes from the Old Testament . . . the remainder of the pictures, 22 in number, were devoted to Christ’s life on earth and final crucifixion.’ For reports, reviews, and advertisements of the film in the Philadelphia press, see K. Niver, Klaw & Erlanger Present Famous Plays in Pictures (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1976). For respective lists of total scenes available at the premiere, shown at the premiere and sold by Edison, see Musser, ‘Les Passions et les mystères’, pp. 163–4. Not mentioned in press reports associated with the premiere.

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5. Women washing clothes24 6. The ‘Passion’ Spielhouse 7. Gröllhesl’s House 8. Jordan Witschke (The Christus) 9. Anna Wurzigur (Mary) 10. The Drop Curtain of the Spielhouse 11. Adam and Eve (Creation) 12. Adam and Eve (Fall and Expulsion)25 13. Cain and Abel 14. The Flood 15. Noah’s Thanksgiving 16. The Sacrificing of Isaac 17. The Stealing of Joseph 18. Joseph in Egypt 19. Moses found in the Bullrushes 20. The Manna in the Wilderness 21. Esther 22. Elias 23. The Angel Appearing to Mary 24. The Visit of the Magi 25. The Flight to Egypt 26. The Holy Family 27. Baptism of Christ 28. Christ blessing two little children 29. Resurrection of Lazarus 30. Entrance into Jerusalem 31. Christ blessing the Bread and Wine26 32. Christ washing the disciples’ feet 33. Judas receiving money 34. Christ on the Mount of Olives 35. Christ before Caiaphas 36. Peter denying Christ 37. Christ before Pilate the first time 38. Christ before Herod 24 25

26

Not mentioned in press reports associated with the premiere. That Adam and Eve appeared in the scene of the Creation is suggested by the review of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (22 March 1898); the list in the Biograph catalogue supplement (1903) suggests that Adam and Eve appeared not only in the ‘Garden of Eden’ (i.e. Creation) (50 ft) but also in a scene of the Fall (‘Adam and Eve after Expulsion’) (60 ft). This seems likely to be identical to ‘The Last Supper’ sold by Edison.

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

19

39. Christ before Pilate the second time 40. Condemnation of Christ 41. The Way of the Cross 42. The Crucifixion 43. The taking down from the Cross 44. The Burial of Christ 45. The Resurrection Given that the Höritz film is likely the first representation of a scriptural subject on the American screen, it is worth reflecting on both the structure of the film and the reception of it, as evidenced by the promotion and review of the film in the local Philadelphia press.27 Most obvious from the structure and scene selection of the film itself is the producers’ concern to position the film first and foremost not as a representation of the Passion itself, but as a representation of the Passion play of Höritz. Thus, unlike other early films of the Passion, in the Höritz film, the biblical scenes of the play are prefaced with a series of introductory pictures (some moving, some still) intended to highlight the dramatic artifice of the filmic narrative to follow: the image of ‘A street in Höritz’ establishes the broad geographical/cultural/temporal frame of reference as a contemporary provincial Bohemian town. So too the following scenes of villagers at work in the quarries and fields and their dancing and washing establish the amateur status of the players and situate the play as a product of local piety rather than theatrical professionalism or primarily the pursuit of profit.28 This discourse of non-professional, naive piety is partially (and presumably unintentionally) undercut by the succeeding image of the specially constructed ‘Passion Spielhouse’, perhaps included to underline the dramatic artifice by supplying a physical and overtly theatrical frame of reference. The otherwise unexpected view of the house of Gröllhesl, the author of the 1816 text, serves to clarify the hermeneutical status of the text to be performed not as ancient gospel, but as quasi-medieval mediation. Finally, the specific picturing and naming of the local actors portraying the Christus and Mary will, on this account, have been intended to highlight the ‘enacted’ nature of the appearance on screen of the two characters most likely to inspire indignation at any perceived irreverence of representation. Thus while the live production of Höritz itself evidently strives for a realism of representation (including approximations – however flawed – of 27 28

See Musser, ‘Les Passions et les mystères’, for a very useful treatment of the Höritz film and its reception which differs in emphasis, however, from the one offered here. A point emphasised in the advance publicity associated with the production (Philadelphia Record, 21 November 1897): ‘[the performances are] elaborately prepared and with such reverent care by the peasants who undertake this work as a fervent religious observance’.

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ancient settings and costumes), the scenes of the film’s ‘prologue’ facilitate the film’s intentionally more modest claim to mediate not the ‘real’ Passion of the Christ in first-century ancient Palestine, but rather a ‘real’ Passion play about the Christ in nineteenth-century Bohemia. That this was indeed the promoter’s intention is confirmed by the promotional ad placed in the Philadelphia Record on 21 November, the day before the film opened. While later films would opt for titles such as ‘The (Life and/or) Passion of (Jesus) Christ’,29 the advertisement placed by Klaw and Erlanger promotes merely: ‘The Passion Play (as given at Höritz)’ and indeed reproduces the live production’s own claim to be ‘The Austrian Ober-Ammergau’ – a qualification which both trades on the association with the better-known Bavarian production and reinforces the foreign origins of the spectacle. That a ‘realist’ discourse is nevertheless being invoked is confirmed by reference to the illustration ‘by moving pictures, accurate and impressive’. Indeed, the play so illustrated is itself further displaced within the advertisement – being situated instead as merely the subject of the ‘lecture by Ernest Lacy’. As we will see, the inclusion of a well-known lecturer such as Lacy served an important narrative function itself within the show, but it is worth noting at this point that it also served to associate – and invite favourable comparison – with earlier lectures on the same subject illustrated by the still pictures of the stereopticon.30 The highlighting of the dramatic artifice of the film, the foregrounding of its foreignness and the characterisation of the moving pictures themselves as mere illustrations of a lecture on the subject of the Passion play all point to the particular sensitivities which surrounded the theatrical representation of the Christ narrative in America at the turn of the century. Having witnessed first-hand the pious outcry which thwarted Salmi Morse’s attempt to stage a theatrical version of the Passion of the Christ in New York less than twenty years before, the makers of the Höritz Passion play film were clearly keen to ensure that all was done to mitigate the risks of their film suffering a similar fate. That such risks were real, but also satisfactorily mitigated by the producers’ representational and promotional strategies, is suggested by the remarks of one reviewer: the series of tableaux [of the Höritz Passion Play] that were given last night at the Academy of music, with accompanying lecture by Professor Ernest Lacy, was equally as impressive, and in some respects more so than an actual presentation by the peasants themselves. There was something so extraordinary, so unearthly, so fascinating in the strange, silent pictures with their 29 30

See, for instance, Zecca’s Vie et Passion de N.S.J.C. (Pathé, 1902–5, 1907). See Musser, ‘Les Passions et les mystères’.

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moving, gesticulating, yet voiceless crowds, that the absence of flesh and blood only made the conception more spiritual and relieved it from the touch of irreverence.31

The characterisation of the spectacle as ‘unearthly’ underlines the perception of the spectacle’s ‘alien’ qualities – not now in relation to its ‘foreign’ origins, but rather with reference to the otherworldly quality of the silent visual spectacle. Given the physically elevated nature of the screen itself, such an invocation of the ethereal invites associations with that other, ‘heavenly’ realm onto which the moving pictures might offer a window. That this cinematic spectacle might be more impressive than the live presentation is attributed to the heavenly quality associated with the mediation of the moving picture – a quality which keeps the audience at one remove from the spectacle – freeing it from the taint of a live actor’s dubious reincarnation of a ‘flesh and blood’ Christ. The conceiving of moving pictures of the Passion in terms of ‘lecture illustration’ is a reminder of the extent to which these ‘silent’ films were experienced as anything but silent. The absence of diegetic sound such as dialogue was compensated for by non-diegetic sound including musical accompaniment of various sorts,32 but also the live narrative commentary framing the interpretation of the accompanying ‘visual illustrations’. The latter suggests the the new medium’s continuity with not only previous forms of such lectures (illustrated with still image projections), but also the practice of Bible illustration, which enjoyed particular prominence in the latter half of the nineteenth century thanks to the efforts of artists such as Doré, Schnoor Von Carolsfeld and Tissot. This continuity in all its complexity is reflected in another review of the time: [Professor Lacy] accompanied the presentation of the illustrations by a running commentary couched in graceful language, and telling fittingly the story which was being pictured. It may in fact, be said, that had the lecture been the only attraction of the evening it would have been enjoyed by thoughtful people, and it certainly helped to a more thorough understanding of the movement in the various tableaux.33

While the language of ‘illustration’ initially suggests the derivative nature of the pictures in relation to an implied text, the immediate characterisation of the lecture as supplying a ‘running commentary’ on the pictures suggests a 31 32 33

Philadelphia Public Ledger (23 November 1897). In the case of the Höritz film, reviews critical of the ‘monotonous’ organ music apparently prompted the provision of vocal soloists. See Niver, Klaw & Erlanger Present, p. 16. Philadelphia Inquirer (23 November 1897).

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rhetorical reversal, with the pictures functioning as a visual text which is thus the object of the professor’s interpretation. Yet, the final qualification of the lecture as ‘telling the story which was being pictured’ finally reverses the polarity again, relegating the recently promoted pictures to the original function of visual accompaniment and reasserting the primacy of the lecturer’s text/story – irrespective of whether the reviewer is referring to the ‘story’ of the ancient Passion itself or (less likely) the ‘story’ of its enactment in nineteenth-century Bohemia. This final reassertion of the primacy of the lecture is rhetorically underlined by the reviewer’s subsequent insistence on the autonomy and sufficiency of the lecture, before finally yet again granting the explanatory function of the lecture in relation to the moving pictures. While it is thus clear that the moving picture ‘illustrations’ were the novelty and the main attraction for audiences, such reviews amply illustrate the complexity of relationship between word and image as Scripture begins to appear for the first time in the new medium of the moving picture show, marketed under the banner of the illustrated lecture. While the list of scenes shown at the premiere confirms that the Höritz film fell well short of a comprehensive coverage of the live production, it also illustrates the extent to which the Höritz film did follow the play’s basic structure, prefacing the Passion of the Christ with additional scenes from the Old and New Testaments. With the fame of the Höritz production having reached American shores, the virtues of such fidelity were not only greater ease of adaptation, but also the avoidance of frustrated expectations among those few who may have been familiar with the live production itself. In relation to the Passion play portion of the drama, the extraordinary volume of footage at the disposal of the producers allowed them to commit a far greater proportion of the Passion scenes to film than Léar had done. For instance, in place of the latter’s solitary scene of the Last Supper, the Höritz film includes depictions of both the blessing of the bread and wine and the washing of the disciples’ feet. Also included in the Höritz film are Peter’s denial of Jesus, the latter’s appearances before Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate (the first time) and the burial of Jesus – all of which appear for the first time on the screen in the Höritz production.34 Even more distinctive (though in this it was seldom followed) was the film’s presentation of the prefatory Old Testament scenes, including those of Adam and Eve, Joseph, 34

Later films increasingly favoured titles reflective of the expansion of narrative focus and abandoned the terminology of the ‘Passion play’ simpliciter in favour of titles such as La Vie et Passion de N.S.J.C. The notable exception was the Eaves-Hollaman Eden Musée production released within months of the Philadelphia premiere of Höritz, which traded on the reputation and name of the Oberammergau play.

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Moses, etc. The film’s preservation of these episodes in their canonical order appears to offer the audience a heavily abridged version of the Old Testament; however, this suggestion is problematised by comparison with the New Testament portion of the film. While the quantity of footage shot by Klaw and Erlanger allows for the effective telling of a reasonably full Passion narrative – with continuity of plot and consistency of characters across scenes – the Old Testament scenes present a rather different picture; in fact, these scenes only ‘tell’ the story in the loosest sense of the word for they focus on discrete characters with no obvious relationship to those which immediately precede or follow. For instance, while the two scenes associated with Moses do follow the biblical sequence, the sheer volume of intervening narrative between the first tableau, ‘Moses found in the Bullrushes’ and the second, ‘The Manna in the Wilderness’ effectively compromises any meaningful continuity of character or plot, with the infant Moses reappearing in the scene which immediately follows as an inexplicably middle-aged adult. Moreover, with the length of the respective Moses scenes totalling only 17 m and 21 m respectively, neither would have run for more than a minute – and potentially less.35 Thus not only was there little opportunity to account for the narrative development between these scenes, there was similarly little footage to account for the minimal narrative development within such limited scenes. Indeed, further evidence for the irrelevance of the Old Testament narrative qua narrative in relation to these scenes is furnished by another review of the opening of the film: Next came the various tableaux of the play itself, beginning with the picturing of well-known events recorded in the Old Testament, each of which is supposed to have foreshadowed or have been emblematic of the life that went out on Calvary.36

Evidently the burden of clarifying the hermeneutical significance of each Old Testament scene in relation to the Passion fell upon the accompanying lecture – hardly surprising given that such narrative explanations were required even at Oberammergau, where each Old Testament scene was followed immediately by the New Testament scene it prefigured. Now unhinged from their New Testament antitypes, and presented as a group 35

36

Based on a standard (hand) cranking rate of sixteen frames per second. The potential impact of overor under-cranking a sacred subject is humorously illustrated by the early projectionist F. H. Richardson in MPW (2 December 1911), 721: ‘In the Passion Play [the projectionist] can make Peter act the part of a jumping jack and he can turn a horse race into a howling farce, by over-speeding and under-speeding . . . Imagine the figure of the Savior carrying the cross at a gallop.’ Philadelphia Inquirer (23 November 1897).

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prior to the Passion play, the Old Testament scenes of the Höritz film clearly required explanation as to their typological significance. Unfortunately, in the absence of the original lecture which accompanied them, we cannot be certain precisely how each scene was interpreted, though medieval precursors may be presumed to point in probable typological directions.37 The innocent death of Abel (Genesis 4) was typically seen to prefigure that of Christ (Matthew 23, 27),38 the Flood and Noah’s salvation from it had facilitated the interpretation of the Ark as a type of the Church by which the righteous are saved;39 Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son, Isaac, was an obvious type of the crucifixion,40 while various aspects of the Joseph narrative had been construed typologically, and Elijah too had been the subject of such interpretations. The first of the two Moses scenes – the ‘The Manna in the Wilderness’ – had given rise to a variety of early Christian interpretations, but it was the understanding of the manna as the eucharistic bread of Christ’s body (John 6; 1 Corinthians 10) which most influenced and exercised the imagination of subsequent Christian interpreters.41 Such typological interpretations inevitably encouraged the inclusion of the episode in the medieval biblical dramatic tradition, from the French Viel Testament to the Castilian Auto del Magna, to the plays associated with Lille and Luzerne and Oberammergau itself.42 In addition to such dramatisations, the pictorial tradition both reflected and in turn shaped the visualisation of the ‘Manna in the Wilderness’ within Western culture. While such depictions may be differentiated by style and historical period, they may also be distinguished by the narrative moment which they choose to depict. In some, such as the Israelites gathering Manna by Ercole de’Roberti (c.1490) and the illustrations of Tissot (nineteenth century), the spectacle of the manna consists exclusively of the act of gathering it. In such paintings, the movement and colour of the Israelites is foregrounded as they collect the manna which has already finished falling from the heavens. In the case of others, however, such as Tintoretto’s famous The Miracle of Manna (1577),43 it is the actual falling of the 37 39 41

42 43

For discussion of Adam and Eve, see above. 38 Muir, The Biblical Drama, p. 70, n. 37. Ibid., p. 73, n. 55. 40 Ibid., p. 76, n. 5. B. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical Theological Commentary (Louisville: WJK Press, 1974), pp. 293–9, offers a brief but useful summary of the history of interpretation of the Old Testament ‘manna’ in subsequent Christian and Jewish traditions. For evidence of the interpretive range of Eucharistic interpretations of John 6 within the early Christian tradition see J. Elowsky and T. C. Oden, John 1–10 (Downers’ Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), pp. 221–38. See also M. Edwards, John (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Muir, The Biblical Drama, p. 215. See also the anonymous illustrations accompanying the Speculum humanae salvationis, Cologne, c.1450.

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manna – having much the appearance of a heavy snow – which adds to the visual spectacle of the people gathering it.44 While it is impossible to be certain given the absence of visual evidence, the sophistication of the Höritz production makes it quite likely that stagecraft was employed to produce the spectacle of the falling manna as it would be in later film productions. The other tableau – ‘Moses found in the Bullrushes’ – has a less distinguished typological pedigree than the previous episode, though the Christian construal of Moses’ escape from Pharaoh’s infanticidal decree (Exodus 1:15–2:10) was seen as a type of Jesus’ own escape from Herod’s ‘massacre of the innocents’ (Matthew 2:16–18). While there is no explicit identification in Matthew (or Hebrews 11:23, where the episode is also referenced), such a typological interpretation is offered by, for instance, patristic commentators such as Prudentius.45 The ‘Finding of Moses’ failed to attract any more than a passing interest from the biblical dramatists of the medieval period, but in this case the cultural memory of the episode was ensured by the preservation of the scene in the pictorial tradition. Appearing already in the wall paintings of the third-century synagogue at Dura Europos, the ‘Finding of Moses’ was to feature prominently in the tradition of European painting including the work of Veronese, Tintoretto, Poussin and Bourdon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.46 While Poussin’s The Finding of Moses evidently drew upon the Jewish historian Josephus’ depiction of ancient Egypt, subsequent treatments in the nineteenth century were heavily influenced instead by the growing familiarity with Egypt resulting from the sketches, photographs and writings of Victorian travellers returning from the ancient land of the Nile.47 With painters such as Roberts depicting the spectacle of Egypt with unprecedented attention to architectural scale, colour and detail, it is hardly surprising that this same tendency is apparent in Victorian portrayals of biblical episodes which were set in Egypt – including those of Exodus. This Egypt of nineteenth-century antiquarian interest is 44

45

46 47

Tintoretto’s composition and dramatic illumination of the heavens which is the source of the manna (and inevitably appears light against a darker background) draws the eyes of both the Israelites and the viewers upwards. For his use of typology, see Valerie Edden, ‘Prudentius’, in J. W. Binns (ed.), Latin Literature of the Fourth Century (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 160–8. For a discussion of this episode and its subsequent interpretation, see J. Cohen, The Origins and Evolution of the Moses Nativity Story (Leiden: Brill, 1993). Rivka Ulmer, Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2009), pp. 297–322. See Peter Clayton, The Rediscovery of Ancient Egypt: Artists and Travellers in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Portland House, 1982). See also James Stevens Curl, The Egyptian Revival (London: Routledge, 2005).

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Figure 1.1 Findung Mosis (Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, 1851).

visible on an epic architectural scale in Poynter’s extraordinary Israel in Egypt (1867) (Figure 8.1, p. 229) and with a slightly more intimate tone, first in Alma-Tadema’s Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son (1872) and latterly in his The Finding of Moses by Pharaoh’s Daughter (1904). While Gustave Doré’s illustration of the scene belongs in this tradition, so too does that of Schnoor von Carolsfeld (Figure 1.1). Following Schnoor’s formative sojourn in Rome, where he embraced the principles of painterly ‘monasticism’ associated with the so-called Nazarenes, he returned to Munich inspired by the idea of producing a Nazarene illustrated Bible.48 By 1851, 240 of Schnoor’s drawings were reproduced in woodcuts for their publication first in Germany and then 48

See Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) pp. 66ff.

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Figure 1.2 Sketch of ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’ tableau from the Höritz Passion play.

in 1860, in England, where they were well received, as indeed they were throughout Europe.49 If the sketches of the Höritz film’s depiction of ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’ may be trusted as a faithful representation of the film’s tableau (Figure 1.2), then the influence of nineteenth-century artists such as Schnoor can hardly be doubted. Unlike the paintings of earlier centuries, both scenes are situated amidst the authentic flora of Egypt – with palm trees dominating both tableaux and providing cover for the watching Miriam. While the building on the left edge of Schnoor’s engraving offers merely a hint of an authentically Egyptian architecture, the Höritz scene reflects the fully developed fascination with not only Egyptian architecture but also its decoration, increasingly visible in the work of later paintings of the nineteenth century such as Poynter’s Israel in Egypt (Figure 8.1, p. 229).50 With the narrative impulse subverted on the one hand by the brevity of each cinematic scene and diverted on the other by the typological schema’s prioritising of the Passion narrative, the Höritz film’s recourse to spectacle is 49 50

For a detailed history of the preparation for and publication of Die Bibel in Bildern see A. Schahl, Geschichte der Bilderbibel von Julius Schnoor Von Carolsfeld (Leipzig, 1936). Note especially the ubiquitous image of the lotus flower and the palm shades in the hands of the women (also seen in the paintings of Alma-Tadema and Doré).

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quite natural and indeed perhaps inevitable, as may be suggested by another contemporary review: ten scenes from the Old Testament . . . were next shown, each prefaced by a short introductory note from the lecturer, accompanied by the verse in the Bible relating to the incident. In this way, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the flood, the sacrifice of Isaac, Moses being found by Pharaoh’s daughter and other familiar scenes were beautifully shown.51

The review is careful to convey the interplay of various texts including those of the lecturer’s own creation, those of the Höritz play and those of the Bible itself. Interestingly, the review also suggests that it is not the filmic narrative of the Old Testament which is ‘told’, but rather the scenes which are ‘beautifully shown’. Not only does this language resonate with Gaudreault’s notion of ‘monstration’ (vs. ‘narration’) as characteristic of the cinema of attractions which prevailed during this period, but the qualification of this ‘showing’ in terms of its beauty demonstrates its reception in aesthetic terms.52 Moreover, it is the very fact that these scenes are ‘familiar’ that allows for not only a minimum of narrative contextualisation, but also the aesthetic judgement that these living pictures compare favourably – indeed ‘beautifully’ – with the pictorial and theatrical spectacles of these scenes previously encountered by the audience. Encouraged by the enthusiastic reviews of the Höritz film’s opening in Philadelphia, Klaw and Erlanger made plans to test audience response further with February screenings for clergy and the general public in Baltimore, before premiering the production in New York during the Lenten season. But the warm reception of the film’s November premiere in Philadelphia had also been noted by others, including Richard Hollaman, who had apparently been initially offered the rights to the Höritz film, before eventually losing out to Klaw and Erlanger. Recognising that the American viewing public were now ready for cinematic versions of the Passion in the guise of a European play, Hollaman made use of the mothballed costumes and sets of Salmi Morse’s ill-fated 1880 New York stage production of the Passion to shoot his own ‘Oberammergau’ Passion, premiering his film at the Eden Musée in New York on 30 January 1898 – a week before the Höritz film’s Baltimore premiere. Subsequent revelations in the New York press that – unlike the Höritz film – Hollaman’s production had not been shot in Europe at all, but on the roof of the Eden Musée, did little to dampen audience enthusiasm for it.53 Thus, by the time the Höritz film received its own New York premiere at 51 52 53

Philadelphia Public Ledger (23 November 1897). A. Gaudreault, ‘Narration and Monstration’, Journal of Film and Video 39.2 (1987), 29–36. New York Herald (1 February 1898).

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Daly’s Theatre on 14 March, it had been well and truly pre-empted in America’s largest and most lucrative market.54 Moreover, having reached an agreement to exclusively ‘manufacture’ and ‘license’ the Eden Musée Passion, Edison’s lawyers were circling the Höritz film ominously even before it opened in New York, and the following month, under threat of legal action, Klaw and Erlanger and their associates signed an agreement which turned over the negative of the Höritz film to Edison and required that further prints be purchased from the latter.55 Hollaman and Eaves were not the only ones to be inspired by the moving pictures of the Passion shown in Philadelphia in November 1897. By then, Siegmund Lubin, a local Jewish optician, had already made a start in the industry and, by 1898, he was manufacturing and selling both projectors and films. Of the latter, his Passion Play (1898) was the most ambitious up to that point, even if the claims of Lubin’s daughter of a cast of ‘about one thousand’ may be doubted.56 Lubin’s cast apparently included family and friends and Lubin himself in various roles including Pontius Pilate, with the film seemingly shot in the back garden of his own house on North Fifteenth Street, in what was then a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood.57 Whatever Lubin’s Passion Play lacked in production values, however, his version of the Passion made up for in comprehensiveness, particularly in relation to its portrayal of the birth and life of Christ.58 Accordingly, it is not surprising that Lubin’s Passion Play is unique amongst the earliest Passion films in including a depiction of the ‘Transfiguration’, a scene which appears toward the middle of the gospel narratives (Matthew 17:1–9, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36), but which Lubin locates following the raising of Lazarus and before Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Though Lubin’s scene itself appears to have been lost along with the rest of the film, further opportunity for reflection on the relationship between word and moving pictures is facilitated by the preservation of a copy of Lubin’s Passion Play 54 55 56

57 58

According to Niver, Klaw & Erlanger Present, p. 17, the Eaves-Hollaman production ran several times per day throughout the month of February. Ibid. reproduces both the Edison letter to the Höritz film producers (NYDM (12 March 1898)), p. 20, and the legal agreement (pp. 21–6). E. Lowry, ‘Life of Siegmund Lubin’, typescript, n.d., Theater Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia: ‘About 1000 people were in the Passion Play, all extras at $1.00 or $2.00 a day. Many women would bring their entire family from the baby in arms to the oldest child, as it was very hard to get extras in those days. After they had worked a few times in the pictures they were so delighted to see themselves on the screen, that they wished to work for nothing.’ J. Eckhardt, King of the Movies: Film Pioneer Siegmund Lubin (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997). Lubin Catalogue, 1905 (NJDH). Lubin’s production offers eighteen scenes of the nativity and life of Christ, whereas the Eden Musée production supplies only nine and the Höritz film only seven.

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Lecture. Lubin’s lecture furnishes notes of two different types in relation to each scene. The first and longer text supplied by Lubin is ‘to be read when the lights are turned on’ – thus in advance of the actual showing of moving pictures of, in this case, the Transfiguration: Jesus and his disciples had come near Hermon and he had partially made known to them his approaching death. His followers remained afar off, while he took with him Peter, James and John, and descended to a spur of the mountain, where he prayed. His weary disciples fell asleep. As Jesus prayed, there appeared before him Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. They talked of the coming death of Christ at Jerusalem. The three sleeping disciples, suddenly awaking, beheld with amazement the vision and fell on their faces. When they arose, it had vanished, and they beheld Jesus alone, who bid them rise and follow him.59

Close scrutiny of the Lubin lecture reveals the extent to which this material to be read between scenes – or in fact, more properly, before the scene which it describes – reflects the biblical tradition and, in this case, primarily Luke’s version of the Transfiguration. While all three synoptic gospels mention the retreat to the mountain which features in the Lubin text, it is only in Lubin’s lecture and Luke’s gospel that: Jesus prays (9:28, 29), Moses and Elijah speak with him about his impending death (9:31) and the disciples fall asleep (9:32) and then awake to see the vision of Moses and Elijah (9:32). Indeed, it is only when the Lubin script suggests that the disciples ‘fell on their faces’ that it departs from the Lukan text in favour of the Matthean tradition (17:6). This overall favouring of the Lukan account (including its drowsy disciples) may reflect the assumption of Luke’s greater ‘familiarity’ to the intended audience and perhaps the estimation of its greater dramatic potential, but the inclusion of the disciples’ heightened reaction to the vision from Matthew (v. 6, ‘fell on their faces’) hints at Lubin’s primary interest in this and other scenes from the gospels. While the stereotypical scenes of the Passion offered early filmmakers a particular species of visual spectacle – predominantly that of crowds, of physical display, emotional pathos and iconographic imagery – Lubin’s inclusion of scenes such as the Transfiguration reflects his particular desire to recreate cinematically the spectacle of the miraculous.60 The Lubin narrator’s invocation of the disciples’ ‘amazement’ at the extraordinary ‘vision’ of Moses and Elijah and a transfigured Christ prepares the viewer 59 60

S. Lubin, Lecture of the Passion Play, 1905 (NJDH). Lubin also included, for instance, ‘The Temptation of Christ’, ‘The Feeding of the Five Thousand’ and the ‘Resurrection of Lazarus’.

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for their own experience of astonishment at the moving pictures they are about to see. The close identification of the narrator’s text with the biblical (Lukan) text invites comparison with pre-cinematic interpretive practices such as the illustrated lecture and its precursor, the illustrated Bible. Just as the latter offered a ‘telling’ of the narrative through its inclusion of the printed biblical text in vernacular translation, so too the early Passion plays evidently offered a kind of ‘telling’ of the narrative by means of the accompanying lecture. Yet, as we have seen in the case of Lubin, even in this ‘telling’, the choice of episode and the redaction of these ‘tellings’ reflect a tendency towards the ‘showing’ of the visual spectacle to follow. Unlike the narrative described above, which was to be read between scenes, the second type of text prescribed by Lubin for the narrator was instead to ‘be committed to memory and recited in the dark while moving pictures [i.e. of the Transfiguration] are being exhibited’: This picture is wonderfully life-like. Christ is seen coming upon the mount, with James, Peter and John who lie down as Christ engages in prayer. The vision of Moses and Elijah is seen as the disciples awake. They fall upon their faces as the vision disappears. Christ lays His hands upon them and they go off, accompanied by the other disciples, who are apart from Jesus and likewise resting upon the earth.61

As Rick Altman has noted, whereas the material to be read between scenes refers to the familiar story of the past and the claims of the religious tradition, the text above, which is to be read during the showing of the moving pictures, describes the filmic image in the present tense, in the form of a running commentary.62 Unsurprisingly, the tendency to ‘show’ evident even in the narrative to be read before the scene is also strongly reflected in the text to be read during the actual showing of the moving pictures themselves. The claim that the picture is ‘wonderfully life-like’ initially appears to undercut a realist discourse by foregrounding the ontological status of the reproduction as merely ‘like’ – and thus not identical to – ‘life’. Yet the remainder of the text demonstrates that the scene’s intended likeness to life lies not in its pretence of depicting reality, but rather in its portrayal of the impact of supernatural spectacle. Thus the narrator immediately reminds the viewers verbally that Christ does not merely come, but rather is ‘seen coming’ by them upon the mountain. So too Moses and Elijah do not merely appear, but rather they ‘are seen’ now also by the awakened disciples, who join the viewers in visually apprehending the miraculous 61 62

Lubin, Lecture of the Passion Play. R. Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 137–8.

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appearance of the long-dead Old Testament prophets, Moses and Elijah. While in Matthew 17:6, the disciples ‘fell (preterit) on their faces’ because of what they heard – namely the Father’s ‘voice from the clouds’ (17:5), Lubin’s disciples instead ‘fall upon their faces as the vision disappears’. Indeed, the disappearance itself is offered as further evidence of the otherworldly, supernatural character of a spectacle intended to astonish Lubin’s viewers just as it does the disciples themselves. Thus, if the preterit narration offers the analogue to the ‘telling’ of the biblical narrative found in the printed text of the illustrated Bible, the voice-over narration of the action being depicted in the moving pictures provides a functional correspondence to the shorter caption which is frequently found in illustrated Bibles of the nineteenth century (see Figure 1.1). One advantage of such a comparison is that it allows for a clearer comprehension of the relationship between narration and monstration in the Höritz film as perceived by the reviewers at its premiere. By redacting an obviously biblical text and evoking its historical claims, Lacy’s Höritz lecture presumably offered an ‘authorised’ version of the canonical text which justified and indeed demanded a discourse of autonomous authority vis-à-vis any illustrations. That the biblical text might, however, be profitably illustrated by pictures had long since been established by illustrated Bibles and was now proven again in the most spectacular fashion by the ‘moving pictures’ which accompanied them for the first time that November evening in Philadelphia. In attending to the specific depiction of Moses within Lubin’s ‘Transfiguration’, we note first the lecture’s qualification of Moses first as ‘lawgiver’.63 That Moses’ association with the Law would have resonated within Orthodox Jewish circles in America is hardly surprising. Proof, however, that the notion of Moses as legislator resonated even within the liberalising movement of Reform Judaism is offered by the prominence of ‘Moses: A Wise and Just Legislator’ in Isaac Wise’s lecture of 1883, Moses, the Man and Statesman.64 Indeed, however tempting it may be to understand Lubin’s interest in Moses as lawgiver as a reflection of his admittedly rather unorthodox Judaism,65 this interest had long since ceased to be the exclusive preserve of Judaism. In fact, the long association of Moses with the Law reflected in Lubin’s lecture was very much in evidence within wider 63 64 65

Lubin, Lecture of the Passion Play. I. M. Wise, Moses, The Man and the Statesman: A Lecture Delivered in New York and Boston, January 23 and 25, 1883 (Cincinnati: Block and Company, 1883), pp. 20–7. The portrait offered in Eckhardt, King of the Movies, presents a figure of no obvious piety.

‘Like one of the prophets of old’: passions and cameos

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Western – and especially American – culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even in Christian circles, where Protestant readings of the New Testament especially ensured a more controversial and conflicted role for the Law, the minister of New York’s Broadway Tabernacle, Rev. William M. Taylor, might still devote some 500 pages to a history of ‘Moses the Law-giver’ four years earlier (1879) for no less mainstream a press than Harper and Brothers.66 Indeed, in the same city only two years after Lubin’s film was released, the main entrance of Lord’s ‘Beaux Art’ Appellate Courthouse on Madison Avenue would be supplied with a large statue of Moses, in whose lap would lie Moses’ Book of the Law, the size of which is an indication of its cultural cachet. Over the centuries, the iconographic marking of Moses’ status as lawgiver within depictions of the Transfiguration varied, from the provision of a scroll (as in Duccio’s The Transfiguration, c.1307) to the stone tablets pictured in the illustrated Bibles of Schnoor and Doré.67 Given the popularity of such Bibles and Lubin’s bestowing of the epithet ‘the lawgiver’ on Moses, it is not at all unlikely that Moses was furnished with a set of tablets in Lubin’s scene as well. Lubin’s most significant contribution to the ‘birth’ of Moses in the earliest days of the cinema lies perhaps not in his depiction of the Law of Moses, but rather the appearance (and disappearance) of Moses himself. From Lubin’s lecture and its notes, it may be deduced that his interest in exploiting the tricks of the cinematic trade in his depiction of the Christ narrative was fully brought to bear on the Transfiguration. While it is unclear from the lecture precisely how Moses and Elijah are made to appear alongside Jesus as the disciples sleep, it is likely that this was accomplished in the same manner as their disappearance – namely by means of the technique of ‘double exposure’, which was already common in the cinema on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks in large part to the pioneering efforts of Georges Méliès.68 Particularly in its mounting of scriptural spectacle through the deployment of cinematic trucs, Lubin’s Passion was to make a significant contribution to the subsequent evolution of the representation of Scripture in the early silent cinema. It is true that Klaw and Erlanger’s film of the Höritz Passion from the previous year was able to draw on the extensive theatrical 66 67

68

W. M. Taylor, Moses the Law-giver (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879). For an early appearance of the tablets in a depiction of this scene see the Bible illustrations of Gerard Jollain, La Saincte Bible, Contenant le Vieil and la Nouveau Testament, Enrichie de plusieurs belles figures (De L’imprimerie de Gerard Jollain, 1670). For a recent appraisal of Georges Méliès’ significance in the emergence of modern spectacle, see M. Solomon, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011).

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effects facilitated by the latest developments in nineteenth-century stagecraft. Thus in the original stage version of the Höritz play (not included in the film), Christ’s Transfiguration was illuminated by means of the coalpowered electric lighting with which the Spielhaus in Höritz had been specially fitted.69 Yet, whatever Lubin’s version may have lacked in such theatrical effects, what it evidently did offer viewers was a scriptural spectacle which was specifically ‘cinematic’ – one which not only brought pictures to life, but brought the miracles themselves to life by equally wondrous and inexplicable means. As we shall see, this particular species of spectacle was to enjoy a long and pervasive influence on the representation of Scripture in the silent era. 69

Evidence for the very striking lighting effect utilised in the staged version of the Höritz ‘Transfiguration’ comes from the remarkable photographic illustrations preserved by Štábla, Queries. Indeed, insofar as such theatrical effects were captured on film in other scenes in the Höritz film, they undoubtedly did contribute significantly to the visual spectacle being offered to viewers.

chapter 2

‘See this great sight’: spectacle and miracle

Despite the proliferation of Passion films produced on both sides of the Atlantic in the years before and after the turn of the century, Lubin’s Passion continued to be listed for sale in the company’s catalogues until at least 1905.1 The Höritz film – once presumed to have perished shortly after Edison took over the negative in April 18982 – does in fact reappear, in the 1903 catalogue supplement of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (hereafter ‘Biograph’).3 The marketing of the film by Biograph – one of Edison’s chief rivals in 1903 – is curious to say the least. While the film features prominently in Biograph’s supplement, it does so not as a Biograph production, but rather as one of a series of subjects sourced through the ‘Warwick Trading Company’.4 Primarily a producer of travel films and newsreels, this London company did act as agent for a variety of producers, but its association with the Höritz film remains a mystery.5 Nevertheless, the list of scenes offered for sale in connection with this ‘Warwick-Biograph’ version of the Höritz film does offer some indication of which scenes had proved most popular with previous viewers and were thus expected by Biograph to attract the custom of exhibitors wishing to turn a profit. The Höritz film’s inclusion of prefatory scenes from the Old Testament and the daily life of the peasant players had remained entirely unique amongst the Passion films which were produced in the five years after the Höritz film’s premiere in 1897. It is therefore not entirely surprising that by 1903 the number of these prefatory scenes had been significantly reduced; 1 3 4 5

Lubin Catalogue, 1905 (NJDH). 2 Niver, Klaw & Erlanger Present, p. 27. American Mutoscope and Biograph catalogue supplement (#1) April, 1903 http://hdl.rutgers.edu/ 1782.2/rucore00000001079.Book.17704. Ibid. Indeed, it is not impossible (though also not provable) that the Biograph catalogue supplement’s inclusion of the Höritz film in a list of ‘Warwick’ imports was a deliberate subterfuge designed to disguise the origin of their print of the film.

35

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gone are views of the street of Höritz, of the Passion Spielhaus and its drop curtain and of the actors playing the principal parts of Jesus and Mary. It may be surmised that audiences in 1903 were not as tolerant of still images alongside moving pictures as they had been in 1898, when the illustrated stereopticon lecture was more prevalent. Indeed, the fact that some scenes of daily life in Höritz were retained at all should perhaps be seen as testament to the distributor’s commitment to turn an artistic anomaly into a unique selling point, given the foregrounding of the film’s authentic European origins in the catalogue’s promotional description of it.6 The prefatory Old Testament scenes – no less unique, but perhaps less saleable – were even more dramatically reduced by 1903 with the elimination of the scenes of Cain and Abel, Noah’s Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, both views of Joseph, as well as Esther and Elijah. Indeed, by 1903, all that remains of the Höritz film’s Old Testament are the two scenes of Adam and Eve (in the Garden and after their Expulsion) and the two of Moses (found in the Bullrushes and witnessing the Manna from Heaven). Of all the Old Testament scenes, perhaps the least easily jettisoned were those of Adam and Eve’s Fall, which provides the starting point for the soteriological story of which the Passion of the Christ is the crucial act. This, along with the iconographic status of the Adam and Eve scenes themselves (and especially the spectacle of a sexualised Eve), may well account for the preservation of these scenes despite the culling of others from the Höritz Old Testament. The preservation of Moses in the curtailed 1903 version of the Höritz film is perhaps, on the face of it, less easily explained. On the one hand, neither of the surviving Moses scenes (nor any associated with Moses) boasts anything like the theological significance of the primeval ‘Fall’ of Adamic creation. Moreover, while the typological significance of the Manna scene cannot be gainsaid, it would be difficult to argue that it is more worthy of inclusion on this basis than, for instance, the scene of the sacrifice of Isaac whose typological career is hardly less distinguished, yet did not save it from the distributor’s cull. It may well be that Moses and the Manna survived where others did not, simply because of audiences’ greater familiarity with the figure and narrative of Moses – a familiarity fostered both by the celebration of Moses within Judaeo-Christian traditions and by the depiction of Moses in pictorial art and illustration in wider culture. Despite the rather patchier typological pedigree of ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’, it is not impossible that this latter scene has been preserved because of its prefigurement of 6

Biograph catalogue supplement: ‘As enacted annually since 1816 by the peasants of the mountain town of Horitz, Bohemia’.

‘See this great sight’: spectacle and miracle

37

the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ – especially when one considers the Höritz’ film’s focus on the Holy Family and the ‘Flight into Egypt’ which appears some four scenes later. What makes it less likely that ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’ was preserved for purely or even primarily typological reasons, however, is the fact that in the very same year (1903), Biograph was also marketing a stand-alone version of this very same scene under the same name (Moses in the Bullrushes) in the firm’s other promotional organ, the Biograph Bulletin: Moses in the Bullrushes. (Special.)

120 feet. Price per foot. Originals 15c, Duplicates, 12c.

This is altogether a remarkable subject, handled in such a high-class way as to make it an extremely appropriate subject for exhibitors who make a speciality of church and lyceum work. A river bank is shown thickly lined with rushes. Through a wandering path come Pharaoh’s daughter and her attendants. At the edge of the stream the infant Moses is found peacefully sleeping in a bed of rushes. After all the party have surveyed the infant in silent admiration the princess takes it up lovingly and after fondling it gives it to one of her women and the process then starts back through the rushes. The scene is made particularly effective by the fact that a live and kicking baby is employed and by the naturalness of the scene throughout.7

It might easily be supposed that this apparently independent version of Moses in the Bullrushes was in fact nothing more than the footage of the Höritz scene being marketed and sold separately – especially given that Biograph was promoting both films as imports from Great Britain. Yet, such a supposition is immediately complicated by the observation that, whilst the scene in the Höritz film was sold at a length of 55 feet (17 m), the version of Moses in the Bullrushes being sold on its own by Biograph was more than twice this length, at 120 feet (39 m).8 Moreover, in light of Biograph’s association of the Höritz film with the Warwick Trading company, the Bulletin’s listing of Moses in the Bullrushes as a ‘Gaumont’ production strongly suggests that the latter was an independent production after all. British Gaumont – founded in 1897 as an agency of Léon Gaumont’s parent company in France – was predictably and primarily occupied with 7 8

Bulletin no. 15 (21 September 1903) in K. Niver (ed.), Biograph Bulletins 1896–1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971). Biograph catalogue supplement.

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distributing French films in the British market. However, the firm’s interest in the indigenous cinema included both the distribution of other British filmmakers and the filming of its own productions.9 While the majority of British Gaumont’s own early efforts (e.g. Runaway Match, 1903) were chasefilms directed by the well-known director Alf Collins, an unknown director apparently filmed two biblical subjects for the company which were released in 1903: The Good Samaritan and Moses in the Bullrushes.10 While neither film appears to have survived, the above description in the Biograph Bulletin is again suggestive of the latter film’s narrative scope and interest as well as its intended appeal. With films being shown in various venues at the turn of the century, the pitching of Moses in the Bullrushes to exhibitors specialising in ‘church and lyceum’ suggests that there was at least a niche market of sufficient size to justify targeted marketing. The description’s invocation of a ‘high-class’ handling of the subject of ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’ undoubtedly reflects the film’s attempt to exploit the interest shown in this scene by the nineteenth-century artist-antiquarians and illustrators discussed in the previous chapter. In addition to their inclusion of the ubiquitous palm trees, artists such as Doré and Tissot, Frederick Goodall, Edwin Long (and indeed William Blake earlier in the nineteenth century) offer Nilotic settings that foreground the ‘bullrushes’ that feature within the biblical account (Exodus 2:3–5) but also in the title of the British Gaumont film and in its catalogue description.11 While the infant Moses is likewise offered for the viewer’s pleasure, the inevitable focal point for these artists is not the child itself, but the woman who finds him. Thus, Alma Tadema (in his The Finding of Moses by Pharaoh’s Daughter, 1904), as well as Schnoor and Tissot, would seize the opportunity to make a spectacle of the orientalising dress and ornamentation of Pharaoh’s daughter and maidservants as part of the peculiarly Victorian evocation of Ancient Egypt. On the other hand, for Doré, Goodall and then Long, the spectacle of Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage is marked not by what they wear, but rather by what they do not. These latter artists seize upon the biblical detail that Pharaoh’s daughter had come to the river to wash (v. 5) to license their display of not only the 9 10

11

L. McKernan, ‘British Gaumont’, in R. Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p. 122. British Gaumont catalogue (1902–3), Early Rare British Filmmakers Catalogues 1896–1913, reel 2, microfilm, BFI. The absence of directorial credit for these films and the lack of further biblical films suggest that British Gaumont’s interest in such subjects was very much a passing one. Niver, Biograph Bulletins: ‘A river bank is shown thickly lined with rushes’; ‘the infant Moses is found peacefully sleeping in a bed of rushes’; ‘the process then starts back through the rushes’.

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disrobed daughter of Pharaoh, but her maidservants as well – all under the auspices of an authentic recreation of ancient and exotic bathing practices. As the British Gaumont film was being aimed at least partially at those frequenting the ‘church and lyceum’, it is highly doubtful that its cinematic depiction of Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage would have offered such fleshly displays nor would the quality or colour of their costuming have been able to rival the richness which would be displayed by, for instance, Alma Tadema’s painting the following year. Rather, in the British Gaumont film, the bathing (and disrobing) is evidently upstaged by the discovery of the infant Moses. Indeed, according to the catalogue description, it is not primarily the picture itself, but rather the movement of and within the picture which promises the film exhibitor a spectacle which is both scriptural and saleable. Thus, rather than beginning in situ, at the water’s edge, Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage do what they cannot do in any still picture: they process ‘through a wandering path’ and, following the retrieval of the baby, ‘the process then starts back through the rushes’. So too, while painters such as Goodall and Long (and especially Blake’s The Compassion of Pharaoh’s Daughter or the Finding of Moses, 1805) seek to capture the liveliness of the infant Moses by various means – and succeed in various degrees – the cinematic trumping of such accomplishments is foregrounded by the catalogue’s assessment of the film’s best quality, namely: ‘the fact that a live and kicking baby is employed’. That the live baby is intended to function as the visual focus of the short film is further suggested by the description of the retrieval of the baby in visual terms: ‘After all the party have surveyed the infant in silent admiration, the princess takes it up lovingly.’ Like the disciples in Lubin’s scene of the Transfiguration, here the party of maidservants model the desired reception of the visual spectacle. Whereas in Lubin’s scene, the miraculous spectacle of Moses’ appearance and disappearance alongside the Christ prompts the appropriate astonishment of disciples and the audience, in British Gaumont’s Moses in the Bullrushes the display of the infant and the scene itself is intended to prompt precisely the kind of ‘silent admiration’ with which the audience would have been expected to view the Victorian canvasses which the film so clearly seeks to animate. In much the same way that Victorian painting and Bible illustration had done, British Gaumont’s cinematic interpretation of the scene highlights the curious role of visual perception within the biblical narrative itself: 5

And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among

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The Bible on Silent Film the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. 6And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children. (Exodus 2:5–6 KJV)

First, the text makes it clear that the intervention of Pharaoh’s daughter is prompted by the fact that ‘she saw the basket among the reeds’ (v. 5). While it is also noted that the young Moses wept when the basket was opened, the visceral reaction of Pharaoh’s daughter is prompted, according to the text, not by what she hears, but by what she sees: ‘Behold: a young one, weeping’ (v. 6 literally translated from the Hebrew). As will be seen in subsequent chapters, the Egyptian threat to the Hebrew children which prompts the hiding of Moses would eventually be explored within the silent cinema. However, at the turn of the century, the catalogue description suggests that British Gaumont’s cinematic realisation follows the Victorian pictorial tradition in offering the viewer not the spectacle of the traumatised infant (about which more later), but rather that of the ‘goodly child’ (Exodus 2:2) seen by his mother prior to her concealing of him. If it seems unlikely that the ‘fondling’ of even a ‘live and kicking’ child – however goodly – might qualify as a bona fide cinematic attraction in 1903, it is worth remembering that in the world’s first commercial exhibition of moving pictures less than ten years earlier, one of the short films included by Auguste and Louis Lumière was Repas de bébé, an otherwise unremarkable scene of the feeding of an infant much less famous than Moses, namely, un petit Lumière.12 In light of this, it seems plausible that the catalogue’s promotion of the ‘naturalness of the scene throughout’ is intended to apply not only to the depiction of the baby itself, but also to the female entourage’s admiration of the baby – an element mentioned explicitly by the catalogue but not by the biblical narrative. In thus emphasising the naturalness of the Egyptian women’s observing of the baby in ‘silent admiration’, Biograph undoubtedly hoped to persuade exhibitors that audiences would happily follow suit. Finally, that explicitly narrative concerns remained largely foreign to the British Gaumont director who produced Moses in the Bullrushes is confirmed by the focus of the film on a mere two verses of the biblical text (Exodus 2:5–6) and its comparative lack of interest in even the immediate narrative context of this passage. While Miriam’s own observation of proceedings (v. 4) and ingenious return of 12

Repas de bébé was screened at the commercial premiere of the Lumière Cinématographe on 28 December 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris and was still inspiring such scenes as Alice Guy’s Le Dejeuner des Enfants for Gaumont in 1899. That les enfants des Lumières were not always so good humoured is clear from Lumières’ Querelle Enfantine (1896).

‘See this great sight’: spectacle and miracle

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the boy to his mother’s care (v. 7) would eventually find their way onto the silent screen, the prioritisation of spectacle over story in 1903 ensured that the debuts of Miriam and her mother would need to wait. The early success of Léar’s Passion in 1897 had not gone unnoticed in Paris – a city which was already well on its way to becoming the world’s leading centre of film production, thanks to the initial industry of, among others, the Lumière brothers. Following their initial exhibition in December of 1895, the Lumières commissioned the production of a steady stream of films primarily for the purposes of promoting and selling their cinématographe. While the bulk of these were actualités (such as Repas de bébé ) shot both at home and abroad, the Lumière brothers also employed George Hatot, formerly of the Hippodrome theatre, to direct comic and ‘historical scenes’. Amongst the latter was a thirteen-tableaux version of La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ, shot in 1898 – the same year that the Passion films of the Eden Musée, Höritz and Lubin were taking American screens by storm.13 While the firm of the Lumières’ great rival and friend Léon Gaumont would not produce his own version of the Passion until Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ (1906),14 that other pioneer of French film, Charles Pathé, quickly recognised and moved to exploit the creative and commercial prospects of the cinematic Passion. Pathé catalogues before the turn of the century suggest that, like Gaumont, Pathé was distributing an edited and supplemented version of Hatot’s Passion, but with the arrival of Ferdinand Zecca at the turn of the century Pathé was finally in a position to begin to produce its own scènes bibliques.15 Fresh from his success with Quo Vadis (1901), Zecca set to work on L’Enfant Prodigue, a film whose praises are sung with predictable enthusiasm by the Pathé catalogue of March 1902: 13

14

15

Rather than 1897, as suggested by Sadoul, Histoire Générale, pp. 308–9. While it is not possible to determine precisely when Hatot’s film was shot, Štábla, Queries, pp. 24–5 is correct to date the production to the first half of 1898, given that it first appears in the Lumières’ catalogues in the latter half of that year. The eleven tableaux of La Vie du Christ listed in Gaumont’s catalogues of 1899 have sometimes been understood to be a Gaumont production directed by Alice Guy (so, for instance, Anthony Slide (ed.), Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986), p. 144). A. McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York and London: Continuum 2003), pp. 28–9, however, notes that Guy herself disavows any involvement in the filming of the Passion prior to 1906 in correspondence with Léon Gaumont. Gaumont’s own suggestion that the film was thus probably Hatot’s film is almost certainly correct, if, as McMahan suggests, the collegial relationship between the Lumières and Gaumont would have permitted the latter to distribute an eleven-tableaux version of the Lumières original. Henri Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914 (Bures-sur-Yvette: Editions Henri Bousquet, 1994–2004) (accessible online at FJS).

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The Bible on Silent Film We can do no better than to textually follow this parable which is certainly one of the most endearing of the New Testament in the sense that it is eternally true. Its touching simplicity makes it naturally suitable for spectacles specially intended for families and institutions. Along with our superb Passion de N.S.J.C, in 16 tableaux, it constitutes an entirely informative programme of the highest moral value. Nothing has been overlooked in the preparation of this scene. The luxuriousness of the specially designed sets, the splendor of the costumes and accessories, as well as the artistic aspects of the mise-en-scène, make this the grandest scene that has been presented so far in cinematography.16

Pathé’s emphasis on the unprecedented lavishness and artistic qualities of the mise-en-scène, including backdrops, costumes and props, reflects a desire to capitalise on the firm’s continuing collaboration with Vincent LorantHeilbronn, who was enlisted to ensure that Pathé’s historical and biblical films set new standards in set design in the French industry. Pathé’s intent to appeal to families and institutions, both educational and ecclesial, explains its insistence that the five tableaux vivants of L’Enfant Prodigue follow the gospel text of the parable, whose primacy and superiority (‘nous ne pouvions mieux faire’) is explained in terms of its inclusion in a select (but unspecified) set of New Testament narratives which are ‘éternellement vraie’. Thus, quite apart from any aesthetic pleasure the film will stimulate, the eternal truth of the narrative ensures its contribution to a programme which is ‘instructive and of great moral value’. The catalogue’s recommendation that such a programme should include Zecca and Nonguet’s other biblical production, La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1902), is entirely understandable given that the latter’s sixteen tableaux represented the most elaborate and extensive European production of the gospel narrative at the time.17 Unlike the Höritz film, but in keeping with its French predecessors, Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ dispensed with the conceit of the medieval theatre in favour of a specially staged and cast production which generated scenes offered for sale individually and as a series beginning in 1902. While some progress has been made in reconstructing the history of this film, a definitive account of the initial production and subsequent shooting and distribution of scenes and series in the years which followed remains elusive.18 What is clear from the sixteen 16 17 18

Ibid., Catalogue no. 4 (March 1902). While the Höritz play was staged in Europe, its filming was undertaken by an American firm for distribution in the American market. See, for instance, Ricardo Redi, ‘La Passion Pathé, de Ferdinand Zecca, problème de datation’, in Pierre Guibbert (ed.), Les Premières pas du cinéma français (Perpignan: Institut Jean Vigo, 1985),

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tableaux initially released in 1902 and the catalogue entry above is that Pathé’s attempt to generate scriptural spectacle relied heavily on the spectacle of mise-en-scène in all its Heilbronnian glory, rather than purely the deployment of cinematic tricks in order to reproduce Lubin’s spectacle of the miraculous. While the ‘Transfiguration’ (and with it Moses’ cameo) did not therefore feature amongst the initial sixteen tableaux distributed in 1902, things had evidently changed by the time Pathé’s own version of the Transfiguration scene began to be sold in the summer of 1905.19 As was the case in Lubin’s scene some seven years earlier, in Pathé’s 1905 version of the Transfiguration, Moses’ cameo – already brief by biblical standards – is made all the briefer by the need for the audience to see him both miraculously appear out of thin air and disappear shortly thereafter.20 Despite the brevity of this cameo, Pathé’s interest in the spectacle of the miraculous in biblical films and in the subject of Moses in his own right were to converge the following year in the production of La Vie de Moïse (1905). Moses was not the first Old Testament subject to be taken up by Pathé under Ferdinand Zecca, nor indeed even the second. About the time La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ was completed, Zecca turned his attention to Samson et Dalila, which appears in the Pathé catalogues in late 1902. That Pathé should begin its cinematic Old Testament with the narrative of Samson and Delilah is perhaps understandable. First, the story of Samson and Delilah could be satisfactorily abridged to allow it to be shot on less than 400 feet of film. Moreover, the story was also sufficiently familiar to audiences that the majority of this footage could be devoted to tableaux which offered the audience the maximum possible spectacle. Indeed, the narrative itself offered significant opportunities for the display of such spectacle, including: Samson’s displays of supernatural might in carrying off the gates of Gaza (Judges 16:3); his single-handed defeat of the Philistines (Judges 15:15); his emasculation at the hands of Delilah (Judges 16:19); his cruel subjugation by the Philistines (Judges 16:21) and his ultimate destruction of their Temple of Dagon (Judges 16:28–30). The visual spectacle of a narrative ripe for such exploitation is further enhanced in Pathé’s Samson et Dalila by means of the novelty of colour,21

19 20 21

pp. 167–71 and Alain Boillat and Valentine Robert, ‘Vie et Passion de Jésus Christ (Pathé, 1902–1905): hétérogénéité des tableaux, déclinaison des motifs’, 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, 60 (2010), 33–63, available at http://1895.revues.org/3864, accessed 13 August 2012. This contrast between the 1902 and 1905 versions in relation to the employment of ‘trucage’ is noted by Boillat and Robert, ‘Vie et Passion’, 42. Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé, no. 4 (July 1905). According to Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé, Juan Gabriel Tharrats claims that this film was handcoloured at Segundo Chomón’s facility in Barcelona.

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the inclusion of a troupe of women who dance in the Temple of Dagon before its destruction, and a final scene (absent from the biblical narrative) in which Samson ascends heavenward accompanied by angels. In its embrace of various species of spectacle (female display, physical suffering and violent destruction), Pathé’s Samson et Dalila would anticipate the trajectory of the biblical film’s development throughout the ‘silent’ era and indeed the company contributed to this evolution by offering a raft of Old Testament films in 1904 and 1905, including: Joseph vendu par ses frères, Le Jugement de Salomon, Le Festin de Balthazar and Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (both part of Pathé’s trilogy Martyrs chrétiens)22 and of course La Vie de Moïse.23 While Ferdinand Zecca’s close collaboration with Lucien Nonguet on La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ in 1902 and the latter’s directing of additional scenes for this film in 1904–5 suggests that Nonguet may have directed these Old Testament episodes as well,24 the absence of any evidence prevents any certain attribution. Whether Nonguet did in fact direct La Vie de Moïse or not, we can be more certain about one source of inspiration for the film.25 Just as Pathé had drawn on the illustrations of Gustave Doré for the mise-en-scène and composition of Samson et Dalila, and especially La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ between 1902 and 1905,26 so too Schnoor’s illustrations evidently offered inspiration for Pathé’s La Vie de Moïse. That Schnoor’s illustration is accompanied not only by a caption (e.g. Die Findung Mosis), and an excerpt from the sacred text 22 23

24

25

26

Le Jugement de Salomon ran to only 60 m, Samson et Dalila to 140 m and La Vie de Moïse totalled 160 m. The print of the latter held by the BFI in London has a running time of 5 minutes 7 seconds. Elley, Epic Film, p. 35 mentions a title Moses and the Exodus from Egypt (1907), but his description: ‘confetti manna, winged angels, flame streamers and God with a paper halo summed up the revential Sunday school tradition’ suggests that the film is in fact Pathé’s La Vie de Moïse (1905). While the description of the film appears in Pathé’s catalogue supplement for August 1905, it seems to have been released in Lyons and Toulouse in the first months of the following year and eventually as far afield as Brazil by 1908. For the important place of Pathé in the early American cinema see R. Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). So Dumont, L’Antiquité, p. 44, perhaps following Jean Mitry, Filmographie Universelle, vol. ii (Paris: Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, 1965), p. 49. That such an attribution is impossible to confirm is noted by A. Gaudreault (ed.), Pathé 1900: Fragments d’une filmographie analytique du cinéma des premiers temps (Paris/Quebec: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993), p. 160. That Moïse begins with the retrieval of the infant Moses from the river might suggest that Pathé was aware of and encouraged by British Gaumont’s Moses in the Bullrushes released only two years earlier – especially given that industrial links between the French and British cinemas were well established. However, the iconic status of this scene and its position at the start of the Moses narrative mean that Pathé’s decision to begin with ‘Moïse sauvé des eaux’ hardly requires the precedent of the British Gaumont film. See Boillat and Robert, ‘Vie et Passion’.

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(2 Moses 2.5, 6), but also an explicatory narrative (Figure 1.1, p. 26) is all the more fascinating given that La Vie de Moïse may well also have been supplied with a narrative designed to be read out loud to the audience during the showing of the moving pictures. While in some cases the Pathé catalogues simply noted that these ‘récits’ or lectures, were available to exhibitors upon request,27 from 1905, Pathé’s catalogues and supplements began to furnish exhibitors with printed texts which seem admirably suited to accompany the showing of each tableau of their biblical films.28 With only 160 m of film (and a running time of just over five minutes) at his disposal, the director of Moïse could not hope to include all of Schnoor’s twenty scenes of the life of Moses. Instead six tableaux were chosen, introduced with the following subtitles (here offered in English translation): ‘Moses saved from the waters’; ‘The Burning Bush’; ‘Passing through the Red Sea’; ‘The Hebrews in the Desert’; ‘On Mount Sinai’ and finally ‘The Worship of the Golden Calf’.29 The visual similarities between the film and Schnoor’s illustration (Figure 1.1, p. 26) are apparent even in the first tableau: the classical façades and trees in the respective backgrounds appear similar, as does the costuming and even the jewellery of the Egyptian women; moreover, in both the still and moving pictures, the women dominate the foreground, and in both the infant Moses appears in the lower right corner.30 In bringing Schnoor’s image to life, the Pathé scene simplifies the composition (and the casting) by reducing the number of female attendants to just two.31 Whereas in British Gaumont’s Moses and the Bullrushes, the 27

28 29

30

31

Such a ‘récit’ is offered to exhibitors of Zecca’s Vie et Passion de N.S.J.C. in Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé (1907). For recent discussion of this phenomenon see V. Robert ‘Le Verbe en intertitre, l’Icone en photogramme: citations canoniques dans le cinéma muet’, in C. Clivaz, C. Combet-Galland, J.-D. Macchi and C. Nihan (eds.), Ecritures et réécritures (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), pp. 529–47. The first ‘récit’ for a biblical film appears in the catalogue entry for Le Jugement de Salomon (1905). While the present study represents the first detailed analysis of this film, Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 162–3 offers a brief but helpful discussion of La Vie de Moïse in his account of the transition to narrative cinema in France between 1904 and 1907. According to Abel, the film’s tableau style and reliance on spectacle and ‘tricks’ reflect a style of representation – Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ – which continued to inform Pathé’s biblical films even as other genres began to reflect increasing narrativisation. Our discussion depends on the viewing of two prints of the film held by the British Film Institute, both of which originate in the collection of the Swiss priest Abbé Joye. The intertitles of one of these copies – which forms part of a hybrid print to be discussed below – are in German, while the intertitles of the complete copy are in Italian. Here we refer to the intertitles contained in the original French release. For a more fully illustrated comparison of the film and Schnoor’s illustrations, see D. Shepherd, ‘Prolonging “The Life of Moses”: Story and Spectacle in the Early Cinema’, in D. Shepherd (ed.), Images of the Word: Hollywood’s Bible and Beyond (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), pp. 11–38. The first two scenes each consist of a single shot, taken from a fixed camera and lasting approximately thirty seconds.

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focus is initially on the female Egyptian finery parading to the Nile, Pathé’s scene instead opens with Pharaoh’s daughter emerging (fully clothed) from the Nile and seating herself between the two maidservants who proceed to attend to her after her bath. So too, while in the earlier British Gaumont scene the baby basket is evidently already in situ, in the Pathé scene the viewers are offered the additional interest of Moses’ basket drifting gently into view from the lower right of the frame – in time to be spotted by Pharaoh’s daughter. The retrieval of the baby from the water prompts not silent admiration, as per the British Gaumont film, but rather excitement and delight amongst the maidservants – though Pharaoh’s daughter appears rather less enthusiastic. Yet again, as with the British Gaumont scene, it is clearly the live and kicking baby who is the star and intended to be the focus of both the actors’ and audience’s attention. Yet, again, the clearly traumatised infant of the biblical narrative is replaced with what appears to be a more peaceful and contented one in the Pathé scene. Of course, the failure to portray the ‘crying’ of the infant may simply reflect a conciousness of the limitations of the silent medium. This may also explain, in part at least, why the musical instruments which feature so prominently in Schnoor’s scene (Figure 1.1) fail to appear in Pathé’s moving pictures. By contrast, whereas Miriam peers from the shadows at the extreme right-hand edge of Schnoor’s illustration, her absence from the Pathé scene must result – as it does in ‘Moses in the Bullrushes’ – from the prioritising of the display of maternal delight at the expense of even the modest narrative development Miriam’s presence would entail. This same contrast is reflected in the respective narratives: the text which accompanies Schnoor’s illustration includes references to the intervention of Miriam and finally Jocheved, whereas Pathé’s text is concerned only with the film’s tighter narrative focus: Pharaoh’s daughter comes out of the bath, her maidens rush around her. Suddenly, the young princess sees, drifting over the clear water, a small cradle in which a baby sleeps peacefully. The maids clamber down the rocky shore and bring the baby to their mistress, who wakes and reaches out his tiny arms. The daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt comes to save a baby Israelite, doomed to death by the king who ordered that all the male children of the race be thrown into the water. This child was Moses.32

Like British Gaumont’s earlier Moses in the Bullrushes, this first scene of Pathé’s Moïse is clearly focused on the narrative moment captured in the French intertitle: ‘Moïse sauvé des eaux’. Without the footage necessary to 32

Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé, supplement August 1905 (author translation).

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contextualise this moment, the Pathé director, like his anonymous British Gaumont counterpart, eschews story in favour of the spectacle of the baby saved – a theme which will resurface in subsequent treatments of the Moses tradition in the silent cinema. A second intertitle, ‘Le Buisson ardent’, introduces the viewer to the next episode from Pathé’s Vie de Moïse: the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–4:17). The action begins with a small flock of sheep entering the foreground from the lower right of the frame and then disappearing behind the foliage and the large rock thanks to the prodding of Moses, who follows closely behind. Just before disappearing himself, Moses pauses, turns and then slowly retraces his steps, lifting his hand to his ear, indicating to the viewer that he has heard something which they have not. On the one hand, the gesture effectively reinforces the limitations of the silent medium, yet within the narrative itself it manages (perhaps quite unintentionally) to capture a fundamental aspect of the biblical presentation of Moses within the wider narrative: namely, that Moses is a man who hears the voice of God, in a way in which others do not. Just as Pathé’s Moses reaches the foreground at the right of the frame, the vegetation is obscured by a puff of smoke and the foliage bursts into ‘flames’ courtesy of several strips of fabric ingeniously blown from below by a fan. Already startled, Moses is even more surprised when, thanks to the early cinematic technique of multiple exposure,33 an angel dressed in white appears above the flames, framed by the large black rock on the left (Figure 2.1). With the angel pointing directly at him, Moses drops to one knee and finds to his further surprise that the staff in his hand has become a snake thanks to yet another piece of early cinematic trickery. Dropping the snake in the sand, Moses steps back and – having bowed as the angel points at him yet again – turns toward the background and follows his sheep behind the bush, exiting behind the rock to the left of the frame. While the scene of the burning bush would eventually achieve an iconic status in later cinematic renditions of the life of Moses, its depiction here for the first time signals Pathé’s embrace of a quite different sort of spectacle than that found in the opening scene. In terms of the wider narrative, the passage portrayed in this scene constitutes the ‘Calling of Moses’,34 yet in keeping with the Western pictorial tradition (and indeed probably for this very reason) Pathé prefers the intertitle of ‘The Burning Bush’ with its focus on the iconic symbol of 33

34

After an initial take in which certain parts of the set are draped with a black cloth, the film stock is rewound and re-exposed in order to capture a second moving image which is superimposed over the blacked-out portion of the background. For a useful discussion of the ‘call narratives’ of Moses in Exodus see F. Wimmer, ‘Tradition Reinterpreted in Ex. 6:2–7:7’, Augustinianum 7 (1967), 405–18.

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Figure 2.1 The burning bush, La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905).

the scene. Yet on closer inspection the biblical account of the episode itself may be seen to invite the sort of treatment afforded it by Pathé: And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. (Exodus 3:2–3 KJV)35

While the audible divine voice will shortly take centre stage within the ancient narrative, the initial stimulus for Moses’ distraction from the flocks is the sight of not merely an angel of the LORD, but an angel which appears within a bush, which is, moreover, alight. One can hardly think of a more apt example of narrative spectacle given that this visual display is evidently intended for the expressed purpose of capturing and holding Moses’ attention – that is, ‘diverting’ him, in the fullest sense of the word. It is, furthermore, the sustained and therefore inexplicable character of the spectacle which Moses sees (v. 2: ‘it was not consumed’) that in turn prompts his decision to ‘look at this great sight’ (v. 3). 35

In the most popular French translation of the Bible of the nineteenth century, that of Sacy, Moses insists on turning aside to see ‘cette merveille que je vois’ (Exode: 3:3): ‘this wonder that I see’.

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Figure 2.2 The Burning Bush (Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, 1851).

That this ‘great sight’ is the focal point of Schnoor’s depiction of this scene is not surprising, nor is the influence of Schnoor (Figure 2.2) again on this second Pathé scene. In both still and moving pictures, the spectacle of the bush dominates the left-hand portion of the frame, overshadowing Moses, who occupies the lower right quadrant; while the Pathé film will not shy away from representing God himself on Mount Sinai, here it resists Schnoor’s curious interpolation of the divine figure into the scene. What is unclear is whether Pathé’s preference for an angel here reflects a conscious correction toward the biblical text (Exodus 3:2) or simply a continuing penchant for angelic figures.36 In either case, Pathé’s following of Schnoor’s 36

The biblical angel from Dan. 6:22 appears (and disappears) in Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (1904), while extra-biblical angels accompany Samson on his ascent heavenward in Samson et Dalila (1902) and in Zecca’s Passion et Vie de N.S.J.C., an angel is supplied in the scene of Christ’s agony in the Garden.

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literal, figural interpretation even extends to the reproduction of the pointed/pointing gesture – a visual encoding of the verbal message (Exodus 3:7–10) which will require Moses to return to Egypt. That Pathé’s angel rises from the bush itself and gestures repeatedly and emphatically allows the cinematic scene to arguably transcend and eclipse Schnoor’s still depiction – however vivid – of the sending of Moses. Ill-equipped to relate the lengthy discussion between God and Moses which follows in Exodus Chapters 3 and 4, Pathé’s scene prefers to focus on the changing of the staff into the snake – the first of three miraculous signs offered to Moses in response to his fear that he will not be believed on his return to the Hebrews. While the ‘advantages’ of Pathé’s moving pictures over Schnoor’s still image are perhaps less obvious in the depiction of the burning bush itself, they are more clear in the miraculous signs which follow. For whatever reason, Schnoor chooses not to depict the narrative moment in which the staff is transformed into the snake – perhaps halfway through the process for maximum effect. By contrast, Pathé’s Moïse exploits the cinema’s capacity for realising the miraculous by employing a cinematic truc37 to transform the staff into a live snake before the eyes of the viewers and Moses, who models for the audience the appropriate astonishment. That this Pathé scene does not include the wonder of the leprous hand (Exodus 3:6–7) – despite it being mentioned in Pathé’s catalogue description of the scene38 – may be explained in part by the lack of film footage at the director’s disposal, but also perhaps by the more limited visual appeal of the healing of the leprous hand. Limitations of scene length may also explain in part why Pathé’s Moïse passes directly from the burning bush (Exodus 3) to a depiction of the parting of the sea (Exodus 14:10–31). Like the Höritz Passion film, which moved from the birth of Moses to the giving of the manna, Pathé’s Moïse omits any account of Moses’ return to Egypt, the plagues which precipitate the Exodus or the Passover which marks it. However, if, as we have suggested, the narrative supplied in the Pathé catalogue was intended to

37

38

As Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 62–3, points out, such transformations could be effected by either stopping the camera and replacing one object with another before continuing the shot, or by allowing the film to roll during the substitution and then dropping these same frames in the editing process. In either case, the illusion depends on – and may be compromised by the absence of – a directorial concern for continuity of space and action. For trick cutting in the films of George Méliès see P. Jenn, ‘Le Cinéma selon George Méliès’, in M. Malthete-Méliès (ed.), Méliès et la naissance du spectacle cinématographique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), pp. 143–6. Bousquet, Catalogue, Pathé, supplement August 1905: ‘And the hand of Moses, suddenly numb and stiff, then became flexible’ (author translation).

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be read before or during the showing of ‘Le Passage de la Mer Rouge’, it suggests Pathé’s awareness of the need to contextualise the scene: Moses having obtained from Pharaoh the freedom of the Israelites in bondage, led them by night, guided by a pillar of fire, to camp on the shores of the Red Sea. But Pharaoh having repented of letting the Hebrews leave, launches his soldiers in pursuit. But Moses performed a miracle.39

In an effort to supply a narrative context for the scene of the parting of the sea, Pathé introduces it with an extremely concise summary (as above) of what has transpired since Moses’ encounter with the burning bush in the previous tableau. Like some of the earliest depictions of this scene (cf. the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore), Schnoor’s illustration focuses on the moment when the sea returns to overwhelm the Egyptians, yet his accompanying narrative references the episode as a whole, including Miriam and her part in the proceedings (Exodus 15:20–1). By contrast, Pathé’s moving pictures of the scene are very much focused on the fact that, as the Pathé catalogue suggests, ‘Moses performed a miracle’. In the Pathé scene itself, we find the Israelites with Moses at the water’s edge, the sea in the foreground and a painted desert scene in the background. A couple of Israelites make abortive efforts to wade into the water but are dissuaded both by the spray of the ‘sea’, which is splashed on them from outside the frame, and by Moses, who motions for them to return to the shore. Climbing onto a rocky promontory which stands at the water’s edge to the right of the frame, Moses then motions for the people to kneel and, after crossing his arms in front of him, spreads them wide and appeals to the heavens. With a great sweep of his arms upwards, Moses parts the sea, the miracle marked by a prolonged flash of white created by scratching several frames heavily.40 Following these frames, we see Moses holding his hands aloft, and then shortly thereafter the Israelites rise to their feet and solemnly process toward the foreground between the painted flats of tempestuous waves which now stand to either side of the frame. As the last of the Israelite men, women, children and donkeys exit the lower left of the frame, Moses climbs down off the promontory and, with his arms still raised, looks backwards anxiously as he follows the people. As Moses exits, Pharaoh’s soldiers appear from where the Israelites had come, entering from the upper left of the frame. While the first Egyptian appears to continue 39 40

Ibid. As is sometimes the case with productions of this vintage, the special effect here involves a compromise of continuity, with several actors appearing in quite different positions before the ‘miracle’ than they do after it.

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straight on and exits frame right as if failing to notice the parted sea, others follow in the footsteps of the Israelites, rushing forward towards the camera and kneeling in the foreground to draw their bows. Unlike the parting of the sea, the return of the waters is not marked with a visual effect. Instead, the audience is offered a view of Pharaoh’s army overwhelmed by the sea. From a slightly elevated position, the camera is trained on a stretch of water shot either on location or perhaps in the studio pool.41 Bedraggled cavalry enter from the upper left of the frame and move through the water diagonally across the frame to exit bottom right, followed by a steady stream of foot soldiers doing their best to look as if they are drowning.42 The significance of this sequence within the film is indicated first by the fact that, whereas the previous two scenes occupy only thirty seconds each, ‘Le Passage de la Mer Rouge’ is nearly three times longer (1:30). It is, moreover, the only sequence within the film to which the director devotes not merely one, but two distinct shots, as described above. While the centrality of the Mosaic miracle is clear from the sequence itself and the accompanying narrative offered by the catalogue, it is worth considering why the parting of the sea was included by Pathé – especially given that the sequence of the plagues (Exodus Chapters 5–13) might also have supplied an abundance of spectacle. On the one hand, the inclusion of episodes such as the gift of the manna (as we will soon see) may suggest that the parting of the sea’s typological significance (see above, Chapter 1) had not yet vanished entirely from cultural memory. Significant too, perhaps, is the fact that the parting of the sea serves as the climactic ‘wonder’ in the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, signalling the end of the captivity and serving to introduce the desert wanderings which will form the backdrop for the remaining three episodes of Pathé’s La Vie de Moïse. Most significant of all, however, is the potential for cinematic spectacle offered by the parting of the sea, realised by Pathé with great effect over the course of the two shots. The fourth intertitle, ‘Les Hébreux au désert’, introduces a tableau in which Moses stands front and centre in the frame while the Israelites are strewn across the foreground, apparently faint with hunger. As Moses kneels and raises his hands to the heavens in prayer,43 manna begins to fall. Roused by the arrival of the manna, the Israelites immediately look to 41 42 43

Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 163 suggests the latter; the light and the colour and quality of the water may suggest the former. The fact that Pharaoh’s army thus appears to be moving in a quite different direction (exiting lower right) than the Israelites (exiting lower left) does not seem to have worried the director. While the clasping of the hands indicates this, the movement of the mouth is also visible to the viewer even though the sound is absent.

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Moses, who rises to his feet and with a sweeping gesture of the arm invites them to partake. It is not long, however, before the still prostrate Israelites begin to clutch their throats, silently signalling their thirst both to the audience and to Moses, who has continued his prayers. In response, Moses takes up the staff which lies against the rock, raising it toward the latter, which then obliges by furnishing a waterfall which gradually grows from a trickle to a torrent. With yet another gesture, Moses invites the Israelites to drink, which they do without hesitation, rising to their feet and rushing to the pool into which the water has fallen. While this scene evidently draws on the biblical narratives immediately following the crossing of the sea (Exodus 16–17), yet again the Pathé catalogue narrative explicates the connection between the two episodes: From the banks of the Red Sea, Moses led his people to Mount Horeb. Provisions were exhausted and they began to feel hunger. Before the entreaties of his sons, God let fall to earth a thick layer of tiny seeds like sand. It was manna from heaven. The Hebrews were fed by it until they entered the promised land. Then, when his followers [Fr. ‘disciples’] were thirsty, Moses struck the rock of Horeb with his staff and brought forth an abundant spring which quenched the thirst of the exiles.44

The Pathé narrative not only confirms the characterisation of Moses as a pious intercessor for his people, but also – by using the term ‘disciples’ – hints at the rationale for the depiction of the manna and the water, rather than for instance the provision of quail found also in Exodus 16. As we have already seen, the earlier Höritz film’s representation of the ‘Giving of the Manna’ reflects this scene’s place in the antecedent medieval Passion play tradition and its typological significance in foreshadowing the giving of the bread/body in the Eucharist.45 While the film’s inclusion of this scene is thus hardly surprising, the Pathé catalogue narrative’s reference to the ‘disciples’ of Moses – and by analogy, Jesus – suggests that the bringing of ‘Water from the Rock’ too reflects the typological pedigree of this scene as reflected in the medieval dramatic and pictorial tradition.46 That both the manna and water are included within the Pathé scene seems to confirm its dependence on Schnoor, whose illustration likewise portrays both the gathering of the manna

44 45

46

Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé, supplement August 1905 (author translation). In John 6:31–58, Jesus identifies himself as the bread of heaven, which is analogous but inevitably superior to the manna supplied in the wilderness. See Tintoretto’s marvellous The Miracle of Manna (1577) and Nicholas Poussin, The Gathering of Manna (c.1640). See Chapter 1, n. 15.

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(to the left) and the water from the rock (in the centre).47 Rather than being restricted to the simultaneous depiction of multiple narrative episodes on a single canvas,48 Pathé’s scene offers the viewer the sequence of first manna (ch.16) and then water (ch.17) found in the biblical narrative. Yet the omission of the journey from the wilderness of Sin to Rephidim (Exodus 17:1) and the resulting compression of the two episodes into a single scene in Pathé’s La Vie de Moïse, signals again the priority of display and the depiction of the spectacle of the supernatural. The fact that in both the case of the manna and the water, this spectacle is facilitated not by cinematic tricks – whether in-camera or post-production – but by theatrical ones reflects the continuing influence of stagecraft in the early cinema and detracts not at all from the intended effect. Curiously, at the end of the scene, as the people drink and Moses kneels to pray once more, a man on horseback appears unannounced in the background, entering the frame from the right, peering and then gesturing towards the left of the frame and presumably beyond it. It is quite possible that this final enigmatic action of the scene is meant to point toward the battle with the Amalekites which follows in the biblical text (Exodus 17:8–16) though not in the Pathé film nor in the narrative found in the catalogue. Yet, in the absence of the Amalekite scene or even a passing reference to it, the appearance of the mysterious horseman serves no narrative purpose and functions as pure, if modest spectacle. As the next intertitle, ‘Sur le Mont Sinaï’, suggests, the fifth tableau offers the audience a view of Moses on the mountain receiving the stone tablets. As the initially dense fog or mist begins to dissipate, we see a painted background to the left of the frame depicting distant mountains, while the rocky slope constructed in the foreground climbs toward a large stone face in the middle ground in the upper right of the frame. Ranged in a row against the rock face are five winged angels dressed in white, four of whom raise trumpets to their lips while the one in the centre holds a branch aloft.49 After several moments, the angels lower their instruments, signalling the end of their silent fanfare, and disappear as the mist and fog return. As they do, Moses enters the frame from the lower left and picks his way through the boulders, climbing towards the crag where the angels had stood. Falling 47

48 49

In drawing upon Deut. 8:3’s interpretation of the episode as teaching that ‘man does not live by bread alone but by every word which comes from the mouth of God’, Schnoor may (but need not necessarily) be alluding to Matthew 4:4. For a recent discussion of the renaissance of continuous narrative, see Lew Andrews, Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Comparison of the angels with those found in Schnoor’s depiction of the ‘Giving of the Law’ supports the suggestion that the director was familiar with nineteenth-century depictions of this scene.

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on his knees, Moses is soon rewarded with the superimposed appearance of not only the stone tablets but God himself, also in white robes but distinguished from the angels by a halo, fulsome white beard and the absence of wings. Stepping forward towards Moses, God gestures first toward the heavens and then in the direction of the tablets, at which point Moses leans back in astonishment, before both God and the tablets vanish into thin air. The narrative of Pathé’s catalogue again effects the transition between the wilderness and the giving of the Law, but also reflects the prominence of the trumpets in the scene: In the third month after their departure from Egypt, the Israelites encamped in the Sinai desert. This is where Moses ascended the mountain of the Lord among the roar of thunder, among the blasts of celestial trumpets. At daybreak on the third day Moses saw the Lord appear who then gave him His commandments.50

Pathé’s penchant for angels appearing and disappearing is evident in earlier Old Testament efforts and indeed in Zecca’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, but the influence of Schnoor here is reflected in the celestial trumpets drawn directly from Schnoor’s illustration, which includes the same trumpets in the hands of the angels which surround God.51 Evidently taking his cue from their repeated mention in the biblical text (Exodus 19:13, 16, 19; 20:18),52 Schnoor’s accompanying narrative explicates the trumpets and their clarion call as symbolic of the divine revelation of the Word, which in the context of Sinai, is to be identified with the Law.53 While it is not impossible that some showings of La Vie de Moïse were accompanied by music, the film nevertheless follows Schnoor’s attempt to represent the aural aspects of the text (the divine voice and associated heavenly sounds) by means of visual spectacle. As we will see, DeMille will eventually devise a means of presenting the verbal spectacle of Sinai without diegetical sound, but it is not surprising that Pathé’s initial effort evidently draws iconographic inspiration from the medium of Bible illustration in an attempt to make cinematically visible what is narratively audible. Thus, yet again, in this earliest of cinematic depictions, the giving of the Law is represented in terms of pious spectacle at the expense of any attempt to develop the story. 50 51 52

53

Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé, supplement August 1905 (author translation). Further evidence of the visual influence of Schnoor’s illustration on the Pathé scene is furnished by the similarity of the design of the tablets of the Law. E.g. ‘On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled’ (Exo. 19:16 (NRSV)). J. Schnoor von Carolsfeld, Die Bibel in Bildern (Leipzig, 1851).

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Pathé’s short film, La Vie de Moïse, concludes with ‘L’Adoration du Veau d’Or’, drawn from Exodus 32. On the lower slopes of Sinai, we see the Israelites lounging and making merry around a small white calf in the centre of the foreground. No sooner has one of the men beckoned, goblet in hand, than maidens begin to appear from behind the tent in the lower right of the frame. While the rest continue to drink, the women lay wreaths and garlands with great ceremony round the pillar on which the calf stands and then proceed to dance in a circle around the calf, arms aloft, for several seconds before ending with a pose for the camera. As in the Western pictorial tradition (see especially Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf), the biblical mention of dancing (Exodus 32:19), eating, drinking and revelry (Exodus 32:6) licenses Pathé’s portrayal of the spectacle of the ancient feast and especially that of women dancing.54 As Abel has observed, the spectacle of dance featured prominently in Gaumont’s production between 1900 and 1902 and also found a place in Pathé films of the period.55 Thus it is not surprising that in a scene boasting relatively few cinematic trucs, a troupe of dancers might serve as a suitable ‘divertissement’. However, the fact that the dancers’ final address to the audience bears a striking resemblance to the one which appears in Pathé’s Samson et Dalila suggests the need to locate such displays within the context of the evolving biblical genre. While the fact that the dancers are, in these contexts, women rather than men may well reflect the tradition of dance performance in nineteenth-century France,56 the prominence of dancing women in scenes of ‘oriental’ feasting is intimately bound up with the discourse of the (foreign/oriental) woman as seductress.57 As we will see, apart from the spectacle which they supply, Pathé’s foregrounding of women in the idolatry of the golden calf will anticipate the further development of female characterisation in this scene at the hands of DeMille in 1923. With the worship of the calf well progressed, Moses makes his entrance, descending from the mountain, tablets in hand, to stand at the top of the slope in the centre of the frame. Having leaped to their feet, the Israelites are quickly made to bow in obeisance or shame by a sweeping gesture from 54 55 56 57

See for instance Pathé’s Le Festin de Balthazar (1904) and Samson et Dalila (1902). Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 78. On the relationship between vaudeville performance and the cinema, see R. C. Allen, Vaudeville and Film: 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Arno Press, 1980). This discourse is reflected pre-eminently in the figure of Salomé and the Dance of the Seven Veils. For the depiction of Salomé and dance in the nineteenth century see T. Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 23ff. For discussion of the ‘Salomania’ which emerged in 1907–8, see A. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915 (Jefferson: MacFarland, 2004) pp. 107ff.

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Moses and as he walks down the slope toward the calf, the Israelites recoil from him in fear. Arriving at the statue, Moses raises the tablets above his head and brings them crashing down on the calf, shattering both in the process. In depicting the consequences of the Israelite idolatry, the peculiarity and complexity of the biblical narrative (Exodus 32:20) – in which the calf is burned and ground into dust for the Israelites to drink – is abandoned in favour of the simultaneous destruction of tablets of the Law and the calf with its amplification of the spectacle of (righteous) violence. Moses then points upwards toward the mountain, admonishing the people, who stand, chastened, before beginning to trudge up the slope and out the right of the frame. As they do, Moses stops one of them and gestures toward the ground in front of him, at which point the man kneels, bows his head, clasps his hands and begs for mercy. In full view of the exiting Hebrews, Moses waves away the man’s pleas and steps back from him, only for the man to clutch at his cloak. Moses steps back again and, having been warned against coming closer, the man collapses at the foot of the column which supported the calf. While a familiarity with the biblical narrative of Exodus 32 allows for an identification of Moses’ supplicant as his brother Aaron, there is nothing within the introductory intertitle or the scene itself to allow for this identification or the motivation for his agonised petitioning of Moses. This suggests again the probability that Pathé’s catalogue narrative (or something similar) was intended to be read during or before the showing of the scene: The people, however, not seeing Moses descending the mountain, compelled his brother Aaron to fashion them a god formed of gold jewelry. A golden calf was their symbolic idol, around which they drank and danced. Moses suddenly appeared, trembling with anger at their impiety. He broke the tablets of the law by overthrowing the Golden Calf. The Israelites fled in fear; only Aaron remains, begging, pleading for the mercy of his brother, prostrate and trembling before this majestic anger.58

While the spectacle of dance, drink and destruction evidently requires little by way of introduction, the beginning of the scene in medias res clearly requires an explanation of Aaron’s role in the debacle and its ramifications. Moses’ commissioning of the Levite slaughter of their fellow Israelites (Exodus 32:27–8) is passed over by Pathé in favour of a melodramatic elaboration of Moses’ brief exchange with Aaron (32:21–2) with its emphasis

58

Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé, supplement August 1905 (author translation).

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Figure 2.3 The glorification of Moses, La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905).

on the spectacle of Aaron’s penitence and Moses’ anger. As with the destruction of the calf, here again the simple display of Mosaic indignation is preferred to the biblical narrative’s more complex consequence and its inevitable complicating of Moses’ characterisation. This impulse accords entirely with the depiction of Moses in the final action of the film, where Moses retreats still further toward the left of the frame until he stands in front of the rug hanging against the rock face. Once there, he himself becomes the object of the final spectacle, the sudden white glow and the emitting of rays from the transfixed Moses, apparently signalling his glorification. (Figure 2.3) Aware of the need for La Vie de Moïse to end as all mortal lives do, but unable to portray Moses’ biblical death (Deut. 34:5), Pathé prefers here a solution adopted in its other biblical films of this period. In Vincent LorantHeilbronn’s Joseph vendu par ses frères (Pathé-Frères, 1904), the life of Joseph is told in five scenes, the last of which – ‘Triomphe de Joseph’ – is noted by the catalogue as including an ‘Apothéose’. Rather than indicating Joseph’s deification, Pathé’s use of ‘apotheosis’ indicates the visualising of Joseph’s

‘See this great sight’: spectacle and miracle

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glorification – a treatment well known from the tradition of Western art.59 Such an exalted end is also accorded to Samson in Zecca’s earlier Samson et Dalila (1902), where the piety of Samson’s martyrdom in destroying the Temple of Dagon is confirmed by his ascent to heaven contrived by means of mechanical stagecraft. The glorious end of Moses is not marked within the narrative of Pathé’s catalogue, but it is signalled at the end of La Vie de Moïse itself by the film’s imitation of the visual tradition, not of Schnoor but of Doré – whose ‘Moses coming down from Mount Sinai’ invites comparison (Figure 2.4). While Pathé’s apotheosis of Moses supplies La Vie de Moïse with a sense of narrative closure, it is also worth noting the means by which it does so. Much more than merely an apotheosis, the final shot of a glorified Moses is a kind of iconisation which serves as a marker of the silent cinema’s intention to evoke the iconography (and attendant pious devotion) of the pictorial tradition, particularly as it is found in the illustrated bibles at the end of the nineteenth century. In the end, whether audience awareness of the wider Exodus narrative was simply assumed by Pathé, or whether – as seems far more likely – La Vie de Moïse was intended to be accompanied by a live lecture of the sort supplied in the Pathé catalogue, there can be little doubt that the six tableaux of the film fall some way short of constituting a coherent cinematic narrative on their own.60 Rather, much as Pathé’s other early biblical films did, La Vie de Moïse offered early audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, not so much a fully fledged ‘life of Moses’ as rather a parade of the ‘wonders’ of Moses. As we have seen, these wonders range from the gendered display of Pharaoh’s daughter at her bath and the dancing women of the golden calf, to the spectacle of the supernatural seen in: the bush which is not consumed, the staff which becomes a snake, the water which is first miraculously parted and then miraculously provided, along with the manna from heaven and the divine Law. Characteristic of Pathé in this early period, the sense of spectacle is also enhanced by the appearance (out of thin air) of the inhabitants of heaven, including the winged angels and indeed God himself. That Pathé insisted on making a spectacle of Moses, 59 60

See, for example, H. P. L’Orange, Apotheosis in Ancient Portraiture (Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, 1947). That the ‘récit’ for La Vie de Moïse functioned in this manner is supported by the presence of a ‘legend’ for Joseph vendu par ses frères (1904) in a catalogue of Pathé’s American distributor in 1904/5, George Kleine Optical Company (NJDH). Under representative images of the six tableaux of the film, a present-tense English-language narrative closely corresponding to the action in the scene is provided and was almost certainly intended to serve as an accompanying lecture. The French catalogue’s description of the final scene in terms of Joseph’s apotheosis (see above) becomes, in the Kleine catalogue, merely his ‘Exaltation’.

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Figure 2.4 Moses Coming Down from Mount Sinai (Gustave Doré, 1866).

Samson and Daniel themselves in the final scenes of these films not only confirms the influence of antecedent artistic traditions, it also suggests that, in the first years of the twentieth century, Pathé’s biblical films were conceived, promoted and received in terms of the spectacle – rather than the story – of scripture.

chapter 3

‘That my wonders may be multiplied’: Blackton and elaboration

By the time films such as La Vie de Moïse were being made, Charles Pathé’s ambitions for his firm had long since extended beyond the borders of the Third Republic. To counteract the rampant and illegal ‘duping’ of his films by American distributors, Pathé notified Edison in 1904 of his intention to establish an office in New York, in imitation of the international ‘agency’ model which was serving the French automobile industry so well at the time.1 Established in August of 1904 under the management of J. A. Berst, the New York agency formed a beachhead from which the Pathé brand could mount its assault on the American market in earnest. Undercutting the prices offered by American distributors and counteracting the threat of duping by releasing its films in America before the domestic French market, Pathé was soon the largest supplier of films in America, selling on average seventy-five copies of six or more prints per week.2 With George Kleine Optical also appointed as agents in Chicago and now selling genuine Pathé prints, including its biblical films, Pathé’s very significant licensed output was augmented further by the continued selling of ‘dupes’ of its films by certain firms.3 Thus, while Berst’s Pathe Cinematographe Co. was offering the licensed film under its anglicised title, ‘The Life of Moses’, at the bargain price of $62.88 in The New York Clipper,4 the less scrupulous Siegmund Lubin was still marketing the same film at an even lower price in his catalogue of 1907 without any indication of its Pathé provenance. Notwithstanding the promotional hyperbole typical of Lubin’s publications, his catalogue’s efforts to persuade American exhibitors of the virtues 1 3

4

Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 23. 2 Abel, The Red Rooster, p. 53. Pathé’s biblical films were being sold under English titles (Solomon’s Judgement, The Prodigal Son, Joseph Sold by His Brothers and Samson and Delilah) in George Kleine Optical Company catalogues as early as 1903. NYC (16 September 1905), p. 752.

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of Moses repay closer attention.5 First, while we have already seen that La Vie de Moïse ends prematurely at Sinai, Lubin’s catalogue insists that the film nevertheless shows ‘the whole life of Moses’. It is, of course, not impossible that someone at Lubin was unacquainted with the latter career of Moses (as recounted in Numbers and Deuteronomy but omitted in the Pathé film). However, in light of the fact that the six scenes of the film are listed, the enduring American interest in Moses as ‘Law-giver’ suggests rather that – in the popular imagination, if not the biblical narrative – the scene of the giving of the Law really did serve as both the functional climax and effective conclusion of the cinematic life of Moses. That Pathé’s Moïse does not in fact deliver ‘the ten commandments to the people’ at all, but breaks them on the golden calf is, of course, conveniently omitted by Lubin’s advertisment. The Lubin catalogue’s foregrounding of the familiarity of the story (‘too well-known to be repeated’) may well serve to excuse the catalogue’s omission of a plot summary but was undoubtedly also included to persuade exhibitors of the film’s intelligibility to audiences. Yet, this very same audience familiarity with the story requires Lubin’s further comment that the film is the ‘truest possible reproduction’ – a notion which reflects a discourse of interpretive fidelity even though the truth of the film’s reproduction is, according to the catalogue, apparently facilitated by ‘its photography being superb’. Finally, the catalogue’s superimposing of the cross on the quartet of stills from the duped ‘Life of Moses’ offers a visual illustration of the catalogue’s comparison of the Life of Moses with Lubin’s own ‘world-known Life and Passion of Christ’. Such a comparison with and promotion of Lubin’s Passion – nine years on from its original release – reflects the crucial role of the cinematic life of Christ in the development of the biblical film on American screens. That it was not Lubin’s own version which he was now promoting, but Pathé’s new and allconquering La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) reflects Lubin’s corporate travails but also the French firm’s American triumphs. The rapid expansion of Pathé in America both benefited from and was in turn fuelled by the transformation of the American industry as moving pictures themselves began to move out from the fairgrounds and amusement parks and increasingly dominate the programmes of theatres which had previously been devoted to vaudeville and other entertainments. While the pace of this transformation must have varied from region to region, already by 1907 nickelodeons in the Greater New York area were apparently seeing audiences of between three and four hundred thousand each day and weekly 5

Lubin Catalogue, 1907 (NJDH).

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totals in the vicinity of three million.6 Moreover, the suggestion that major urban centres such as New York made up only 10 per cent of the moving picture shows being screened each week across the country hints at the sheer scale of the market which Pathé and other firms were creating and servicing.7 While, as we have seen, various biblical films including La Vie de Moïse had featured prominently in Pathé’s exports to American screens from 1902, it was the firm’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1902–5; 1907) which audiences would most strongly identify with the company. With its distinctive colour, Zecca’s first edition (1902) and Nonguet’s subsequent supplements (1904–5) were distributed widely within the vaudeville circuits of the American eastern seaboard and beyond, concluding the 1904 summer season at a Kansas City amusement park, for instance, and running several weeks at the People’s Theatre in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, around Christmas and New Year.8 Such a proliferation was, of course, aided and abetted by George Kleine Optical Company’s aggressive marketing of the film (above all other versions) to exhibitors working these circuits and beyond.9 The subsequent American release of Zecca’s new and improved version of La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ in 1907 renewed audience and exhibitor interest in the subject to a remarkable extent, both in small centres like Des Moines – where it was held over for a second week and seen by 13,000 people – and in large cities like Detroit, whose Royal Theatre held the film over for thirteen weeks, during which time it claimed that the film had been viewed by no fewer than a quarter of a million customers. If this and the other evidence of the film’s popularity marshalled by Richard Abel is indicative, there seems little reason to doubt that in the years of 1907 and 1908 Pathé’s biblical ‘blockbuster’, La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, was the most viewed picture in America10 and that the film’s success at the box office was sustained to some degree until at least 1910.11 That such profits could be generated by so unimpeachable a subject cannot have escaped the attention of Vitagraph, as Pathé’s chief American rival was to embark on a concerted effort to enhance the cultural reputation of its own pictures and, with them, the industry as a whole. While the origins of the America Vitagraph Company belong to the final years of the nineteenth century, it was only in the early autumn of 1905 that the firm resumed selling productions to the trade following the reversal of 6 10 11

7 8 9 Abel, Red Rooster Scare, pp. 63–4. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 43–4. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 60–1. ‘The Pathé Passion Play undimmed in popularity’, MPW 29 (October 1910), 988.

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the legal decisions which had originally gone in Edison’s favour against the company.12 Facilitated by the simultaneous emergence of the ‘nickelodeon’ across America, Vitagraph soon became the most important domestic production company in America13 and thus, arguably, the one on which the industry’s reputation most depended. In the first decade of the twentieth century such a reputation was still far from secure, with various civic and ecclesial authorities remaining highly suspicious that the films of Vitagraph and others were appealing to the baser desires of the impressionable underclasses, rather than contributing to the greater good. In response, Vitagraph began to release a variety of ‘Quality’ films based on historical subjects (e.g. The Life of George Washington, The Life of Napoleon (both 1909)) and the classical literary canon including Francesca di Rimini (1907) (from Canto v of Dante’s Divine Comedy) as well as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Richard III (all 1908) and King Lear (1909).14 In seeking to respond to the industry’s critics within the ecclesial establishment, however, Vitagraph turned also to the Church’s scriptures themselves in its sourcing of ‘Quality’ subjects suitable for adaptation. Given the historical primacy of the cinematic Life of Christ in the development of the biblical film on American soil, Vitagraph’s decision to instead focus its initial attentions largely on Old Testament narratives (e.g. Saul and David (1909)) is worthy of reflection. While, as we have seen, the appearance of the European Höritz Passion play in America before the turn of the century had prompted a veritable cinematic stampede as producers on both sides of the Atlantic moved quickly to exploit audience interest in the subject, the release of Zecca’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) seems to have prompted a quite opposite reaction. Indeed, after Zecca’s film no major American production of a life of Christ would appear before 1912, the year in which From the Manger to the Cross was released by Kalem and Star of Bethlehem by Thanhouser. The most plausible explanation for this lacuna is of course that Pathé’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) was so successful and its distribution so extensive that neither Vitagraph nor any other firm felt confident that American audiences could be persuaded to purchase tickets for the same subject so soon after so lavish a production. Nevertheless, given the penchant of Vitagraph’s principal director, Stuart Blackton, for literary adaptations and the firm’s desire 12 13 14

For an account of the personalities associated with Vitagraph and an initial filmography see A. Slide, The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1987). C. Musser ‘The American Vitagraph, 1897–1901: Survival and Success in a Competitive Industry’, in J. Fell (ed.), Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 22–66. As argued by Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture.

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to win over its religious detractors, Vitagraph was evidently not about to give up the prospect of mining the rich biblical vein exposed by Pathé’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907). In fact, it is not at all unlikely that Vitagraph’s interest in Old Testament subjects was spurred on by what seemed likely to be Pathé’s own imminent return to them. Given that Zecca’s initial scenes of La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1902) were followed by a series of Old Testament productions beginning with Samson et Dalila (Pathé, 1902–3), Vitagraph’s directors will undoubtedly have observed with interest when the enormous success of Zecca’s second La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) was followed soon after by Pathé’s remake of Samson (1908), this time directed by Albert Capellani. Born in 1874 and trained at the Paris Conservatory, Capellani began his career in the theatre, first as an actor with the Théâtre Libre and then behind the scenes with Firmin Gémier. Recruited by Ferdinand Zecca to Pathé in 1905, Capellani was seconded to direct SCAGL (Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres), the subsidiary set up by Pathé to produce ‘films d’art’ which focused on stage and literary subjects and enlisted the talent of the contemporary Parisian theatre.15 Released just six months before his first film for SCAGL (L’ Arlésienne (September 1908)), Capellani’s Samson marked a significant departure from Pathé’s earlier Old Testament efforts, not least in terms of length: while Zecca’s Samson et Dalila occupied a mere 140 m, six years later Capellani’s Samson filled a full reel (330 m). Some of Capellani’s additional footage is devoted to an enhancement of the set-piece spectacles which had already featured in Zecca’s 1902 film: Samson’s superhuman removal of the Philistine gates is even more impressive, as is the catastrophic destruction of the Temple of Dagon, while the emasculated Samson’s enslavement at the mill is more graphic and his apotheosis even more fully adorned with angels. Yet if the spectacle of Capellani’s Samson is enhanced, the story is even more generously embellished. Rather than beginning in medias res with Samson’s removal of the gate, as Zecca does in 1902, Capellani’s opening scene introduces the hero by means of an abridged version of Judges 13’s annunciation and nativity of Samson, in which – like the Christ child of Zecca’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) – the infant Samson is held up and displayed by his mother for the onlookers’ approval. In addition 15

Under Capellani’s supervision, SCAGL would go on to make Athalie (1910), a film adaptation of Jean Racine’s seventeenth-century play focused on the bloodthirsty daughter of Ahab (2 Kings 11). For more on Capellani, see C. Ford, Albert Capellani, précurseur méconnu (Bois d’Arcy: Service des Archives du Film, 1984).

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to furnishing Samson with an opening scene worthy of the name, Capellani develops the characterisation not only of Samson’s chief Philistine enemy – who reappears in multiple scenes – but also of Delilah, whose seduction and angst following her betrayal of Samson are both entirely absent from Zecca’s earlier version. Amidst the continuing success of Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ in 1908, Samson’s arrival on American screens in August of that year must have suggested to Blackton and his colleagues at Vitagraph that ‘biblical history’ was about to repeat itself, with Samson soon to be followed by other Old Testament subjects from Pathé as before. In fact, following the release of Samson in 1908, Pathé’s next Old Testament picture – another remake, this time of Joseph vendu par ses frères – would not arrive until December, 1909. By this time, both of Pathé’s chief rivals – Gaumont in France and Vitagraph in America – would have begun to produce biblical films which would, in various ways, extend the trajectory of development seen already in Capellani’s Samson. Following his initial production of Salomé in the autumn of 1908,16 Vitagraph’s Stuart Blackton directed three films based on the Hebrew Bible, the first of which – Saul and David – was released at the end of February, 1909. Like Capellani’s Samson, Blackton’s Saul and David was afforded an entire reel by Vitagraph, yet in other respects the two films are very different. The figure of David, neglected by Pathé thus far, had featured for the first time only the year before in Sidney Olcott’s David and Goliath (Kalem, 1908). While the spectacle of violence and the story of David’s unlikely victory made it an obvious subject and one which would feature again when Pathé’s Andréani eventually turned his attention to David in 1910 (David et Goliath), Blackton’s Saul and David has a far wider compass which includes the depiction of David’s felling of Goliath, but also extends far beyond it. Indeed, the killing of Goliath turns out to be one of the few moments in the film where Blackton draws upon the biblical narrative in an uncomplicated way. Yet, even here, in having Goliath felled with David’s stone and beheaded with his own sword off-camera, Blackton foregoes the obvious opportunity to display the spectacle of violence. Moreover, that other moment of violence in the young life of David – the killing of the lion (1 Samuel 17:35) – is in fact utterly transformed in Blackton’s film: instead of killing the lion to deliver a lamb, David kills a

16

It is worth noting that both Vitagraph and Pathé produced their own versions of Wilde’s Salome in 1908 as part of the Salomania which was gripping the entertainment world at the time.

‘That my wonders may be multiplied’: Blackton and elaboration

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tiger to save Michal, who is caught unawares whilst picking flowers in the field. The centrality of Saul’s daughter, with whom David falls in love (‘at first sight’),17 is apparent already in the opening scene when she arrives at the tent of Jesse with her sister Merab and her brother Jonathan to summon David to court to soothe the troubled spirit of their father Saul. The biblical narrative knows of David’s summons (1 Samuel 16:19) but the introduction of Saul’s offspring at this point is a pure invention to facilitate the primary storyline of Blackton’s film, namely, the love affair of David and Michal, signalled at the end of the first scene by the latter’s proffering of a rose to David. The rose, returned by David to Michal in the penultimate scene of the film (some two years later) comes as David pledges his love to Saul’s youngest daughter. When Saul returns to insist that David be given the elder daughter Merab, David storms off in a rage, only returning in the final scene following the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, when he is crowned king and reunited with Michal. Blackton’s development of other characters such as Doeg and Phalti/Paltiel in ways which bear no relation to the biblical narrative further establishes his approach, but it is the radical development of the David–Michal love story which signals the extent of Saul and David’s novelty in relation to what had gone before, not least Capellani’s Samson, which we have seen to be a modest elaboration of the tableaux of spectacles offered previously by Pathé. That Saul and David’s unusual elaboration was not derived from the biblical tradition is obvious. That it did not originate with Blackton himself is also clear when the film is compared with a stageplay which had appeared on the New York stage in 1903 and then around the country in the years that followed. Written by Arnold Reeves and Wright Lorimer, The Shepherd King (1903) supplies Blackton’s film with the principal love story of David and Michal (complete with flowers), the maidservant Adora and the machinations of Doeg, whose love for Merab is as unrequited as hers is for David.18 While the play has David’s deliverance of Michal from the predatory cat merely reported rather than portrayed on stage, Blackton seizes the opportunity to display the spectacle of the scene itself – however unconvincingly. Yet, Blackton follows the play in leaving the viewer to merely imagine the narrative’s greatest spectacle – the giant’s death and his beheading – which takes place out of shot. Indeed, if Blackton’s film fails to make the most of the spectacle of previous 17 18

According to the description of the scene published along with the others by Vitagraph in MPW (27 February 1909), 251. A. Reeves and W. Lorimer, The Shepherd King: A Play in Four Acts and Five Scenes (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: [n.p.], 1903).

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productions, its capacity to tell the story is even more limited. Deprived of the dialogue intertitles which would develop only slowly in the silent cinema and more slowly still in the biblical film, Blackton’s Saul and David lacks entirely the ability to reproduce the dialogue which carries the play. Limited in this way, the film clearly requires a greater degree of audience familiarity with the story it attempts to tell, yet it is precisely this familiarity which is radically compromised by the departures from the biblical narrative as the audience would have known it. Unless permission to use Reeves and Lorimer’s play was privately negotiated and never publicly acknowledged, Vitagraph’s apparently uncredited use of it is surprising, not least, considering the controversy which erupted following Kalem’s unauthorised adaptation of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur in 1907 and the court case which followed. In any case, Blackton’s failure to reproduce in his subsequent biblical films the radical elaboration seen in Saul and David, suggests that the director’s adaptation of the play – credited or otherwise – was not an altogether successful one. In The Judgment of Solomon, Blackton returned to a subject which had previously been seen by viewers on both sides of the Atlantic in Pathé’s Le Jugement de Salomon (1904). In 1 Kings 3:16–28, King Solomon’s judgement is offered in a single scene along with the women’s presentation of their dispute regarding whose child has survived the night. While the Pathé version supplements the women’s telling of the tale before Solomon with a cinematic ‘showing’ of the tragedy of the death of the child and its discovery in an initial scene, the scope of Blackton’s film is more restricted and fails to include a dramatisation of the tragedy itself. Yet the fact that the Vitagraph film is twice the length of the former belies developments of a different sort.19 Indeed, whereas Pathé’s Jugement de Salomon consists of only two tableaux, Blackton is less constrained by the convention of the single-shot tableau. For instance, in the transition from the women’s discovery of the dead child to the court scene of the judgement, Blackton begins with a shot of the approach of Solomon and his retinue to the palace, before cutting to an interior shot of the procession as Solomon approaches and eventually takes his seat on the throne. Blackton then cuts back to the exterior shot of the palace to depict the arrival of a group including the two women and the disputed child. Initially barred from entering by a guard, the group are eventually allowed in by the captain of the guard, who – as the action cuts back to the court room – explains the situation to Solomon as the two women eventually arrive before his throne to plead their case. While 19

Le Jugement de Salomon (60 m), The Judgment of Solomon (121 m).

‘That my wonders may be multiplied’: Blackton and elaboration

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Blackton has, up until this point, offered only a series of long shots without camera movement, the women’s positioning before the throne in this scene is facilitated by a slight pan left. Much more significantly, as the women plead their case, Blackton cuts in to a mid-close-up of the plaintiffs and the king, allowing the viewer a far fuller appreciation of the emotional trauma of the ‘true’ mother and the impassiveness of the mother whose child is already dead. Indeed such is the proximity of the shot that the latter’s stoic insistence that ‘The child is mine!’ may be clearly read on her lips. From one vantage point, the development of Blackton’s Judgment of Solomon over and against Pathé’s earlier treatment of the same subject is not dissimilar to the advances seen in Capellani’s later Samson over Zecca’s earlier Samson et Dalila. Here too, Blackton offers not a radical departure from the structure of the biblical narrative (as we have seen above in his Saul and David ) but rather a fleshing out of the narrative by means of the elaboration of the emotional reactions plausibly implied – or indeed perhaps even demanded – by an attempt to portray the psychological realism of the story. Blackton’s willingness, however, to depart from the conventions of the tableau and to move towards the reduction and variation in shot length and shot distance seen elsewhere in the American cinema foreshadows similar developments in subsequent ‘biblical’ films, including his own.20 Released that same month, Blackton’s Jephthah’s Daughter: A Biblical Tragedy (1909) broke new ground in offering to viewers for the first time the story of the Israelite judge (Judges 11) whose foolish vow to sacrifice the first thing which meets him on his return from battle costs him the life of his illfated daughter. Far shorter than Saul and David, Blackton’s Jephthah’s Daughter is only slightly longer than The Judgment of Solomon and shares much with it in terms of approach. An opening scene in which Jephthah bids fond farewell to his wife and beloved daughter is plausibly implied by Judges 11:29’s notice that Jephthah went out to war against the Ammonites. Having established the emotional bond between the warrior and his women – who are united in their grief at his departure – Jephthah’s Daughter proceeds to hove close to the narrative structure of the biblical

20

For Vitagraph’s leading role in reducing the distance between the camera and the actors between 1907 and 1913 see B. Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983), pp. 106–9. For subsequent discussion of the evolution of style during the ‘transitional’ period of the American silent cinema (1907–13) see C. Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Film-making, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), and Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

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text, with verse 29 also serving to justify a second scene which offers the spectacle of the Israelite troops marching out to war. A third scene depicts the eve of battle and includes a dialogue intertitle – perhaps the first to be found in a biblical film – which reproduces Jephthah’s vow (vv. 30–1) verbatim. A fourth scene briefly portrays the spectacle of Jephthah’s defeat of the Ammonites (vv. 32–3) before the film lingers on the unfolding tragedy, portraying the daughter’s greeting of him on his return (v. 34) in a fifth scene, and Jephthah’s confession of his terrible vow (v. 35) and his daughter’s brave acquiescence (v. 36) in the sixth. In a seventh scene, Blackton dramatises the daughter’s request to bewail her virginity for two months (v. 37) and Jephthah’s agreement (v. 38), highlighting the emotional toll which the daughter’s fate takes on both father and mother. The first shot of the final scene shows the preparation for the sacrifice, while the second shows the burnt offering of the daughter (noted in v. 39 but not described) and – thanks to a cinematic truc – the ascent of the latter’s spirit to heaven (in a manner not unlike Pathé’s apotheosis). Much as in The Judgment of Solomon, the characters of Jephthah’s Daughter offer the depth and range of emotional responses only hinted at in the biblical narrative itself, but increasingly expected by audiences steeped in the melodrama of the early twentieth-century cinema. As we will see, while the overt and – from a modern perspective – overacted emotionalism of such melodrama itself will prove itself worthy of display alongside the traditional species of spectacle cultivated in Vitagraph’s first biblical films, it also contributes to the increasing capacity of the ‘biblical film’ to tell the story of scripture in addition to making a spectacle of it. While Vitagraph’s decision to make yet another biblical film probably suggests that the firm’s initial biblical instalments were not entirely unsuccessful, the distinctiveness of their fifth film, The Life of Moses, also suggests that Blackton’s aims of emulating the success of Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ had not yet been achieved. In his attempt to do so, Blackton proceeded to embark on a production the scale of which far exceeded any of Vitagraph’s earlier ‘Quality’ films or indeed any ‘biblical film’ produced anywhere up to that point. While, as we have seen, the trend toward longer running times on both sides of the Atlantic meant that Vitagraph’s Saul and David (1909) consumed a full reel (300 m) and ‘Quality’ films like Julius Caesar were even allowed two reels (600 m), Vitagraph’s decision to devote a total of 5,000 ft (1,500 m) to its version of The Life of Moses was truly extraordinary. While both Alice Guy’s La Vie de Christ (1906) and Ferdinand Zecca’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) had stretched over multiple reels, only the enduring

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popularity of the life of Christ had heretofore warranted such a significant investment in film footage. It is thus a measure of Vitagraph’s ambitions and their estimation of the market for the film that they were willing to fund a life of Moses which dwarfed even previous cinematic lives of Christ. Indeed, the hope that Vitagraph’s Life of Moses might emulate Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ was made quite explicit in Vitagraph’s promotion of the film to exhibitors. Copy evidently supplied by Vitagraph to the New York Dramatic Mirror and Moving Picture World early in February of 1910 first trumpets the company’s Life of Moses as ‘the greatest event of its kind in motion pictures since the Passion play’.21 A week later advertisements promise exhibitors comparability in terms of attracting audiences, insisting that Moses is: ‘beyond question the peer of “The Passion Play” in drawing power’.22 Indeed, the economic benefit of this comparable drawing power is made even more explicit in the firm’s own publication for exhibitors, the Vitagraph Bulletin: There has been no similar opportunity since The Passion Play, and you cannot fail to recall the vast amount of money that was made from Passion Play exhibitions. The same thing can be done with The Life of Moses. Book a route of churches and halls in towns surrounding your own and give this idea a try . . . Depend on it, there is money in this proposition and the first ones out will gather the cream.23

In their search for audiences and profits, it seems clear that Vitagraph timed Moses’ release to capitalize on the Lenten season, traditionally a quieter time for exhibitors, but one in which churches were more open to religiously appropriate subjects, including especially the Passion play.24 Another point of comparison between Pathé’s Life of Christ and The Life of Moses is Vitagraph’s provision and promotion of a lecture to accompany the film. In contrast to Lubin’s Passion play lecture, which was published by the firm, the lecture for Moses – or at least the first reel of it – appeared the week of the latter’s release in an issue of the Moving Picture World.25 That these lectures were not merely provided but also used is suggested by an advertisement in the same journal a year later which noted that demand had depleted the supply of back issues containing the lectures and that they were now available to exhibitors directly from the Moving Picture World at the ‘nominal price of 10 cents, postage paid’.26 21 22 23 25

MPW (12 February 1910), 220; NYDM (12 February 1910), 17. MPW (19 February 1910), 244; see also NYDM (19 February 1910). VB, 206 (February 15–March 1, 1910). 24 Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 172. MPW (18 December 1909), 886. 26 MPW (22 April 1911), 918.

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If Vitagraph’s ambitions (and distribution practices) for The Life of Moses were, as they seem to be, comparable to Pathé’s earlier life of Christ, it is of course not implausible that Vitagraph’s film might also emulate the approach and especially mode of representation seen in the French firm’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907). Indeed, it has been suggested that while Vitagraph’s quality films were themselves already retrograde in terms of style and mode of representation, The Life of Moses was still more so, principally reflecting the representational practices of the pre-1907 cinema rather than those generally prevalent elsewhere in the cinema at the end of the decade.27 Yet, suggestions that The Life of Moses was stylistically retrograde are complicated by contemporary reception of the film, including one exhibitor’s objection to the film’s ‘modern’ tendency to position the camera closer to the action: It seems to me that some of our manufacturers are abusing the fad of showing facial expressions. It is all right to show facial expression in certain scenes of certain productions . . . [but] . . . To obtain face expressions, the camera is so close that the participants have to be crowded in a very small space.28

The fact that this exhibitor felt The Life of Moses to lack the long shot so characteristic of the tableau mode of representation associated with the Passion and other biblical films of the pre-1907 cinema suggests the value of attending to Vitagraph’s film itself in light of the development of the ‘biblical film’ and specifically the representation of Moses. Just as Blackton’s Judgment of Solomon had remade a subject taken up originally by Pathé, so The Life of Moses took up the subject, and indeed the title, of Pathé’s Vie de Moïse, which we have seen was released on both sides of the Atlantic some five years earlier. With fully five reels now at Blackton’s disposal, however, his Moses towered above a Pathé production which had occupied less than half a reel – as may be seen when the contents and coverage of the two films are compared. It is immediately apparent that Blackton’s five reels go well beyond what Pathé’s Vie de Moïse was able to offer in terms of depicting ‘the whole life of Moses’ (as Lubin had claimed for the latter). Thus, Blackton’s film not only effectively sets the narrative scene for the finding of Moses (as we shall see below), but also extends the filmic narrative of his life beyond the episode at

27 28

Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 163; See also Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). MPW (26 February 1910), 303–4.

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Sinai. In doing so, he draws upon episodes from the later career of Moses before concluding with a depiction of the death of Moses – rather than merely resorting to his premature ‘glorification’ at Mount Sinai. Yet, for all that the Blackton film radically expands the structure of La Vie de Moïse, it by no means does so beyond recognition. Unsurprisingly the six tableaux of the French film all feature in Blackton’s film with only the third reel lacking at least one of the scenes of the Pathé film (see Figure 3.1). Indeed, the Blackton film parallels La Vie de Moïse in depicting the manna from heaven prior to the water from the rock and in preferring these miracles to the provision of the quail. While this falls short of proof that Blackton was acquainted with the earlier French film, it is far from unlikely that he had viewed it, given Pathé’s American distribution, the recycling of similar biblical subjects and the fact that Lubin was still duping and selling La Vie de Moïse in 1907, barely two years before the release of Vitagraph’s five-reel Moses. Even as the fifth and final reel of The Life of Moses was released, Vitagraph was already actively promoting the exhibition of all five reels in a single showing and apparently with some success.29 However, while the showing of all five reels may have suited church meetings called for the purpose and at which The Life of Moses was the ‘feature’ attraction, the exhibitors and proprietors of regular movie houses were ill-equipped and disinclined to accommodate such ‘feature’-length releases at a time when films running even to a full reel were very exceptional.30 Thus, it is not surprising that while Vitagraph had evidently already shot all five reels of The Life of Moses by mid-November,31 the firm chose to initially release it one reel at a time, at one- and two-week intervals, between 12 December 1909 and 19 February 1910.32 Such a practice accommodated the demands of the movie houses, even as it facilitated Vitagraph’s overarching and eventual goal of emulating the multi-reel Passion play in securing new audiences in churches and other temporary venues. Yet the release of the film as a series also created challenges for exhibitors. Despite being sold separately in five reels, The Life of Moses lacked the textual flexibility of the Passion plays, which exhibitors might ‘finish’ themselves by purchasing and showing any and all combinations of individual scenes sold separately. Nevetheless, 29

30 31 32

This practice appears as early as April 1910, when the Plumb Opera House appears to have screened all five reels at 3.00, 7.30 and 9.00 p.m. on Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 April. See Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 164. See the useful discussion of the development of film length in relation to the emergence of the feature in Bowser, Transformation, pp. 195–8. MPW (13 November 1909), 678: ‘All five reels are now in hand.’ The second reel was released early in 1910 (4 January) with the third and fourth following on 25 January and 12 February respectively.

74 Biblical passage 1:11–14 1:16–22 2:1–4 2:5–10 2:11–14 2:15 2:16–21 3:1–4:23 4:27–31 7:1–11:10 12:1–28 12:31–37; 13:18–22 14:1–15:21 16 15:22–27 17:8–13 17:15–16 20:1–18 32:1–35 34 40:29–32 40; Leviticus 8 Numbers 14 Deuteronomy 34

The Bible on Silent Film La Vie de Moïse (1905)

The Life of Moses (1909–10)

Tableau 1

Reel/Part 1 The oppression of the Hebrews Decree to kill Hebrew children Hiding of Moses Finding of Moses

Finding of Moses (vv. 5–6) Tableau 2

Burning Bush Tableau 3

The Passage through the Sea Tableau 4 Manna from heaven and Water from the rock

Tableau 5 The giving of the Law Tableau 6 The Golden Calf

Reel/Part 2 Moses kills an Egyptian Flight to Midian Marriage to Zipporah Burning Bush Moses’ return to Egypt Reel/Part 3 The Plagues The Passover Departure from Egypt Reel/Part 4 The Passage through the Sea Manna from heaven Water from the rock The battle with the Amalekites Moses offers a sacrifice Reel/Part 5 The giving of the Law The Golden Calf The second giving of the Law Consecration of the Tabernacle Ordaining of Aaron as Priest Israel too afraid to enter Land Moses views land and dies.

Figure 3.1 A synoptic comparison of the biblical narrative, La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905) and The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10).

analysis of the film itself below will suggest that Vitagraph was aware of concerns regarding the autonomy and intelligibility of individual reels for audience members who had not witnessed earlier ones. While space does not permit a full treatment of The Life of Moses, Vitagraph’s approach and its place within the evolution of the ‘biblical film’ will be evident from the following shot analysis of the first reel and its

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accompanying lecture.33 Following an initial title announcing ‘A Grand Biblical Presentation of the Life of Moses’, the film unfolds as follows: Title: (0:10) ‘Pharaoh finds that his slaves, the Children of Israel, increase in spite of hardship. He fears them.’ As we have seen, Pathé’s Vie de Moïse depicts the scene of Pharaoh’s daughter finding and retrieving Moses from the Nile, introduced with the summary intertitle ‘Moses saved from the waters’. Blackton’s more extensive opening intertitle – ‘Pharaoh finds that his slaves, the Children of Israel, increase in spite of hardship. He fears them.’ – reflects the developing role of intertitles in the narrativisation of the cinema and frames the viewers’ expectation by telling them what they will be shown.34 Shot 1 (1:20) The opening shot depicts scenes of Egyptian taskmasters physically abusing the Hebrews with whips as they work. Blackton’s use of the long shot here facilitates a tableau of sadistic violence interrupted only by the arrival of the chariot of Pharaoh pulled by two steeds (also abused by their driver) and followed by a phalanx of soldiers. While the accompanying lecture explains that Pharaoh is satisfied with the building work, it also confirms the intertitle’s initial indication of his fear. This in turn prompts a renewal (and, according to the lecture, intensification)35 of the orgy of abuse as Pharaoh’s chariot sweeps out of the frame. In offering a visualisation of Exodus 1:11–14, the opening scene establishes the personal sadism of Pharaoh and offers the spectacle of Egypt’s visual splendour and the violence by which it has been achieved. Title (0:05) ‘Pharaoh plans the death of all male Hebrew Children.’ Shot 2 (2:32) The longest single shot of the first reel pictures Pharaoh in his palace, commissioning a scribe to write a decree, which he then signs. While Pharaoh sits pondering the ‘dangers to the state from the Israelites’, his daughter and her retinue of female maidservants enter the courtroom, offering the spectacle of feminine finery, but also diverting the Pharaoh 33 34

35

MPW (18 December 1909), 886. Unless otherwise noted, in the discussion which follows, quoted text is drawn from this lecture. All transitions between shots take the form of straight cuts. The conservative use of titles in Blackton’s film is evident both in the limited number (seven) (cf. the eleven titles in Vitagraph’s earlier ‘Quality’ film Napoleon, Man of Destiny (1909)) and the absence of true ‘dialogue’ titles which were beginning to appear in very limited numbers in the American cinema during this period. See Salt, Film Style, pp. 107–8. MPW (18 December 1909), 886. The lecture –‘urges the taskmasters to afflict them with new burdens’ – is evidently an attempt to interpret the biblical narrative’s recollection of the increasing level of abuse. Compare Exodus 1:12 ASV: ‘But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.’

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from his murderous thoughts with ‘cheerful words coming from a sweet and gentle heart’. When messengers arrive to inform the Pharaoh that ‘the court is assembled and ready to receive him’ in the throne room, his parting from his daughter is evidently sweet sorrow. More dependent than most on the accompanying lecture, this shot embellishes the biblical narrative at this point by introducing Pharaoh’s daughter – a primary character in the filmic narrative – and establishing the intimacy of her relationship with her father, the Pharaoh. Title (0:05): ‘The decree is read at Pharaoh’s court.’ Shot 3 (1:16) The visual splendour of the palace is confirmed as the action moves to the throne room, where Pharaoh takes his throne and is presented with a variety of decrees, some of which meet with his satisfaction and some of which do not. As the edict damning the Hebrew children is about to be read out by the chief scribe, the retinue of Pharaoh’s daughter enters the court and bows to the Pharaoh. Title (0:08): ‘Pharaoh’s Decree. Every male child that is to the Hebrews shall be cast into the river.’ That this intertitle functions differently than those offered thus far is marked by the black lettering on white background, often used to signal the text of a letter, and here to represent the decree being read. In taking this form, the title functions less as a conventional intertitle used to divide and introduce scenes and more as a precursor of the dialogue intertitle which would become increasingly common in the silent cinema. Shot 4 (0:50) Positioned in the foreground to the lower right of the frame, Pharaoh’s daughter models, at closer proximity to the camera, the appropriate response to the decree: ‘its fearful cruelty fills [her] heart with horror and compassion’. Throwing herself at Pharaoh’s feet, his daughter signals for her entourage to lend their voices to hers, but clearly to no avail (Figure 3.2). Having established the intimacy of Pharaoh’s relationship to his daughter in the previous scene, the innovation of Pharaoh’s refusal to hear his daughter’s plea for compassion signals the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart – a motif which is in full evidence later in the narratives of the plagues (Exodus 7ff.) but not present at this point in the biblical tradition. Shot 5 (0:53) The scene shifts without notice to an interior shot of ‘a cottage by the Nile’ and ‘the tender infant Moses . . . an object of the caressing love of his sister’. At her mother’s request, the sister takes up a pitcher and departs the cottage in search of water. Whereas the biblical narrative introduces Moses

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Figure 3.2 Pharaoh’s daughter and her maids plead for Pharaoh to spare the Hebrew infants. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10).

by referencing the Levite ancestry of father and mother (Exodus 2:1), Blackton’s film prefers to present a domestic idyll from which the father is absent. In introducing this novel scene, the film serves to foreground the happy alliance of mother and daughter and the latter’s bond to her brother which will prove crucial for the resolution of the narrative tension which now begins to build. In terms of the narrative to follow, the daughter’s willingness to fulfil the admittedly unremarkable request of her mother to fetch some water also foreshadows her willingness to heed her mother in the difficult situation to come. Given that it will be water which will ultimately preserve Moses, it is more than a little ironic that it is in fetching water that Miriam learns of the danger. Title (0:05): ‘Moses’ Sister learns of Pharaoh’s decree.’ The biblical text offers no indication of when or by what means the family of Moses learns of the danger to the child. However, the foregrounding of Moses’ sister at this point reflects her prominence in the filmic narrative to come – and may be contrasted with the biblical insistence on the primary agency of the mother throughout the narrative. Shot 6 (1:00)

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Figure 3.3 Miriam aids a woman as her child is taken by an Egyptian, The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10).

The action cuts to an exterior scene of a well – the spectacle of which is confirmed by the accompanying lecture: ‘The well was the great center of life in the East, and is to this day, and a busy throng passes to and fro.’ Further evidence is supplied by the length of time this throng is depicted – fully twenty-three seconds – before Moses’ sister appears from the deep space of the set and makes her way to the well. No sooner has she begun to draw water than a woman with a child in her arms runs past her into the foreground in a panic, hotly pursued by a soldier. Alarmed by what she is seeing and hearing, Miriam is drawn into the foreground, allowing the audience a closer view as the woman informs Miriam of what is transpiring, and the latter attempts to help the woman hold on to the child (Figure 3.3). As the latter is torn from her arms by the soldier, who then exits frame left, Miriam comforts the bereft mother, who has subsequently collapsed on the ground. When Miriam eventually rises to her feet, her positioning in the foreground allows the viewer to read her lips with crystal clarity – ‘Moses!’ – before she exits via the background from where she had entered. The absence of the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah and their resistance to Pharaoh’s attempt to eliminate the Hebrew infants (Exodus 1:15–22)

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highlights the distinctiveness of Blackton’s treatment. The Hebrew women, who fail to feature beyond Exodus 1, are evidently displaced by the expansion of the role of the Egyptian women – Pharaoh’s daughter and her maids – who serve the comparable narrative function: to oppose Pharaoh’s murderous plans. The melodrama of the child wrenched from his mother’s arms not only facilitates the foreshadowing of Miriam’s impending support for her own overwrought mother, it also allows for the mounting of a particular species of spectacle. While Herod’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (Matthew 2:16–18) had appeared previously in films of the Passion (e.g. Hollaman-Eaves and Lubin, both 1898), Zecca’s portrayal of the scene in his 1907 Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ included live babies being torn from women’s arms and swung about in the most remarkable and seemingly hazardous fashion. While neither the scene from Matthew nor Exodus offers any detail, the melodrama of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms was evidently as irresistible to Blackton in The Life of Moses, as it was to Zecca in his life of Christ. Shot 7 (0:56) The scene is again the cottage, where Moses’ mother is making bread as Miriam returns through the door. Closing the curtain at the door behind her, Miriam pulls her mother into the foreground, which allows for a functional mid-close-up of both their anxiety and eventually their piety. With animated gestures Miriam explains the situation, which in turn produces sufficient panic in her mother for her to suggest that they kneel and pray. Even as she prays, the mother receives an answer in the form of an idea which prompts her to rise, check the door and then prepare the basket, with which they then depart. With Miriam learning of the decree, this shot is required to hand the initiative back to Moses’ mother. Unable, for obvious reasons, to accommodate the hiding of Moses ‘for three months’ (Exodus 2:2), Blackton’s film maintains the narrative momentum by having Moses deposited in the Nile immediately following Miriam’s witnessing of the decree’s devastating effects first-hand. Shot 8 (0:45) Arriving at the river bank (the first external shot), the two women set the basket down, with the Nile in the background. Miriam decants the baby onto the ground and keeps watch while the mother, ‘as the Bible tells the story, daubs the cradle with pitch and slime to protect it against the water’. The accompanying lecture for the first time explicitly reinforces the discourse of fidelity to the authoritative text, identifying its own story with the story of Scripture. At her mother’s request, Miriam exits the right of the frame. Shot 9 (0:11) While the straight cut and entry from frame left allows Miriam’s entry to match her exit, the reversion to a studio location is disclosed by an error of

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continuity: the river (courtesy a studio tank) is now between the camera and Miriam, rather than behind her, as in the previous shot. As she enters the shot, the camera tilts slowly downwards, allowing the palace visible in the upper left corner of the frame to slide out of view as the river in the foreground slides into the bottom of the frame in the foreground. The narrative purpose of the tilt becomes clear, when Miriam, having spotted a suitable location for the launch of the basket, looks towards the upper left of the frame and points towards the palace initially seen by the viewer and then circles her head with her finger to indicate that she ‘has seen the daughter of Pharaoh and her maids coming toward the river’s bank’ – rather than merely the palace, as might otherwise have been implied by the pictures alone. Miriam finally exits frame left to return to her mother and Moses. The narrative significance of this shot in initiating the convergence of the Hebrew and Egyptian storylines is marked, not only by the movement of the camera – in contrast to the fixed camera used thus far – but also by the brevity of the shot in comparison with those thus far which, by contrast, range in length from 45 to 152 seconds. Miriam’s scouting of a suitable location not only allows for the preparation of the basket out of shot, but also allows for the further development of Miriam’s role as her mother’s accomplice. Whereas in the biblical narrative the reader is left to assume that Moses’ discovery by Pharaoh’s daughter is a happy and/or divine coincidence, in Blackton’s film it is Miriam’s contrivance. Shot 10 (0:23) In another short shot, Miriam returns to the location scene on the river bank as her mother finishes wrapping up the baby in the basket. Having explained what she has found to her grateful mother, Miriam helps her carry the basket from whence Miriam has just come, exiting frame right. Title (0:05): ‘Pharaoh’s Daughter Finds Moses in the Bullrushes.’ While the scene which follows is more self-explanatory than most and thus hardly in need of such a title, the provision of an intertitle here reflects, in all likelihood, the iconic and autonomous nature of this scene within the visual tradition of both pictorial and theatrical art and the moving pictures. Shot 11 (0:44) Miriam and Jocheved enter the frame with the basket and deposit their ‘precious burden in the water, hoping that the child would attract the attention of the princess and move her pity’. As we have seen in previous treatments of this scene, the lecture seeks both to shape the expectations of the viewer and confirm an appropriate response. Kissing Miriam, who then positions herself to the left of the frame to watch over Moses, the distraught mother exits frame left, whence she has come. As she does so, the camera tilts upward, allowing the palace (on a painted background) to come into

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Figure 3.4 Jocheved’s anguished prayer. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10).

view in the upper left corner along with Pharaoh’s daughter and her retinue, who now make their entrance and descend the stairs, picking flowers. While this shot technically runs to forty-four seconds, the tilt of the camera marks a functional transition between two discrete narrative moments – the exit of Moses’ mother and the entry of Pharaoh’s daughter. Thus that this scene appears longer than any other in this sequence should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it contains both the end of the hiding of Moses (twenty-six seconds) and the beginning of the finding of Moses (eighteen seconds) – foreshadowed here by the finding of flowers by Pharaoh’s maids, as they lead their mistress to her bath. Shot 12 (0:20) Blackton cuts at this point to a shot of Miriam’s mother, passing where she had prepared the basket, on her way back to the cottage. In contrast to previous shots, where actor movement into the foreground facilitates closer proximity to the camera, here, for the first time, Blackton offers a mid-close-up cut in shot of Jocheved’s anguished prayers for the safety of Moses (Figure 3.4). Whereas the plain white background of a similar cut-in of the Ecce Homo in Zecca’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) signals its

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emblematic, extra-diegetical function, Blackton’s mid-close-up of Moses’ mother on the river bank is clearly intended to illustrate action which is parallel to the discovery of Moses in the reeds. That this is so is indicated by the accompanying lecture, which, despite the portrayal of only one instance, insists that ‘Again and again on her way home, the mother turns in agony.’ In offering the audience a closer view of this agony, Blackton acts to make a spectacle of maternal anguish and piety – amply displayed by the overwrought supplications of the mother who sinks to her knees in prayer. Without precedent in the biblical narrative itself, the interpolation of a scene of maternal anxiety and piety at this point in the film reflects the intention to render an emotionally fully fledged filmic narrative. Final evidence of the narrative intention of Blackton’s cross-cutting is the resumption of shot 11 following a straight cut: Shot 13 (0:11) In picking another flower for her mistress near the water’s edge, a maid finds the basket and signals the Princess, who rushes down to see for herself, followed by the rest of the women. Whereas in the Pathé version of the scene and the biblical narrative itself, it is Pharaoh’s daughter who sees the basket, here the artifice of the search for flowers leads naturally to the maidservant’s discovery of Moses. Moreover, the composition of the scene dictates Blackton’s preference for the movement of Pharaoh’s daughter and her retinue to the basket (à la British Gaumont’s Moses in the Bullrushes (1903)) rather than having the basket drift toward the women already in situ (as in Pathé’s Vie de Moïse (1905)). Shot 14 (0:21) For the second time in the film, Blackton’s camera is moved closer to capture the expression of emotion of a female protagonist – not now the anguish of the birth mother, but the excitement of the soon-to-be adoptive one (Figure 3.5). At such proximity, both the delight and affection of Pharaoh’s daughter and the full-blooded wail of the child are fully visible to the viewer and are together the focus of the shot. Yet, if, in this respect, Blackton’s scene shares much with earlier versions, his inclusion of Miriam to the left of a frame (only her arm is visible above) already crowded with Egyptian maidservants also marks Blackton’s situating of the scene within the wider narrative. Encouraged by the biblical narrative’s note that ‘his sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him’ (Exodus 2:4), Blackton’s Miriam responds as one might expect given that the plan to secure Moses’ royal adoption is her own. Invisible to the Egyptians, Miriam’s ‘beating heart’ and her eventual delight at their discovery and embrace of Moses are fully visible to the viewer and models for the audience an appropriate interpretation of the moving pictures themselves. While these images themselves make clear the feelings of

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Figure 3.5 Miriam (frame left) observes as Pharaoh’s daughter and her maidservants delight in the discovery of Moses. The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10).

Pharaoh’s daughter, the accompanying lecture nevertheless echoes the biblical text in noting that she was ‘moved to pity’ (Exodus 2:6) and in identifying Moses as a child of the Hebrews. In further noting that Pharaoh’s daughter also said, ‘I will adopt it for my own’, the lecture goes beyond the explicit information provided by the biblical text, in order to make clear Miriam’s assumption (Exodus 2:7) that the princess intends to keep the baby. Shot 15 (0:45) From the mid-close-up of the previous shot, Blackton’s camera retreats to a long shot, in order to allow Miriam to appear from her hiding place as Pharaoh’s daughter, and her servants stand cooing over the baby in her arms. Bowing low, Miriam engages the Princess in conversation, the subject of which (namely: volunteering Moses’ mother as nursemaid from Exodus 2:7–8) would be unclear apart from audience familiarity or the accompanying lecture. As Miriam departs with the Princess’s permission to bring her mother, the lecture also explains that Pharaoh’s daughter names ‘the baby Moses, which means drawn out of the water’ – an event which Exodus locates after ‘the baby had grown up’, but which the film includes here evidently due to its textual proximity (2:10) and its appropriateness at this point. Pharaoh’s

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daughter, now with babe in arms, makes her way back up the steps, in the direction of the palace which reappears in the upper left corner of the frame thanks to the camera’s slow tilt upward. Her retinue follows. Shot 16 (0:51) The action returns again to the cottage by the Nile where Moses’ mother, just in the door, ‘is plunged into deepest grief ’ – an emotion which she proceeds to express by tearing her clothes and collapsing on the ground – not now in prayer but in hopelessness. The impression of continuing parallel action is aided by the delay in the arrival of Miriam, who then arrives through the door to tell her that she has good news. As in shot 7, the women make their way to the foreground of the shot, allowing for the viewer’s fuller appreciation of the mother’s relief at the news relayed by her daughter’s miming (and the accompanying lecture) that the Princess will allow Jocheved to nurse the child. Both women then prepare to leave, clearly destined for a reunion with Moses which will, the viewer is informed, happen at ‘the palace of Pharaoh’. Title (0:05): ‘Moses is adopted by Pharoah’s [sic] Daughter.’ The fact that the intertitle focuses on Pharaoh’s daughter, rather than Moses’ birth mother hints that the final scene will involve more than merely passing Moses over into his mother’s care. Shot 17 (1:03) Pharaoh’s daughter enters the palace with her retinue, one of whom carries the foundling Moses. Pharaoh’s daughter gestures for servants to bring ‘a royal chair and a pillow from her own couch for a fitting bed for the child’. Taking Moses in her own arms, Pharaoh’s daughter and her retinue move again into the foreground as she coos over and cuddles the baby. While the audience expects the arrival of Moses’ mother (and sister), the sudden appearance of Pharaoh from frame left offers a potential complication of the denouement. Given his initial refusal to repeal his decree of death for the Hebrew children, the spectre of Pharaoh’s hardness of heart threatening the adoption of Moses momentarily arises, yet the accompanying lecture defuses any real suspense by noting only that ‘at first [author’s emphasis] he is loath to give his consent to the adoption of the child so marvellously rescued from death.’ A pause noted in the lecture allows for Pharaoh’s consultation with his chief scribe before he yields to his daughter’s wishes. The daughter’s display of the naked infant aloft before the assembled court is apparently indicative of his official adoption – for the court officials and her retinue immediately bow to the floor. Given the impression made by Pathé’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907) on Vitagraph, this sequence has almost certainly been influenced by Zecca’s nativity scene, in which Mary holds the naked Christ child

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aloft, prompting those assembled to likewise bow in adoration and worship. While it is not altogether impossible – though rather less likely – that Blackton may here be attempting to allude to the tradition of divinisation of Egyptian royalty,36 the reappearance of this ritual in Moses more likely reflects Blackton’s attempt to highlight the sanctity of the figure of Moses as comparable (though presumably not equal) to Christ. The placing of Moses on the bed requested by Pharaoh’s daughter is immediately followed by the arrival of Moses’ mother and sister – with the former’s ‘natural anxiety to clasp her child to her heart . . . wisely restrained by the daughter’. In addition to confirming the film’s characterisation of Miriam, the lecture also supplies a lightly amended form of the Pharaoh’s daughter’s commission (Exodus 2:9): ‘Go, take the child and nurse him and I will give thee wages.’37 As Pharaoh and his daughter and the courtiers exit the room to the right of the frame, the two women proceed to shower the infant Moses with affection ‘in a very ecstasy of joy and thanksgiving to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’. At first glance, the assumption that Blackton’s Life of Moses reflects a reversion to a pre-1908 tableau mode of representation might seem to be warranted.38 It is true that the majority of the shots in the first reel reflect the longer shot distance found less and less in the American cinema generally at this time, and in most of the shots the camera is static. Moreover, with the average shot running to slightly more than fifty seconds, the first reel of The Life of Moses certainly appears to resist the trend toward shorter shot lengths increasingly characteristic of the evolution of Griffith’s style at this time and indeed Vitagraph’s earlier ‘Quality’ films.39 Yet, closer attention to the reel itself complicates the assumption of stylistic reversion, particularly as we will see, in relation to the genre of the biblical film itself. Thus, while long shots predominate, the theatrical convention of actor movement into the foreground – absent in films such as La Vie de Moïse – appears frequently in 36 37

38

39

G. Hart, Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 125–6. Unlike some later biblical films, Vitagraph’s The Life of Moses did not unduly archaise its biblical language, as can be seen by its slight modernising of the most modern standard English translation available at the time: ‘Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages’ (Exodus 2:9 ASV, 1901). See also Bowser, Transformation, p. 255. For a comparison of the film with Pathé’s Vie de Moïse, facilitated by a curious hybrid print held by the BFI which incorporates both of them, see D. Shepherd, ‘Prolonging’. For the reduction in average shot length in the American cinema and specifically Griffith see Salt, Film Style, pp. 128–9, who notes Vitagraph’s earlier one-reel ‘Quality’ film Napoleon, Man of Destiny (1909) has fully twenty-seven shots and eleven intertitles. The first reel of The Life of Moses with its seventeen shots and seven intertitles is cut noticeably more slowly.

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Figure 3.6 Shot length, reel 1, The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10).

Blackton’s Life of Moses as a means of moving the action closer to the viewer. The actual reduction of the shot distance itself to mid-close-up which we began to see in Blackton’s earlier biblical films in 1909 reappears in Moses – and does so, it is worth noting – in order to depict, on one hand, the anguish of Moses’ birth mother (shot 12) and on the other, the delight of his adoptive mother (shot 14). So too while the camera remains largely static throughout the first reel, it is worth noting that Blackton deploys a modest tilt in shot 9, as Miriam recognises Pharaoh’s palace and the opportunity for Moses’ salvation and again in shot 11 when the action pivots from the hiding of Moses to the arrival of the one from the palace who will find him. That these shots are to be found in a sequence which discloses the narrative climax of Blackton’s first reel is confirmed by observations regarding the length of shot across the reel (Figure 3.6). Thus, while the average length of all seventeen shots of the first reel is more than fifty seconds,40 it is worth noting that shots 1–8 and 15–17 average over sixty-six seconds while shots 9–14 are three times shorter, averaging only 21.6.41 This quicker cutting toward the middle of the reel facilitates a sense of growing dramatic tension, including the depiction of parallel action focused on Moses’ mother and Pharaoh’s daughter. 40

41

While the representation of shot length in seconds lacks the precision of footage (due to variable cranking speeds), it conveys the relative shot lengths equally well and has been preferred here as a better means of reflecting a probable viewing experience. This calculation reflects the full length of shot 11 (forty-four seconds) even though the virtual transition of the tilt creates, in effect, two shots of twenty-five and nineteen seconds respectively.

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It will be evident from the above discussion that in his depiction of the spectacle of the violence against the Hebrews and the visual splendour of the Egyptian court Blackton both begins and ends the first reel of The Life of Moses in a mode which is strongly reminiscent of the tableau style most characteristic of biblical films before 1907–8 on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet it is also clear that at the heart of the reel Blackton increasingly abandons this style in favour of quicker cutting, camera movement and a reduction in shot distance, all in the service of elaborating the cinematic melodrama of the saving of a Hebrew child from an Egyptian Pharaoh by an unlikely alliance of both Hebrew and Egyptian women. What is finally evident too is that, while the elaboration of this narrative permits Blackton to abandon particular manifestations of spectacle (e.g. cinematic trucs and long-shot tableaux of earlier cinematic eras), it offers him the opportunity to confront viewers with a different species of spectacle, namely, a proximate portrait of the range and depth of human emotion in response to the joys and traumas of la vie quotidienne. While the first reel of The Life of Moses is not introduced with an intertitle of its own, Blackton’s intention to supply each reel with its own narrative shape is suggested not only by the rising action, climax and denouement of reel one (de facto: Moïse sauvé des eaux), but also by the subsequent introduction of the four remaining reels with titles of their own. Thus, whereas Pathé’s La Vie de Moïse’s second tableau is the burning bush, the second reel of Blackton’s The Life of Moses is presented as ‘Forty Years in the Land of Midian’. This is an apt description of a reel which begins with Moses’ flight from Egypt and ends with his return, but has for its focus not so much the burning bush as his relationship with a daughter of Midian, as will be seen below. Covering material passed over entirely by the earlier French film, Blackton’s third reel is entitled ‘The Plagues of Egypt and the Deliverance of the Hebrews’, capitalizing in this case on the dramatic tension created by the conflict between the irresistible force of Moses’ God and the unmoveable object of Pharaoh, culminating in the relenting of the latter and the resulting Exodus of Israel. The sandwiching of the scenes of the manna from heaven and the water from the rock between the destruction of the Egyptians in the sea on one hand and the defeat of the Amalekites on the other facilitates a narrative shape which makes Vitagraph’s title for the fourth reel – ‘The Victory of Israel’ – fully intelligible. Lastly whereas the episodes of the giving of the Law and the golden calf – tableaux 5 and 6 in the Pathé film – both feature in the fifth and final reel of Blackton’s film, the latter’s title, ‘The Promised Land’, reflects the subordination of these two scenes to subsequent episodes which culminate in Moses’ viewing the land to which he has led the people.

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If Vitagraph’s efforts in imparting a sense of narrative structure to reel one are also to be seen in those which follow, Blackton’s basic approach in the first reel is also carried through into the others. Thus, in developing the filmic narrative of ‘Forty Years in the Land of Midian’, the display of traditional forms of spectacle is interwoven with, but largely subordinated to, Blackton’s visual exegesis of Exodus 2:11–4:31. Yet the selectiveness of this exegesis is amply demonstrated by Blackton’s treatment of the burning bush scene. Given that Vitagraph’s silent Moses is no better equipped than its Pathé predecessor to convey the conversation between Moses and God which occupies the bulk of Chapters 3 and 4, it is hardly surprising that Blackton’s depiction too focuses on the spectacle of the bush exploding into flame. The fact, however, that Blackton’s scene lasts only forty seconds and is thus slightly shorter even than Pathé’s earlier version of the same scene hints at Blackton’s changed priorities. Blackton’s compression of the burning bush and the remainder of Chapters 3 and 4 – fully 72 per cent of Exodus 2:11–4:31 – into a mere 5 per cent of the second reel’s running time, demonstrates his comparative lack of interest in the spectacle of the burning bush and also allows him the remainder of the reel to develop narrative interests which are signposted, but not elaborated upon, in the ancient text. In sharp contrast to Blackton’s compression of Exodus 3–4, fully 50 per cent of Blackton’s second reel is devoted to the depiction of Moses’ killing of the Egyptian and escape from Egypt – a sequence of events which makes up less than 10 per cent of the ancient narrative (Exodus 2:11–15) adapted in Blackton’s second reel. Indeed, not all of even these five verses find a place within Blackton’s film, for the Hebrews’ challenging of Moses (vv. 13–14) is passed over to allow Blackton’s film to fill what were perceived to be two ‘gaps’ in the narrative. First, how Pharaoh comes to learn of Moses’ murder of the Egyptian is explained rather daringly, by having the Hebrew witnesses testify at length to an Egyptian overseer. Second, how Moses manages to escape into the desert (Exodus 2:15) is portrayed at even greater length, in a scene in which Moses seeks refuge in a Hebrew home where a man assists him in donning a disguise while the man’s wife, in parallel action, fetches water from the river for Moses’ journey. This tendency toward filmic expansion of the biblical narrative is also found in Blackton’s allocating of more than 30 per cent of the second reel to Moses’ encounter with and marriage to Zipporah – an episode in which Exodus’ interest is exhausted after only seven verses (Exodus 2:15c–21). More specifically, Blackton concedes to modern romantic sentiment by translating the laconic biblical account (‘and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter’ (Exodus 2:21 KJV) into a sequence in which Moses is besotted, Zipporah swoons and the son-in-law enjoys a meal with his new family.

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If, as we have suggested, Blackton offers a significant elaboration and expansion of the ancient narrative – often at precisely those moments where the latter is most reserved and the modern viewer most interested – it is worth noting that his film does not depart from the basic structure of the ancient narrative. As in the biblical films which immediately preceded it, Blackton fleshes out the biblical narrative by means of an elaboration of the emotional reactions plausibly implied – or indeed perhaps even demanded – by modern notions of psychological and narrative realism. Indeed, such an analysis of the filmic text fits very well with an explication of the film’s approach in a promotional ‘review’ of the second reel: the ‘Life of Moses’ [is] a graphic reproduction of the main events in that Biblical Personage’s career which corresponds closely in the minds of those who have attended Sunday school and church. The skeleton of the story is gathered from the first two chapters of the Book of Exodus and it has been elaborated upon with considerable fidelity to the customs and costumes of ancient Egypt, as handed down to us through the long ages.42

Vitagraph’s insistence that the ‘skeleton’ of the story is derived from the sacred text itself is evidently designed to reassure exhibitors of the film’s basic fidelity to the familiar text, even if this skeleton has (of necessity) been fleshed out in the film. Yet even in admitting this filmic enfleshing, Vitagraph invokes the notion of interpretive faithfulness in reassuring potential purchasers that the narrative structure itself ‘has been elaborated upon with considerable fidelity’, not now to the ancient text, but to received knowledge of the ancient world including the ‘customs and costumes of ancient Egypt’. Vitagraph’s intent to produce and promote a faithful elaboration of the Life of Moses on film, of the sort which would conform to the collective impression possessed by those who ‘attended Sunday school and church’, evidently encouraged it to enlist a recognisably religious figure to assist and promote the production, namely the Rev. Madison C. Peters, DD.43 Ordained in the Reformed Church and having subsequently ministered in Presbyterian and Baptist Church circles in the New York area, Rev. Peters was ideally placed to judge the expectations of traditional churchgoers in America’s largest film market. Dubbing himself the ‘People’s Preacher’, Peters apparently embraced an increasingly itinerant ministry, reaching larger audiences by means of lectures and services accompanied by 42 43

Bio (10 March 1910), p. 25. For a fuller discussion of Peters’ involvement in the production of the film see Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, pp. 167–71.

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still and moving pictures, in theatres and other non-ecclesial venues.44 Having already endorsed the Eden Musée’s filmic Passion of Oberammergau some ten years earlier, Peters’ growing enthusiasm for the ability of the new medium of moving pictures to communicate the old message of the Scriptures evidently convinced Vitagraph that they had the right man for the job. Vitagraph’s promotion of Peters’ authorship and direction45 of the film and the extraordinarily prominent position afforded Peters’ name (and doctorate in divinity) on advertisements and even the introductory titles of each of the five reels strongly suggest Vitagraph’s concern to deploy a recognisably religious figure to legitimate and authenticate their adaptation of the sacred text for the purpose of winning new audiences among the religiously interested. In announcing its engagement of Peters some three and a half months before The Life of Moses’ first reel was released, Vitagraph was keen to emphasise Peters’ guaranteeing of the production’s dramatic qualities (‘replete with dramatic action’), but also, and perhaps more importantly, its piousness (‘entirely reverent in spirit’) and its fidelity to the biblical narrative (‘accurate in history’).46 Elsewhere, Vitagraph’s promotional efforts stressed the production’s scriptural tone (‘biblical in character’)47 and its handling of the sacred subject ‘with due respect of its inspired origins’.48 Whether or not such a claim reflects Peters’ own conservative convictions regarding Scripture,49 this use of the term ‘inspired’ undoubtedly reflects theological claims based on the text’s own characterisation of its divine origins (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16) – claims increasingly emphasised by traditional Christian movements in the face of liberalising elements, which raised doubts regarding, for instance, the historical veracity of the miracles which dominate Exodus. Given Vitagraph’s objectives and Peters’ involvement, it is immediately evident that The Life of Moses could not have deviated far from a traditional depiction of the ‘miracles’ as clearly supernatural.50 Indeed that such miracles formed an important part of viewers’ and exhibitors’ expectations is suggested by both the review of the portrayal of the Plagues in Variety and the Vitagraph ‘article’ on the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea which appeared in the Film Index but also in The Bioscope: 44

45 47 49 50

The suggestion (ibid., p. 167) that Peters finally abandoned parish ministry may be complicated by Bush’s advertisement, which suggests that he was associated in some way with Greenhill Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia (MPW (26 February 1910), 304). MPW (28 August 1909), 278. 46 Ibid. MPW (4 December 1909), 819; Bio (10 February 1910), 14. 48 MPW (20 November 1909), 717. For Peters’ belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible see Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 184. As observed eventually by Uricchio and Pearson, ibid., p. 193.

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The latest release deals with a series of miracles in which trick photography serves an effective purpose.51 The entire series of Moses pictures has been marked by an absence of the appearance of ‘fake’ devices and obviously this, the biggest scene of all, must be able to stand up to the closest critical scrutiny. A dozen ways were tried to do it – mechanical, scenic and otherwise – until it was decided that nothing but a real sea of water would suffice to get it across to the spectators.52

On the one hand, the Variety reviewer is happy to acknowledge that the miracles of the Plagues appearing in the Life of Moses are nothing but tricks – cinematic illusions – yet at the same time the reviewer acknowledges and even endorses the effectiveness of such illusions in depicting the spectacle of the supernatural. While Vitagraph’s promotional/editorial content also acknowledges the cinematic illusion of the supernatural, it reassures exhibitors of the absence of ‘fake’ devices in creating the miraculous, thereby underlining its commitment to producing ‘real’ spectacle in The Life of Moses. Indeed, the film is far from short of such efforts, and there can be no denying that techniques such as stop-motion photography, stock tinting, double exposure and frame scratching are all employed very effectively – particularly in reels 3 and 4 – to fulfil the expectation of the spectacle of the supernatural associated with the genre of the biblical film. Yet our analysis of the filmic text itself has suggested that in the context of the evolution of the genre, the more significant contribution of Vitagraph’s Life of Moses lies in its relative subordination of biblical spectacle to biblical story told with a level of cinematic sophistication and narrative sensitivity which was all but unheard of in the silent Bible before 1907. Peters’ own role in the production of this story is highlighted in a thinly veiled ‘editorial’ in The Moving Picture World, which also recounts his part in ensuring the piousness of the production as a whole: Those taking part in the making of the picture could be seen through the weeks in the study of the Bible in order that they might in spirit, enter into what I had outlined in my manuscript story, and it is safe to say that few, if any, pictures which have been put on the market, have been more carefully wrought out and more reverently presented, an old yet ever new and thrilling story.53

Peters’ endorsement acknowledges his own textual intervention and adaptation of the biblical narrative (‘in my manuscript story’), but his noting of the cast’s own ‘study of the Bible’ not only affirms the piousness of those 51 53

Var (5 February 1910). 52 Bio (17 February, 1910), 25; FI (February 1910), 5. Bio (10 February 1910), 15.

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involved, but also reasserts the hermeneutical primacy of the sacred text itself as the spiritual guarantor of the piety of Peters’ production. While there is no way to prove Peters’ authorship of the ‘manuscript story’, there is also no particular reason to doubt the claims, asserted here and elsewhere within the trade press, that he had penned the scenario. If so, there is every likelihood that Peters may also have composed the lecture which Vitagraph published to accompany the film, not least because it was as a writer and presenter of lectures – including one on the subject of his journeys to the Holy Land – that Peters had first made his name.54 In offering his running commentary on The Life of Moses, Peters was, as we have seen above, afforded the opportunity to further the process of Vitagraph’s faithful elaboration begun in the moving pictures themselves. Whilst the mise-enscène and costumes are intended to demonstrate the fidelity of the elaboration to the supposed realia of the ancient world, the accompanying lecture establishes the fidelity of the filmic midrash to the realist expectations and received theological tradition of the intended viewer. Thus, in addition to articulating narrative cause and effect, the lecture’s running commentary frames and/or confirms the viewer’s interpretation of the emotion on display (e.g. ‘its fearful cruelty fills [her] heart with horror and compassion’) but also associates this emotional realism with a particular brand of piousness and a knowledge of the wider theological narrative (e.g. ‘in a very ecstasy of joy and thanksgiving to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’). Much like published commentaries, academic and popular, the lecture accompanying The Life of Moses, in the very act of drawing out meaning, seeks to circumscribe the viewer’s understanding of the visual text and in so doing acts as a further guarantor of the propriety of the film for the audiences Vitagraph intended to win. While the privileged and authoritative position of Vitagraph’s lecture was reinforced by its proprietary status and its publication in the Moving Picture World,55 the autonomy of the visual text of The Life of Moses ensured that once exhibitors had purchased the film, they were free to seek out alternative ‘commentaries’ on Moses. Thus, in a letter to the editor of the Moving Picture World published the following year, the president of the Lake Shore Film and Supply Company writes: On Monday evening, February 13, we, in cooperation with the local AntiTuberculosis League, under whose auspices the exhibition was given, exhibited the five reels of the ‘Life of Moses’, a vitagraph issue, at the Euclid Avenue Christian Church, [sic] this city. The projection was 54

Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, pp. 167, 181.

55

Or at least the first reel.

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accompanied by a well-prepared Biblical lecture, delivered by the Rev. Dr. H.M. Cook.56

While the contents and character of the lecture of the otherwise unknown Rev. Dr Cook are unknowable, it is surely not incidental – or at least not to the writer of the letter – that the unofficial commentary on the film was ‘well-prepared’ and ‘delivered’ by someone whose clerical and educational qualifications were no less distinguished than those of Peters himself. Whether or not Cook was called upon regularly for such services, it is clear that a few went so far as to make moving picture lecturing something of a stock in trade, including one Stephen Bush, well known to readers of the Moving Picture World from his articles and advertisements. Lacking the credentials of Cook and Peters, Bush evidently had no shortage of enterprise, going so far as to include, in one advertisement, a letter of endorsement from Peters himself, whose church, Greenhill Presbyterian in Philadelphia, had apparently enlisted Mr Bush to accompany a showing of the life of Moses with his lecture. In the reprinted letter, Peters praises Bush for his ‘very successful way of speaking while the pictures are in motion’,57 confirming that the earlier practice of speaking between scenes (cf. Lubin’s Passion play lecture) had been abandoned. Given Bush’s vested interest in promoting his services, it is hardly surprising that his advertisement also warns exhibitors: ‘Do NOT attempt to feature this great show without music and lecture and expert guidance,’ a sentiment echoed in an article published a year and a half later, encouraging the use of the film lecture for multi-reel subjects such as The Life of Moses: having a suitable lecture competently delivered will strike everyone as a welcome and fitting feature, because it is directly connected with and grows rationally out of the moving picture itself, because it heightens rather than disturbs the illusion. Such a feature goes with the picture, it helps and completes it and the picture often demands it.58

While such sentiments rehearse well the hermeneutical case for the accompanying lecture, the very fact that such arguments and advertisements were seen to be required suggests that not all exhibitors shared the conviction that a picture such as The Life of Moses really did ‘demand’ an accompanying lecture, after all. Indeed, long before the advent of the talkies, moving picture lecturers like Bush would be largely silenced by the continuing evolution of narrative technique in the cinema and the ongoing development of the intertitle. If, however, the combination of intertitles and 56

MPW (4 March 1911), 488.

57

MPW (26 February 1910), 304.

58

MPW (1 July 1911), 1,492.

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audience familiarity with the Bible is likely to have meant that the basic intelligibility of films such as The Life of Moses did not entirely depend on the accompanying lecture,59 then one may wonder why Vitagraph produced and promoted them, particularly given the logistical challenges of supplying them to exhibitors and the modest return on their investment.60 Bush’s use of advertisements to sell his lectures for not only The Life of Moses, but also Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, suggests the likelihood that, as in so many other ways, the supplying of the lecture for Moses was part of Vitagraph’s wider production and distribution strategy to reproduce the perceived success of Pathé’s Christ in 1907–8 in opening up the religious market. Indeed, Vitagraph’s accompaniment of the image of the moving picture with the word of the lecture must have been intended partly – or perhaps even primarily – to allay clerical concerns by evoking the spirit of the less controversial illustrated lecture, much as Klaw and Erlanger had done with the Höritz Passion film before the turn of the century. In light of its bold promise that The Life of Moses would be the first of a series of biblical productions, Vitagraph’s failure to produce any others may be interpreted in various ways. While cases of clergy abandoning sermons in favour of moving pictures were duly noted and celebrated by Vitagraph and the industry, The Life of Moses’ success in tapping into the kinds of markets reached by Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ is difficult to properly assess. It may well be that Vitagraph’s abandonment of the genre reflects the company’s belief that its series of ‘Quality’ films which culminated in The Life of Moses had realised its objective of legitimating the cultural value of its films in particular and those of the industry more generally. While The Life of Moses’ enormous production and promotion costs may well have further discouraged Vitagraph from continuing to invest in biblical films, we will see that the impact of Vitagraph’s biblical blockbuster would be significant in the subsequent development of the genre, both in America and in Europe, to which we now return in the chapter which follows. 59

60

Such a contention complicates the assumption that the renaissance of the lecture in association with the feature was driven largely or entirely by increasing narrative complexity (as intimated by Bowser, Transformation, p. 255). Vitagraph eventually decided to sell them rather than printing them in the MPW.

chapter 4

‘How are the mighty fallen’: Feuillade and tragedy

American firms like Vitagraph were not alone in seeking to cultivate both a better class of audience and a better reputation for their company and the industry as a whole. In France, Pathé-Frères’ efforts in the same direction led to them to invest in not one but two new enterprises in 1908, both of which were designed to cultivate new audiences by enhancing the literary and aesthetic qualities of their own films. While the emergence of SCAGL and Film d’Art may well have been spurred on by Édouard Benoit-Lévy’s production of Michel Carré’s L’Enfant Prodigue (1907), the pantomime on which the film was based was a modern and decidedly free adaptation which had little to do with the biblical parable found in Luke 15.1 Carré would later go on to direct an adaptation of Jean Racine’s Athalie (1911) for Albert Capellani at SCAGL, but it was Pathé’s investment in Film d’Art which was to bear biblical ‘fruit’ first. Launched with much greater fanfare than SCAGL, Film d’Art was the brainchild of the author and playwright Charles Le Bargy, an actor of the Comédie Française, and Henri Lavedan, a respected author and playwright. Founded as a société anonyme (public limited company) in February 1908 by the French businessman Paul Lafitte, Film d’Art’s initial financial subscription proved inadequate, which in turn paved the way for Pathé-Frères to underwrite the costs of production and facilitate distribution. Released on 19 November 1908, the new firm’s initial production, L’Assasinat du duc de Guise, would have a significant impact on the development of the cinema on both sides of the Atlantic. With an original score written by Camille Saint-Saëns, a script penned by Lavedan himself, and a cast of theatrical actors including Le Bargy in the lead role, Guise opened up new possibilities for collaboration between the previously discrete worlds of the cinema and the legitimate theatre. One of the novelties of L’Assasinat du duc de Guise, and one which would characterise 1

See A. Carou, Le Cinéma français et les écrivains: Histoire d’une rencontre. 1906–1914 (Paris: École des Chartes/AFRHC, 2003), p. 80.

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subsequent Film d’Art productions, was the comparative economy and restraint of the acting – a feature noted by critics of the time.2 Following the historical interest of L’Assasinat du duc de Guise, Film d’Art turned to a classical source in Le Retour d’Ulysse and a biblical one in Armand Bour’s Le Baiser de Judas, both of which received their Paris premiere at the Salle Charras in the final week of 1908. The willingness of Lavedan to turn to the Bible for Film d’Art’s third picture reflects the firm’s interest in and perception of the Bible as a classic piece of literature of historical/spiritual value. That it was the gospel to which he turned is hardly surprising given Pathé’s significant success with Zecca’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ only two years earlier. However, Lavedan’s original scenario for Le Baiser de Judas focuses on an episode drawn not from the life and ministry of Christ, but rather from the Passion itself. Indeed, Baiser de Judas’ American release in the first week of April and its promotion in the trade journals encouraged exhibitors to capitalise on the Easter season – a strategy which had been regularly exploited in promoting the Passion. While Le Baiser de Judas may have lacked a precursor on the stage, its theatrical pedigree was ensured by the casting of Jean Mounet-Sully in the role of Judas, alongside Albert-Lambert fils as Jesus.3 The fact that MounetSully – a mainstay of the Comédie Française since Racine’s Andromaque in 1872 – could be persuaded to take on the title role of Le Baiser de Judas reflects not only Film d’Art’s success in attracting theatrical actors to the screen, but perhaps also Lavedan’s willingness to depart from traditional depictions of the anti-hero of the Passion tradition. Indeed, apart from the various portrayals of Salomé, whose career in the early cinema was aided and abetted by Wilde’s play of the same name, Le Baiser de Judas was the first film to focus on one of the supporting cast of gospel characters, rather than Jesus himself. While the decision to shoot the initial scene of the Last Supper in the Théâtre de Neuilly will have afforded Mounet-Sully the familiar surroundings of the stage, he may have been less comfortable in the forest of Fontainebleau – that common Parisian stand-in for Palestine and, in this case, for the Garden of Gethsemane.

2

3

See ‘Chronique théâtrale: L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise,’ Le Temps (22 November 1908) reprinted in R. Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: A History /Anthology (Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 50–2. Note also Rollin Summers, ‘The Moving Picture Drama and the Acted Drama’, MPW (19 September 1908), 211–13. For discussion of Mounet-Sully’s career and his role in Le Baiser de Judas see Anne Penesco, MounetSully: L’Homme au cent cœurs d’homme (Paris: Cerf, 2005), pp. 452–3.

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Le Baiser de Judas, which runs to a length of 215 m, largely follows the biblical tradition in its depiction of the Last Supper and the betrayal in the garden. However, in its radical elaboration of Judas’ remorse in the final sequence of the film, Lavedan and Calmettes offer an extraordinary supplement to previous cinematic depictions of the Passion, including Pathé’s own version in 1907. Overwhelmed with remorse, Lavedan’s Judas casts the blood money away, collapsing on the ground in anguished prayer. Fleeing the scene of his betrayal, Judas collapses again further down the road, where he is plagued by a series of visions of Jesus: bound and in prison, with Judas’ own sneering face in the background; released from his bonds and forgiving Judas; as a poor man, handing the blood money back to him; then, as an old man who plays the role of the Samaritan in stopping to wash and comfort Judas and remove the thorns with which Judas has tortured himself in his madness. A now haggard Judas resumes his journey and comes across a tree on which hangs the rope which had bound Jesus. Trying and failing three times to grasp the rope, Judas eventually climbs atop stones he has piled up and places his head in the noose. Though he is at first terrified by what he has managed and frightened by the prospect of death, Judas’ resolve is strengthened and, kicking away the pile of stones on which he stands, he hangs himself – his death eventually confirmed by the arrival of a raven which descends to consume his flesh. Like Pathé’s Samson directed by Capellani the previous year, Le Baiser de Judas follows a model of faithful elaboration, not contradicting the details of the biblical narrative nor departing from its sequence. Yet the Film d’Art production goes well beyond Samson, not least in its use of a vision sequence to elaborate Judas’ psychological state. While the cinematographic spectacle of Judas’ dream-like vision itself resonates with earlier use of this technique in the ‘Writing on the Wall’ sequence in Pathé’s Le Festin de Balthazar (Nonguet, 1904/5), the exploration of Judas’ inner emotional state would anticipate similar developments in Pathé’s biblical films in the years to come. That such a development and the style of acting introduced by players such as Mounet-Sully were, however, at odds with what had gone before is confirmed by a review at the time of Le Baiser de Judas’ American premiere in early April. While the Moving Picture World praises the outstanding quality of photography it often associated with Pathé productions, its review is unusually ambivalent regarding the film’s artistic qualities: Pathé Frères have given us a film of high dramatic merit. Perhaps too much so, for general approval, and this is the principal criticism we have to offer, that as the scenes flit over the screen it is the actor and his art that rivets the

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While the review questions the suitability of Mounet-Sully’s ‘temperament’ for the title role of Judas, there can be little doubt that it was in fact taking issue with Sully’s style of acting – differing as it did from that found in most films up to that point in the American cinema. While the review finds the acting to be too dramatic for general acceptance, the subsequent evolution of acting style in the American cinema suggests that not all within the industry were of the same opinion, and certainly not within studios such as Biograph and Vitagraph, whose embracing of the ‘new’ way of acting may be seen already in The Life of Moses, which would appear the following year and has been discussed in the preceding chapter. In the very same month Pathé’s Le Baiser de Judas premiered in America, another film opened in Paris which hinted that Pathé’s virtual monopoly on the ‘biblical film’ in France was about to be contested by its chief rival, Gaumont. Under the direction of Alice Guy, the Société des établissements Gaumont had shown little interest in biblical films up until 1906. While the company’s catalogues had included a version of the Passion from the turn of the century, this was almost certainly not the firm’s own production, but one directed by Hatot for the Lumière Brothers, with whom Léon Gaumont always had very congenial relations.5 When Gaumont’s belated entrée to the genre – Guy’s own Vie du Christ – did eventually arrive in 1906, its cinematic juxtaposing of Jesus’ embrace of and by women with a masculine world which rejects both Christ and feminine concerns was not merely unconventional amongst filmic Passions of the period, but utterly unprecedented.6 Despite its originality, or perhaps because of it, Guy’s film was soon forgotten, overtaken by that of her former employee Zecca, whose second edition of the Passion was, as we have seen, shot and widely distributed the following year. Following Guy’s departure for America in 1907 with her new husband, Herbert Blaché, Léon Gaumont appointed in her place another of her assistants, Louis Feuillade. Born in 1873 in Lunel, France, Feuillade was the son of a wine-merchant who furnished him with a pious education, first at a Christian school and 4 6

MPW (3 April 1909), 403. 5 McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, p. 28. See the initial observation by Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 164–6, and the much fuller treatment by D. Shepherd, ‘Alice and Jesus: The Women of Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ (1906)’, in D. Shepherd (ed.), The Silents of Jesus in the Early Cinema (New York: Routledge, forthcoming, 2014).

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then at a seminary in Montpellier, where he studied Classics. While Feuillade displayed an early interest in amateur arts, he completed his military service in the cavalry and, following the deaths of his parents in 1898, moved with his wife Leontine to Paris. Initially involved with the Parisian political press, Feuillade was soon introduced to the cinema by André Heuzé, with whom he had previously written some minor theatrical pieces. Preferring Léon Gaumont’s fledgling company to Pathé-Frères, Feuillade was enlisted by Alice Guy to write scenarios, which he did prolifically while occasionally being involved in their direction. Following his appointment as Guy’s successor, Feuillade too recognised the trend toward ‘Quality’ subjects in the cinema, including those drawn from biblical narratives. Undoubtedly under the influence of Feuillade’s own interests and education, Gaumont was already in 1908 beginning to produce classical subjects such as L’Amour et Psyche and Prométhée (attributed to Feuillade himself) as well as minor biblical productions, such as Le Christ et la pécheresse (150 m), La Naissance de Jésus (114 m) and Retour de l’enfant prodigue (85 m). It was, however, only in 1909 that Feuillade himself turned his hand to biblical subjects, beginning with L’Aveugle de Jérusalem (200 m). The film recounts the story of a blind man unaware that, under his own roof, his daughter has taken a lover and his servants are robbing him. When the man’s sight is restored by Christ, he returns home and – pretending to still be blind – sees for himself the awful truth. However, inspired by the subsequent sight of Christ bearing his cross and forgiving his enemies (Luke 23:34), the man does likewise. In crafting a non-biblical narrative which intersects with the gospel accounts of Christ rather than following them closely, Feuillade’s first (quasi-)biblical film resonates with Lew Wallace’s novel Ben Hur (1880) and its subsequent film adaptations beginning in 1907. While Feuillade would eventually resume Gaumont’s interest in the New Testament, he followed L’Aveugle with a trio of films drawn from the Hebrew Bible: Judith et Holophernes (June 1909), Esther (February 1910) and Le Festin de Balthazar (May 1910). While these films are sometimes associated with Feuillade’s ‘Film Esthétique’, such associations are in fact difficult to maintain.7 As we will see, Feuillade’s announcement of a new series of films under the banner ‘Le Film Esthétique’ in the pages of Ciné-Journal came not before, but after the release of the above-mentioned films. Moreover, Feuillade’s programme made it very clear: 7

For such an association see, for instance, F. Lacassin, Louis Feuillade: Maître des lions et des vampires (Paris: P. Bordas & fils, 1995), p. 106.

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The Bible on Silent Film First of all in its conception, ‘the Aesthetic Film’ must be distinguished from all the other films. We do not think that the cinema is sentenced to remain solely dependent on theatre, and confine itself to adaptation.8

In announcing a programme of films which distinguished itself by demonstrating its independence from theatrical and literary adaptations, Feuillaude can hardly have had in mind his earlier films such as Judith et Holophernes, given that this subject had been serially adapted for theatrical and operatic productions since the seventeenth century. Indeed, in the golden era of ‘tragédies bibliques’ inaugurated by Racine, the subject of Judith was adapted for the lyric theatre no fewer than six times in eight years with Italian operas and arias featuring prominently.9 Interest in Judith in the French theatre persisted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with three-act ‘tragedies’ of Judith being written by Decomberousse in 1825 and Girardin 1843. Before the Franco-Prussian War, in dramatic works such as Gustave Gille’s five act Judith (1865), the heroine’s repeated and earnest query of others, ‘Is it a crime?’, reflects the ethical anxieties aroused by Judith’s seduction and deception of Holofernes, while in 1873 Lefebvre’s operatic treatment of Judith returned to three acts, beginning and ending with entreaties to God and emphasising religious faith as an important, even essential, aspect of national restoration.10 Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s narrative poem Judith of Bethulia (1896) was followed by George Whitefield Chadwick’s opera Judith (1901), and the first publication of Alexander Serov’s nineteenth-century opera of the same name in 1903, among still others.11 If Judith was therefore far from unknown to consumers of theatrical and musical performances, neither were Feuillade’s two other biblical films, Esther and Le Festin de Balthazar, without their own theatrical and artistic precursors. Belshazzar’s feast on the eve of Babylon’s fall, famously painted by Rembrandt in 1635, had also featured regularly as a subject in the performing arts, not least in G. F. Handel’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1745). Interpretations, theatrical and artistic, continued into the nineteenth century, with paintings of the same name by Washington Allston and John Martin, poems by Lord Byron (1815) and Heinrich Heine (1827, set to music 8 9 10

11

L. Feuillade, ‘Le Film Esthétique’, C-J (28 May 1910), 16. Mireille Herr, Les Tragédies bibliques au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion; Geneva: Slatkine 1988), pp. 165–6, 254–5. On the treatment of Judith in French lyrical theatre of the late nineteenth century, see J. Pasler, ‘Politics, Biblical Debates and French Dramatic Music on Judith after 1870’, in K. R. Brine et al. (eds.), The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across the Disciplines (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), pp. 431–52. For which see J. Buchanan, ‘Judith’s Vampish Virtue and Its Double Market Appeal’, in Wyke and Michelakis, The Ancient World in the Silent Cinema, pp. 205–28.

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by Schumann), an opera/oratorio by Rossini (1812), a cantata by George Friedrich Root (1860) and a play by Finnish composer Hjalmar Procopé (1906), for which his countryman Jean Sibelius wrote incidental music. Esther enjoyed a comparably active afterlife, serving as the subject of Jean Racine’s first biblical tragedy (1689), which in turn formed the basis of the libretto of Handel’s first oratorio (1718). Esther too continued to attract musical settings in the nineteenth century, for instance, in the light opera of Bradbury (1856) and, at the turn of the century, in music by Luigi Ferrari Treccate (1900) and Costante Adolfo Bossi (1904). In view of developments elsewhere in the industry in 1908, it would seem more than likely that Esther, Judith and the feast of Belshazzar were all chosen by Feuillade precisely because, on one hand, they all represented reputable and familiar subjects, and on the other, Belshazzar’s feast had not been seen in the French cinema since 1904, and Judith and Esther not at all.12 With a largely blank canvas on which to project his own inventions, Feuillade began his cinematic triptych of late Hebrew history with a treatment of the deuterocanonical tale of Judith, the Jewish maiden who saves her besieged city of Bethulia by seducing and decapitating the invading Babylonian general, Holofernes, in his tent. While Capellani’s Samson of the previous year lingers on the foreign Delilah seducing the Hebrew hero Samson, whose redemption could only be secured by a final act of martyrdom, Feuillade’s Judith et Holophernes offers the viewer a reversal of roles: redemption for the Jewish people is secured by their own heroine’s seduction and ultimate destruction of the foreign general Holofernes. Rather than dwelling on the moral quandary of Judith’s luring of the general to his death (as the Italian Cines’ version of the previous year had done), Feuillade’s film exploits the narrative’s own interest in Judith’s adornment by lingering on the spectacle of her preparations for the seduction.13 As we have seen, while Delilah’s seduction of Samson leads to the spectacle of his enslavement, it does nevertheless permit Samson’s redemption in the destruction of the Temple of Dagon. In Judith et Holophernes, however, no such room is made for even this limited male redemption. Instead, Feuillade’s foregrounding of the male elders of Bethulia’s initial impotence in lifting the siege and Holofernes’ weakness for women and wine confirms the superiority of the feminine. In the second film, Le Festin de Balthazar (21 February 1910), Feuillade takes up the tale of Belshazzar – the Babylonian king referred to in Daniel 5 12 13

In 1908, Mario Caserini had directed Giuditta e Oloferne for the Italian film company Cines-Roma. Buchanan, ‘Vampish Virtue’, pp. 205–28.

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and other ancient sources – who famously feasts even as Babylon is falling to the Persians. Comparison with the film of the same name directed by Lucien Nonguet for Pathé some six years earlier demonstrates, on one hand, the continuing importance of spectacle within the genre. Nonguet’s film consists of a single long shot depicting a succession of three spectacles: first Belshazzar and his court drunk on women and wine, then the cinematographic trick of a hand appearing to produce the ‘writing on the wall’, followed by Cyrus’ killing of Belshazzar and the carrying away of the women, as his palace is destroyed amidst smoke and falling debris. With almost a full reel of footage at his disposal, Feuillade is able to amplify the spectacle of all three narrative moments. Thus, Feuillade’s feast of Belshazzar itself is no less strewn with woman and wine than Nonguet’s, but to this is added the appearance of Mlle Napierkowska, a dancer of l’Opéra Comique, whose appearance in the title role of Capellani’s Salomé for SCAGL in 1908 had evidently not gone unnoticed by Feuillade. Napierkowska’s reprise of that film’s exotic dance (Figure 4.1) for the benefit of a feasting Belshazzar (and her inclusion in the opening cast title), not only

Figure 4.1 Stacia Napierkowska’s ‘Dancer’ delights the King in Le Festin de Balthazar (Gaumont, 1910).

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demonstrates SCAGL’s influence on Feuillade, but also confirms his commitment to enhancing the visual display of his feast scene.14 Drawing inspiration from the ancient narrative description of Belshazzar’s drunken sacrilege (Daniel 5:2), Feuillade then offers viewers a single long shot depicting the opening of the vault and the removal of the vessels taken from the Jerusalem temple by Belshazzar’s Babylonian forebear Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kings). Following another lengthy intertitle, the viewer is then offered the spectacle of the temple treasures – whose great weight is emphasised by the ponderous pace of the parade and occasionally the need for two men to heft a single vessel – before the action returns to the court’s orgiastic indulgence of women and wine. Following the arrival of the vessels, the mysterious hand and its miraculous writing predictably take centre stage, with Feuillade preferring the recognisable, romanised version of the Aramaic (‘Mane, Thecel, Phares’) to Nonguet’s earlier use of more ‘authentic’ Aramaic characters. The four scenes which conclude Feuillade’s Festin de Balthazar continue the amplification of the spectacle of Babylon’s fall far beyond that offered by Nonguet’s earlier film. In the first scene Feuillade depicts the arrival of the Persians on the ramparts and their slaying of the Babylonian men at arms while in the background the city begins to fall. The spectacle of violence continues into the throne room of Belshazzar, where the Persians arrive to take captives and dispatch the King, played with a dramatic flourish by Léonce Perret. Eventually destined to greater fame behind the camera than in front of it, Perret’s talent, well honed at the Odeon Theatre, ensures that Belshazzar’s death is sufficiently long and slow to allow for the arrival of Cyrus to join the viewers in appreciating it. A second shot of the ramparts offers the equally dramatic view of Babylon burning, as Persian soldiers walk the ramparts strewn with the Babylonian dead, before the film concludes with the triumph of Cyrus, marked by the parade of captives from the dead king’s court. For all its unadulterated spectacle, Feuillade’s Festin de Balthazar does situate it – however loosely – within a narrative which again supplements, but does not contradict, the biblical account of Daniel. As with other dramatic treatments of the subject, such as Handel’s oratorio, the role of Daniel is considerably enhanced and in the case of Feuillade’s film reconstructed specifically in opposition to Belshazzar, who represents blind hubris. Thus, in the opening scene, the King is warned by his general (and the arrows being loosed by his archers from the palace wall) that he and his kingdom are in danger. Blithely toasting his enemies and embracing 14

P. Pelletier, ‘Stacia Napierkowska’, www.cineartistes.com (accessed 25 September 2012).

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his women, the King is then confronted by Daniel, whose role as righteous prophet is confirmed by the white cloak, shepherd’s staff and the evidently cautionary word which is dismissed by the King with a laugh and wave of his wineglass. While such a confrontation is lacking in the biblical text, this and the equally contrived reticence of Belshazzar’s general to desecrate the Jerusalem temple vessels enhance the portrait of Belshazzar’s ungodly pride and opposition to prophetic purposes. That Feuillade’s Belshazzar will be brought low is confirmed when the prophet returns to interpret the ‘writing on the wall’. While the biblical Belshazzar’s blind hubris remains to the end (as seen in his curious rewarding of Daniel on the eve of his demise (Daniel 5:29)), Feuillade’s Belshazzar pleads before the now triumphant prophet, who in turn dismisses the entreaties of a king whose great pride is about to precipitate the still greater fall of Babylon itself. Released three months later, Esther (9 May 1910, the last film of Feuillade’s Babylonian/Persian trilogy, draws together themes explored in the previous two. While the mantle of empire has passed from the Babylonians to the Persians and the setting is now that of Judaean exile, Feuillade’s Esther displays the redemptive force of the Jewish female in juxtaposition with the oriental indulgence of the masculine, seen already in Judith et Holophernes. A first summary intertitle allows Feuillade to pass over the disobedience of Ahasuerus’ previous queen Vashti and focus at great length instead on the King’s recruiting of a new consort (Esther 2:8). Filmed in colour, the opening scene depicts the arrival of women against the backdrop of the Persian court. Alighting from a procession of donkeys, palanquins, ox-drawn carts and camels, the women in their finery are presented for the inspection of both the viewer and the male court official. Only when all others have arrived does Mordecai reluctantly part with Esther, who is also carefully scrutinised before being taken away into the palace. In the second scene, Feuillade pans slowly across the bevy of maidens as they are prepared to be presented to the King before the camera comes to rest on Esther herself. Feuillade then cuts to a mid-close-up of Esther having her hair combed and further focuses the viewer’s attention on the display and production of feminine beauty through the use of a circle vignette, familiar from nineteenth-century photography. A third scene, in which the women are presented to the King and Esther is chosen, is followed by a scene of the wedding feast, which allows Feuillade to display the opulence of the Persian court before the King and new Queen pass through at the end of the shot. While Feuillade then proceeds to offer a relatively faithful elaboration of the biblical narrative, the first nine of the film’s nineteen minutes thus offer confirmation of Feullade’s positioning of female beauty as the principal

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catalyst of the narrative, which culminates in the redemption of the Jewish people, including Esther’s uncle Mordecai, who is both saved and elevated at Haman’s expense. Yet, as it does in Judith et Holophernes, the exploitation of this beauty in Esther leads to more than merely the redeeming of the righteous. The masculine malevolence of the foreign Haman is shown again to be helpless in the face of feminine Hebrew beauty, which dooms him to a demise less gory but no less final than that suffered by Holofernes and Belshazzar. While this interest in the tragic consequences of foreign hubris in the face of divine purposes will be discernible in Feuillade’s subsequent films, the publication of ‘Le Film Esthétique’ a few weeks after the release of Esther warrants further reflection. Even as Feuillade distances the new series from subjects derived and adapted from the theatre, he insists in ‘Le Film Esthétique’ that cinematography derives ‘as much if not more from the painter’s art as that of the playwright, because it is addressed to our eyes’. Thus, Feuillade makes clear that the ‘Film Esthétique’ will set out to be ‘much more a truly pictorial work of art than a theatrical one’. That the painter’s canvas might provide not merely a superior aesthetic to the stage, but an improved range of subjects is indicated by Feuillade’s further insistence that pictorial art is a suitable source for ‘Le Film Esthétique’, ‘whether allegory, poetry or symbol, whether it is impregnated with Christian mysticism, whether it sacrifices to the Gods of Olympus or whether it seeks its effects in the beauty of nature’. In addition to invoking works of pictorial art (‘canvas of Millet’ and ‘fresco of Puvis de Chavannes’), Feuillade also proclaims cinematography’s proper debt to the ‘photographic science’, which he insists is ‘as indispensable to us in translating our ideas as syntax is to the writer’.15 Given previous discussion, it is worth considering to what extent, if at all, these ideas, espoused following the spring release of Esther, impacted Feuillade’s treatment of biblical subjects the following autumn. In September of 1910, Feuillade departed from the reel-length form of his previous three biblical films by releasing a series under the title of Les Sept Pêchés capitaux.16 In illustrating each of the deadly sins (pride, gluttony, lust, etc.) with a narrative, Feuillade’s series offered a direct parallel to the writings of Eugène 15

16

Feuillade, ‘Film Esthétique’, p. 16. It is interesting to compare Feuillade here with the analogy drawn in MPW (30 April 1910), 675, in discussing a series of stills from Vitagraph’s Life of Moses: ‘which as our artist friend truly remarked, looked like steel engravings from a de luxe edition of the Old Testament . . . The moving picture is to art what the printing press is to literature. And as every printed book is not a literary gem, neither is every picture in the millions reeled off day by day a work of art. But in the plenitude of quantity there is enough quality to establish the supremacy of this modern form of enlightenment.’ While the original title card displays the full title of the film: ‘Les Sept Pêchés capitaux et l’Écriture Sainte’, some promotion of the film dispensed with the reference to Holy Scripture. See, for instance, Bio (8 September 1910), 25.

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Sue, who had, under the same title, published fictional tales exemplifying each sin in the middle of the nineteenth century. In keeping with his affinity for ancient subjects, Feuillade prefers to illustrate each sin by means of an episode from the biblical narrative: pride – Nebuchadnezzar (120 m); greed – Delilah (162 m); lust – Susanna and the Elders (126 m); envy – Cain and Abel (84 m); gluttony – Esau (103 m); anger – King Saul (40 m); sloth – the Israelites at Paran (86 m). Having witnessed the release of Vitagraph’s five reels of The Life of Moses in France the previous winter, Feuillade apparently followed suit, releasing the first two episodes of Les Sept Pêchés capitaux on 12 September, the second two the following week and the final three episodes on 26 September. Unified by their narrative source and thematic composition, the episodes taken as a whole total some 720 m and constitute the lengthiest treatment of narratives of the Hebrew Bible produced by a French firm before the Great War. More significant than its length, however, is the nature of Feuillade’s approach to his subject, particularly in light of the stated priorities of ‘Le Film Esthétique’ invoked on the film’s title slide. All of the episodes selected by Feuillade had, of course, featured within the Western pictorial art tradition, not least in the illustrated bibles which we have seen to be so influential in the early development of the biblical film. In the case of some, such as the association of Delilah with greed, Feuillade’s treatment finds a resonance within the pictorial tradition. While any explicit marking of Delilah’s ‘greed’ in betraying Samson is passed over by Zecca (1902) and Capellani (1908), the mention of a prostitute (though not Delilah) in the biblical narrative and especially the reference to Delilah’s seduction of Samson for ‘eleven hundred pieces of silver’ (Judges 16:5) lent itself to the portrayal of Delilah as a prostitute in the pictorial tradition.17 Without precedent in the biblical text, however, Feuillade’s Delilah actively summons the Philistines and then runs her fingers greedily through the many coins she is promised for the betrayal before tossing into the air with delight the few that are left with her as a deposit for her delivery of Samson. When the rest of the payment is offered after Samson has been taken away, Feuillade’s Delilah kneels on the floor before the pot of coins, revelling in the money, and when the other women of the brothel come, arms outstretched to take a share of it, Delilah flies at them in a rage. Much as he had done in Esther, Feuillade combines the mid-close-up and circle vignette, in this case of Delilah 17

See, for instance, Van Dyck’s portrayal of Delilah (Samson and Delilah, 1620) with the chalked face and rouged cheeks of the Parisian prostitute of the seventeenth century. For discussion of the intricacies of the biblical text see, for instance, L. Klein, From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 23ff., and for Delilah’s representation in art and cinema in the sound era, see the excellent work of Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot and Painted (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 175–237.

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Figure 4.2 Circle vignette of Delilah’s greed in Les Sept pêchés capitaux: L’Avarice (Gaumont, 1910).

showering herself with coins and clutching the pot of silver, in order to focus the construction of Delilah as a symbol of the greed being illustrated (Figure 4.2). In doing so, Feuillade deploys a technique strongly associated with the nineteenth-century photography he invokes in ‘Le Film Esthétique’ as a means of drawing out the pictorial moment’s symbolic meaning within the context of the Christian tradition’s taxonomy of sin. While Feuillade’s treatment of Delilah is relatively predictable, his association of the Israelites’ unwillingness to enter the Promised Land (Numbers 13–14) with the seventh sin of ‘sloth’ is rather more surprising. Far less popular than the subject of Samson and Delilah, the narrative of the Hebrews and the

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spies in the wilderness at Paran did nevertheless find its way into the pictorial tradition in, for instance, the work of Nicholas Poussin (The Grapes from the Promised Land, 1660–4) and the nineteenth-century biblical illustrators Schnoor (Die Kundschafter des Landes Kanaan, 1851) and Doré (Return of the Spies from the Land of Promise, 1866). While in Poussin the titular subject is clearly a pretext for the depiction of his majestic landscape, in all the portrayals the artistic focus is placed squarely upon the grapes rather than the Hebrew failure to be persuaded by them to enter the Promised Land. Indeed, that the sin of the people is fear rather than indolence seems so evident from the text itself that one is left with the impression that Feuillade’s use of this episode to illustrate the sin of sloth reflects his failure to find any other episodes which could do so more convincingly. Further evidence of Feuillade’s challenge in adapting this Mosaic episode to his symbolic purpose is offered by his use of the circle vignette, not to illustrate the sloth of the Israelites, but rather to focus on the piety of Moses as he prays with great passion for the forgiveness of his people’s rebellious reluctance to enter the Land. While one could hardly imagine a less apt illustration of Israelite sloth than Moses at prayer, this episode too had featured within the pictorial tradition of the past but also evidently served to inspire, at least in part, Feuillade’s more significant contribution to the depiction of Moses in the silent cinema released the following month, L’Exode. If subjects like Esther and Judith had offered Feuillade vistas largely untrammelled by previous productions, Moses clearly presented him with a quite different prospect. Not only had Blackton’s behemoth Life of Moses been widely distributed throughout Europe, it had been heavily promoted in France itself from the beginning of 1910.18 Moreover, Feuillade will have been well aware that this Moses, which lingered in the minds of cinema-goers on both sides of the Atlantic, was not only more extensive than any of its predecessors in its coverage of the Exodus tradition, but also more detailed in its elaboration of it. Having already devoted more than 700 m to seven biblical episodes the previous month, Feuillade returned to the formula adopted in Esther, focusing on a single narrative over a reel and a half (430 m). Working with only a fraction of the footage which the American Blackton had at his disposal, Feuillade was clearly in no position to compete with the comprehensiveness of

18

Significant advertisements for the respective reels of the film were placed in the Ciné-Journal from the last week of January (first reel) until the middle of April (fifth reel); The film was also afforded fullpage features (including descriptions and photographs) in Ciné-Journal’s supplements 76 and 78.

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Blackton’s coverage.19 However, by focusing his more limited footage on a smaller portion of the biblical narrative, Feuillade evidently aimed to not merely rival but in fact out-strip his big-budget predecessor in his detailed elaboration of a very limited selection of episodes. It is likely that Feuillade’s decision to focus only on ‘The Passover’, the ‘Plague of the Firstborn’, and the ‘Departure from Egypt’ reflects an awareness that Blackton’s film, despite its abundance of footage, devoted a mere ten minutes to a depiction of Exodus Chapters 11–12. Such a suggestion is strengthened by the observation that even within these three episodes it is at those narrative moments where Blackton most quickly moves on that Feuillade tends to linger. Thus, of the three episodes, it is ‘The Plague of the Firstborn’ which is given the most footage (52 per cent) in Blackton’s film, and the Passover the least (23 per cent), whereas in the case of Feuillade it is conversely the Passover which occupies the greatest part (36 per cent) of his running time and the Plague the least (24 per cent). Given the narrative logic of Exodus 11–12 and the assumption of some degree of audience familiarity with it, it is unsurprising that both films reproduce the biblical order of the episodes: Passover, Plague of the Firstborn and Exodus. In Blackton’s Life of Moses, this sequence follows hard on the heels of his spectacular depiction of the seventh plague (hail and thunder; Exodus 9:18–35). During yet another confrontation with Moses – this time at the gate of the city where the royal chariot is passing – the intransigence of Blackton’s Pharaoh prompts a brilliant flash of light as Moses announces the final plague (Exodus 11:4–9). That this plague will be the death of the firstborn is only made explicit by the intertitle which follows, but the Egyptian people’s traumatic reaction to Moses’ pronouncement (including the immediate collapse of one individual) contrasts sharply with Pharaoh’s dismissal of the threat and allows Blackton to foreshadow the drama to come. The first shot of Feuillade’s L’Exode similarly includes Moses’ declaration of the plague to Pharaoh, but Moses’ appearance at the court of Pharaoh (rather than in public at the city gate) is prefaced by the arrival of four nurses with the Pharaoh’s son, whom the father kisses and then, following Moses’ exit, embraces as well. While Pharaoh’s son is included as a prospective victim of the plague in Moses’ prophetic announcement within the biblical tradition (Exodus 11:5), Feuillade’s foregrounding of the Pharaoh’s son and the emotional bond between father and 19

Vitagraph’s Life of Moses ran to a length of approximately 1450 m, while Gaumont’s L’Exode apparently totalled approximately 430 m based on cataloguing information and viewing copies held at the British Film Institute.

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son at the outset of the film foreshadows the centrality of this relationship in the unfolding cinematic drama. Following an intertitle, Blackton’s Life of Moses offers three shots relating to the Passover (the preparation for the meal in the house of Moses, the daubing of the doors with blood outside and finally the celebration and meal again in the house). In keeping with narrative practice elsewhere in the ancient biblical text, Exodus 12 itself is focused on the conveying of instructions for the Passover (vv. 1–27) rather than a description of its celebration/observance by the Israelites, which is instead limited to a single verse summary (Exodus 12:28). Devoting only two and a half minutes to his depiction of the Passover, Blackton predictably dispenses with the communication of the regulations in favour of a reconstructed portrayal of the observance itself, which begins with a shot of a spartan Hebrew home in which Moses prays as the family prepares the meal and the children tend to the pesach lamb on the spit. The action then cuts to a long shot of Moses and his wife as they daub blood on the doorposts and continue to pray. In the third and final shot of the sequence, Moses and family are back inside the house, where the Passover meal is then served amidst more prayer and solemnity. Feuillade’s Passover scene also consists of three shots, but, with a total running time of nearly nine and a half minutes, it constitutes the single largest scene in L’Exode. Working with more footage than Blackton in this scene, Feuillade devotes his first shot to the communication of the Passover ordinance. Young boys stand in the background as Moses sits enthroned, praying piously, eyes turned towards the heaven from which the Passover command comes. Aaron ushers in the elders of Israel, who duly accept the instructions from Moses and exit to implement them, as Moses continues in prayer. The second shot depicts the application of the blood to the doorposts. A man slings an actual lamb over his shoulders and disappears through the door and into the house, while the elder uses some twigs to spread the lintel, doorposts and ground with blood from a vessel being held by a woman. She and the child with her disappear through the doorway, and the elder eventually follows. Normally static, the camera exceptionally here pans left to find Moses and Aaron standing on the steps before another door; however this time it is left to Moses to spread the blood on the doorposts, before the camera continues its slow pan to the left as they walk around the corner to find yet another blood-letting while a mother and child look on, before Moses and Aaron eventually exit the scene. In comparison with The Life of Moses, Feuillade’s scene distinguishes itself through its effective use of camera movement and its exploitation of the deep space of an impressive

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set20 and in Feuillade’s effort to represent the participation of the community through the repetition of the ritual daubing of various doors. As in Blackton’s film, it is the eating of the Passover meal that occupies Feuillade’s third and final shot of the Passover scene – a shot which, at 5:30, runs longer than the previous two shots combined. While the Blackton and Feuillade scenes both focus on the role of Moses as spiritual leader in the celebration of the Passover meal, Feuillade constructs a scene which lingers on various details and is thus slower to develop. Alongside greater attention to biblical detail, the scene displays a concerted effort to depict the quiet domesticity and harmony of the bourgeois patriarchal family home idealised in many of Pathé’s melodramas of the preceding years.21 Thus the mother of the Israelite house sits comforting her kneeling daughter, and, as servants bring through the food and drink for the feast, the daughter hospitably takes the staves of the male guests who arrive first. The female guest who then appears through the door deposits her child on the lap of the mistress of the house, who kisses the infant and invites the daughter to coo over it, until the daughter is finally required to return the staves to the men prior to the arrival of the ‘fattened calf’ – evidently reflecting Exodus 12:11’s insistence that the meal be eaten with ‘your staff in your hand’. Feuillade capitalises on the biblical juxtaposition of a familial feast which foregrounds the involvement of children (Exodus 12) with the plague of the firstborn child to come, but in transforming legislation into narrative celebration, and in lingering on an idealised scene of Israelite/French domesticity, Feuillade manages to resonate with the themes of earlier contemporary cinematic melodramas and facilitate a growing sense of foreboding at the disaster to come. Having already depicted Moses’ announcement of the tenth plague to Pharaoh, Blackton’s Life of Moses resumes its interest in it with first an intertitle and then the action itself. Blackton’s solution to the challenge of representing the ‘LORD’ himself as the agent of destruction (Exodus 12:29) is to supply an angel (mentioned in Exodus 3:2 and 14:19 but not here) armed with a sword.22 A cinematic truc (and Blackton’s penchant for spectacle) allows the angel of death to disappear outside an evidently Egyptian door and suddenly reappear within, where a family is sleeping. 20

21 22

While Feuillade clearly reused some or all of a single set to shoot Judith et Holophernes, Le Festin de Balthazar and Esther, none of these films displays the dramatic use of deep space evidenced in L’Exode. Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 130. The iconography of the angel of death clearly echoes the nineteenth-century French artist Gustave Doré’s biblical illustration The Firstborn Slain. Angels also feature prominently in Pathé’s early biblical films, sometimes with biblical warrant, as in Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Daniel 6:22) and La Vie de Moïse (Exodus 3:2) and sometimes without as in Samson et Dalila (1902).

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The angel’s disappearance after touching the sleeping child with the sword is the cue for the child’s rapid and dramatic demise, which the parents and those who rush in – now roused – are agonisingly unable to prevent. The final death throes are heightened through an otherwise uncommon midclose-up shot of parents and the struggling child. Blackton follows this with a shot of the angel of death appearing outside and then declining to enter one of the doors which has been daubed with blood during the Passover sequence – evidently an attempt to reflect the contrasting fortunes of the Israelites referenced in the text itself (11:7, 12:13). Finally, the action moves to a banqueting room in Pharaoh’s palace, where his apparently pre-pubescent son is feeding his mother grapes and is given an affectionate embrace by Pharaoh and a necklace which is much admired by the courtiers and seems designed to symbolise his status as firstborn or heir apparent. The appearance of the angel (apparently invisible to all but the viewer) and the application of the sword lead to a repetition of the previous episode, with Pharaoh and his wife leaping to the aid of their stricken son, catching him as he falls. In the melee, Pharaoh orders that Moses be summoned, and the young man and the royal entourage are moved outside. Now housed in an outdoor pavilion, the royal party mourns the death of Pharaoh’s firstborn, who lies prostrate in the middle foreground. Servants appear to take away incense pans, and Pharaoh holds his son amid the mourners as Moses and Aaron appear and are told to take the people of Israel out of Egypt. When Feuillade’s own representation of the Plague sequence is compared with Blackton’s, both similarities and differences are clearly discernible. With more footage at his disposal, Feuillade has the luxury of resuming the story of Pharaoh and his son with which he opened the film. In order to do so, the action moves without intertitle from Moses and his family to Pharaoh and his. On the arrival of his young son and entourage in the throne room amidst bowing courtiers, Pharaoh rises to welcome his son with a kiss and an embrace, before sitting with his son on the chaise. When Moses and Aaron arrive shortly thereafter, Pharaoh takes his son by the hand and rises to meet them. Having already dismissed Moses’ warning of the tenth plague at the outset of the film, Pharaoh does so again, before Moses reiterates the threat by gesturing specifically toward Pharaoh’s young son, who responds by cowering – clearly traumatised – in his father’s arms. Yet again Pharaoh wags his finger in contempt and further indicates his refusal with the words, easily discernible on his lips: ‘Vous restez ici.’ Having thus reached a stalemate, Moses retreats from the court, arm around Aaron, while Pharaoh returns – his arm around his son – to their domestic scene.

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Feuillade’s seamless transition from the Israelite household scene to Pharaoh’s own domestic idyll serves to create a set of family values which are shared by Egyptian and Israelite (and arguably their modern French counterparts). By foregrounding the emotional bond between Pharaoh and his son in an episode which is without precedent in the biblical text and without direct parallel in the Blackton film, Feuillade reinforces in unambiguous terms precisely what Pharaoh has to lose in his refusal to release the Israelites. That Feuillade’s Pharaoh ignores Moses’ warning against the firstborn not once (as in the biblical text) but eventually three times and that this warning causes his son to cower in his arms, dramatically heightens the viewer’s perception of Pharaoh’s own hubristic folly and foreshadows the tragedy to come. An intertitle alludes to Moses’ insistence that the plague on the firstborn will leave no stratum of Egyptian society untouched before the action cuts to a room in Pharaoh’s palace in which the young prince lies sleeping on a chaise longue while being fanned and serenaded by maidservants. Pharaoh signals for silence as he tiptoes in to see the ‘sleeping’ child and to kiss him yet again on his head before stealing from the room and continuing on his way. Moments later, the young boy bolts upright on his chaise – fear in his eyes, mouth gaping wide, clutching his chest and waving his arms to great melodramatic effect. The maidservants rise and rush to his side, but can only cradle the stricken prince in their arms while others sink to their knees, head in hands, and still others raise their arms to heaven in prayer (Figure 4.3). Unlike Blackton’s Life of Moses, Feuillade’s final plague does not depend on the intervention of ‘the angel of death’ but operates instead with invisible effectiveness – shifting the focus away from the spectacle of the plague’s administration to the melodrama of its effect. So too, whereas in The Life of Moses the Prince’s death is confirmed by the mourning scene which follows, Feuillade prolongs the suspense, pre-empting Pharaoh’s notification of his son’s death, with a scene which portrays the plague’s impact at the other end of the Egyptian social scale. Taking inspiration from the biblical reference to the ‘firstborn of the female servant at the handmill’ (11:5),23 Feuillade’s scene initially reasserts the conventional maternal role of the mother by foregrounding her rocking of her young child in her arms, while her husband does the heavy work of milling in the background. In leaving her child momentarily to assist her husband at the mill, the woman not only fulfils the letter of the biblical text, but also plays on the parental anxiety of the unattended child – an anxiety which is justified by her 23

That the other victims specified in Exodus 11:5 (firstborn of the livestock) fail to feature in the film must reflect the greater melodramatic potential of the human tragedy.

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Figure 4.3 The death of Pharaoh’s firstborn, L’Exode (Gaumont, 1910).

discovery that the child is soon sitting up, clutching at its throat. As in Blackton’s film, though not so aggressively, Feuillade exploits developments in framing in order to increase the emotive impact, cutting in to a closer depiction of the pathos of the child’s battle for life and the parents’ agony as the child eventually falls back onto the floor. The mother cradles the child, leans in to check the breathing, raises her hand to her mouth in horror and clutches at the child’s hand. As the father raises his arm and calls for help, the mother scoops her child up into her arms and rushes out, followed immediately by her husband (exiting frame left) before Feuillade cuts away from the shot. What appears initially to be a matched cut (entry frame right), with the couple and their son coming out through the doorway into the street, turns out instead to be the royal maidservants bearing the stricken son of Pharaoh. This extraordinary editorial sleight of hand serves to identify the slain firstborn of the Pharaoh and the Miller and in doing so foreshadows the fusing of the horizons of king and subject in this penultimate shot as a means of maximising the tragic potential of the sequence as a whole.24 The royal maidservants deposit Pharaoh’s son in the foreground before a standing soldier, who 24

In Blackton’s Life of Moses, by contrast, the plague’s fatal impact on the houses of king and subject are dealt with in discrete shots.

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promptly staggers back and raises his hand in a gesture of horror and dismay as the women begin to wail and gesticulate. Only now do the Miller and his wife appear from the deep space of the mise-en-scène, the dead son now in the Miller’s arms as they move towards the foreground – the tragedy looming ever larger for the viewer. Another woman with a child appears from frame left and then still another from the deep space of the mise-en-scène as the entire space begins to fill with parents bearing and mourning their children. As Pharaoh finally appears from the doorway through which his son has been brought, the crowd rise and turn to him. Striding into the centre of the frame and surveying the dead children being thrust at him by his people, he spreads his arms in dismay, impotence or incomprehension, but it is only then that he sees his own son in the foreground. Clutching at his breast, grabbing the wrist of his son to confirm the worst and then joining the rest in lifting their hands to the heavens, Pharaoh drops his head in anguish before a voice is heard from the deep background, which causes the assembled crowd to shake their fists. As Aaron, Moses and other Israelites make their way towards Pharaoh, the latter points to the carnage and then specifically to his own son, clutching his breast again while the Miller lifts his own dead child up for Moses’ inspection (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4 The tragedy of Egypt; Pharaoh accuses Moses, who looks to the heavens with the dead firstborn of Egypt in the foreground. L’Exode (Gaumont, 1910).

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Moses’ series of gestures, first towards Pharaoh, then towards the heavens, then to both the dead sons, makes it clear that the catastrophic loss of young lives – the tragedy which has touched every house in Egypt including Pharaoh’s own – has been brought about by Pharaoh’s own intransigence and hubris. It is this folly which Feuillade has been at pains to re-emphasise and now underlines by having Pharaoh stretch out his arms to signal his impotence. In response, both Moses and the Pharaoh’s own people plead with him to release the Israelites, which at long last he does. The climactic function of the subsequent Israelite departure from Egypt within the broader biblical narrative (12:32–6) and its inclusion in Blackton’s film evidently requires that Feuillade conclude with the parade spectacle of the Exodus. However, whereas Blackton’s Life of Moses first dwells on the ‘plundering’ of the Egyptians by the Israelites (12:35–6) before documenting a steady stream of Hebrews and their flocks, Feuillade’s continuing interest in underlining the tragic destruction of Egyptian firstborn is signalled by the intertitle, which faithfully transmits the ancient text’s own tradition that those departing were ‘six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children’.25 As if to make the point, as the city gates open to allow the Exodus to begin, two children emerge from the gates initially on their own, waving and shouting with excitement at their new freedom before the assembled Egyptian crowd. As the trickle of Hebrews becomes a steady stream, so the abuse from the Egyptians and their Pharaoh (who is seated on a dais to observe the exodus) becomes a torrent. As Moses and Aaron pass Pharaoh, the latter rises from his throne and extends a fist, clenched in rage, and then, in reply to Moses’ stoic response, violently points towards the desert, as do the rest of the Egyptians. Moses’ final response before leading the people onwards is to turn his palm upwards, signalling his own lack of responsibility, and then point again directly and emphatically at Pharaoh, reinforcing for the last time that responsibility for the Egyptians’ and his own terrible tragedy rests entirely with Pharaoh and his overweening pride and prejudice. It should be acknowledged that Feuillade’s realisation of the plague of the firstborn as tragedy draws significantly and creatively upon the resources of the biblical text itself, taking as its inspiration both the narrative’s emotive characterisation of the Egyptian response to the plague,26 but also the 25 26

‘The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children’ (Exodus 12:37 NRSV). ‘Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead’ (Exodus 12:30 NRSV).

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biblical tradition’s insistence that Pharaoh chose to ignore the warnings which were offered. Moreover the biblical text’s own juxtaposition of the familial feast of the passover with the plague of the firstborn offers ample opportunity for melodramatic treatment and Blackton’s Life of Moses had already effectively capitalised on the biblical text’s passing mention of Pharaoh’s own son (12:29). Yet it is clear that Feuillade’s film goes well beyond Blackton’s or its biblical source in its creative elaboration of the tragic aspects of the narrative. Such an elaboration is visible not only in Feuillade’s radical emphasis on the emotional bond between father and son, but also in his repetition of Moses’ warnings to Pharaoh (latterly in the presence of his fearful son), his emotive visualisation of Pharaoh confronted by the consequences of his folly and finally in his depiction of Pharaoh’s judgement even in the final scene of the Exodus. In light of our discussion, the reception of L’Exode, released in America as Pharaoh; or Israel in Egypt the following month (8 November 1910), offers further insight into its contribution to the evolving genre of the biblical film. While the camerawork in Blackton’s film had attracted criticism in some quarters for leaving viewers too close to the action and frustrating expectations of the spectacle afforded by the long shot typical of earlier biblical films (see above, Chapter 3), Feuillade’s use of the longer shot and his management of a large cast was noted by various reviews of the time, including one in the Moving Picture World, whose comments on the Exodus scene concluded with: ‘Six hundred thousand was the number which left, and the Gaumont film shows a fair percentage of them.’27 Unsurprisingly, given the reputation of French film production at the time, Feuillade’s film was also praised by several reviewers for the excellence of its colouring, another means by which Gaumont had hoped to eclipse the spectacle offered by Blackton’s film earlier in the year.28 At the same time, Feuillade’s unusually vivid portrayal of the tragic consequences of Pharaoh’s pride and folly for his own people divided critical opinion. On one hand, the reviewer for Variety was less than impressed: ‘The Tenth Plague of Egypt is pictured, although the scene of the dead children is unpleasant.’29 On the other hand, the radical nature of the scene appears to have prompted quite the opposite reaction from the reviewer of the New York Dramatic Mirror, who considered ‘the multitudes of Egyptian parents 27 28 29

MPW (12 November 1910), 1,126. The comparatively large cast was also noted in NYDM (16 November 1910), 30. Bio (29 September 1910), 32; MPW (19 November 1910), 1,178. ‘Moving Picture Reviews’, Var (12 November 1910).

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with their dead firstborn appealing to Pharaoh’ to be among the ‘most striking scenes’, before concluding that: ‘The film is a masterpiece.’30 Masterpiece or not, this difference of opinion undoubtedly reflects the distinctiveness of Feuillade’s focus on the tragedy of Egypt rather than purely or primarily the triumph of the Hebrews. By now, the continuities between L’Exode and Feuillade’s earlier biblical efforts will be clear. Like Holofernes, Haman and Belshazzar, the Pharaoh of L’Exode is clearly opposed to the divine purpose and manifestly at odds with the chosen people. But also like these characters of his earlier biblical films, Feuillade’s Pharaoh has a terrible, indeed fatal, flaw. What makes the situation all the more serious for Egypt is that, whereas the sins of both Haman and Holofernes lead only to their own destruction, Pharaoh’s flaw, like Belshazzar’s, will be tragically fatal for both Prince and people. In the case of Feuillade’s Babylonians, Belshazzar and Holofernes, the fatal flaw which brings about their downfall is, of course, the lethal combination of weakness for wine and lust for women. While on the face of it Feuillade’s Pharaoh falls, as Haman does, thanks to his efforts to destroy God’s people, such opposition to God’s people merely hints at the underlying malaise and truly besetting sin of Pharaoh, namely, a prideful rejection of God’s word of warning. What sharpens Feuillade’s depiction of this ungodly pride in both Le Festin de Balthazar and L’Exode is the presence of the prophet of the LORD. Like Daniel in Le Festin de Balthazar, the Moses of L’Exode bears the prophet’s staff and demonstrates the miraculous power of Israel’s God in dramatic fashion. Far more importantly in terms of the development of the tragedy, however, the prophet allows ample opportunity for the King to renounce his pride before it eventually takes its ultimate toll. In seeking to account for the ‘tragic’ quality of the vision offered in L’Exode and other biblical films of 1909 and 1910, it is worth noting that in the very same month Feuillade’s L’Exode appeared Capellani’s SCAGL released Michel Carré’s adaptation of Racine’s biblical tragedy Athalie (1691). Feuillade’s debt to the French theatrical tradition of ‘tragédie biblique’, which was inaugurated by Racine and persisted well into the nineteenth century, is clear both before and after the announcement of ‘Le Film Esthétique’. More specifically, what early French biblical films (including those of Feuillade) inherited from biblical tragedy was precisely this theme of the eventual downfall of the wilful and proud opponent of the divine purpose. In the end, Feuillade’s opponents fail to match the tragic complexity of, for instance, Racine’s Athalie, and more closely 30

NYDM (16 November 1910), 30.

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resemble Racine’s Haman – whose tragedy, like Pharaoh’s, falls on his progeny.31 Yet if the Racinian legacy of biblical tragedy offered Feuillade inspiration in rendering late Hebrew history, his belated application of the pattern to the Moses tradition is at first glance rather curious. True, Moses had not entirely escaped the attention of the French tragedians. Most famously in the nineteenth century, Chateaubriand’s Moïse – a tragedy in classical form, complete with chorus – took for its focus the Golden Calf narrative (Exodus 32–4). Conjuring up an Amalekite Queen Arzanes, Chateaubriand also greatly elaborates the roles of Nadab and Dathan in order to explicate in fleshly terms the seduction of Israel, which is for the dramatist the symbolic meaning of the calf and the true tragedy of the tradition.32 In the previous century, Augustin Nadal’s own five-act tragedy Osarphis (1728) preferred to echo the ancient sources’ interest in Moses’ involvement in the Egyptian court and his identification with the Hebrews. In Nadal’s tale of intrigue and rivalry between Pharaoh’s natural son Amenophis and his adopted one, Osarphis/Moses, the latter is predictably torn between his adopted culture and his true identity as a Hebrew. By contrast, it is Pharaoh’s titanic struggle with Moses and his God which was the focus of a play by L. G. citoyen de Genève which premiered that same year.33 While such a play is unlikely to have influenced Feuillade, the shared interest in the struggle of wills, divine and human, is noteworthy. Moses’ failure to reach the Promised Land thanks to his failings in the wilderness might well have presented Feuillade with his ‘tragedy’, yet his eulogising of Moses’ piety in the seventh episode of Sept Pêchés capitaux suggested his unwillingness to seek out the potentially tragic elements in the figure of Moses himself. Nor was Feuillade apparently willing to repeat the exercise of that film in locating the fatal flaw in the Hebrews as a whole, as he had done so implausibly in ‘Sloth’. Instead, as we have seen, Feuillade constructs his tragedy around the consequences of Pharaoh’s folly – the sacrifice of the firsborn of both palace and people – an interpretive innovation whose novelty demands further reflection. 31

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Claude Abraham, Jean Racine (Boston: Twayne, 1977), p. 141, puts it well: ‘More than any other character of Racine, Aman is guilty of unmitigated pride. It is from his offended pride that all his other vices and misdeeds originate. Though he is fairly lucid as to his methods of operation (ll. 483–514) and speaks with utter cynicism of a new order from which honor and rectitude will be banished, this judgment, wholly derived from his overinflated concept of self, can only lead him to disaster.’ ‘It is from this story [Exodus] that I have drawn the substance of the tragedy of Moses. The subject of this tragedy is the first idolatry of the Hebrews; idolatry which compromised the fortunes of this people and the world’ (author translation from the preface to Moïse in François-René de Chateaubriand, Oevres de Chateaubriand, vol. iv (Paris: Dufour, Mulat et Boulanger, 1859)). For both of these plays, see Herr, Tragédies bibliques, pp. 80–7.

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Figure 4.5 The Death of the Firstborn (Alma-Tadema, 1872).

While Feuillade’s ‘Le Film Esthetique’ had invoked the French tradition reflected in the ‘canvas of Millet’ and the ‘fresco of Puvis de Chavanne’, his pictorial inspiration for L’Exode appears to have been found further afield, in the work of a Dutch artist who found and enjoyed most of his fame in Britain. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was, of course, far from the first to depict the tragic consequences of the tenth plague, but it is clear that his The Death of the Firstborn (1872) had secured the subject’s place in the artistic imagination of the late nineteenth century (Figure 4.5). Having previously painted the scene in 1859, Tadema’s second, more famous effort was completed with the death of own son (1864) still fresh in his mind and not long after his arrival in London, where he stayed for six months in the house of Frederick Goodall, an artist well known for his interest in the Near East.34 Evidently drawing inspiration from both his host and the detailed illustrations contained in J. G. Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Alma-Tadema had completed work on both An Egyptian Widow in the time of Diocletian and The Death of the Firstborn by 1872.35 While the latter was first exhibited in the Salon des 34 35

This discussion of Alma-Tadema depends on that found in Edwin Becker and Elizabeth Prettejohn (eds.), Sir Lawrence Alma (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 172–3. M. J. Raven, ‘Alma-Tadema als amateur-egyptoloog’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 28, no. 3 (1980), 103–17.

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Beaux-Arts in Brussels and hailed by London’s Pall Mall magazine as the picture of the year in 1872, it may well have first come to Feuillade’s attention when the painting received a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1878. Even cursory comparison of Alma-Tadema’s The Death of the Firstborn with Feuillade’s shot of the comparable scene strongly suggests that the former served as the latter’s specific inspiration. On one hand, the debt of Feuillade’s mise-en-scène to Alma-Tadema is visible in his use of the virtually identical fresco of papyrus reeds as the backdrop for the shot.36 While Alma-Tadema’s physician sits on the floor to the left of Pharaoh, he is replaced by Feuillade with the maidservant, who sits now on the floor to the right until moved by the tragedy. In keeping with this, whereas the only woman present in Tadema’s scene is the firstborn’s grief-stricken mother, his male onlookers are replaced by Feuillade with women, the nursemaids who are witnesses to the tragedy and first to sound the alarm. It is, however, in the depiction of the Pharaoh’s firstborn himself that Feuillade’s homage is most evident: in both Tadema and Feuillade, the dead boy is bare-chested and bare-legged, in both he is positioned centrally, and, most clearly of all, Feuillade follows Alma-Tadema in posing the firstborn in the form of the pietà – lying on his back, arms splayed as he is cradled.37 Indeed, further reflection suggests that the painting has supplied the conceptual inspiration not only for this scene, but for Feuillade’s L’Exode as a whole.38 First, while the firstborn and his mother are at the centre of the canvas, it is the visage of 36

37

38

The scenes of fishing and birds which are lacking in Tadema but very prominent on Feuillade’s background may well have been inspired by a painting which included an Egyptian spear-fishing from a boat found in the tomb of Nakht in the Theban Valley of the Nobles. Not only was the tomb the subject of the famous French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero’s Le Tombeau de Nakhti (Paris: Lerou, 1891) at the end of the nineteenth century, but tinted tracings of the scenes by M. Hippolyte Boussac were preserved at the Musée Guimet in Paris from at least the turn of the century. While the fishing spear is obviously and inexplicably omitted from Nahkt’s hands, the inscription confirms the depiction of fish-spearing. See Norman de Garis Davies, The Tomb of Nakht at Thebes (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1917), p. 68. Blackton’s depiction of the scene in The Life of Moses earlier that same year also betrays the influence of Alma-Tadema’s painting, not only in the similarity of composition and detail, but also in a solitary and seemingly trival detail which appears earlier in his film: in giving his son a necklace which is then much admired by the courtiers, Blackton’s Pharaoh confirms the director’s own object of admiration, namely, the pendant and chain which may be seen to rest prominently on the dead chest of Tadema’s firstborn. This suggests that Vitagraph’s invocation of a wide range of artists including Alma-Tadema as sources for the film was not without substance (VB 204 (15–31 January 1910)). As Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 180, suggest, the company’s intention was undoubtedly to reassure exhibitors of the film’s familiarity and its cultural caché. A comparable example of two films drawing apparently independently on the same artist may be seen in the dependence of Guy’s La Vie du Christ (1906) and Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross (1912) on Tissot’s biblical illustrations. See Shepherd, ‘Alice and Jesus’, forthcoming.

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Alma-Tadema’s Pharaoh which looms largest and holds the viewers’ attention. Whatever Pharaoh’s vacant gaze signifies, his centrality in Alma-Tadema’s tragedy is mirrored in Feuillade’s own realisation of his filmic narrative of Pharaoh’s tragic folly. Moreover, if the painting’s assemblage of mourners, including the mother, emphasises that the tragedy is more than Pharaoh’s alone, Feuillade will go still further in offering the viewers the extraordinary climactic scene of the mothers bearing their dead children into the street to present them to Pharaoh. Even Feuillade’s portrayal of Moses as prophetic foil for Pharaoh resonates with Tadema’s depiction of him emerging with Aaron out of the shadows in the upper right corner of his canvas – a reminder not only that Pharaoh’s tragedy might have been averted, but also that the death of the firstborn will lead to the deliverance of the Exodus. In reflecting finally on Feuillade’s contribution to the development of the biblical film, we have seen that his initial efforts in the genre sought to capitalise on the pedigree and prestige of subjects well established within the tradition of the performing arts. Yet, if the subsequent disavowal of literary and theatrical adaptation in ‘Le Film Esthétique’ led to the director’s abandoning of precisely such subjects, Feuillade’s resonance with the more fundamental concerns at the heart of the ‘tragédie biblique’ are scarcely less evident in the biblical productions which followed than they are in his earlier Babylonian/Persian trilogy. Indeed it was precisely this symbolic bent of Feuillade’s approach to the biblical film which led the director to the increasingly innovative cinematic interpretations of Hebrew Bible narratives visible in Sept Pêchés capitaux and L’Exode. While Feuillade was not the first (nor would he be the last) to draw inspiration from the pictorial tradition, his radical conceptual dependence on Alma-Tadema’s singular painting and his daring exploration of the tragedy of Pharaoh in L’Exode confirm both the depth of Feuillade’s aesthetic convictions and his originality as a director of biblical films. As we will see, however, the greater significance of Feuillade’s contribution to the development of the biblical film will lie not so much in his aesthetic commitments, as in his interest to visually interpret the biblical text increasingly and explicitly in terms of transcendent values and mores.

chapter 5

‘All the country wept aloud’: Andréani and melodrama

While Pathé-Frères had continued to produce biblical films following Zecca’s 1907 Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, its dwindling output in the years which followed was increasingly supplied by its subsidiary and associated companies including: Film d’Art (Joseph vendu par ses frères, L’Enfant Prodigue, both 1909 and under the direction of George Berr), SCAGL (Athalie, Carré, 1910) and even Pathé’s Italian spin-off, Filme d’Art Italiano (La Samaritaine, 1910). Indeed, by 1910 whatever de facto monopoly Pathé-Frères had once enjoyed over the biblical film had well and truly disappeared. In Italy firms such as Milano, Ambrosio and Cines were also producing biblical films, and in America Vitagraph had promised that Blackton’s blockbuster Life of Moses (1910) would be but the first of a series of ‘biblical pictures’.1 Meanwhile, in France itself, Feuillade’s interest in biblical subjects – so manifest in the autumn and early winter of 1910 – showed no signs of abating in the early months of 1911.2 By 1910, even Éclair, one of the upstarts of the French industry, had begun to see the ‘virtues’ of biblical subjects. Founded in the spring of 1907 by Parisian lawyers Charles Jourjon and Marcel Vandal, Éclair quickly acquired the services of Jasset and Hatot, who proceeded to mastermind the studio’s series of Nick Carter detective films and subsequent series in various genres. Following a hiatus in which Jasset and Hatot worked for Raleigh and Robert, the two returned to Éclair, and in the summer of 1910 Jasset took up the post of ‘artistic director’, which included directing his own unit. By then Éclair’s own vehicle for industry uplift, ACAD (Association des compositeurs et des auteurs dramatiques), was already busy enhancing the prestige of the firm’s output, much as SCAGL was doing for 1 2

MPW (28 August 1909), 278. Feuillade’s La Nativité (December 1910) and Fils de la Sulammite (June 1911).

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Pathé.3 Given Hatot’s involvement in Pathé’s first Passion film before the turn of the century and Jasset’s assistance in the production of Alice Guy’s Vie du Christ for Gaumont in 1906, it is hardly surprising that the two encouraged Éclair’s interest in the biblical genre beginning in 1910 – and that their efforts were largely focused on New Testament subjects.4 While Massenet’s operatic treatment of Flaubert’s novella Hérodias inspired Jasset’s Herodiade (1910) and his La Parabole de l’enfant prodigue appeared the following summer, Éclair’s first biblical film, La Resurrection de Lazare (1910), offered Jasset an opportunity to depict a subject which Guy had excluded from her film, but which had featured frequently in Passion films before and after her Vie du Christ.5 In comparison with the version of the raising of Lazarus from Zecca’s 1907 Passion, Hatot and Jasset’s much longer treatment of the subject offers a much more fully orbed filmic narrative. Whereas the biblical text’s fascination with Jesus’ raising of Lazarus to life had predictably discouraged Zecca’s interest in the death that precedes it, Jasset and Hatot’s setting of the scene within an elaborated narrative allows for a lengthy depiction of Lazarus’ death. Following the opening scenes, the intertitle announcing ‘the death of Lazarus’ introduces a location shot of Lazarus walking towards the house of his sisters. Despite Jasset’s use of the long shot, Lazarus’ distress is apparent as he reaches the steps and collapses at the door. The prospect of his death on the doorstep appears a very real one as he struggles to rap the door, at which point his sister appears and begins to help him inside. Before she can do so, Lazarus collapses, clutching his throat, and the second sister is called, who then assists her sister in supporting the ailing Lazarus through the door before the next shot depicts him on a couch inside the house. The women’s desperation mounts as Lazarus goes through paroxysms of distress, and they lay him gently on his back on the couch. The sisters rise and discuss what can be done, and while the camera remains further from the action than in the films of Blackton and Feuillade, the women’s emotional trauma is nevertheless evident as they summon a man to go and fetch Jesus and then retreat to the couch, where a quivering Lazarus is helped to a seated position only long enough to kiss his sisters before enduring a final wide-eyed demise and slumping back to the ground. A further scene in which Christ appears to Mary (conflated, as usual, with

3

4 5

For more on Éclair see E. LeRoy and L. Billia (eds.), Éclair: Un siècle de cinéma à Epinay-sur-Seine (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995); R. Abel, ‘Lightning Images: The Éclair Film Company, 1907–1920’, Griffithiana 47 (1993); Henri Bousquet, and L. Mannoni , ‘Éclair 1907–1918’, 1895 12 (1992). The Old Testament subject which is the exception to this rule is Caïn (Éclair, 1910). Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 263 may not have been aware of the existence of this film.

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Magdalene) allows for a further depiction of histrionic grief but also Christ’s revelation of his plan to end her ‘torment’ (so the English subtitle). By beginning the film with a scene of Lazarus and his sisters making plans to invite Jesus to their home, Jasset and Hatot announce their intention to evoke aspects of the narrative which will resonate with the themes of family melodrama, with its interest in the traumatic impact of death in the family and its display of over-ripe emotionalism. Such concerns would be visible in Éclair’s production of the well-worn subject of the Prodigal Son the following summer,6 but, as we will see, they were also to become increasingly important as Pathé renewed its investment in the genre by embarking on a new and sustained programme of biblical productions beginning in 1911. In selecting a director to spearhead the firm’s new series of biblical productions, Pathé promoted from within its ranks, offering the opportunity to a relative newcomer, Henri Andréani. Born Gustave Sarrus in La GardeFreinet in the vicinity of St Tropez in 1877, Andréani had moved to Paris, working first for Gaston Velle, the magician, before assisting the latter and Zecca at Pathé, beginning around 1910. Having shared directorial responsibilities with Zecca on historical films – including those set in antiquity such as Messaline and Cléopatra (both 1910) – Andréani soon turned his hand to the biblical subjects which would become the hallmark of his directorial work for Pathé. Announced in the pages of the Ciné-Journal’s first issue of 1911, Andréani’s initial film, David and Goliath, offered viewers the spectacle of lethal combat between shepherd boy and giant which had been passed over by the only previous treatment of the subject, Blackton’s Saul and David (1909). While the first of his biblical films thus presaged Andréani’s later interest in the Samuel narratives, his fascination with biblical violence and the threat of it was to resurface in his very next film, Moïse sauvé des eaux, which first appeared on screens toward the end of January 1911.7 That Andréani would return to the subject of Moses within a year of Blackton’s Life of Moses and less than six months after Feuillade’s L’Exode reflects the popularity of the Mosaic tradition and the enduring resonance of the child’s deliverance from the waters which had so captivated the earliest filmmakers. Indeed, given various hints of the melodramatic, which we have observed above in Blackton’s and Feuillade’s treatments of the Moses tradition in previous chapters, the suggestion that Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux might 6 7

For a helpful discussion of the melodramatic aspects of this film see ibid., p. 264. While the British release of the film is dated to 28 January 1911 (Bio 12 January 1911, 27) its premiere in France appears to have come the following month, judging from its appearance in C-J (25 February and 4 March 1911). The American release does not appear to have taken place until the same time the following year (MPW, 6 January 1912, iv), under the title of the Infancy of Moses.

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also reflect such influences is far from improbable.8 Before going on to assess such a suggestion, however, it is worth considering more fully the various ways in which the melodramatic mode expressed itself in the early cinema. While the earliest cinema’s embodiment of the melodramatic impulse has not often featured prominently as a subject of investigation in its own right,9 a recent study of early sensationalist cinema offers a useful set of five basic features of melodrama, emerging from discourse and reflection within the early industry itself.10 First, melodrama’s pathos allows it to elicit in the viewer or audience a strong sense of sympathy or pity. Such pity or sympathy is reflected in the viewer’s sense of identification with the cinematic situation and, often, a character’s victimisation. This identification facilitates the impression that the cinematic drama is not merely real drama, but the viewer’s own drama, however far removed in period or setting the melodramatic scene may be from their own.11 Distinct from melodrama’s pathos, but often instrumental in facilitating it, is the genre’s tendency toward intense expressions of emotion. Such emotions are especially manifest in the full range of dramatic gestures and poses displayed by the cinematic actor particularly before the advent of the true close-up. A third feature of melodrama, mentioned by critics and commentators of the early twentieth century, is its penchant for the moral polarisation of good and evil.12 Whether or not the genre’s tendency toward moral simplification is a symptom of anxiety at the perceived erosion and complication of moral and social values,13 there can be little doubt that early critics of cinematic melodrama strongly associated it with a moral universe in which the good are very good indeed and the wicked are irredeemably so. Fourthly, the widespread consensus of early critics was that cinematic melodrama was especially concerned with, and characterised by, sensational action, often of a particularly violent sort. Such violence is often realised with great relish, but might also be threatened (i.e. the 8 9

10 11

12 13

Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 257. The recognition of the indebtedness of cinematic melodrama to nineteenth-century literary and theatrical expressions of the same may be found in the seminal essays of both Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, Monogram (1972), no. 4, 2–15 and E. Gledhill’s subsequent but no less important ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in E. Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), pp. 5–39. For a fuller discussion of these five features see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 37–58. For discussion of realism in the early cinema see N. Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), pp. 199–210, and subsequently Gledhill, ‘Melodramatic Field’, pp. 26–8. This polarisation of Good and Evil is sometimes referred to rather fancifully in the literature as ‘Manichaean’ (see Gledhill, ‘Melodramatic Field’, p. 20). See especially Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

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woman tied to the train tracks) in order to build suspense and render an escape or deliverance all the more (melo)dramatic. Finally, it is worth noting that early melodrama’s sensationalism is often wedded, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a mode of representation in which narrative elements including character and plot development are subordinated to a structure which is episodic and focused on wonder and spectacle in a manner not unlike that associated with the early ‘cinema of attractions’. While none of the above features, taken on their own, suffices to qualify a given film as melodramatic, such a qualification need not require the presence of all such features in a single film or when they are present, to an equal degree. Rather, the clustering of the features outlined above in various films – and always in varying degrees and configurations – is what contributes to the correspondingly variable impression of melodrama which may be traced in films of differing traditions and periods.14 To what extent Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux reflects such features becomes clearer when considered in light of Blackton’s Life of Moses and Feuillade’s L’Exode. Having at his disposal only 60 per cent of the footage available to Feuillade, Andréani focuses his even more limited footage (260 m) on an even briefer episode within the tradition.15 Unlike Feuillade, however, who chooses a portion of the narrative which Blackton’s blockbuster passed over quickly, Andréani’s decision to return to the hiding and finding of Moses is striking given that Blackton had recently devoted an entire reel to it. If the similarities between Blackton’s treatment and Andréani’s are in large part a reflection of their shared dependence on the basic narrative of the tradition, the differences in their treatment are all the more noteworthy. Following an introductory title,16 Andréani, like Blackton, begins his sequence with the physical abuse of the Hebrews at work in Egypt, establishing the narrative context of the action to follow. However, whereas Blackton’s Hebrews are anonymous workers, one of Andréani’s is identified as none other than Amran, the father of Moses, whose temperate nature is established in the opening seconds of the scene as he attempts to intervene between a 14 15

16

For further discussion of the advantages of such an approach over previous efforts at defining the genre of melodrama, see Singer, Melodrama, p. 44. This discussion depends on the viewing of a print with German intertitles from the Joye Collection held at the BFI (London) and a print with English subtitles evidently distributed in America and held at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). As in L’Exode and The Life of Moses, the intertitles found in Andréani’s film go well beyond early ‘titles’ in offering a more fully fledged narrative introduction and description of the scene to follow. The fact that the intertitles largely correspond to the résumé of the film found in the Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé (FJS), which in turn reflects the summary deposited for legal purposes (AFF), reaffirms the relationship between the filmic text and the catalogue (see previous chapters) but also illustrates the increasing significance of the intertitle in the biblical film (along with other genres).

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taskmaster and one of his fellow Hebrews, anticipating the later intervention of Moses known from the biblical tradition. For Blackton the abuse of the Hebrews forms the backdrop for the spectacle of Pharaoh’s arrival and observation of the scene, which in turn leads to a lengthy scene of Pharaoh’s dictation of the murderous proclamation and the introduction of his affection for his daughter. Andréani’s comparative lack of interest in such elements is signalled by the arrival not of Pharaoh, but of his captain, whose proclamation of Pharaoh’s edict is aided by the insertion into the scene of an intertitle which furnishes the text which functions here as dialogue. In Andréani’s scene, Amran’s hearing of the Captain’s proclamation of the already issued edict not only facilitates an immediate transition to the rising action of the film, but also sets the stage for the battle of wills and wits between the captain who seeks the death of the child and the father who seeks to save it. As we saw in a previous chapter, the next scene of Blackton’s Life of Moses establishes the domestic situation and the bond between the infant Moses, Miriam and Jocheved, who remain blissfully unaware of the impending threat. In Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux, this same lack of awareness is signalled in his next scene by the apparently untroubled woman who rises with babe in arms in the immediate foreground and departs the shot as Amran approaches from the deep space of the background along a city street. He arrives in the centre of the foreground and again reassures his fellows before a squad of soldiers appears from the background and passes through the shot exiting to the left of the foreground, reminding both Amran and the viewer of the impending threat. As the group of men disperses, a young teenage girl, Miriam, and her younger brother, Aaron, emerge from the doorway of the house of Amran (frame left) and rush to their father, who clutches them to himself as he looks around in all directions, hushing the children so as not to arouse suspicion and attention, before bustling them across the street and back into the house. Thus Andréani establishes not only the strength of Amran’s paternal concern for, and parental bond with, his children, but also the imminent threat to them. In Blackton’s film, we saw that his scene of domestic tranquillity is followed by Miriam finally witnessing (and attempting to obstruct) Egyptian soldiers depriving Hebrew mothers of their toddlers at the well, before she returns to break the news to her mother. In Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux, the witnessing of such horrors will only come following Amran’s revelation of the threat, though even as he enters the house with Miriam and Aaron in tow, he does not break the news to Jocheved immediately. Still hushing the children, Amran takes the infant Moses from his mother, looks at him lovingly and then shakes his head, handing him back to his mother before slumping down on a chair in the right

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Figure 5.1 Jocheved, Aaron and Miriam comfort Amram, who despairs at the threat to the infant Moses (frame left). Moïse sauvé des eaux (Pathé, 1911).

foreground, his head bowed with anxiety as the family gathers around him to find out the cause of his distress (Figure 5.1). When Amran finally rises and breaks the news of the impending infanticide, the family responds with horror: Miriam and Aaron retreat together, while Jocheved screams and retrieves Moses from his cot, clutching him to her and moving forward defiantly, as Amran slumps back down on to his chair. Whereas in Blackton’s scene the terrible news prompts an outburst of emotion followed by the women’s piety and prayer, in Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux the mother’s emotional outburst is followed by maternal resolve and juxtaposed with what the preceding intertitle announces as Amran, ‘driven to despair’. Andréani’s curious inclusion of an intertitle from the New Testament book of Hebrews (11:23) which insists that Moses was hidden by his parents for three months after his birth and that ‘they were not afraid of the king’s edict’ is followed by a sequence which suggests quite the opposite on both counts. Andréani cuts back to the street outside Amran’s house, where the Pharaoh’s captain arrives in the foreground with two soldiers, who exit the left of the frame apparently in search of more infants. As they do, a man enters the middle ground from the left of the frame, pulling a cart which is clearly burdened with more than one live infant. The arrival of this horror prompts the women to the left of the frame to scream and raise their hands in dismay,

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but even as they do another solider appears carrying a baby, holds it up and then places the baby into the cart just as the child’s mother arrives and throws herself at the feet of the captain, pleading for the child. As she rises, the captain takes her and violently throws her to the foreground, frame left. Like Blackton’s scene of the women at the well, Andréani’s scene serves up the spectacle of the bereavement of the Hebrew women but now with the added macabre attraction of a literal pile of infants. Unlike Blackton’s scene, which functions as a catalyst for the disclosure of the threat by Miriam to Jocheved, the integration of Andréani’s scene into the cinematic narrative is ambiguous at best. While Andréani will experiment with relatively crude point-of-view shots in subsequent biblical films, the fact that Amran peers out at the horror only at the beginning of the next shot (when the action returns to the interior of the house) confirms that Andréani’s ‘massacre of the innocents’ is initially unobserved by him, but rather a spectacle mounted to evoke the audience’s amazed horror at the violent cruelty not of men to women (as in Blackton’s film) but of Egyptians to Hebrew infants and mothers. Yet if Amran’s peering out through the door (after Miriam and Aaron have both rushed out of it to investigate) cannot be a point-of-view shot, the dramatic sweep of his arm as he reacts to the horror of what he sees encourages the viewer to the conclusion that what is unseen by them can hardly be less horrible and indeed may well be more so than what they have already witnessed in the previous shot. In response, Jocheved rises, clutching the baby and retreating into the background towards her husband at the door. Whereas in Blackton’s scene Jocheved and Miriam prepare to leave, in Andréani’s scene the return of Miriam through the door, biting her nails in concern as she looks out the door, confirms that the opportunity for escape has gone and that the only recourse is for her parents to hide Moses in one of the two bundles of clothes hanging in the background. That the threat to the infant Moses is indeed imminent is confirmed by the cut back outside the door, where little Aaron stands to bar any from entering. Pausing only to point and laugh at the boy’s futile effort, the captain roughly throws the boy to the ground, confirming the captain’s abusive tendencies, before his soldiers follow his orders to enter the house. Another cut facilitates the matching exit and entry of the soldiers, followed immediately by the captain himself, who then proceeds to interrogate Amran. Unconvinced by the latter’s pleas of innocence or ignorance, the captain orders his soldiers to search the house, which one does with a sword, stabbing things on the ground. As the soldier moves to hack one of the hanging bundles of clothes, Jocheved rises in alarm, her anxiety relieved only for a moment as he slices through the one which does not hold Moses (Figure 5.2). With the soldier poised to strike the bundle of clothes containing Moses, he and his colleagues

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Figure 5.2 The family looks on in horror as the Egyptian soldier prepares to strike. Moïse sauvé des eaux (Pathé, 1911).

are suddenly required elsewhere. As they depart, Amran shakes his first defiantly, and then, with Miriam and the others ensuring that the coast is clear, the father returns Moses to his anxious mother’s arms. The plan to hide Moses in the river is agreed, but Amran’s despondency continues as he raises his hands in frustration again and then lets them drop in evident despair. As Jocheved wraps herself and her baby up and Miriam fetches the basket, Amran looks out and then goes out the door to check to see if the coast is clear. For the last time in the sequence, the action cuts back to the exterior of Amran’s house, where the continuing threat is signalled again by a squad of soldiers which marches past the door into the background just as Amran emerges. Following Amran’s signal that the coast is now clear, Miriam emerges from the house with the basket, hard on the heels of Jocheved, who carries the baby into the foreground with Amran in tow. As the mother unwraps Moses, Amran kisses the baby’s forehead before raising his hands and rolling his eyes heavenwards with a plaintive cry. His wife also lifts her eyes heavenwards as she exits with the baby, followed by Miriam with the ark, leaving Amran crying out to God. The remainder of Andréani’s film unfolds predictably toward the climax of the biblical narrative with the hiding and then finding of Moses. Like

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Blackton, Andréani offers the viewer greater camera movement (a slow pan following Jocheved and Miriam on the river bank) and variation in shot lengths, similarly cutting in a closer shot of both the actual hiding and finding of Moses. Whereas the return of Blackton’s Jocheved to her home allows for the depiction of both Jocheved’s anxiety and Miriam’s offer of her mother’s services to Pharaoh’s daughter, Andréani’s Jocheved (with Miriam at her side) immediately approaches Pharaoh’s daughter and quickly has Moses back in her arms. Thus, while both Blackton and Andréani conclude with Pharaoh’s daughter appearing before Pharaoh to ask if she might keep the child, the dramatic import of the scenes differs significantly: whereas in Blackton’s scene, Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness (well established at the outset of the film) and the initial absence of Jocheved and Miriam allows for a modicum of suspense regarding whether Moses will end up in his mother’s arms, in Andréani’s final shot, the fact that Moses is already in Jocheved’s arms deprives the viewer of any real doubt that Pharaoh, whom we meet for the first time in this final scene, will be persuaded by his daughter’s pleadings.17 There can be little doubt that both Blackton and Andréani’s versions of the hiding and finding of Moses reflect various features of melodrama already discussed, but the differences should not escape our attention. Clearly, the moral universe assumed or projected by Blackton’s film admits few shades of grey: as we have seen earlier, in the first reel of Blackton’s Life of Moses, men are made culpable either by their absence (e.g. Amran) or by their violence (e.g. Pharaoh’s sadistic tendency toward infanticide), while women are to be applauded for either their piety and maternal resourcefulness (Jocheved and Miriam) or their powers of persuasive resistance (Pharaoh’s daughter). Yet for all the much-vaunted colour of Pathé’s films, the moral horizon on display in Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux is hardly less black and white.18 Indeed, if the villainy of Andréani’s Pharaoh is less apparent, his captain’s embodiment of evil exceeds anything offered by Blackton. Not only does Pharaoh’s captain preside over the infanticide with some relish, pressing his soldiers to add still more babies to the cart, his wanton abuse of the little boy Aaron and excess of physical violence towards the bereaved Hebrew women confirms that the Egyptian captain’s anti-Semitic hatred extends beyond even that of his master or his infanticidal legislation. Moreover, while Pharaoh grants his daughter and Moses special dispensation, the film offers no evidence of his captain’s relenting. 17

18

While neither print contains a complete version of the film’s final shot, the preservation of the initial portion of the shot in the BFI print and the majority of the latter portion in the LOC print allows for a reasonably full analysis. While the review in MPW (30 December 1911), 1,094, observes that the events are ‘faithfully and beautifully presented’, the film’s most noteworthy feature is that it is ‘magnificently colored’.

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Similarly, if the expressiveness of the women characters of Blackton’s film (both Egyptian and Hebrew) easily satisfies melodrama’s demand for overwrought emotionalism, Andréani’s Miriam and Jocheved are still more passionate. Indeed, what is most striking about Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux is that the range of emotional expressiveness is amplified through the depiction of not merely the female characters, but Amran himself, who displays not only alarm, but also defiance, paternal affection and, perhaps most vividly, despair. Quite apart from the function of Amran’s character in amplifying and diversifying the display of excess emotion so characteristic of the melodramatic mode, his development in Andréani’s film allows for a reconfiguring of the moral polarity not in terms of male and female, but in terms of Egyptian and Hebrew.19 More specifically, the inclusion of both father Amran, and brother Aaron (both absent from Blackton’s film) clarifies that the animating anxiety in Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux concerns not merely Moses, but the nuclear family and the threat which Egyptian infanticidal tendencies pose to that institution. Nowhere is this more clear than in the sequence leading up to the neardiscovery of the infant Moses in the house. Whilst Blackton’s film preserves the private space of the home as a place of piety and limited protection and is content to display the horrors of infanticide in the public space of the well, Andréani’s sequence allows the threat to quite literally ‘come home’, as the soldiers invade the private space of the house of Amran in search of the son. Whereas in Blackton’s film Miriam’s solitary glance out the door suffices to mark the danger, in Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux, Amran is constantly glancing in different directions, unable to track the threat signalled by the relentless marching of soldiers in the street outside the home. Once inside, as the soldiers tear through the house and progress toward the hidden child, Andréani creates a level of narrative suspense – of ‘drama’ in this more limited sense – not discernible in either the biblical text or Blackton’s film. As the sword pauses before the hidden baby, already hanging precariously in a bundle of clothes, and then hacks through the one beside it, the child’s heightened vulnerability to violence is undoubtedly intended to evoke a response in the viewer as visceral as that modelled by Andréani’s Jocheved as she leaps from her seat. In true melodramatic fashion, then, Andréani brings the threat of violence – represented by the cart of babies in the previous scene – as near to Moses as possible in order to maximise the emotional relief of his eventual escape. 19

Such an analysis qualifies the suggestion in Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 257, that Andréani’s Moïse uses ‘the pacific bonds between women as mothers and daughters to resolve the hateful antagonism between men’. In Blackton’s Moses, where Hebrew men are absent, such female bonds circumvent not the antagonism between men (Hebrew and Egyptian) but the antagonism of (Egyptian) men.

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It is perhaps a measure of the success of the model of faithful elaboration – in which the biblical narrative is elaborated in ways which do not contradict it – that the Moving Picture World’s review of the film’s American release finds that ‘the dramatic incidents surrounding the infancy of the great Jewish leader are faithfully and beautifully portrayed [by the film]’.20 Moreover, that Andréani’s melodramatic interpolation of the violation of the house was perceived to be foremost amongst these ‘dramatic incidents’ is suggested by the Bioscope’s review of the film’s UK release, which particularly notes that ‘the soldiers, acting on Pharaoh’s edict to destroy all the newly-born male children, enter the house and thrust their spears through the pillow’.21 In considering what has given rise to the domestic melodramatic turn in the biblical film, it is important to situate Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux within the broader context of French cinema in the middle years of the twentieth century’s first decade. As Abel has capably shown, Andréani’s own studio, Pathé-Frères, was filling French screens with what Rémy Gourmont in 1907 described as ‘scenes of domestic life’.22 Yet such films were stories not merely of drama, but of melodrama and, in many cases, contemporary family trauma – including the particular trauma of a loss, real or threatened, of a child. So, as early as 1903, in Pathé’s Indiens et Cowboys, a woman and child are kidnapped by a marauding American Indian. In 1905, Honneur de Père focuses on a daughter who is inextricably strangled and hidden and only eventually discovered and avenged by her father. The loss of the child is also seen in Pauvre Mère (1906), which opens with a young girl falling out an open window, despite warnings from her mother, and then chronicles the mother’s subsequent descent into desperation, depression and substance abuse as she obsesses over the daughter who has been lost. So too in the same year, Terrible Angoisse recounts the story of a lawyer at work in Paris, who receives a telephone call from his wife at their home in the country and then proceeds to witness, thanks to the new technology, the strangulation of both her and their son. Grist for this particular cinematic mill was provided, Abel suggests, by the pages of tabloids such as Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien, which ‘told stories of contemporary family traumas of the threatened loss to the family of a father or child’.23 Alongside and increasingly supplanting these stories of the tragic and irretrievable loss of a child were films in which the child was threatened but then eventually restored. Thus in Le Detective (1906) 20 22 23

MPW (30 December 1911), 58. 21 Bio (12 January 1911), 27. Rémy Gourmont, ‘Epilogues Cinématographe’, Mercure de France (1 September 1907), reprinted in Abel, French Film Theory, pp. 47–50. Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 129.

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a young girl and only child is kidnapped in order to extract a ransom from the parents before the child is eventually recovered and the family reunited, and in Lutte pour la vie (1907) a man who’s been given a job in a factory sees the owner’s house in flames and, at an upstairs window, the owner’s daughter, whom he then saves from the smoke-filled house. The increasing preference for the happy ending is best illustrated by A Narrow Escape (1908), which retells the story of the threat to wife and son as witnessed over the phone, but allows the man (now a doctor rather than a lawyer) to arrive just in time to protect the mother and child at the heart of the home.24 If Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux moves well beyond Blackton’s Life of Moses in its incorporation of such melodramatic features into the biblical film, what light does such a discussion shed on previous suggestions that a film such as Feuillade’s Judith et Holophernes too reflects the melodramatic impulse?25 On one hand, Judith et Holophernes lacks anything like the dramatic sequence observed above in Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux, offers little genuine pathos and does not dwell at great length on overwrought displays of emotion. On the other hand, Feuillade’s film does build to an act of sensational violence in Holofernes’ decapitation, and its projection of a moral universe in which Judith and the Hebrews embody the good and Holofernes and the Babylonians embody the evil can hardly be doubted. Yet such a universe, and with it the audience’s sympathies, are complicated in some measure by the action of the ‘righteous’ heroine in seducing the villain with her beauty and her wine. It is this measure of complication which encourages the suggestion that, while Feuillade’s biblical films may reflect something akin to the melodramatic impulse, that impulse is less clear, more complicated and ultimately less fully fledged than in a film such as Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux. Such a conclusion may be checked by briefly considering the relationship between Andréani’s film and Feuillade’s L’Exode – not least because we have argued above that the latter also exploits anxieties relating to the loss of children and the disruption of the family unit. Like Judith et Holophernes, Feuillade’s L’Exode lacks the suspenseful structure leading up to the inflicting (or narrow avoidance) of violence characteristic of earlier contemporary melodrama in the French cinema and visible in Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux. Indeed, while the death throes of the miller’s and Pharaoh’s sons in L’Exode could be construed as ‘violent’ in a sense, it is unclear whether such scenes would have been perceived to 24 25

Ibid., pp. 130–55, situates these and other films in the context of evolving strategies of representation in the French cinema between 1904 and 1907. Ibid., p. 277.

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satisfy the sensationalist requirements of fully fledged melodramatic expectations, even if these same scenes do offer ample scope for the expression of the overwrought emotion indigenous to melodrama. Perhaps even more fundamentally, while Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux offers a straight and even path down which the pathos of melodrama may travel, Feuillade’s L’Exode provides a comparatively winding road which would have been hard pressed to facilitate the same degree of audience sympathy. More specifically, whereas the focus of Moïse sauvé des eaux on Exodus 2 facilitates an easy identification with the righteous Hebrew victims against the evil of the Egyptians, L’Exode’s ability to evoke a comparable degree of sympathy is limited by Feuillade’s daring decision to focus on not the evil of the Egyptians but on the tragedy they suffer, thanks to their Pharaoh. However much the audience might otherwise be inclined to sympathise with the terrible loss suffered by Pharaoh and his people, the Egyptians’ archetypal status as enemies and oppressors of the ‘people of God’ and Feuillade’s clear attribution of the tragedy to Pharaoh’s own pride must inevitably complicate, and indeed compromise, the full extension of the audience’s sympathy. Thus in L’Exode the otherwise fine melodramatic punishment of Egyptian evil is complicated by the tragedy of consequences: it is the innocent son of not only the culpable Pharaoh, but even the blameless miller who feels the full force of the divine judgement.26 If the subject of Moïse sauvé des eaux thus offered Andréani an obvious starting point for his development of biblical melodrama in the silent cinema, the films which followed demonstrate that variations on the theme of the domestic trauma were to remain his animating interest. While Georges Méliès had included the episode of Cain and Abel as the first of eleven tableaux in his ambitious series La Civilisation à travers les âges in 1907/8 and Louis Feuillade had included the same episode in his series Les Sept Pêchés capitaux in the autumn of 1910, Andréani offered his own version, Caïn et Abel, in the spring of 1911.27 Undaunted, or perhaps even encouraged, by the popularity of the subject of Cain at this time,28 Andréani again realised his own distinctive vision of the episode, as may be seen again in comparison with Feuillade’s. Like Feuillade, Andréani follows Méliès by specifically emphasising the 26

27 28

For Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (London: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 88–9, such complications compromise melodrama’s ‘monopathy’ and veer toward the ‘polypathy’ of tragedy. The film was announced in France in C-J (1 April 1911) and released in America on 11 November 1911 (according to MPW 25 November 1911, 645). In France, Éclair had already produced a version (Caïn, 1910) as had Milano films (Caino, 1910) in Italy, where its rival, Ambrosio, would release its own La Dannazione de Caino, 1911.

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primitive, even primeval, setting of the story by having the characters garbed in the furs of the ‘caveman’. Strengthening this impression of the stone age is the decision by both Feuillade and Andréani to shoot on location in the rocky hillsides of the forest of Fontainebleau. Structurally, Andréanis film shares much with Feuillade’s: they both devote approximately a third of their respective films to each of the following narrative elements in succession: 1) the growing enmity of the brothers; 2) the killing itself and the divine pronouncement of judgement; and finally 3) the impact of the judgement on Cain’s state of mind. Yet if the proportions are comparable and not unexpectedly so, given the character of the narrative in Genesis 4, the manner in which Andréani uses his additional footage (170 m vs. Feuillade’s 84 m) again illustrates his contribution to the evolution of the genre. Feuillade begins in medias res, with Abel sacrificing a lamb in the foreground while Cain, having already concluded his own unacceptable sacrifice, creeps up behind him, club already in hand. Placing an arm over the shoulder of Abel, he leads him out of the shot, matching exit with entry to a scene of a brook, where Cain clubs his brother’s head as the latter bends down to drink. Andréani’s film, by contrast, begins with Abel pointing out to Cain the lamb which he plans to offer. When Cain rises in anger, their mother, Eve appears out of the background to stand between the two, followed soon by the father, Adam, who then stays the hand of Cain as he attempts to strike Abel. Unlike Feuillade’s treatment, Andréani’s film thus establishes at the outset that the spectre of fraternal violence is a threat not merely to the brothers’ own relationship but to the harmony of the family as a whole. In keeping with the canons of melodrama, Andréani both foreshadows but also forestalls the threat of fraternal violence in order to allow the suspense to build, but Cain’s reaction in this first scene signals the depth of the emotional conflict, for, as he retreats from his family and the camera, his fists are clenched and he is hunched over, animal-like in his anger. Andréani’s second shot is of the competing sacrifices themselves, with Cain’s anger increasingly evident as Abel’s lamb smoulders splendidly and Cain violently sweeps his own apparently unsatisfactory offering onto the ground. Andréani’s Cain then, however, exits the shot to the left of the frame, and the action cuts to him on his own, as he approaches the camera to give full vent to his frustration and anger. Gesturing and glancing back towards his brother out of the shot (Figure 5.3), Cain’s address to the camera illustrates the process by which fraternal frustration becomes fratricidal hate. He finally clutches at the axe in his belt and retraces his steps, pausing before returning to his brother in order to brandish the axe and leave the viewer in no doubt as to his intentions.

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Figure 5.3 Cain addresses the viewer, gesturing in his anger toward Abel. Caïn et Abel (Pathé, 1911).

Here, in a manner quite unlike previous versions, but in keeping with the melodramatic impulse, Andréani offers the viewer full access to the emotionally overwrought Cain as he plunges toward murder. As the action cuts back to the earlier shot and Cain returns to Abel, there is an exchange between the brothers which is then followed by Cain planting the axe violently into the top of Abel’s head as the latter turns his back on Cain. Unlike Feuillade’s scene, but in keeping with melodrama’s love for gore, blood flows freely down Abel’s face as he clutches it and falls dramatically to the ground.29 While neither Feuillade nor Andréani can resist the spectacle of a divine messenger appearing out of thin air to deliver Cain’s judgement, Andréani goes further by supplying several lightning strikes to get Cain’s attention and by having the angel use his sword to conjure the removal of the stones Cain had piled up to hide Abel’s body. Andréani’s dependence on Feuillade’s treatment but also development of it is fully evident in the sequence of Cain’s flight which follows. While Feuillade can only afford a single shot lasting a few seconds of Cain’s flight through a 29

That Abel is not quite as dead as he should be is clear when his continued breathing is betrayed by the frostiness of the early morning, even as he is being buried.

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rocky crevasse, Andréani offers a series of four shots, the first of which pans slowly across a rocky face as Cain flees his judgement. In the second, Cain clambers through another rocky canyon pursued by ‘demons’ which are very visible to him (judging from his tortured expression) but unseen by the viewer. A third scene has Cain on a still different rocky slope, where he is suddenly haunted by the mirage of his slain brother’s body, which is immediately transformed into the angel with the sword before a dialogue intertitle announces that Cain shall live to bear the weight of the divine curse. As Cain flees yet again, the action cuts once more to a very close crevasse in which Cain now crawls on his hands and knees towards the camera, with his continuing emotional trauma very much in evidence. Feuillade’s final scene ‘the sleep of Cain’ illustrates Cain’s continuing mental fragility as his dreams continue to be haunted by his dead brother. Yet even as he is wakened from his sleep by the unseen nightmare, Feuillade’s Cain is nevertheless surrounded by his family and comforted by his wife. In Andréani’s final shot, by contrast, Cain – now weakened to the point of needing a walking stick – appears in a woodland, still alone. Even though, or perhaps because, the sun has now begun to rise, he sinks to the ground, tortured to the end and utterly bereft of the consolation of family or human companionship. In exploring the pathology of violence, Andréani’s Caïn et Abel exchanges the saving of a son in Moïse sauvé des eaux for the killing of a brother as he explores both the emotional causes but also consequences and costs of fratricidal violence. The glut of productions of Cain and Abel which arrived on American screens in 1911 and 1912 prompted a range of responses in the trade press. Given some reviewers’ resistance to the increasingly ‘dramatic’ style of acting inspired by Film d’Art and its imitators, it is perhaps not surprising that the depiction of the sheer intensity of Cain’s expression of emotion – first rage and then despondency – struck some as overdone, as may be seen in a review of Andréani’s film when it reached American shores: The character of Abel is presented with suitable simplicity, but it is a question if that of Cain is not a little overwrought; an excess of acting tends to exaggerate the manner of even the guilty one.30

Nevertheless, a dim view of such dramatic excesses was tempered with an appreciation of the challenges in adapting the laconic and brief account offered by the biblical text in Genesis 4: 30

MPW (11 November 1911), 480. While the review (and the caption beneath the accompanying still) claim that the film in view was produced by Vitagraph, the action described and most tellingly the still itself establish beyond doubt that the film was Andréani’s.

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The Bible on Silent Film All pictorial representations of such scenes must be, in a sense, imaginative. While it is possible to obtain fairly accurate ideas of costumes and manners it is difficult to know from the narrative just what occurred. But the producer [i.e. Feuillade for Gaumont] has put into concrete form the impressions which are most likely present in the Bible.31 . . . it was encumbent upon the producers of this scene to draw upon a most wise and discriminating imagination. In doing this it is pleasant to record that violence has not outraged the subject, while differences of opinion may repeatedly arise, it must be remembered that where detail of prescription is lacking the most reasonable presumption of ‘what might have been’ is allowable. The consecutive order of the Biblical account has been preserved and a desire to faithfully follow the original is evident . . . In its place as a Biblical picture Cain and Abel is capable of easy descriptive accompaniment, as it runs parallel with the original account and is not spoiled by superfluous additions or conspicuous shortcomings.32

Such reviews (perhaps penned in this case by the same person) reflect a credible awareness of the challenge of adapting a laconic ancient text in which ‘detail of prescription is lacking’ and certain details are ‘difficult to know from the narrative’. Such awareness leads to a corresponding allowance for the filmmaker’s use of ‘discriminating imagination’ and a ‘reasonable presumption of “what might have been” with a view to forming ‘impressions which are most likely present in the Bible’. At the same time, the persistent discourse of fidelity is visible in the concern that the biblical picture might be spoiled by ‘superfluous additions’ or ‘conspicuous shortcomings’. While the discourse of fidelity invoked by the reviewer will, on one hand, have been intended to reassure the potential exhibitor that the film would not offend those familiar with the story, the explicit reassurance that such fidelity allows for ‘easy descriptive accompaniment’ offers evidence that the practice of the accompanying lecture persisted in the biblical genre into the early teens. That Andréani’s efforts to illuminate the familial context of Cain’s fratricide did not go unnoticed are suggested by the summary of the film supplied by one trade journal: The story of the first murder in the history of the world is vividly told in this picture. The life of Adam and Eve and their two sons is charmingly shown. But soon jealousy creeps in and Cain becomes envious of the love so showered upon Abel by his father and mother.33

In Feuillade’s version of the biblical episode released the previous year the appearance of God and two angels following Abel’s offering facilitates the 31

MPW (7 January 1911), 32.

32

MPW (11 November 1911), 480

33

MPW (18 November 1911), 570.

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director’s affirmation of the biblical insistence that Cain’s eventual murder is rooted in his envy of God’s acceptance of Abel’s offering.34 By contrast, in Andréani’s scene of the brothers’ sacrificing, God is not depicted, and divine approval of the sacrifice is indicated purely by the kindling of Abel’s sacrifice and Cain’s rage. Andréani’s film invites the conclusion that it was, as the reviewer suggests, not God’s acceptance of Abel, but Adam and Eve’s preference for him which prompted Cain’s jealousy – not least by offering an initial (and entirely novel) scene in which Eve intervenes to protect the younger brother Abel, and his father forcibly restrains Cain from striking him and threatens to pursue the ostracised Cain as he flees. Such themes of fraternal rivalry and parental favouritism would recur as Andréani continued his exploration of familial melodrama by means of the biblical film. Having begun with some of the most often adapted biblical subjects, Andréani proceeded to take up subjects which had never been explored in the cinema. In Jaël et Sisera (August 1911), for instance, Andréani seized on a biblical narrative (Judges 4 and 5) which offered many of the attractions furnished by earlier productions of Judith and Holofernes. Like Holofernes, Sisera is a foreign (Canaanite) general and, like Judith, Jael is a heroine who lulls the foreign general into a false sense of security before dispatching him with an act of graphic physical violence. Unlike the book of Judith, however, Judges offers comparatively little by way of detail and thus, perhaps happily for Andréani, allows ample scope for an elaboration which did not contradict the structure of a laconic biblical narrative.35 Abandoning the biblical preamble concerned with Deborah and Barak (Judges 4), Andréani prefers a narrative novelty which pictures Jael, an Israelite woman, but the wife of Heber the Kenite – himself a ‘friend’ of Sisera – as present in the camp of the Caananite army. Having already offered food and drink to her Israelite kinsmen held captive in the camp, she then bravely sets them free to reveal to the Israelites the location of Sisera’s army to Barak. The description of 10,000 Israelites defeating Sisera’s chariots in Judges 4 offers Andréani the ideal opportunity to stage the visual spectacle of the massed battle scenes against the backdrop of a rocky French coastline meant to approximate the ‘Kishon torrent’ (so the English intertitle; Judges 4:13) and the Israelites’ pursuit of the fleeing Sisera. Following the climactic violent spectacle of Jael driving a tent peg through 34

35

Unsurprisingly given the title of Feuillade’s film (Envy), it is in this very scene that the director deploys the circle vignette used throughout this series (see previous chapter) to focus the viewer’s attention on the narrative moment most illustrative of the deadly sin in view. For a discussion of the portrayal of Judith, Jael and Salomé as femmes fatales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see H. W. van Os, Femmes Fatales 1860–1910 (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 2002).

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Figure 5.4 Hammer in one hand, peg in the other, Jael prepares to kill the sleeping Sisera. Jaël et Sisera (Pathé, 1911).

Sisera’s head into the ground (Figure 5.4), the final scene has her acclaimed by the Israelite army, and Barak kisses the hem of her dress.36 While Israelite femmes fatales such as Judith and Jael had already enjoyed a long history of glorification and vilification prior to their emergence on the silent screen, Andréani’s choice of Jael and treatment of her can hardly be a coincidence given the prominence enjoyed by feminine heroines, often armed and dangerous, within early sensational melodrama.37 While this depiction of biblical violence reaches its zenith in Le Martyre de Saint Étienne (1912), a film in which Stephen endures a Christ-like Passion, Andréani’s interest in the traumas and melodramas of the biblical family led him to focus his attention on the patriarchal narratives and those of David and his successors. The Pathé catalogue confirms that David et Sau¨l (1911, 385 m) resumes where the director’s earlier David et Goliath had left off, taking up Saul’s gift of Michal to David (1 Samuel 18), the death of the priest Ahimelech (1 Samuel 22), and David’s sparing of Saul’s life in the cave at En Gedi 36 37

Jael’s stone hammer has evidently been borrowed from Cain. Singer, Melodrama, pp. 221–63.

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(1 Samuel 24).38 In La Mort de Sau¨l (1912, 305 m), the King’s grief at the death of his son and his protracted taking of his own life are emblematic of the overwrought emotionalism characteristic of Andréani’s Saul and indeed of a third, still longer, film, Absalon (1912, 415 m), which focuses on not Saul’s son, but David’s. Here too Andréani’s interest is in the dysfunctional family, the rivalry of brothers and the grief of the father. In the final film of this sequence, Le Jugement de Salomon (1912, 405 m) the rivalry is not that of brothers but mothers as the threat of violence to the child returns. While in Le Sacrifice d’Abraham (1912) the melodrama revolves around the narrow escape of the son Isaac from the knife of the patriarch, in Andréani’s subsequent Sacrifice de Ismaël (1912, 340 m) – also drawn from the narratives of the patriarchs (Genesis 16)39 — the cause of the threat to the life of the child is again the rivalry between mothers – in this case Sarah and Hagar – the latter of whom is ostracised with her son as surplus to patriarchal requirements.40 Perhaps more significant than Le Sacrifice de Ismaël’s treatment of its subject matter, however, was the location where it was shot. While Andréani’s biblical productions up to and including Le Jugement de Salomon appear to have been shot in France (though not all in Paris), Le Sacrifice de Ismaël is the first of his biblical films to have been shot on location in the Middle East – a feature which was happily exploited in the promotion of the film: This beautiful Biblical scene is executed on the spot where the poetic legend of Hagar took place; the sands of the desert and unscrutable sphinx and the Pyramids of Egypt in turn lend it their majestic scenery.41

While precise dates of Andréani’s shooting in Egypt are not known, it is not improbable that his decision to shoot biblical scenes ‘on location’ was encouraged by the American company Kalem’s release of a series of films shot in Egypt earlier that same year. Having filmed in Ireland and continental Europe in previous years, Kalem’s Frank Marion had sent director Sidney Olcott, writer-actor Gene Gauntier and others to Egypt late in 1911, with stops en route at various ports in the Mediterranean, culminating in their arrival in Alexandria just before the 38

39 40

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Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé ( FJS). See also the more interesting and slightly critical review of the film by the ‘Moving Picture Educator’ column found in MPW (13 April 1912), p. 118, which wishes for greater fidelity to the narrative of the biblical text. Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé (FJS): ‘An angel suddenly appeared and showed him a spring of living water where she could have a drink with her son and continue his journey.’ The summary offered in Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé (FJS) indicates that Sara ‘drove Hagar into the desert with her son, when she herself had given birth to Isaac. Their water having run out, Ishmael dropped to the sand and Hagar left in tears so as not to see her son die’ (author translation). Bousquet, Catalogue Pathé (FJS).

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New Year.42 It was not long before the fruits of Kalem’s Egyptian labours began to be seen on screen: Egypt, the Mysterious (15 May), Egypt (20 May), The Fighting Dervishes of the Desert (27 May), Luxor, Egypt (29 May) and others followed Kalem’s initial offering, the Potters of the Nile (3 May). By this time Olcott and Gauntier were already in Jerusalem, having shot the Egyptian scenes of a cinematic life of Christ before departing Egypt – despite Marion’s refusal to sanction such a project. Inspired by J. J. Tissot’s gospel illustrations,43 Olcott’s Kalem unit had reached Jerusalem in the spring, with Easter in Jerusalem shot soon after their arrival and released in August of the same year. While Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross received its London premiere on 3 October 1912 and may thus lay claim to being the first biblical film shot on location in the Holy Land, it is likely that Andréani had already arrived in Egypt, or was soon about to, in order to shoot scenes which would appear not only in Le Sacrifice de Ismaël – which appeared on French screens before the end of 1912, but also in La Reine de Saba. It was thanks in large part to these Egyptian scenes that Andréani’s treatment of the Queen of Sheba ran to 580 m – nearly two full reels and more than 40 per cent longer than Le Jugement de Salomon. Sheba’s journey from her land to Solomon’s court in Jerusalem afforded Andréani ample opportunity to include nearly five minutes of footage of Sheba’s caravan processing through the Egyptian desert. Recruited from local Bedouin communities, Andréani’s caravan boasts an impressive array of musicians and servants in traditional garb and camels in Arab livery, two of whom bear the enormous palanquin containing the Queen of Sheba herself high above the sands of the desert. Slow pans up and down the length of the caravan and multiple shots from different vantage points allow Andréani to maximise the impact of the spectacle as the caravan proceeds and a particularly accomplished shot from ground level simulates a point-ofview shot which foregrounds local Bedouin musicians playing traditional instruments whose music is acknowledged by the Queen when her palanquin comes to a halt in the background, before continuing its journey (Figure 5.5).

42

43

Details of the journey and the company’s time in Egypt and the Holy Land are gleaned from the serialised version of Gene Gauntier’s memoirs published as ‘Blazing the Trail’ in the Woman’s Home Companion (November 1928–March 1929). The otherwise unpublished memoirs are held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. While the influence of Tissot’s illustrations may already be seen in Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ (1906), Kalem’s filming of From the Manger to the Cross in the Holy Land facilitated a far more thorough dependence on Tissot, whose own illustrations resulted from his sojourns in the same locales. See H. Reynolds, ‘From the Palette to the Screen: The Tissot Bible as Sourcebook for From the Manger to the Cross’, in R. Cosandey et al. (eds.), Une invention du diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de L’Université Laval, 1992), pp. 177–8.

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Figure 5.5 On location in Egypt, a courtier bows before the palanquin of the veiled Queen of Sheba; in the foreground, musicians supply some local flavour. La Reine de Saba (Pathé, 1913).

On one hand, Andréani’s use of indigenous Middle Eastern cast, costumes and props in the service of biblical illustration has even less claim to historical authenticity than some of the neo-classical, orientalising painters of the nineteenth century discussed in previous chapters. On the other hand, the significance of Olcott and Andréani’s shooting on location should not be underestimated. As Kalem’s actualities of Egypt had demonstrated, scenes of foreign culture carried with them an intrinsic appeal as spectacle, irrespective of their association with the biblical text. Moreover, as Tissot had discovered, the visualisation of a culture associated geographically with the biblical lands could be promoted as – and was evidently seen to be – a powerful guarantor of biblical ‘authenticity’ for cinema audiences. If the ancient account’s insistence on the sheer size of Sheba’s retinue and costly gifts (10:2, 10) offered Andréani an initial (or merely additional) encouragement to make a spectacle of the Sheban caravan, it also furnished an impetus to display Solomon’s royal pomp and palatial circumstance: 4

And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built, 5And the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his

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The Bible on Silent Film cupbearers, and his ascent by which he went up unto the house of the LORD; there was no more spirit in her. 6And she said to the king, It was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and of thy wisdom. 7 Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard. (1 Kings 10:4–7 KJV)

The words attributed to the Queen of Sheba draw the distinction between the insufficiency of what she has heard of Solomon and the corrective of what she sees. She confesses herself unpersuaded by verbal attempts to convey the scope of Solomon’s prosperity and wisdom, which then turn out to be, when her own ‘eyes had seen it’ (v. 7), far greater even than she had heard. The Queen’s own verbal confession follows the narrator’s listing at some length what the Queen of Sheba ‘had seen’ (v. 4) – that is primarily the visible signs of his wealth including the food, the servants and their deportment, the steps into the temple, etc. (vv. 4–5). While the spectacle of Solomon’s court created by Andréani suffers by comparison with Poynter’s The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890) in terms of colour and scale, there is little doubting Andréani’s intention to bring such a spectacle to life.44 Yet if La Reine de Saba retains all the Solomonic spectacle of the firm’s earlier Le Jugement de Solomon, Andréani’s narrative itself offers a significant departure. That it does so is thanks largely to the paucity of information furnished by the biblical account of Sheba, which offers only the barest of narrative bones (1 Kings 10:1–13) and thus ample opportunity for interpretive expansion. Further stimulus for such elaboration is supplied by the various gaps, ambiguities and otherwise intriguing elements which had already prompted ancient interpreters to interrogate and elaborate various aspects of the narrative, including the character of the Queen’s sexuality.45 Thus by the nineteenth century, operatic treatments such as Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (1875) and Gounod’s La Reine de Saba (1865) were fixated on a Sheban sexuality which was far from innocent and was, in fact, predatory.46 In the librettos of both 44

45

46

In sharp contrast to the scenes of the caravan, the remainder – indeed all the dramatic scenes – gives every appearance of having been shot back in France on the sets and with the cast used by Andréani for previous biblical productions. Indeed, having played the role of the Israelite king in Le Jugement de Solomon, René Alexandre of the Comedie Française reprised it in La Reine de Saba. So, for instance, the interpretation of Solomon’s satisfaction of all the Queen’s desires (10:13) in sexual terms seems to appear first in a text as ancient as Ps. Ben Sira. For a thorough exploration of ancient and medieval interpretations of the Queen of Sheba in Jewish and Islamic traditions see J. Lassner, Demonising the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Post-biblical Judaism and Medieval Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1993). For the representation of the Queen of Sheba and other femmes fatales in nineteenth-century opera see P. McGrail, ‘Eroticism, Death and Redemption: The Operatic Construct of the Biblical Femme Fatale’, Biblical Interpretation 17 (2007), 405–27.

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operas, the Queen’s sexual predations take their toll on Israelite men who fall under her spell. In Goldmark’s opera, the Queen’s arrival leads to the destruction of Assad, one of Solomon’s army commanders, who is betrothed to Salamith, the daughter of the High Priest. Entranced by the Queen of Sheba, Assad jilts Salamith at the altar and subsequently perishes. In Gounod’s opera, it is the Queen’s own betrothal to Solomon which is the casualty of her affections for the Israelite king’s master craftsman, Adoniram. Gounod’s love triangle is shattered when Adoniram is stabbed in the final scene by three of his traitorous workers as he waits to run away with the Queen, who arrives only in time to embrace Adoniram before his death. Andréani’s film too constructs a love triangle which includes the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, but in a departure from the nineteenth-century operatic tradition, the other man is not an Israelite, but Horan, one of the Queen’s own Sheban courtiers. While Horan’s affections are toyed with by the bored Queen, the arrival of a musical gift and an invitation from Solomon persuades the Queen to visit. Accompanying his Queen on her long journey to Solomon’s court, Horan is increasingly alienated as Solomon succumbs to the Queen’s beauty and she to his splendour. Yet again, Andréani makes use of a series of adjacent spaces as the narrative builds to its inevitable narrative climax. As Solomon and the Queen retreat into the depths of the palace through first one and then two rooms to continue their intimacies (Figure 5.6), Horan becomes increasingly frantic outside until he can take no more. Bursting past one guard into the first room, Horan draws his sword (whether to use on the remaining guard or Solomon himself), but is disarmed by the guard and stabbed himself as he forces his way into the presence of Solomon and the Queen, where he dies a long and evidently lovesick death. In some ways La Reine de Saba is fully reflective of many of the impulses which we have seen to characterise Andréani’s biblical films: the concern to display not only the female form (exotic dance) but the opulence of costume, ornateness of scenic background as spectacle, is no less present here – and is perhaps even more so – than in previous films, especially when one considers the use of ‘actuality’-like footage in the caravan sequence and in a primitive point-of-view shot in which Solomon invites visitors from Sheba to view the workers in his fields. Yet, if in these ways Andréani’s Reine de Saba sits comfortably within the director’s oeuvre, it marks a turning point in his work and anticipates certain developments of the genre beyond his own time. Much like Gounod’s opera, whose weak articulation of villainy and eschewal of simplistic and uncomplicated victimhood decades earlier had

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Figure 5.6 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba become intimate. La Reine de Saba (Pathé, 1913).

underwhelmed critics expecting something more melodramatic, Andréani’s film itself offers its own moral complications.47 Horan is undone by his weakness, but the viewer’s condemnation is complicated by the Queen’s sexual capriciousness. While this lack of royal restraint claims Horan as its victim, the Queen herself is in turn deprived of her true love, Solomon, who is similarly afflicted. While La Reine de Saba’s moment of violence is undeniable, its significance is diminished by the film’s primary interest in the relationship between Solomon and the Queen – a relationship which is in fact enabled by Horan’s death, before being ultimately pre-empted by the need for the Queen to return to her land to fulfil her duty. Indeed, as we will see, the tangible shift away from climactic and sensational violence in La Reine de Saba will foreshadow the increasing interest on the part of both the director and the genre as a whole in romantic melodrama. While Andréani’s Rébecca (spring 1913) offers the viewer a narrative of a young woman for whom divine providence will provide a husband in the 47

For more on Gounod’s opera in the context of nineteenth-century French musical theatre, see S. Huebner, ‘After 1850 at the Paris Opéra: Institution and Repertory’, in David Charlton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 306–7.

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shape of the patriarch, Isaac, La Fille de Jephté represents the young woman deprived of her marital future by the foolishness of her father, yet celebrated both in scripture and on screen. Such pious obedience on the part of a young woman is also at the heart of Andréani’s penultimate biblical film, Esther (spring 1913), which offers a much fuller treatment of the ground covered by Feuillade’s film of the same name (436 m). In turning his hand finally to the biblical patriarch Joseph, it is somehow fitting that Andréani would devote the last of his biblical energies and greatest abundance of footage to a subject which Pathé had taken up first in 1904 (Joseph vendu per ses frères, 190 m) and then again in the firm’s remake of the same title (240 m) directed by Georges Berr and Paul Gavault for Film d’Art in 1909. Andréani’s specific dependence on the earlier Film d’Art production is most clearly visible in the opening scenes, where the director, like Berr, establishes the frame of reference as the familial melodrama by offering a domestic scene which illustrates the close bond between Joseph and his much younger full brother Benjamin. Whereas the theatricality of Berr’s film is reflected in the stationary camera and longer shot distance, Andréani draws the action toward the camera and pans right to include the arrival of the brothers and then the patriarch Jacob himself, who in both films demonstrates the favouritism signalled by the ancient account (Genesis 37:3). In passing over Joseph’s ‘bad report’ of his brothers with which the biblical account begins (37:2), both productions ensure that their Joseph remains untainted. Moreover, by including Benjamin when the biblical account does not, both productions establish the fraternal association of the sons of Rachel (Joseph and Benjamin) over and against the other brothers, whose mature vindictiveness is established by Andréani’s contriving of their obvious lack of interest in the young child, Benjamin. Carefully cultivating an ‘authentic’ pastoral scene, Andréani supplies the flocks of sheep which the text implies (v. 2) but whereas the earlier production moves directly to the selling of Joseph into slavery, Andréani’s additional footage is devoted to a series of shots of the brothers speaking conspiratorially as they tend to the flocks, clearly intended to increase the suspense. Passing by the symbolism of the dreams as recounted in the biblical text, Andréani realises Joseph’s vision of the sheaves of his brothers bowing down to his sheaf (37:7) by having Joseph’s brothers appear for several seconds out of thin air all around him, bowed low to the ground, as Joseph himself stares into the heavens. Andréani’s preference for the melodramatic moral polarisation of characters is visible again in his omission of the biblical Jacob’s rebuke of Joseph’s report of the dream (v. 10) and in his brothers’ pre-emptory taking of Joseph before he can even share the offending dream; the status of Andréani’s Joseph as innocent victim is .

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unimpeachable. While the biblical account limits the prospects of Joseph’s murder to a discussion amongst the brothers (37:18–22), Andréani’s Joseph is made to kneel, arms outstretched like Stephen in Le Martyre de Saint Étienne while his brother raises a stone hatchet to kill him (as in Caïn et Abel), before his life is saved at the last moment by an unexpected intervention (as in Le Sacrifice d’Abraham). As in Berr’s earlier version, Andréani includes a shot of Joseph being dropped into a well. Unlike the earlier version – but very much like the sequence in which Stephen is pushed from the cliff in Le Martyre de Saint Étienne – Andréani cuts to a shot of the bottom of the pit, into which Joseph immediately drops. While the perils of the pit are of no interest to the ancient narrator, Andréani’s shot dwells on a dazed Joseph as he vainly and pathetically attempts to claw his way up the wall before dropping back down to the floor of the pit in a manner clearly intended to engender sympathy for the afflicted Joseph. The demonisation of the brothers is facilitated by their uproarious laughter at Joseph’s plight when the action cuts back to the initial shot of the brothers clustered around the mouth of the pit and then still further by their greed as they demand more from the Midianite slave traders who purchase Joseph and then fight among themselves over the proceeds. While the Midianites’ journey to Egypt offers Andréani the opportunity to reuse the Egyptian location footage of the camel caravan which had appeared already in Le Sacrifice d’Ishmaël and La Reine de Saba,48 the action resumes with Jacob’s traumatised response to Joseph’s apparent death as reported by the brothers, before finally moving to Joseph’s arrival in Egypt. Joseph is ushered through the foreground unceremoniously, but the arrival of a phalanx of soldiers from a background of palm trees and quasi-Egyptian scenery announces the imminent and much more spectacular presence of the wife of Potiphar, whose palanquin is lowered to the ground and her husband’s arm offered as she steps down.49 Her presence is required ostensibly to survey the slaves on offer, but in keeping with Andréani’s tendencies, and in a fashion thoroughly reminiscent of Ahasuerus’ parading of Esther, it is clear that the spectacle on display is none other than the wife of Potiphar in all her feminine finery. When Potiphar moves Joseph into the foreground in order for his wife to have a closer look, it is also to allow the audience to observe both her lust and his wary obeisance. The obliviousness of Potiphar to his wife’s affections for Joseph is reinforced in the next scene, in which husband and wife lounge in 48

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Appearing as it does after the Midianites’ negotiation with the brothers has already begun, but before Joseph has been extricated from the pit, this location footage appears to have been either misplaced in the original print or in a subsequent version. The initiative of Pharaoh’s wife in the selection of Joseph, unprecedented in the biblical text or previous cinematic versions, foreshadows her significance within Andréani’s film.

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ornate surroundings amidst the sensual trappings of the stereotypical ‘oriental’ feast. When Joseph arrives bearing a bowl of grapes and the Queen bids him stay, he kneels in the foreground as Potiphar rises and retreats to the background to attend to other matters. As his wife treats herself to Joseph’s grapes, Potiphar returns to take his wife away and, much to her delight, as she rises and parades through the foreground, Joseph is required to retreat, bowed before her. A last, longing look from Potiphar’s wife toward Joseph leads to her pressing the cluster of grapes to her bosom and dropping them before Joseph, as she turns to take her oblivious husband’s arm and exit the scene. In the shot which follows, Potiphar’s wife wanders about her boudoir in a lovesick trance, leaning against an entirely un-Egyptian fluted pillar in her weakened state, excitedly hatching her plan and dismissing the last of her maidservants after catching a glimpse of Joseph through the door. Lost in his own innocence, Joseph wanders unawares into the boudoir and proceeds to tidy it (Genesis 39:11) as Potiphar’s wife walks into the foreground and summons him with an outstretched arm. When he approaches her, arms outstretched and head bowed, and she takes his hand and presses it to her lips, he retreats. Stung but not yet thwarted, she comes near to him again, attempting to embrace him before being left only with his cloak as he retreats again.50 Joseph’s accusation and imprisonment51 are followed by his rehabilitation thanks to the cupbearer’s testimony regarding Joseph’s powers of interpretation after the wisemen have proven unequal to the task of deciphering Pharaoh’s dream. Andréani’s continuing interest in Potiphar and especially his wife are reflected in their presence in Pharaoh’s retinue and the positioning of the wife in the centre of the frame throughout this sequence, allowing for the viewer’s easy registering of her shock – when Joseph appears and then interprets the dream – and then the couple’s disgust when Joseph is elevated by Pharaoh to the position of Prince of Egypt. Whereas Berr’s earlier version followed the 1904 version in devoting considerable space to Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers, Andréani’s interest in first the selling of Joseph and then his seduction leaves him little footage to depict the prolonged cat-and-mouse narrative in which Joseph teaches his brothers a lesson (Genesis 41–6). As a result, Andréani’s film offers a sequence which is much compressed and concludes with a final 50

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In Pathé’s earlier (1904) version Potiphar’s wife attempts to attract Joseph’s interest twice over, though in the 1904 film her second effort takes place after Joseph has already been imprisoned. It is not impossible that there has been an attempt to represent the ancient narrative’s own testimony to her persistence (Genesis 39:10). Andréani allows Joseph to reveal the cup-bearer’s imminent release by means of the biblical genre’s first flash-forward facilitated by two fades through black.

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scene in which Jacob’s eventual arrival in Egypt (46:29) is collapsed with Benjamin’s earlier appearance before Joseph (45:14). While the ancient narrative emphasises Joseph’s forgiveness of the brothers who had wronged him, Andréani’s final scene prefers to focus on the reunion of Joseph, ‘fils de Jacob’, with the father who thought him dead and the brother to whom he was most close, thus bringing the narrative of redemption full circle.52 Insofar as it reflects many of the impulses seen in his earlier pictures, Joseph fils de Jacob, Andréani’s final and lengthiest biblical film, serves as a suitable memorial to the director’s legacy in the development of the genre. Inspired by the dramatic vision of Feuillade and the ambitious scope of Blackton, Andréani’s persistent interest in the melodramatic potential of the biblical narrative led him to produce more biblical films than any other director in the silent era, or indeed any era since. Yet Andréani’s contribution extends well beyond sheer volume of production. In his consistent efforts to reproduce the grandeur, opulence and ostentation of the ancient world and its inhabitants, Andréani demonstrated a desire to display the species of spectacle which viewers had come to expect of the biblical film in the first decade of the cinema. Indeed, along with Kalem’s From the Manger to the Cross, Andréani’s willingness to shoot on location in the Middle East would presage later filmmakers’ quest for the spectacle of the ‘authentic’ biblical backdrop. It is, however, Andréani’s recognition of the appetite for the spectacle particularly associated with melodrama which would leave the clearest mark on the genre of the biblical film. More specifically, his thoroughgoing exploration of domestic melodrama in the biblical narrative allowed Andréani the scope to display for cinema-goers a range and depth of human emotion on screen that was often only hinted at, or even omitted entirely, by the ancient narrratives with which they were familiar. As we have seen, one of Andréani’s favourite catalysts for overwrought emotionalism in his earlier films is sensational violence, or the threat of it – a type of spectacle found often in early cinematic melodrama and easily supplied from the ancient biblical texts. Yet, if this is where Andréani begins, his later biblical films demonstrate his increasing attentiveness to the potential of biblical narratives to satisfy his audience’s appetite for domestic melodrama of a different, more romantic sort. As we will see, Andréani’s radical elaboration of the Sheba tradition in La Reine de Saba was to leave its specific mark on the biblical film after the Great War, and indeed the legacy of romantic melodrama in the biblical film would be felt well beyond the 1920s, as would Andréani’s categorical moralising tendencies. 52

A feature shared with Pathé’s earlier version of 1909 directed by Berr. See Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 262–3.

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Despite Andréani’s appreciation for spectacle and his occasional use of the pan shot to display it to best advantage, it was undoubtedly his desire to ‘tell’ a good biblical story on screen and develop its dramatic potential that encouraged him to bring the action closer to the camera and make use of an increasing (though still limited) range of cinematographic techniques, including slow pans, primitive point-of-view shots, flashes forward, and especially cutting between adjacent spaces to sustain narrative energy and build suspense. Thus, if Pathé’s biblical films were comparatively progressive in relation to other historical films produced in France in moving beyond the tableau system of representation,53 the above analysis provides abundant evidence that this was due in large part to the biblical films of Andréani. The very fact that Andréani was allowed by Pathé to produce as many biblical films as he did from 1911 onward suggests that they had not been unprofitable for the firm. It is thus worth considering why the director’s final two films, Esther and Joseph fils de Jacob, were distributed by Pathé but produced under the aegis of his own Andréani Films, established in 1913. At least part of the reason for his departure from Pathé’s production stable seems to have been related to his desire to shoot longer films. Andréani’s allowance of footage for Les Films Bibliques had hovered between 300 and 400 m (Le Jugement de Solomon, 405 m; Le Sacrifice d’Ishmaël, 340 m) before climbing to 580 m with La Reine de Saba in early 1913. If Andréani was expecting such largesse to continue, the progressively curtailed footages of La Fille de Jephté (405 m) and Rébecca (315 m), released the following spring, suggest that he was sorely mistaken. That Andréani was sufficiently dissatisfied with this state of affairs to part company with Pathé is suggested by the fact that Esther (740 m) and Joseph, fils de Jacob (860 m) – his first biblical films for the new firm, announced in the pages of the Ciné-Journal the following autumn – were also by far his longest. Given the scale of both the footage and the success of Thanhouser’s Star of Bethlehem and Kalem’s From the Manger to the Cross the previous year, one could hardly fault Andréani if he had concluded that the biblical films of the future would need to be bigger in order to be better. Indeed, it is clear that by the spring of 1913 Pathé had already begun to shoot the fourth edition of its celebrated Life and Passion of the Christ franchise under the direction of Maurice André Maître.54 That it was not Henri Andréani behind the camera of what would become Pathé’s largest 53 54

So ibid., p. 321. The nature of the scenario deposited by Pathé on 19 April 1913 suggests that filming had already begun prior to this date. For this scenario and the brief but helpful discussion of Maître’s Vie et Passion by Emmanuelle Toulet (‘Les Écritures’) see the souvenir programme for the screening at the first Dormitor conference (1990) http://www.domitor.org/downloads/1990_Domitor_Show_Program. pdf (accessed 28 January 2012).

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ever biblical production, can hardly be immaterial in the circumstances, given Andréani’s long experience of biblical films and Maître’s complete lack of it. Whether Andréani refused an invitation to direct the film or never received one, it is not hard to imagine him judging that the proverbial ‘writing was on the wall’ for him at Pathé when, in the spring of 1913, the extra footage which might have been devoted to his Old Testament films was instead diverted to the gospel according to Maurice André Maître. Whatever enthusiasm Andréani may or may not have had for the subject of the Passion, Pathé’s willingness to invest heavily in it is perhaps understandable on a variety of counts. While the gap between Zecca’s original Passion and his second in 1907 had been no more than four years, six years had passed since the 1907 edition had met with such success on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, in an era of ever-increasing film lengths, Zecca’s 950 m Passion in 1907 had since been equalled by Thanhouser’s Star of Bethlehem (1,000 m) and well and truly eclipsed by Kalem’s From the Manger to the Cross (1,500 m), the latter of which had been particularly well received, thanks in part to being shot on location in the Middle East. Thus it is far from surprising that one of the most obvious differences between Zecca’s earlier edition of 1907 and Maître’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ is the far greater running time of the latter. With its four parts totalling some 2,090 m, Maître’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ of 1913 was longer even than Luigi Maggi’s Satana (Ambrosio, 1912, 1,960 m) whose scope includes various biblical episodes but ultimately extends far beyond it and owes more to Milton than it does to the sacred narratives of the Bible. With such enormous quantities of footage at his disposal, Maître’s film is both radically faithful and radically elaborated in comparison with Zecca’s earlier version, as may be seen when the two are compared. For instance, Zecca’s scene of the annunciation takes the form of a single tableau, shot in studio against painted flats, in which Mary returns home with a jug of water on her shoulder (almost certainly drawn from Tissot’s illustration of the scene) and bows down to pray before the angel appears to announce the incarnation. While Maître’s film also opens with Mary bearing a jug on her shoulder, she is not returning home from the well, but leaving home to fetch the water. Maître’s surplus of film allows him to follow Mary’s progress to and from the well in a sequence of shots filmed not in the studio, but on location in a French countryside dotted with painted flat palm trees and other women fetching water. The extent to which Maître’s radical elaboration is radically faithful to Zecca’s scene is made clear when Maître’s Mary returns home and does precisely what Zecca’s Mary does: setting her jug down on a three-legged stand to the left of the frame before kneeling to pray

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with her hands pressed together. Maître’s angel too is strikingly similar to Zecca’s, appearing in the doorway centrally behind Mary, thanks to a cinematic truc, before disappearing in the same fashion.55 Even the response of Maître’s Mary to the angel mimics Zecca’s Mary, with both bowing and extending their arms before crossing them on their chest. Indeed at other points, such as when the angels appear to the shepherds, Maître’s film is barely distinguishable from Zecca’s.56 Given Andréani’s reduction in shooting distance, it is not surprising that Maître’s camera is closer to the action than Zecca’s is as the annunciation unfolds. Nor is it unexpected that Maître lengthens his shot distance on occasion, to enhance the spectacle of, for instance, a Bethelehem overrun with visitors arriving for the census – a sequence which is likewise radically faithful and and radically elaborated vis-à-vis Zecca’s version. This scene and others such as the long-take long shot of sheep and people flowing down the hillside are strongly reminiscent of comparable scenes in, for instance, Andréani’s Joseph, fils de Jacob. Finally, Maître’s use of the high-angle, ultra-long shot in a sequence such as the ‘Flight to Egypt’57 represents a significant advance on Zecca in its effort to reproduce the desert expanse by shooting on location – and even supersedes Andréani himself, in the distance and scale of the shot. Such sequences ultimately fail to rival the equivalent ones in Kalem’s From the Manger to the Cross (1912), which enjoyed the advantage of being shot on location in Egypt itself against the backdrop of the pyramids, but Maître’s efforts suggest that Pathé was not unaware of the impact of Kalem’s picture on viewers’ expectations of its own Passion. Precisely why Maître’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ hoved so close to Zecca’s earlier version is unlikely ever to be known for certain, but the probable causes are not difficult to discern. While Zecca’s 1907 version had improved upon his 1902 version in terms of colour, quality of mise-en-scène and sheer scope, in terms of fundamental structure Zecca’s second version did not greatly differ from his first. That such conservatism might prove so wildly successful on both sides of the Atlantic in 1907–8 – despite the release of Alice Guy’s innovative La Vie du Christ the previous year (1906) – may well have encouraged Pathé to believe that Kalem’s From 55 56

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As Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 320, has observed, the iconographic similarity of the angels extends even to the ‘film-reel’ halo they share. As demonstrated by Philippe Gauthier and André Gaudreault, ‘De la nouveauté des Passions filmées du cinéma des premiers temps. Ou: comment faire du neuf avec du vieux . . .’, in A. Boillat, J. Kaempfer and P. Kaenel (eds.), Jésus en représentations. De la Belle Époque à la postmodernité (Gollion: Infolio, 2011), pp. 173–89. So Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, p. 320.

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the Manger to the Cross (1912) would similarly pose no real threat to the profitability of their own recycled Passion in 1913–14. Whether Pathé’s intent to do little more than expand Zecca’s 1907 version predated the choice of Maître as director or arose from it, his selection suggests other powers may have been at work. Having been sent by Pathé to Russia in 1908 to produce films (including Anna Karenine) for the firm’s production unit there, Maître had only returned to France in 1911 and then primarily to work on the firm’s Bebe serial. Whatever indisposition Andréani may or may not have had to directing the Passion, the possibility of pressure from on high – which is precisely where Zecca now was – to do little more than update Zecca’s own film would hardly have made the proposition more attractive to Andréani, the veteran of so many biblical films. In such a circumstance, a recently returned prodigal from distant lands such as Maître may well have seemed to Zecca an ideal prospect to follow faithfully in his own footsteps. While it seems unlikely (though not impossible) that Zecca himself was directly involved in Maître’s production, there is no denying that the ghost of Zecca and Pathé’s long tradition of Passion production weighed heavily on the shoulders of Maître – a weight which must have felt all the greater given the huge investment being made by Pathé. The irony is of course that Pathé’s commitment to merely update Zecca’s earlier Passion was undoubtedly part of the reason why the film failed to reproduce the success of the earlier film. In producing little more than a faithful elaboration of its own film, Pathé failed to recognise that Kalem’s widely distributed From the Manger to the Cross the previous year had changed the rules of the Christ film in a way which Alice Guy’s film in 1906 had not. Moreover, by 1913, Pathé’s pre-eminent position in film production on both sides of the Atlantic had already been significantly eroded and was about to disappear entirely, thanks in part to circumstances which it could not have controlled nor even imagined. While such changes undoubtedly meant that Pathé’s final Passion would never have reached the heights of its celebrated predecessors, given Pathé’s unmatched history of biblical productions, few would have imagined that the firm’s longest biblical film would also be all but its last.

chapter 6

‘The top of it reached to heaven’: Griffith, analogy and scale

If, by 1913, the declining influence of French filmmakers like Pathé-Frères and Gaumont on the American market was already well advanced, the same could not be said of Italian firms such as Ambrosio and especially Cines.1 Originally founded in 1905 as Alberini and Santoni, by April of the following year the latter firm had become Società Anonima per Azioni Cines and could boast 250,000 lire in capital stock. Like French and American firms, Cines and other Italian film companies produced a variety of genres and types of films including actualities, but by 1909 they too were caught up in the rush toward quality subjects with a literary and/or historical pedigree. As in America and France, so too in Italy in a more modest way, biblical subjects were taken up as part of this wider interest, with Cines releasing its own Giuditta e Olofernes (1908) two years before Feuillade’s own version for Gaumont. That an Italian director, Mario Caserini, would begin with Judith may perhaps be explained by the longstanding interest in Judith within the Italian operatic and theatrical tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to and including Paolo Giacometti’s play Giuditta (1857).2 One reel in length, Caserini’s film shares much in style and approach with Pathé’s earlier biblical efforts by Nonguet and especially Berr, with its illustration of suitable moments by means of a series of long-shot tableaux and with extraneous biblical detail excised for the sake of economy. The recurring appearance and disappearance of an angel within the Cines production, while undoubtedly functioning narratively to steel Judith’s resolve as she dispatches Holofernes,3 also reflects 1 2 3

For a history of early Italian cinema see A. Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano I–III (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1980–2). See Chapter 4 above. So Buchanan, ‘Vampish Virtues’, pp. 205–28. In Isaac Pray’s translation of Giacometti’s play (Tragedy of Judith (New York: Gray and Green, 1866), p. 35), Judith’s resolve is steeled not by an angel, but by her own prayer and strengthened further by the arrival of Arzaele, Holofernes’ Queen, who intends to kill Judith herself.

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the ubiquity of angels as cinematically contrived ‘attractions’ within the early biblical films of Gaumont and Pathé. Given that Enrico Guazzoni worked as Caserini’s assistant at Cines before moving into directing himself, it is not impossible that an experience of Giuditta e Olofernes – or at least an awareness of it – encouraged him to direct his own biblical film, 1 Maccabei (1911). While it features the characters of Judas and Antiochus found in the book of 1 Maccabees, Guazzoni’s film otherwise shares little with the ancient narrative and presents instead a romantic tragedy which serves up various staple narrative elements of the biblical genre of this period. Thus, just as Potiphar’s wife attempts to seduce the righteous Joseph, so Astarte, the fictional wife of Antiochus, attempts to seduce the pious Hebrew Judas Maccabaeus, who, like Joseph, resists her overtures. Also like Potiphar’s wife, Astarte gets her revenge by having Judas imprisoned, but in the case of Guazzoni’s film, and in keeping with the interests of domestic melodrama, Judas’ entire family are imprisoned with him. Like the Pharaoh of the Exodus tradition, Antiochus’ imperial hostility toward the family is confirmed when the death sentence is passed. Though Astarte’s heart is softened towards Judas and she attempts to set him and his family free, their path to martyrdom is unswerving and in the final scene, the viewer watches the crowd’s reaction to Judas’ death, before Astarte falls on the hero’s lifeless body. The success of 1 Maccabei is of course difficult to judge, but it may not be a coincidence that much as Stuart Blackton’s radically elaborated Saul and David (1909) was followed by films which hove much closer to the biblical tradition, so too 1 Maccabei’s melodramatic confection of biblical traditions was not reproduced in Giuseppe ebreo (November 1911), the biblical film Cines produced later that same year on the subject of Joseph. Indeed, given that Guazzoni had borrowed Maccabei’s seduction scene from the story of Joseph, it is interesting that the seduction does not dominate Cines’ production of Giuseppe ebreo, as it would Andréani’s Joseph fils de Jacob two years later. Instead, like Berr’s Film d’Art production of Joseph vendu par ses frères (1909) two years earlier – with which it shares much else – Giuseppe ebreo largely follows the biblical narrative itself. What the Cines production does offer by way of innovation is the detail and backdrop against which the film is shot. Thus to an even greater extent than Andréani’s later film, the Cines production delights in the spectacle of a river of sheep flowing over the hillsides as an illustration of the pastoral context in which the Joseph narrative is set. Already in 1911, Giuseppe ebreo also demonstrates an interest in the expansive set design and massed crowds which would characterise the later work of both him and others and represent the most

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enduring legacy of the Italian historical film. Andréani’s scene of Joseph being sold to Potiphar in Egypt was filmed two years after the Italian production Giuseppe ebreo, but the French director’s interest in the emotional import of the scene draws his camera closer to both the actors and sets. In the Cines production, by contrast, the director’s interest in the spectacle of scale is facilitated by the set’s radically expansive deep space and the sea of Egyptians, which extends from the foreground into it. While the extent of Guazzoni’s involvement in the production of Giuseppe ebreo is unclear, this expansiveness of set design and cast visible already in it and other Italian historical films of the period reaches a still fuller expression in the film for which Guazzoni became most famous, namely Quo Vadis (1913). Eclipsed in terms of scale by Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) the following year, Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis – based on the Sienkiewicz novel of the same name – was perhaps the most accomplished of the early Italian ancient world super-spectacles and certainly the most significant, as we shall see, for the development of the biblical film.4 As early as 1907, Cines had joined Pathé in opening a sales office in New York, and by 1913 Italian spectacles of antiquity by directors such as Caserini, Pastrone and Guazzoni were being widely distributed around the world, and not least in America. With Guazzoni having already proven his ability to handle biblical and classical subjects (e.g. Brutus, Agrippina, both 1910) Sienkiewicz’s novel – for which he had won the Nobel prize for literature in 1905 – must have seemed an obvious choice to be adapted again for the screen.5 Like Wallace’s Ben Hur, which had itself already been adapted by Kalem in 1907, Quo Vadis’ historical setting facilitated the telling of a tale whose fictional characters interact with those known from ancient sources including the biblical narrative. If there was thus little novel in such a treatment, Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis had much else to commend it, including its greatly extended running time. In the spring of 1913, while Pathé was gradually reeling the length of Andréani’s Old Testament films back towards 300 m, Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis premiered in America at the extraordinary length of 2,250 m. Yet what impressed viewers even more than the astonishing length of the film was the scale of the spectacle offered by Guazzoni. In place of painted canvasses and theatrical flats, the film’s enormous, purpose-built three-dimensional sets created an unprecedented illusion of an antiquity that was not merely staged, but substantial and indeed radically realistic. With such remarkable sets at his 4 5

For a corroboration of Quo Vadis’ claim to superiority see Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: from Neorealism to the Present, 3rd edn (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 3. The first adaptation of the novel for the screen was undertaken by Zecca for Pathé in 1901.

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disposal, it is hardly surprising that Guazzoni structured his film around the spectacular sequences depicted within them, including the orgiastic banquet of Nero, the burning of Rome and finally the visceral violence of the Christians in the arena.6 If Quo Vadis offered extraordinary space and spectacle, the sheer extent of its footage also allowed it to attend to the story at the heart of Sienkiewicz’s novel. Thus, interwoven with the wider narrative related to the historical Nero, Guazzoni’s film tells the tale of the fictional tribune and patrician Marcus Vinicius, who, upon his return to Rome, falls deeply in love with the beautiful but dangerously Christian Lyggia – a turn of events which drives the film through to its eventual conclusion. Andréani was not the only director casting envious glances at the enormous footage being afforded others in 1913. While Guazzoni’s 2,250 m Quo Vadis premiered in New York – not at a cinema but at the legitimate Astor theatre – the American director D. W. Griffith was in California, finishing work on his latest effort for Biograph, Mothering Love, which was released at the respectable length of 465 m. While some have been persuaded that Griffith didn’t see Quo Vadis in the spring of 1913 – primarily because he was shooting in California both before and after its New York premiere7 – it is far from impossible that Griffith was back in New York, either immediately before or after working on The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, which finished shooting in early May. Indeed, if Blanche Sweet’s memory and her correspondence with Kevin Brownlow in the early sixties can be trusted, Griffith not only saw Quo Vadis, but was inspired by it: Mr. Griffith and I went over to the theatre in New York to see it. He was very impressed by the production and by its size. His attitude was, ‘We can make as big productions as they can! [ Brownlow’s emphasis]. I’m sure that picture influenced him because it wasn’t long after that he came up with the idea of Judith of Bethulia. We had never done as long or as large a picture and at first the heads of the company turned him down cold. But he finally won.8

6 7

8

See Bowser, Transformation, pp. 258ff. and S. Neale and S. Hall, Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010) pp. 31–3. M. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of ‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 73, insists that Griffith cannot have seen Quo Vadis until his return from California in August – a conclusion which requires him to account for the film’s influence on Griffith by attributing it to the latter’s reading of reviews in the trade press. Still less likely is the suggestion by D. Fairservice, Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice (Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 155, n. 2,that Griffith managed to wrap the shooting of Judith in time for him to return to New York before Quo Vadis? finished its twenty-two-week run in New York at the end of August. K. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 92, citing correspondence from Blanche Sweet to the author (London, September 1963).

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Sweet’s recollection finds some measure of support in the fact that the next film Griffith shot was indeed Judith of Bethulia and that its four reels represented a significant advance on Griffith’s previous footages. Indeed, before the director had left for California in December 1912, Biograph had only reluctantly conceded the move to two reels and even then only for a limited number of films and always subject to Biograph’s approval in New York.9 Moreover, Sweet’s recalling of the influence of Guazzoni’s film on not merely the film’s length but also its size (‘We had never done as long or as large a picture’) seems to be corroborated by Griffith’s insistence on greater investment in the building of ever more impressive sets beginning in the summer of 1913. Having commissioned and built a mocked up Western town for The Battle of Elderbush Gulch at Chatsworth Park in the San Fernando Valley in May, he proceeded to repeat the exercise in recreating ancient Bethulia in preparation for shooting Judith of Bethulia. Indeed, the influence of Quo Vadis’ expansive sets and massive cast is visible on both sides of the city wall of Griffith’s Californian Bethulia. Within the city, Griffith’s favoured shot is one which looks down the street running the length of the wall, creating a vast expanse of deep space whose physical extension is evidenced by the mass of people who populate not merely the foreground, but the deep background as well. It is, however, when the Assyrians attack the walls of Bethulia that Griffith’s advances in scale are shown to best advantage as the street is engulfed by the Bethulians desperate to ward off the Assyrian attack. The substantiality of the inside of Griffith’s wall is established by the ladders which are thrown up against it and the men who disappear up them to man the ramparts. Whereas the ubiquitous archways of previous biblical sets almost invariably consist of painted flats at best, in Griffith’s ‘real’ Bethulia, soldiers pour over the structural arch which extends over the street, linking the city to its wall. Outside the wall, the spectacle facilitated by Griffith is even greater. While the shot along the top of the ramparts shows the Israelites frantically defending them, a mixture of long shots and high angle extra-long shots depict the Assyrians’ assault, with men on horseback ordering foot soldiers to press the attack with the assistance of siege engines of various sorts, while all the while, stones rain down on them from the ramparts above and smoke engulfs the battlefield. If Griffith’s scenes of Bethulia’s wall offer the spectacle of battle on a scale which was unprecedented in the biblical film up to this point, Griffith’s display of Holofernes’ festal indulgence in women and wine shows 9

For this latter point, see Stokes, Birth, p. 73.

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comparable developments. In the Cines version of Judith, the spectacle of Holofernes’ feasting is largely static. While in 1910 the Salomé-inspired fashion for solitary dancers saw the seductive Stacia Napierkowska entertain Belshazzar in Feuillade’s Festin de Balthazar (Figure 4.1) by 1913 expectations had apparently shifted again. In Andréani’s La Reine de Saba (1913), the Egyptian belly-dancer’s brief dance for Solomon is supplemented by an extended ensemble performance by Solomon’s own troupe of veiled dancers – a tradition which appeared in Pathé’s earliest versions of La Vie de Moïse (1904–5) and Samson et Dalila (1902) and then faded from the genre. Griffith’s own sequence of Holofernes’ ‘Bacchanalian festivities’ (according to the intertitle) has Holofernes entertained by a dancer in the foreground whose display of herself – and in her final pose, largely her cleavage – appears to be at least as much for the benefit of the viewer as the King himself. Like Andréani’s film, shot quite independently a few months later, however, Griffith is not content with the spectacle of the solo dance, and in the deep space to the right of the frame a troupe of female dancers with veils performs a series of choreographed moves in unison, before ending up writhing on the floor like the solo performer in the foreground. If Quo Vadis’ inspiration for the heightened spectacle of Griffith’s film is easily observed, his treatment of the story of the film requires closer attention. The eponymous heroine Judith and her encounter with Holofernes predictably stand at the centre of Griffith’s film as they do the biblical narrative itself and the cinematic adaptations of Feuillade and Caserini described at the outset of this chapter. As others have observed, Griffith departs from previous cinematic treatments of the climactic scene in which Judith is torn between her religious duty to dispatch Holofernes and her disgust at the prospect (as in Caserini’s film and Giacometti’s play). Instead, Griffith’s Judith is torn between duty and her own womanly desire for the vulnerable and powerfully attractive Holofernes – a desire which belongs to a sexualised life banished by widowhood (cover photo).10 Griffith’s Judith narrowly avoids her own seduction by the sensual world she has entered, when she is called back to her patriotic senses at the last moment by Griffith’s cut to a scene of her beloved Bethulia’s starving inhabitants. In sharp contrast to Andréani’s and Feuillade’s approach to the spectacle of climactic violence, in Griffith’s film, Holofernes’ decapitation is not seen at all. Instead, Griffith prefers to illustrate the ‘sound’ of the violence, by 10

So Buchanan, ‘Vampish Virtures’, pp. 205–228. D. Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), pp. 115–16, does not note this difference, and his suggestion that Griffith has specifically and intentionally drawn upon Ernest Normand’s Bondage (1895) lacks any visual cues connecting film and painting beyond that found in earlier cinematic depictions of Holofernes.

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cutting first to the guard outside and then Judith’s maidservant, who are both evidently startled by what they have heard. Here and elsewhere, Griffith’s film clearly declares its debt to its theatrical precursor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s fouract play Judith of Bethulia, which was itself based in part on the author’s own poem, Judith and Holofernes (1896).11 Having premiered with Nance O’Neill in the title role at Boston’s Tremont theatre on 13 October 1904, the play was toured the following year by a company in which D. W. Griffith was then employed. While Griffith apparently did not act in the production himself, his memory of it and interest in realising its cinematic potential were undoubtedly the catalyst for Biograph’s purchase of Grace Pierce’s scenario of the play in the spring of 1913, whether the plan was to make use of it in some way or simply pre-empt any accusations of plagiarism when Griffith’s own writer, Frank Woods, set to work on a scenario for the film.12 Whether or not Aldrich’s play was kept on set and consulted, as has been suggested, the film’s debt to the play is acknowledged in the opening titles and evident at various points,13 including its inclusion of Bailey’s ‘fictional’ characters, Naomi and Nathan. Yet if Bailey’s names were borrowed, it is quite clear that Griffith’s Naomi and Nathan (played by Mae Marsh and Robert Harron respectively) are quite different characters. In Bailey’s play, Judith is desired by Achior the Ammonite, both before and after Judith’s seduction and dispatching of Holofernes – though Achior’s desire is thwarted initially by Judith’s violent purpose and then afterwards by her reclusive piety. The contribution of Nathan, one of two ‘scholars’ of Bethulia in Bailey’s play, is very limited indeed. Apart from commenting on Judith’s wondrous transformation in advance of her going to Holofernes,14 and her subsequent reversion to widow’s weeds on her return,15 Nathan’s only narrative function in Bailey’s play is to escort to Judith’s own home a woman to whom Judith initially gives a few pieces of silver out of pity. Judith’s request for Nathan to escort the woman arises from her discovery that the woman is none other than Naomi, the mother of a former herdsman of Judith’s deceased husband, made mad by the 11 12 13

14 15

For other points of similarity between Griffith’s film and Bailey’s play, see Mayer, Stagestruck, pp. 115–16. T. Stempel, Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film (Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 21. Unfortunately, the suggestion of Mayer, Stagestruck, pp. 112–13, that Griffith was as dependent on Giacometti’s play as he was on Aldrich’s is unpersuasive. Of Mayer’s suggested points of dependence, only Griffith’s development of the townspeople’s futile foray to wells beyond the walls might plausibly point to an awareness of Giacometti’s novelty of Judith encouraging the Bethulians to seek out a well which she has seen in a vision and later turns out to be poisoned. Thomas Aldrich Bailey, Judith of Bethulia: A Tragedy (New York and Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1904), Act II, p. 32. Ibid., pp. 94–6.

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loss of her daughter, Leah. Thus the role of Bailey’s Naomi consists of receiving Judith’s alms and accepting Nathan’s escort, who then plays his own limited part by leading her away. In Griffith’s film, Judith also goes out of her home to distribute coins, but does so to townspeople played by extras. Like the Judith of the play, Griffith’s also encounters Nathan and Naomi in this scene but, rather than a scholar and a woman mad with grief, Griffith’s Nathan and Naomi are star-crossed lovers who have stopped in the street while Naomi enviously admires a baby held in a mother’s arms. Griffith’s enhancement of the character of Naomi in ways quite unanticipated by Bailey’s play is signalled in the opening credits where the cameos of the two principal players (Sweet’s Judith and Walthall’s Holofernes) are joined by one devoted to Marsh’s ‘Naomi’. The significance of the latter’s storyline is signalled by her appearance in the opening sequence of shots, where Griffith’s camera singles Naomi out for a mid-close-up as she joins the other women in coming to draw water from one of the wells outside Bethulia. Following a scene of the threshing fields, an intertitle announces, ‘Nathan, beloved of Miriam’. Sauntering into the foreground, he is suddenly reminded of his lover and, finding her at the well, helps her draw water to fill her pitcher. Griffith continues to cut back and forth between long and mid shots as the pair engage in earnest conversation, passing by another well as they walk back to the city in the hot sun and wind. Only after their arrival at Bethulia (whose ‘walls were 50 cubits thick’) does Griffith introduce Judith, depicting her prayerful piety before showing us the scene of her almsgiving and pensive encounter with the mother and child in the street. As both Judith and the mother exit the scene, Griffith’s camera remains fixed on Nathan, who teases Naomi about her broodiness. An intertitle announcing that Naomi parted from Nathan in order to return to the well is followed by a shot of them outside the gate of the city, reluctantly going their separate ways, with subsequent shots confirming their returns to the threshing fields and well respectively. After an intertitle introduces the Assyrian aggression against Bethulia and the launch of the infantry and cavalry attack is shown, the ancient biblical plotline is made to intersect again with that of Naomi and Nathan when the Assyrians take the well (e.g. Judith 7:7) where Naomi is to be found. Griffith emphasises the threat to Judith, demonstrating the brutality of the Assyrians by depicting a soldier tearing a child from her mother’s arms and holding it aloft as she falls to the ground. Griffith’s midclose-up of Judith crouched and hiding by the well demonstrates both her vulnerability and her terror. A point-of-view shot establishes Nathan’s observing of events and he rushes towards the camera in the direction of

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his beloved. A further sequence of shots depicts the trauma of Naomi’s seizure by an Assyrian soldier, with the restraining of Nathan from going after her amply illustrating his own trauma. Evidently taking their lead from the ancient text’s own interest in Bethulia’s wells, Woods and Griffith construct a storyline parallel to and interwoven with the ancient narrative, which relies upon motifs already strongly identified with the biblical film. The figure of a woman at a well – pitcher perched on her shoulder – was a staple of the biblical film, thanks in large part to the Christ film tradition. While Maître’s edition in 1914 would (as we have already seen) radically expand Zecca’s earlier scene of the Annunciation by extending Mary’s journey to a well, the prominence of the motif was also ensured by Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well which began to feature in the cinematic tradition in Alice Guy’s film in 1906.16 That Griffith was, however, influenced in a more profound way by the Moses tradition of the silent cinema seems clear when one considers the way in which Blackton’s American film two years before not only elaborates on Moses’ meeting of his future wife at the well but also on his delivery of her from the threat of hostility and violence at that same well. Moreover, the fact that much earlier in the same film (though not in the biblical text), the Egyptians rip the children from their mother’s grasp at an Egyptian well, makes it unlikely that Griffith’s depiction of Assyrian soldiers depriving women of Jewish babies at the Bethulian well is a simple coincidence. Yet if the beginning of Griffith’s novel storyline draws upon and reworks motifs already indigenous to the biblical film, there is much more on offer. Following the spectacle of the Assyrians’ initial assault on Bethulia and the arrival of Holofernes in his tent, Naomi is depicted ‘amongst the captives’, being dragged to a tent full of weeping women where she is tied to a post by a gloating guard. A Bethulian attempt to break through to the wells (perhaps inspired by the second mention of the seizing of them in Judith 7:17) is the catalyst for the spectacle of a fuller Assyrian assault on the walls, and with Judith now in the Assyrian camp preparing for her seduction of Holofernes, Griffith breaks off to depict Nathan distracted by thoughts of Naomi’s captivity (which is shown in mid-close-up) and about to abandon his defensive post, when he is again restrained from doing so by his comrades. That Nathan’s love for Naomi is pure is made all the more clear by the following intertitle, which notes: ‘Holofernes in his tent had thoughts only of Judith’ – thoughts which are evidently those of lust rather than love. Judith’s eventual dispatching of Holofernes leaves the Assyrians 16

See Shepherd, ‘Alice and Jesus’.

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‘as men bereft’, and in the ensuing mayhem induced by the Bethulians’ advance on the Assyrian camp, Griffith offers a shot of the tent in which Naomi is tied, engulfed in smoke and fire, evidently set alight by the retreating Assyrians. Part of the advance party which arrives at Holofernes’ tent to confirm the general’s death, Nathan searches the tent for Naomi and then races from it, panic written across his face as he disappears in search of his true love. Long shots of the enemy camp now enveloped in smoke and the stream of Assyrians fleeing before Bethulian soldiers are intercut with shots of the non-combatants of Bethulia gathered outside the city gate, watching the spectacle which is unfolding before their and the viewers’ eyes. Alternating shots between the captive Naomi and the searching Nathan culminate in the latter’s arrival and deliverance of Naomi just as the flames threaten to overwhelm her. Clutching each other in relief, they flee the camp before the film closes with a sequence of Judith adored by the Bethulians and then retreating to her house to signal the restoration of her previous pious widowhood. Earlier French and American filmmakers had, as we have already seen, clearly developed their own means of elaborating cinematic versions of narratives which remained fundamentally biblical in their structure, but the more radical departure of introducing novel characters (such as Horan in Andréani’s Queen of Sheba) or significantly altering biblical ones (such as Blackton’s treatment of Michal and David) remained resolutely the exception to the rule. In light of this, Griffith’s introduction of not merely non-biblical characters, but an entire storyline focused on the romance of Nathan and Naomi, appears to qualify as a bona fide and significant innovation in the genre. Yet if, as we have seen, the influence of a film such as Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis is relatively clear in the radical expansion of Judith of Bethulia’s running time and the scale and construction of its sets and attendant spectacle, it is perhaps not surprising that Griffith’s debt to the Italian tradition may be seen to extend even to his approach to the Judith story. To an even greater extent than Guazzoni, Griffith was working with a narrative whose basic plotline and characters were sufficiently canonised by the tradition that they would tolerate only a certain amount of adjustment before risking the ire of that portion of American audiences which Vitagraph had sought to placate with their essentially conservative Life of Moses (1909–10). In Sienkewicz’s novel Quo Vadis, Guazzoni was provided with a ready-made solution to such limitations in the shape of the author’s creation of the romance of Vicinius and Lygia – the fictional love story which is at the heart of both the novel and Guazzoni’s film and is told alongside the elements required by the culture memory of Nero and the period. In his own quest for romantic enhancements to the biblical Judith,

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Griffith might well have considered the option offered by the stage versions upon which he was already drawing: in both, Judith’s seduction of Holofernes is complicated by a devoted lover back in Bethulia in the shape of Aldrich Bailey’s Achior the Ammonite, a character whose biblical incarnation praises Judith (14:6) but embraces only her religion (v. 7). Undoubtedly conscious of how close earlier cinematic versions of the Judith and Holofernes story had adhered to the biblical tradition, and perhaps fearful of overcomplicating the character of Judith, Griffith instead followed the approach found in Quo Vadis, weaving the otherwise novel romance of Nathan and Naomi around the elements and characters (including Judith and Holofernes) perceived to be less tolerant of more radical tampering. Indeed, the influence of Quo Vadis appears all the greater when it is considered that, like Nathan and Naomi, Vicinius and Lyggia are also separated by the threat of fire (Nero’s Rome) and that, like Nathan, Vicinius sets out to seek and save his beloved woman from it.17 Edwin Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) had long since demonstrated the cinematic and indeed melodramatic potential of the threat of fire, but the brief sequence from Judith of Bethulia well illustrates Griffith’s use of cross-cutting to enhance the last-minute rescue which was already being developed by him as early as 1908 in films such as The Fatal Hour.18 In addition to facilitating the enhancement of suspense, the Naomi/Nathan storyline allows Griffith to broaden the potential appeal of the film without departing fundamentally from the structure of a biblical account whose ending is distinctly lacking in romantic appeal. While the denouement of the ancient narrative and films faithful to it celebrates the deliverance of Bethulia and the heroism of Judith, the ancient tradition also eulogises – in a manner quite foreign to Griffith’s notion of romance – her commitment to the memory of her dead husband by noting her steadfast refusal of offers to remarry. While in Griffith’s film the distinctly unromantic endings of the Judith/Holofernes relationship and Judith’s return to her widow’s weeds in Bethulia are respected, the inclusion of the Naomi/Nathan storyline allows these unromantic endings to be redeemed by the dramatically and conventionally happy ending of the young lovers, which is itself only made possible by Judith’s sacrifice. If Griffith’s novel treatment of the Naomi/Nathan storyline as discreet from the primary action – and in some ways parallel to it – anticipates Griffith’s subsequent developments of narrative structure in Intolerance (1916), the most resounding testimony to its ‘success’ may well be the remarkable absence of 17 18

In Guazzoni’s film (as in the novel), Vicinius himself requires saving. See Fairservice, Film Editing, pp. 62ff. for discussion of Griffith’s use of cross-cutting in this and other films.

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comment the Naomi/Nathan storyline attracted from most reviewers of Judith at the time. Instead, critical praise was lavished on the spectacle of the massed crowd scenes and the expressive performance of Blanche Sweet in the title role: The strength of the heart interest comes with Judith’s vision and her determination to sacrifice herself to Holofernes, if necessary, to save her people from starvation. From that moment her facial expression is an inspired piece of pantomime. ‘Hear me and I will do a thing which shall go through all generations.’ She clothes herself in sackcloth and ashes and while scorifying herself her face is streaked with tears. Then she attires herself alluringly and goes forth to captivate Holofernes with her beauty of face and figure. ‘And his heart was ravished’ – ‘Then Judith wrestled with her heart for Holofernes now seemed noble in her eyes.’ This facial transition is worthy of Bernhardt.19

Having noted at the outset the production’s indebtedness to the earlier stage version of Judith of Bethulia, the review’s invoking of the renowned stage actress Bernhardt as the gold standard is hardly surprising. While also eulogising the performances of the principals, L. R. Harrison’s review for MPW remarks too on the modernity of its interpretation: A fascinating work of high artistry, ‘Judith of Bethulia’ will not only rank as an achievement in this country, but will make foreign producers sit up and take notice. It has a signal and imperative message, and the technique displayed throughout an infinity of detail, embracing even the delicate film tinting and toning, marks an encouraging step in the development of the new art. Ancient in story and settings, it is modern in penetrative interpretation . . . The dangerous and difficult situation from this point to Judith’s terrible triumph and the defeat of the invading Assyrians is pictured without loss of force or charm by extreme delicacy of treatment. Beauty is constantly asserted by almost reckless prodigality in the matter of costume, and by the appeal of delightful acting.20

While the two reviews taken together suggest that the ‘modern’ and ‘penetrative’ character of Griffith’s interpretation was discerned primarily in Sweet’s virtuoso portrayal of Judith’s extraordinary range of emotions, as we will see, it was Griffith’s experimentation with parallel plotlines and narrative structures in Judith of Bethulia which would prepare the ground for the director’s subsequent, still more radical attempts to offer a modern interpretation of the biblical world. By the time Griffith’s Judith was finally 19

20

In a review which ran well over 600 words in its issue of 27 March 1914, Variety’s interest in the Nathan/Naomi storyline was limited to the query: ‘why was Mr. Harron, who played Nathan, permitted to sport a modern mustache?’ In L. R. Harrison’s much more extensive review for MPW (7 March 1914), 1,242, Nathan/Naomi is passed over entirely.

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and much belatedly released in March of the following year, however, not only had the industry already moved on, so too had Griffith himself. When he arrived at Biograph’s new headquarters in New York at the end of the summer with Judith of Bethulia nearly but not quite completed, his employers were apparently not amused. Griffith’s flight of biblical fancy had not only cost more than they had anticipated, it was also longer – its six reels had still to be cut to four – and in the case of Holofernes’ beheading, more gruesome.21 While Griffith was away in California, Biograph had agreed a deal with theatre impresarios Klaw and Erlanger to produce and distribute multi-reel adaptations of the latter’s stage productions, but Griffith’s Californian excesses apparently persuaded the company’s principals, Marvin and Kennedy, that their headstrong director needed to be reined in.22 When they offered him a ‘supervisory’ role training other directors and then a return to shorter productions, Griffith apparently saw the same writing on the wall as Andréani had in France that same year and parted company with Biograph. It did not take Griffith long to find new employers who were willing to offer him the freedom which he craved – a fact which was announced prior to its reporting in the trade press in a remarkable full-page ad in the New York Dramatic Mirror’s issue of 29 September 1913. Perhaps most significantly, Griffith’s new contract with Majestic, a subsidiary of Harry Aitken’s Mutual Film Corporation, allowed him to produce two independent productions per year – an opportunity of which he was soon to take full advantage. Both the commercial success and the controversial reception of the first of these productions, The Birth of a Nation (1915), would prepare the ground for Intolerance (1916), a film that would definitively influence the shape of the biblical film in the years to follow. While the revenues generated by The Birth of a Nation are difficult to estimate, some measure of the film’s profitability is afforded by the extraordinary, indeed unprecedented scale and ambition of Intolerance, given that it too was financed independently (by Griffith himself and others) and distributed by Wark Productions under the umbrella of the Triangle Film Company, set up by Aitken to facilitate the production ambitions of Sennett, Ince and Griffith.23

21

22 23

Lilian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (London, W. H. Allen, 1969), p. 108. If Gish’s recollection may be trusted, this may be the explanation behind the film’s novel treatment of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes. R. Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 196– 203. For more on Triangle’s rise and fall see R. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 66–9.

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Quite apart from the 3 hour 30 minute running time of Intolerance, the film’s ambition is signalled by Griffith’s narrative construction, which includes among its four historically discrete storylines two drawn from biblical narratives. The most substantial of Intolerance’s four stories, the modern story, opens in a western mill town in which a group of women, funded by the local mill-owner, seek to reform the wayward populace. To compensate for his charitable contributions, the mill-owner turns the screw on his workforce, prompting civil unrest in which workers are killed and many others, including one known as the Boy, are forced to leave for the big city. What follows is a tale of the Boy’s corruption and criminalisation, his marriage to the Dear One, which persuades him to reform, and his imprisonment arising from being framed by the Musketeer, a vengeful gang boss. While the Boy is in prison, the women reformers, newly arrived in the city, remove the baby born to the Dear One, who is then the target of the Musketeer’s seduction. Released from prison, the Boy arrives home to find the Musketeer attempting to rape his wife. As the Musketeer is about to kill them both, he is shot by his mistress, but, in picking up the gun, the Boy finds himself accused yet again, this time of murder. Following his conviction, the Boy is saved at the last moment by a pardon from the governor, and the couple are reunited. Significantly shorter and less developed, the medieval story, set in sixteenth-century France, tells the tale of Catherine de Medici’s Catholic intolerance of the Protestant Huguenots. Seeking to avenge earlier slaughters of Catholics, Catherine persuades King Charles to sign a decree authorising the massacre of the Huguenots on the very same St Bartholomew’s day that a young Huguenot couple, Brown Eyes and Prosper, are to be married. When Prosper rushes to the house of his betrothed, he discovers that she and her family have been killed, a fate he himself suffers shortly thereafter when he carries Brown Eyes’ lifeless body into the street and is shot. As in the Babylonian story, the casualty of intolerance in the medieval story is a true love whose consummation is cut short by the violent and indeed fatal pre-empting of a wedding – the celebration of which is, as we will see in the Judaean story, embraced by Jesus and derided by the Pharisees. The least developed of Intolerance’s four narratives, the Judaean story, is in fact hardly a story at all in its own right.24 While this story’s scenes occupy no more than a dozen minutes of Intolerance’s three and a half hours, and are radically subordinated to the three other stories, their significance for the 24

So for instance, J. Leondopoulos, Still the Moving World: Intolerance, Modernism and Heart of Darkness (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 162, and Tatum, Jesus, p. 35, who characterises the seven segments of the Judaean story as no more than ‘thematic footnotes’.

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interpretation of the much more substantial Babylonian story requires us to attend to the Judaean story first, especially in light of Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross (Kalem, 1912) and Maître’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Pathé, 1913/14). With the birth of Christ having featured in every cinematic depiction of Christ before Griffith, he signals the novelty of his approach by beginning with the mature Christ at the beginning of his ministry. Yet even before the first images appear, an intertitle situates the scene in Jerusalem and sets the tone for what will follow: Ancient Jerusalem, the golden city whose people have given us many of our highest ideals, and from the carpenter’s shop of Bethlehem, sent us the Man of Men, the greatest enemy of intolerance.25

In addition to affording Griffith the opportunity to reproduce Judith of Bethulia’s spectacle of the long city street extending into the deep space of an impressive set, it also allows him to offer the viewer a foreground full of Jerusalemites (including a mother with her baby)26 going about their daily business. After immediately introducing the setting of the second sequence with an intertitle (‘The house in Cana of Galilee’) and establishing shots, Griffith returns to the crowded streets of Jerusalem by means of another intertitle: Certain hypocrites among the Pharisees. Pharisee – A learned Jewish party, the name possibly brought into disrepute by hypocrites among them.

While the latter is undoubtedly intended to deflect potential accusations of caricature or worse by making only some of the Pharisees hypocrites and attributing to the latter the subsequent disrepute of all of them,27 the caveat ‘possibly’ and the assumption of disrepute announces Griffith’s intent to align himself closely with the vilification of the Pharisees found in the New Testament. Moreover, having rolled his camera just out of reach of a camel as it passes through the crowds in the opening Jerusalem sequence, Griffith’s distinctive dolly shot of the Pharisees as they move down the street in the resumption of the sequence is suggestive of the negative characterisation to follow. After another intertitle, ‘When these Pharisees pray they demand that all action ceases’, Griffith dramatises the point by cutting between a man who stops chewing, another who pauses at his trade 25 26 27

Tatum, Jesus, p. 36 rightly interprets the reference to the carpenter’s shop in Bethlehem to be mistaken. Noted by Tatum, ibid., p. 36 as ‘madonna-like’. It is not impossible that this is an oblique reference to the nativity otherwise abandoned by Griffith. So Reinhartz, Jesus, p. 204.

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and another who stops in his tracks and struggles to support a heavy load which he dare not move to set down – all movement arrested for the benefit of the Pharisee who prays (disclosed in an intertitle): ‘O Lord, I thank thee that I am better than other men before eventually releasing the men to return to their activities with a belated ‘Amen’. While the parable of the Prodigal Son was adapted by numerous directors, including Griffith himself, Griffith here redeploys the Pharisee’s prayer from the parable in Luke 18 in a radically new narrative context which transforms the Lukan sin of pride into an imposition of Pharisaic legalism on the hardworking natives of Jerusalem. Following an introduction of the medieval story, Griffith shifts back to the modern story, in which he explicitly signals his analogical intent by depicting the moral reformers in the mill town as ‘modern Pharisees’. In the second sequence of the Judaean story, an intertitle signals the resumption of the scene introduced in the first sequence: ‘There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee (John ii-1.) Note – The ceremony according to Sayce, Hastings, Brown and Tissot.’ The first of Jesus’ miracles had featured in both Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross and Maître’ Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, and in many respects Griffith’s version agrees with them in following the biblical version. A point-of-view glimpse of the festive fare on offer, a ‘first sop’ offered to the bride and a note of the bride and groom’s embarrassment at running short of wine are among the novel embellishments provided by Griffith, but, as with other versions, Mary the mother of Jesus is present, and the miraculous transformation of the water and wine and the requisite astonishment are all depicted. Yet Griffith departs significantly from earlier versions by following the opening shots of the wedding scene with a sequence in which he cuts back and forth between Jesus as he approaches the house and two observers, marked by their clothing as Pharisees. If the shot of doves in this sequence underlines Jesus’ innocence, the intertitle’s allusion to Isaiah, ‘scorned and rejected of men’, associates with the Pharisees an attitude which on the traditional Christian interpretation leads to Jesus’ suffering and death. Moreover, once Jesus is in the house and seated amongst the revellers, Griffith’s cut to a shot of the Pharisees shaking their heads and walking away is prefaced with an intertitle which offers a verbal explication: ‘Meddlers, then as now. “There is too much revelry and pleasure-seeking among the people.”’ Whereas the ancient narrative concludes with a note of the positive impact of the episode on Jesus’ supporters, ‘and his disciples believed in him’ (John 2:11 NRSV), Griffith’s novel interpolation of the Pharisees’ underlines not only their

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potentially lethal rejection of the Christ, but also their intolerance of the people’s wholly innocent and wholesome celebration of marital love. Following a sequence from the modern story which depicts the reformers’ growing influence, Griffith returns to the Judaean story first by means of an intertitle which explicitly draws the analogy to antiquity, ‘Equally intolerant hypocrites of another age’, and then an intertitle which clarifies Griffith’s target, ‘And the Pharisee said: “Behold a man gluttonous and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” St. Matthew XI-19.’ While the text of the intertitle is from the New Testament, the background image of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments with its prohibitions (in Hebrew) offers an unmistakeable association of the Pharisaic ‘legalism’ with the Sinai legal tradition of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament – even if the text itself does not invite such an association. Again, Griffith cuts between Jesus in a house – at table, but making a point of not partaking by raising his hand and declining that which is offered28 – and the Pharisees, who take centre stage once the woman taken in adultery has been introduced. Before returning to a shot of the Pharisees which confirms them as the speakers, Griffith offers the intertitle: ‘“Now Moses in the law commanded that such should be stoned; but what sayest thou?” – John VIII.’ As in the ancient narrative, Jesus’ invitation to those without sin to cast the first stone leads to the dispersal of the crowd, but whereas in the text those last to recognise their sin are characterised by their youth, in Griffith’s scene the last to retreat are the Pharisees. While this episode had not appeared before on screen, Griffith’s inclusion of it may well have been encouraged by Olcott’s portrayal of another narrative moment in John 8 in From the Manger to the Cross a few short years before. Olcott too seizes on Jesus’ confrontation with ‘the Jews’, in this case over his claims to have pre-existed Abraham (8:58). In Olcott’s scene, when the Jews pick up stones to kill Jesus he simply walks away – as per the biblical narrative (8:59). If Olcott, in allowing his camera to linger on the Jews as they evidently begin to plot Jesus’ downfall, goes beyond John 8 in incriminating ‘the Jews’, Griffith’s treatment of the Pharisees goes still further and confirms the pattern of previous sequences. Yet again, Griffith returns to the modern story with an intertitle that implicitly equates the Pharisees with modern antagonists, namely, the reforming ‘Committee of Seventeen’. The fourth sequence in Griffith’s Judaean story follows an intertitle, ‘Suffer the Little Children’, which introduces a slight iris out to a single long shot of Jesus with his arms open to the children who surround him. The scene had 28

As noted by ibid., p. 206.

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been popular amongst the earliest films of the Passion (e.g. Lear, Höritz, Lubin) but Griffith here passes over Jesus’ rebuke of the disciples for initially preventing the children from coming to him (Mark 10:13). By doing so, not only does Griffith avoid complicating this emblematic episode of ‘tolerance’ with an ‘indignant’ Christ (10:14), he also eliminates any possible accusations of intolerance against Jesus’ own followers, which would otherwise complicate Griffith’s association of the scene exclusively with Jewish opponents of Jesus and his ministry in the Judaean story. As has been observed by others,29 Griffith situates this tableau within the modern story sequence in which the Dear One’s baby is legally but immorally removed from her care by the meddling reformers, effectively juxtaposing the antithetical spirit of the Jesus who welcomes children with the reformers who effectively kidnap them. While it has been noted by others that the Pharisees and other Jewish authorities do not appear in the final sequences of the Judaean story, which focus on the Passion and crucifixion of Christ,30 close observation of these sequences in light of previous versions of these scenes demonstrates the means by which Griffith continues his characterisation of the Jews as the enemy of Jesus and perpetrators of ‘intolerance’. Following an intertitle which confirms the Roman condemnation of Christ, ‘Outide the Roman Judgment Hall, after the verdict of Pontius Pilate: “Let him Be Crucified”’, Griffith offers a long shot of Christ carrying his cross through the city. The Roman soldiers struggle to keep back those who hurl abuse at the condemned. Unlike earlier versions (e.g. Olcott) which follow Tissot in picturing the way of the cross in the narrow streets of Jerusalem and with a limited crowd, Griffith’s longer shot allows him to portray an unprecedented sea of people whose vitriol and violence appear ready to wash over Jesus at any moment. Just before Jesus falls under the weight of the cross, a man rises in the crowd and appears to throw something at him, though the speed with which it occurs prevents interpretive certainty. Earlier versions of this scene had Roman soldiers move to raise the fallen Jesus and keep him moving, but in Griffith’s scene, while the Roman soldiers are recruiting Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross, Jews from the crowd break the Roman cordon in order to beat Jesus before dragging him to his feet and marching him to his death. Griffith’s enhancing of the role of the Jewish crowd in facilitating Jesus’ death may also be seen in the penultimate sequence of the Judaean story as Christ, now crowned with thorns, continues on the Way of the Cross. As he does so, one of the Jewish mob walks with him, evidently taunting him, and another comes and shakes his fist at him (Figure 6.1). Following two closer 29

Tatum, Jesus, p. 39.

30

Ibid., p. 41.

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Figure 6.1 Jesus on the Way of the Cross, threatened by a member of the Jewish mob. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916).

shots of those sympathetic to Jesus – isolated pockets of support amidst the mass of people baying for his blood – Griffith uses longer shots to portray the overwhelming mass of people willing the destruction of Jesus. In the first shot, Jesus appears stationary before the crowd, his progress towards his crucifixion ironically halted by the intensity of hatred demanding his death. In the second, the man who was haranguing Jesus as he walked now mocks the women who follow after Jesus in fear and sadness. If, as we have seen, Griffith’s demonisation of the Pharisees by means of John 8 was anticipated by Olcott’s inclusion of a scene from the same chapter four years earlier, then Griffith’s enhancement of the role of the Jews in the scenes of the Passion also finds its precursor in Maître’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, which arrived in America only two years before the release of Intolerance. Thus, in the former film, after the Roman soldiers have scourged Jesus, Jews emerge from the crowd to continue the abuse by mocking and spitting at Jesus at some length. Moreover, in Maître’s film, it is a Jewish ring-leader who drags Jesus off to be scourged and then brings him back to Pilate. While the comparable scenes are absent from Griffith’s Judaean story, his interpolation of Jewish antagonism in the latter scenes of his Way of the Cross suggests treatment of a similar spirit. Griffith’s approach to the final sequence of the Judaean story, the crucifixion itself, is also novel and suggestive. Griffith’s use of an extreme

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long shot leaves the three crosses on Golgotha off in the distance inhabiting only the upper left corner of a frame which is otherwise filled with a sea of people. In Griffith’s scene, rather than the spectacle of the cross itself, the viewer is offered the spectacle of the massed crowd, the intolerance of which has sealed the fate of the one on the cross. The above analysis serves to clarify why the absence of Pharisees and the High Priest from Griffith’s Passion sequence does not ultimately reduce the impression of Jewish intolerance which Griffith depicts so clearly in the initial sequences of his Judaean story.31 Indeed, by involving the Jewish crowd in the abuse of Jesus as he walks the Way of the Cross, Griffith subtly erodes the distinction between the Pharisees and the Jewish mob. More specifically, by the time Christ reaches the cross, he has become the victim of Jewish intolerance which may have been promoted by the Pharisees but has been embraced by all the Jews except for the small band of Jesus’ supporters. Further evidence for the pervasiveness of Griffith’s portrayal of Jewish intolerance in the Judaean story is furnished by contemporary accounts of why the Judaean story was so curtailed in comparison with the three other stories. According to a report in the pages of Variety (7 April 1916), Griffith’s original footage included scenes of Jews participating in the actual crucifixion of Jesus itself. If such scenes were shot by Griffith for inclusion in the Judaean story, the above analysis suggests that the most likely participants in such scenes would have been, not the Pharisees, but the very Jews who are haranguing Jesus on the way to the cross. It also seems entirely likely that the brevity of the Judaean story is thus to be accounted for, at least in part, by the deletion of this and other scenes following objections at the time. Indeed, given that those scenes which remain offer incontrovertible evidence of the tenacity of Griffith’s interpretation, one can only imagine how much more fully the deleted scenes disclosed the extent of his commitment to portray Jesus as the victim of specifically Jewish intolerance. That this commitment has played a crucial role beyond the Judaean story will become clear as we turn our attention to Griffith’s rendering of his much more substantial Babylonian story. Occupying almost as much screen time as the Modern story, and much more than the Medieval story, an analysis of the Babylonian story is fundamental to an understanding of Intolerance as a whole and requires an awareness of not only the Judaean story, and Griffith’s own earlier Judith of Bethulia, but also previous depictions of this same Babylonian episode in the silent cinema. Griffith’s Babylonian story may be summarised as follows: 31

Tatum, ibid., p. 41, attributes the impression of ultimate Pharisaic responsibility to their prominence in the initial sequences alone.

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In 539 bc, the arrival and installation of the idol of Ishtar, the goddess of Belshazzar’s betrothed, Princess Beloved, is the cause of great resentment on the part of the High Priest of Bel. Meanwhile, Rhapsode, a servant of the High Priest, is smitten by the arrival of the Mountain Girl, who has come to the city to watch the religious festivities and becomes besotted with King Belshazzar when he graciously saves her from the cruelties of the Babylonian marriage market. Upon learning that the armies of Cyrus the Persian are approaching, Belshazzar prepares the city, whose walls and defenders eventually repel the massive assault of the Persian forces, which in turn leads to great festal celebrations in Babylon courtesy of Belshazzar. As the city celebrates, the High Priest of Bel visits Cyrus to offer to betray Babylon. Having learned of the Priest’s journey from the lovesick Rhapsode, Mountain Girl’s own clandestine trip to the Persian camp confirms Babylon’s peril, which she then seeks to relay to Belshazzar in Babylon. Before her news of Cyrus’ return can be conveyed and the gates closed, the Persian forces pour into Babylon, which soon falls along with its King, Belshazzar, his Princess Beloved and the Mountain Girl, who dies in defence of her city and her King. Whether or not Griffith’s cameraman Karl Brown remembers rightly that Griffith took his staff to see Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria when it arrived in San Francisco in the spring of 1914, there can be little doubting the influence of Italy’s definitive and most celebrated ancient world epic on various aspects of Griffith’s Babylonian story.32 Thus, while Griffith’s muscular and hirsute ‘Mighty Man of Valor’ – seldom far from Belshazzar’s side – may owe as much to Quo Vadis’ slave Ursus as to Cabiria’s equally hairy and muscular Mascite, Cabiria’s influence may be seen not only in the general abundance of exotic pets (including dancing bears and pet monkeys) which populate Belshazzar’s court, but quite specifically in the King’s patting of a live leopard’s head much as the character Hasdrubar pats the leopard’s head in Pastrone’s film. Evidence of Cabiria’s influence on a far larger scale is furnished by the enormous sculptures of elephants which adorn the eight equally massive columns of Belshazzar’s hall in Intolerance. Given the dearth of ancient sources placing elephants in Babylon or on its walls, the presence of pachyderms, trunks upraised, in Belshazzar’s Great Hall suggests they have come by way of Cabiria’s Carthage (Figure 6.2). If the unprecedented scale and exotic quality of Cabiria inspired Griffith’s own insistence on even greater feats of scenic construction, Pastrone’s innovative use of the camera is also evident in Griffith’s slow tracking shot which swoops down on the spectacle of Belshazzar’s enormous and elaborate hall 32

As recounted to and by Kevin Brownlow, Hollywood: The Pioneers (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), p. 71.

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Figure 6.2 Belshazzar’s Great Hall. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916).

courtesy of a camera dolly 140 feet tall, which was mounted on railway cars and equipped with an elevator to allow the camera to descend from the necessary height.33 The sheer scale of Cabiria’s siege of Cerba, with men seemingly plunging several storeys from the enormous ramparts, was not lost on contemporary reviewers34 nor on Griffith himself, judging from his insistence that the walls of his Babylon be erected to a height of fully 90 feet.35 Indeed the walls themselves may be taken as an index of Griffith’s mounting ambition. Whereas an intertitle in Judith announces the walls as ‘50 cubits thick’, the intertitle which introduces Belshazzar in Intolerance includes: ‘Note: Replica of Babylon’s encircling walls 300 feet in height and broad enough for the passing of chariots.’ While this acknowledgement of the replicated and thus artificial character of Griffith’s wall inevitably compromises the illusion of ancient reality which he ostensibly pursues, what it yields in exchange is evidence – should the scenes themselves not suffice – of the integrity and scale of Griffith’s own accomplishments in recreating it. Yet if Griffith’s Babylonian sequence reflects, 33 34

Billy Bitzer, ‘Intolerance: The Sun Play of the Ages’, International Photographer 7, no. 9 (October 1934), 24. NYDM (13 May 1914), 40. 35 Henaberry, as cited by Brownlow, Parade, p. 57.

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Figure 6.3 Belshazzar’s chariot atop the walls of Babylon; below, the image of Ishtar approaches the city gate. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916).

as we shall see, a level of investment in academic research which was unprecedented up to this point in biblical productions, his preference for the eighthcentury walls of the Assyrian Sargon’s Khorsabad in his recreation of Belshazzar’s sixth-century Babylon demonstrates the pragmatic constraints and artistic priorities to which such research was inevitably subordinated.36 Spurred on by the scale of Cabiria’s own scenes of a city under attack, Griffith’s siege of Babylon unsurprisingly both reflects and eclipses his earlier siege of Bethulia. While in Bethulia the troops climb ladders to man the ramparts, in Griffith’s Babylon they pour up specially constructed ramps. While the width of Bethulia’s wall allows a line of troops to defend it, the wall of Griffith’s Babylon is so wide, so substantial, we see Belshazzar touring the ramparts atop his chariot, while far below the procession which bears the idol of Ishtar approaches the city gates (Figure 6.3). If the wall of Babylon far surpasses that of Bethulia, the inevitable corollary is, of course, a far greater assault. The modest Assyrian siege engines which threaten Bethulia are therefore replaced by enormous Persian siege towers which lumber toward Babylon. Once set alight by the energetic Babylonian defenders, Griffith’s massive towers soon 36

B. Hanson, ‘D. W. Griffith: Some Sources’, Art Bulletin 54 (1972), p. 502.

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demonstrate in spectacular fashion that the bigger the siege towers are, the harder they fall. Beyond its amplitude and magnitude, Griffith’s Babylonian siege also outstrips that of Bethulia by being extended by Griffith into the night, with the chaos of battlements and battlefield lit only by the fires of flares, resulting in further, unprecedented visual display.37 It is in Griffith’s version of the feast of Belshazzar – the archetypal spectacle of the painterly tradition and earlier cinematic efforts – that the director’s particular dispositions begin to become more clear. It was noted in an earlier chapter that Feuillade’s Festin de Balthazar (Gaumont, 1910) largely recycled the three set-piece spectacles which Nonguet’s earlier film of the same name had derived from the ancient narrative: the feast of Belshazzar, the writing on the wall and the fall of Babylon. While Feuillade’s amplification of each was described, it was also observed that Feuillade’s elaboration of the feast – the enlisting of the seductive Napierkowska to dance before the King, the long take of the retrieval of the Jewish temple vessels and subsequent desecration of them in the feast – not only enhanced the visual interest of the film, but reflected the foregrounding of Belshazzar’s folly and ungodliness elsewhere in the film – and well beyond the level indicated even by the ancient Jewish narrative itself. In the visual art of the nineteenth century and then, as we’ve seen, in the cinematic art of the first decade, Belshazzar’s status as the archetypal foreign king whose decadence, moral depravity and defiance of God leads to his downfall was secure. Indeed, it had risen to the point that Griffith’s own depiction of Holofernes’ indulgent desire for the spectacle of female display in Judith of Bethulia is enhanced beyond the warrant of the biblical text and in ways which reflect the traditional conviction of the depravity of ancient foreign potentates. Viewing Griffith’s depiction of Belshazzar’s feast in light of the above allows earlier observations regarding the portrayal of Belshazzar in the Babylonian story to be clarified. The tenor of Griffith’s depiction of the Babylonian King may be discerned as early as the opening intertitle of the sequence, where he is introduced as ‘Prince Belshazzar, son of Nabonidus, apostle of tolerance and religious freedom’. Indeed, in Belshazzar’s benevolent release of the Mountain Girl from the oppressive and false marriage which awaits her as she stands on the auction block of the Babylonian marriage market,38 Belshazzar resonates with Christ’s own endorsement of true marriage in his miraculous transformation of water into wine in the ‘Miracle of Cana’ sequence in the Judaean story. So too, when Belshazzar rescues the same Mountain Girl from the pious violence of the corrupt High Priest of Bel, he prefigures the 37 38

It is worth noting that Feuillade had already highlighted the spectacle of Babylon’s destruction in Le Festin de Balthazar (1910). Clearly inspired by Long’s painting and perhaps by Herodotus’ account which had prompted Long’s painting in the first place.

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Judaean story’s deliverance of the adulterous woman by Christ. Moreover, like Christ with his twelve disciples, Belshazzar is left to face his deadly fate with ‘only twelve guards’, who are likewise helpless to prevent the death of their master.39 Finally, the ending of the Judaean and Babylonian stories with the deaths of Christ and Belshazzar – innocent victims of the intolerance of Pharisees and Persians/priests respectively, offers unmistakeable evidence of Griffith’s analogical intent. Indeed, whether or not such scenes suffice to give Intolerance as a whole the appearance of a ‘crypto-passion’ myth,40 there can be little doubting Griffith’s parallel characterisations of Christ and Belshazzar. The point at which this Christ/Belshazzar analogy has been seen to break down is, perhaps unsurprisingly, when the feast of Belshazzar begins. Typical of such an analysis, J. Leondopoulos concludes that the: established thematic kinship between two protagonists is modified and made relative by introducing a quality which critically distinguishes Belshazzar from Christ. Until now, both were representations of charismatic, liberal and benevolent leadership. But when the sybaritic king’s self-indulgence and decadence fully emerge and lead ultimately to catastrophe for his people, the resemblance between the two is decisively and finally altered.41

Yet such a perception is difficult to sustain on the basis of the film itself – a fact which is illustrated by the way in which Griffith departs from previous cinematic depictions of Belshazzar’s feast and, in particular, the King’s weakness for the pleasures of the flesh. As early as the opening sequence of the Babylonian story, the viewer is of course well supplied with the spectacle of the female form in all its finery, beginning with a shot which introduces Belshazzar’s consort, the Princess Beloved. So too in the ‘Babylonian marriage market’ scene of the second sequence, Griffith pans across a bevy of beautified women in precisely the same manner that Andréani’s camera had panned slowly across the women of Ahasuerus’ Persian harem in Esther (1910). Moreover, following Mountain Girl’s deliverance from the marriage market and the establishment of her infatuation with Belshazzar, an intertitle (‘In the love temple, Virgins of the sacred fire of life’) introduces a sequence of tinted shots of women wearing various minimal and/or translucent costumes, some displaying themselves in quiet repose, others dancing amidst spraying water or splashing others, still others rocking back and forth, mirror in hand, as if hypnotised by their own beauty. There can be little doubt of the intent to make a spectacle of female 39 40

Lesley Brill, Crowds, Power and Transformation in Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 51. Leondopoulos, Moving World, pp. 142–3. 41 Ibid., pp. 136–7.

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Figure 6.4 Belshazzar in the arms of his Princess Beloved, oblivious to the orgiastic dancing of the women visible through the doorway. Intolerance (Triangle, 1916).

(even homoerotic) sexuality for the benefit of the viewer. Yet the appearance of women dancing in the deep background in the following shot and the entrance of Belshazzar from the left of the frame into the room in the foreground establishes that the spectacle of the women has not been for his benefit – a point reinforced by the remainder of the shot, in which the Princess Beloved is defined as the sole object of his attention and affection by the intertitle, which conveys his words to her as they embrace: ‘The fragrant mystery of your body is greater than the mystery of life.’ This is followed by successive shots of: the women dancing in the room in the deep background, a courtier/servant yawning, a woman playing a harp, a tinted shot of a dancing woman clad only in a translucent veil, before we return to shots of the women dancing in the room in the background and then finally Belshazzar and the Princess Beloved’s embrace in the room in the foreground (Figure 6.4). While the bodies of the barely clad worshipers may be for the visual pleasure of the viewers and each other, Belshazzar’s attention is reserved for his fully and beautifully gowned ‘Princess Beloved, Clearest and rarest of all his pearls, The very dearest one of his dancing girls’ (so the following intertitle).

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That Belshazzar has eyes only for his Princess Beloved becomes still clearer in the second act and the scenes of the feast. Intercut with shots of the choreographed dance scenes in the Great Hall (including Griffith’s camera swooping down over Belshazzar’s hall; Figure 6.2), the viewer is offered more scenes of the temple of love: of gauze-wrapped women swaying, seemingly entranced by each other’s barely clothed forms, of men too in various states of entrancement at the spectacle of writhing female flesh. Yet again, however, the following sequence depicts Belshazzar reclining and the Princess Beloved near his feet, facing each other and surrounded by courtiers, evidently nowhere near the temple of love, and perhaps not even witnessing the choreographed dancing in the great hall, which is in any case more pageantry than pornography. That the attentions of Belshazzar and his beloved continue to be focused only on each other is confirmed by the remarkable sequence in which the Princess Beloved presses a white flower to her lips (intertitle: ‘Beloved – a blossom – from Beloved’) and then places it in a chariot drawn by two white doves who then proceed to bear the blossom a few short feet to the King, whose evident delight in turn pleases the Princess. Yet again, Griffith’s editing makes it unmistakeably clear that the visual spectacle of female flesh is of no interest whatsoever to a besotted King, whose eyes are instead fixed on the blossom and doves, whose whiteness confirms the purity of his love for the Princess. Indeed, the possibility that some of the scenes of sexualised spectacle set in ‘the temple of love’ were not even part of Griffith’s original footage and only added subsequently at the encouragement of others is suggested by Woods’ account of being commissioned to shoot additional footage.42 As all four stories move toward their respective conclusions, Belshazzar promises Beloved that the following day he will begin building the city he has promised her – a prediction whose poignancy is emphasised both by the intertitle’s insistence that the city is doomed and by the following sequence which depicts Cyrus’ forces sweeping toward Babylon. Even in the scenes of ‘Babylon’s last Bacchanal’ – with which Cyrus’ journey are intercut – the cuts are between more footage of the choreographed pageantry and the radical disinterest of the couple who gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. When the alarm is finally sounded, Griffith juxtaposes the inertia and impotence of the temple, where those women not too stupefied or sedated to rouse themselves are led away in hopeless terror, with the 42

Brownlow, Parade, p. 64: ‘So I got a bunch of people together, and as a basic shot I developed a section from an old painting known as Belshazzar’s Feast. It was a wild party, I can tell you. A real orgy. I had people lying around so that they weren’t stark naked – almost, but not quite.’

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bravery of Belshazzar, who rushes to confront the vastly superior forces of Cyrus already wreaking havoc in his beloved Babylon. Indeed, if there are other victims of Babylon’s fall, Griffith’s shot of Belshazzar, the Beloved Princess and the Mountain Girl – all dead – suggests that the most tragic casualty of all is true love – both mutual and unrequited – which has been extinguished by Cyrus. By now, the contrast between Griffith’s treatment of the feast and the biblical picture animated by Feuillade will be evident. Whereas in the latter Belshazzar’s insistence on feasting in full knowledge of the threat to Babylon is an illustration of his depraved weakness for women and wine and his foolish hubris, Griffith’s introductory intertitle to the sequence sets a very different tone: The Feast of Belshazzar. In the great court of the palace rejoicing over Babylon’s victory. Before the nobles of Babylon, Belshazzar pours out the colossal hospitality of an ancient time.

Rather than wilful pride, Griffith’s feast is none other than the innocent and generous celebration of a victory which will be compromised only by priestly betrayal. Just as Griffith’s Christ participates in and facilitates the festivities of the Wedding at Cana by turning the water to wine, so too the besotted Belshazzar joins in the celebratory spirit of the occasion through his sponsorship of the public display of pure and innocent festivity. Likewise, while Griffith’s sequence does nothing to deprive the viewer of the requisite – if perhaps reluctantly contrived – spectacle of sexuality, it is clear that this spectacle is lost entirely on a Belshazzar besotted by his Princess with a love which is as pure and unsullied as may be imagined. Again, like Griffith’s Christ, whose love requires him to tolerate and even associate with ‘publicans and sinners’ (much to the disgust of the Pharisees), so too Belshazzar’s love for the Princess Beloved leads him to tolerate the indulgent and ultimately ineffectual excesses of the Ishtar cult – though he himself remains effectively untainted by it. Perhaps encouraged by the very same cultural memory of the corrupt Belshazzar which Griffith’s portrayal radically contests, some find it difficult to entirely exonerate Belshazzar of negligence in the fall of Babylon, but such suggestions do not bare scrutiny. Cyrus gains entrance to Babylon not because Belshazzar is ‘luxuriating and seemingly inebriated’43 (cf. the obvious overindulgence of Feuillade and Nonguet’s Belshazzars) but because the delivery of the Mountain Girl’s warning has been delayed first by the revellers 43

Leondopoulos, Moving World, pp. 136–7.

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and then by Belshazzar’s brief and understandable moment of doubt until Cyrus’ incursion is confirmed by his servant. Rather than a transposition of the biblical King’s inability to read the writing on the wall ‘into an expression of class bias’, this sequence is more plausibly accounted for by Griffith’s desire to eliminate the writing on the wall’s divine judgement of the biblical Belshazzar’s godless defiance. Indeed, such an interpretation is made all the more likely by the observation that the prophet Daniel – whose role as divine denouncer is described in the biblical account and even enhanced in Feuillade’s film of 1910 – is nowhere to be found in Griffith’s Babylon.44 While the elimination of supernatural revelation – written and spoken – might superficially indicate a humanistic interpretation, closer attention to Griffith’s characterisation of Cyrus suggests otherwise. Thorough investigation of Griffith’s sources and the finished film itself demonstrate the lengths to which the director went to unearth textual and archaeological support for his treatment of the Babylonian story. Indeed, Griffith’s establishment of a specific team to undertake significant research exclusively for the film was one of the many legacies he would bequeath to subsequent biblical productions. Yet, as we have seen in the case of the walls, the findings of such research were inevitably subordinated to practical considerations and Griffith’s own proclivities. Such tendencies are displayed most fully in his characterisation of Cyrus, the Persian king celebrated in antiquity for his military genius, his clemency toward the conquered and his enlightened restoration of local and regional worship in the lands under his rule. Perhaps influenced by Persian sources, including Cyrus’ own predictably enthusiastic inscriptions, Greek historians such as Herodotus and Xenophon (in his Cyropaedia) are largely in agreement in their positive evaluation of Cyrus. In sum, while the discovery of contemporary documents in cuneiform in the nineteenth century had emboldened some historians to allege Babylonian complicity in Cyrus’ capture of Babylon, there was little to disturb the scholarly consensus regarding Cyrus’ praiseworthy qualities when Griffith turned his attention to his Babylonian story. Yet, as has been noted by others, Griffith’s Cyrus is an altogether vicious character, who exploits divisions in the Babylonian court and appears to delight in the city’s destruction. Thus, as his Persian forces assault the walls of Babylon, the narratorial voice of the intertitle articulates Cyrus’ appetite for destruction : ‘Cyrus repeats the world old prayer to kill, kill, kill – and to God be the glory, world without end, Amen.’ Similarly, as Cyrus arrives to 44

W. Drew, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Its Genesis and its Vision (Jefferson, N. J. McFarland, 1986), p. 53, notes the discrepancy between Griffith’s film and the biblical account.

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find Belshazzar dead on his throne, Cyrus growls and roars directly into the camera, with an intertitle again translating: ‘To God the glory! Long live Cyrus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords!’ Given that Zoroastrian monotheism likely post-dates the time of Cyrus and would be unknown in any case to the vast majority of viewers, Cyrus’ invocation of the singular and capitalised ‘God’ (as opposed to the plurality of named Babylonian gods such as Ishtar and Marduk) can only be interpreted as confirmation of Cyrus’ solidarity with and service of the ‘God’ whose ancient Jewish worshippers joined their voices to the chorus of praise for Cyrus. Yet, if according to the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Jews inspires Cyrus to repatriate them and restore their temple, according to Griffith, this Jewish God also – and evidently more importantly – authorises Cyrus’ destructive rampage and is given the glory for the death of the innocent Belshazzar. Griffith’s departure from the biblical tradition in his Babylonian story has been noted by others, but the radical nature of his interpretation – especially in light of earlier cinematic versions of the subject and the director’s own Judith of Bethulia – does not appear to have been fully appreciated. As we have seen, the latter film offers an unreservedly negative depiction of another proud, pagan and decadent enemy of the Jews and an unmitigated celebration of Judith as Hebrew heroine. By contrast, Griffith’s Babylonian story for the first time in the cinema, radically and thoroughly reverses the characterisation of the two principal characters known from the biblical narrative and its cultural afterlives. In the absence of any ancient sources to support Griffith’s radical contradiction of the biblical account, what prompted Griffith to remake Belshazzar, one of the most notoriously godless and hubristic pagan kings of the Hebrew Bible, into an innocent and enlightened prophet of tolerance who dies an innocent death when he is betrayed by those nearest him? Indeed, what encouraged Griffith to rewrite Cyrus, the most revered king of the nations and friend of Jews, as the vindictive and radically violent enemy of tolerance? Griffith’s Judaean story, with its portrayal of Christ as the innocent victim of violent Jewish intolerance, clearly points in a particular direction. A further nod in such a direction is provided by the strong visual association of Pharisaic intolerance with the archetypal symbol of Old Testament law furnished by the intertitles of the Judaean story. Indeed, confirmation of Intolerance’s suspicion that the roots of Jewish intolerance could be discerned in the earlier phases of history narrated in the Old Testament is offered by a particular narrative moment where the modern story is interrupted by the Judaean story. The Boy, having innocently picked up the gun used to kill the Musketeer, is arrested, wrongly accused and then forced to

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stand trial. Despite the claims of his lawyer that the evidence against the Boy is only ‘circumstantial’, the following intertitle confirms: ‘The Verdict – guilty. Universal justice, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a murder for a murder.’ The mentioning of the ‘circumstantial’ evidence, along with the underlining of the final words, highlight the miscarriage of Old Testament ‘justice’ as articulated by Griffith’s adaptation of the well-known lex talionis of Old Testament law (Exodus 21:24). In replacing ‘a life for a life’ with ‘a murder for a murder’, Griffith highlights the susceptibility of the Hebrew legal tradition to the kind of corruption which will lead to the murder of someone who has, in fact, not murdered. That the verdict of ancient Jewish law in the modern story finds its correspondence in the guilty verdict which leads to Christ’s crucifixion is signalled by Griffith’s immediate cut to the scenes of Christ on his way to the cross, introduced by an intertitle: ‘Outside the Roman Judgment Hall, after the verdict of Pontius Pilate: “Let him be Crucified.”’ By mentioning the Roman Judgement Hall and Pontius Pilate, Griffith may well have sought to appease his Jewish censors with the ambiguity that ‘Let him be Crucified’ might be construed as the verdict of Pilate. That these words are, in fact, spoken not once, but twice by the Jews of the Gospel of Matthew (27:22–3), who then proceed to call Jesus’ blood upon themselves (v. 28), reveals the true intent of Griffith, which is then visualised by the Jewish haranguing of Jesus, as already discussed, in the scene which follows. When Griffith cuts back to the modern story for the Judge to deliver the verdict to the Boy, an intertitle announces: ‘To be hanged by the neck until, dead, dead, dead!’ The Judge’s sentence crystallises the deadly demands of the law’s intolerance in a way which is clearly intended to resonate with the equally deadly intolerance which has just insisted of Christ, ‘Let him be Crucified.’ Yet, the judge’s distinctive threefold invocation of the lethally intolerant demands of the Jewish tradition points both backwards and forwards in the Babylonian story as well. The Judge’s ‘dead, dead, dead’ points backwards in its resonance with the bloodthirsty Cyrus’s threefold prayer ‘to kill, kill, kill’ in the name of what can only be the Jewish God, whose temple the Old Testament insists he will free God’s people to rebuild. It also points forwards, however, to the end of the Babylonian story, where, as we’ve noted, Cyrus delights in the destruction of Babylon’s own enemy of intolerance, Belshazzar, by giving glory to this same ‘God’. If the above analysis is highly suggestive of Griffith’s construal of the evils of Jewish intolerance – overtly represented in the Judaean story and more cryptically coded in the Babylonian story – one may only speculate as to its genesis, particularly given his sympathetic treatment of the subject of Judith

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only a few years before. It is quite clear that the accusations of racism which had followed in the wake of The Birth of a Nation had not chastened Griffith. Indeed, as has been noted elsewhere, Intolerance was anything but an apology – in the modern sense of the word – for what had been perceived as Griffith’s own racism in adapting The Clansman for the screen.45 Rather, Intolerance was an apologia – in the ancient sense of the word – a defence or indeed attack against those ‘intolerants’ in America who would and did seek to vilify the innocent in various ways, including censoring and attacking artists like him. If Griffith already considered the Jewish tradition in America to contain such intolerance before he began work on Intolerance, the following excerpt from the pamphlet he published the same year it was released suggests that his views had not been tempered by what he viewed to be interference with his depiction of the Judaean story, in a film which he himself was funding: The reason for the slap-stick and the worst that is in pictures is censorship. Let those who tell us to uplift our art, invest money in the production of an historic play of the time of Christ. They will find this cannot be staged without incurring the wrath of a certain part of our people.46

Whether or not Gaye’s memory of a Judaean story which originally included thirty shots may be trusted, the six scenes which were included in the finished film Intolerance represent a significant development in the representation of the life of Christ on screen. Apart from certain technical contributions, including the dolly shot of Jerusalem, Griffith’s Judaean story represents the first attempt since Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ (1906) to offer a cinematic portrait of Jesus which is obviously and ideologically inflected. Whereas Guy had, in the main, limited herself to relatively minor interpretive liberties in realising her portrait of ‘Jesus and his women’, the six scenes of Griffith’s Judaean story suggest a director willing to radically reinterpret the received text in the service of illustrating his chosen theme of Jewish intolerance. Given the potentially inflammatory nature of Griffith’s interpretation, consideration must be given to the fact that the Judaean story largely escaped criticism and even impressed some: In the episode of the persecution of Christ is shown the first miracle of the turning of water into wine at the wedding feast and the rescue of the woman 45 46

Schickel, D. W. Griffith, pp. 303–4. D. W. Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (Los Angeles: D. W. Griffith, 1916). Elsewhere in the publication, he laments people who ‘would not have us show the glories and beauties of the most wonderful moral lesson the world has ever known – the life of Christ – because in that story we must show the vice of the traitor Judas Iscariot’.

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taken in adultery. The curious customs of that time are shown in fascinating detail. The last episode is the crucifixion.47 A great sermon is preached in that portion of the picture where the Pharisees seek to entangle Christ in his possible judgment upon the case of ‘The woman taken in adultery.’ His call for sinless accusers to be the first to administer punishment, and His pronouncement, ‘Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more,’ are perhaps the best exponents of the title of the picture itself.48

That Rev. Jackson would consider the Judaean story a ‘great sermon’ perhaps reflects the general comfort with the gospel’s portrait of the Pharisees in the church of the early twentieth century.49 The general lack of exception taken to it (or indeed even notice of it) is perhaps partly to be explained by a latent antiSemitism in the wider culture, but also in part by the slenderness of the story in scope and scale in comparison with the others and the fragmentation of its twelve minutes across the film’s three-hour running time. If the unprecedented spectacle of Griffith’s Babylonian story had made a deep impression on audiences, it appears also to have blinded would-be critics of Griffith’s radical reversal of the Hebrew Bible’s version of Babylon’s fall. Indeed, Griffith’s revisionist history seems barely to have been noticed by anyone at all, apart from a letter to the New York Times by Canon William Sheafe Chase, the Episcopal rector of a parish in Brooklyn, who offered a learned rebuttal of Griffith’s portrayal of Cyrus alleging that the Babylonian story ‘misrepresents the historical facts, beyond what poetic license can justify’.50 For the bulk of viewers and critics, however, the visual ambition of the Babylonian story, its inclusion of the basic and obligatory elements of the feast and the fall of Babylon, and the marginality of both Cyrus and Belshazzar ensured a reception for Griffith’s radical rewriting of the Hebrew Bible which was largely benign and indeed in some quarters even welcomed: You were taught that the Jewish Jehovah traced destruction’s warning in letters of fire on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace; and that Cyrus, to get in, drained the Euphrates river and walked on its bed under Babylon’s gates. See 47 48 49

50

Harry Carr, ‘Magnificent Film Spectacle Holds Thousands Entranced’, Los Angeles Times (18 October 1916), 1. Rev. W. H. Richardson and Prof. Hardin Lucas, MPW (14 October 1916), 238. So, Julian Johnson, in his review in Photoplay (December 1916), 79 can conclude that ‘I can think of nothing finer in the handling of light, nor in the massing and moving of figures than the “marriage in Cana.” More education! . . . The complete wedding rite, with its odd observances according to Hebrew tradition is a transcription from Minor Asia such as one cannot find outside the pages of Josephus. Stirringly dramatic, yet faithful to the letter of the gospels, is the scene in which Jesus faces those who would stone the woman taken in adultery.’ Drew, Intolerance, p. 48.

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While Intolerance’s Babylonian story was thus largely celebrated and the Judaean story generally appreciated or ignored, Griffith’s decision to interweave all four stories received, as we will see, decidedly mixed reviews. Yet, because of its enduring influence on the biblical film in the years which followed, we conclude this chapter with consideration of the evolution of the analogical hermeneutic which culminates and finds its fullest expression in Intolerance. Some six years after making Intolerance, Griffith would attribute the narrative parallelism in his work to the influence of Dickens: It was the reading of his [Dickens’] works that convinced me of the effectiveness of this policy of ‘switching off.’ It is to be found throughout his books. He introduces a multitude of characters and incidents, and breaks off abruptly to go from one to another, but at the end he cleverly gathers all the apparently loose-threads together again and rounds off the whole. It occurred to me that the method would be far more suitable to films than the straightforward system borrowed from plays which was then in vogue, and I put it into effect.52

While the role of Dickens in Griffith’s filmmaking was famously explored by Eisenstein53 and has prompted further literary excavations,54 Griffith’s recollection undoubtedly simplifies a more complex network of influences – including those of theatrical melodrama – which began to express themselves in the cross-cutting found in his and other films in the first decade of the cinema.55 The most basic reflection of this analogical impulse is evident, as we have seen, in Griffith’s creation of the romantic and melodramatic Naomi/Nathan storyline alongside characters (Judith and Holophernes) made less malleable by their biblical familiarity. Indeed, even in the Babylonian story, where such familiarity was apparently no longer an obstacle to his radical rewriting of Cyrus and Belshazzar, Griffith supplies the parallel storyline of Rhapsode and the Mountain Girl alongside his 51 52 53 54 55

Julian Johnson, Photoplay (December 1916), 78. G. Petrie, ‘Dickens, Godard, and the Film Today’, The Yale Review 64, no. 2 (December, 1974), 187–8. S. Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’, in J. Leyda (ed.), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), pp. 195–255. See, for example, Leondopolous, Moving World, who seeks to associate Intolerance’s narrative structure with modernist literature, including especially the work of Conrad. Credit for delineating these lines of influence in Porter and Griffith goes to Vardac, Stage to Screen.

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portrayal of the characters known from antiquity – allowing them to intersect at various points including their tragic end. Indeed, while the Nathan/Naomi storyline is comparatively slender in Judith, the same cannot be said of the Rhapsode/Mountain Girl’s part in Intolerance’s Babylonian story, nor for that matter, of the story of Brown Eyes/Prosper in the medieval story alongside that of the historical Catherine and Charles. Intolerance’s multiplication and separation of four discrete stories united by a transitional motif was anticipated first in Griffith’s adaptation of Browning’s Pippa Passes (1909) and then in Home Sweet Home (1914), one of the few films made for Majestic before Griffith became consumed by The Birth of a Nation. Yet, these films’ respective fourfold narratives are nevertheless still situated broadly speaking within a single temporal setting. In Pippa Passes, the title character’s presence requires as much, while in Home Sweet Home the generally contemporaneous setting of the stories is clear enough. If this is the case, how then are we to account for the true novelty of Intolerance’s structure – not the incorporation of four discrete narratives – but the interweaving of four discrete narratives from different time periods? It is clear that what eventually became Intolerance began with The Mother and the Law, a film which Griffith had already begun before the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Evidently persuaded that bigger really was better, Griffith at some point decided that the otherwise modest The Mother and the Law – with its revisiting of themes already evident in his Biograph days (The Reformers; or The Lost Art of Minding One’s Own Business, 1913) – might form the nucleus of a film sufficiently grand to match his mounting ambitions.56 It may be that Griffith did seize upon the idea of stories from different time periods after seeing the words ‘The Same Today as Yesterday’ on a billboard as he travelled on his way from California to New York for the premiere of The Birth of a Nation.57 On its own, however, such a sentiment seems ill-equipped to account for the specifically historical species of analogy found in Intolerance. Instead, we offer two more probable precursors: one from Griffith’s own earlier filmmaking and the other from the world of literature. The discussion of both begins with the observation that the Judaean story is, perhaps more than either of the other two, intimately bound up with the modern story, to which it is continually and explicitly liked by transitional intertitles.

56 57

Such at least is the recollection of Gish, The Movies, p. 166. Paul O’Dell, Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood (New York: A. S. Barnes; London A. Zwemmer, 1970), p. 46, attributes this anecdote to Seymour Stern.

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That Griffith had already begun to think analogically in relation to the gospel is clear from a film from 1908, The Modern Prodigal. The early efforts of the French firm Pathé, had seen the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) depicted in its ancient setting first by Zecca (1902) and then by Carré in 1907 (both under the title of L’Enfant Prodigue). In that same year, however, we have also noted that Carré’s three-act theatrical pantomime first staged in 1890 was filmed in its entirety by Édouard Benoit-Lévy (see Chapter 4). Given that the pantomime itself was being staged in America during precisely the period of Griffith’s work in the theatre,58 and the film was distributed in 1907, it is difficult to believe that Griffith’s own version of The Modern Prodigal does not reflect the influence of this ‘staging’ of the tale of the Prodigal Son in a modern setting. While Carré’s pantomime follows the broad outlines of the parable’s narrative structure by reproducing the Prodigal’s departure, debauched indulgence and return, Griffith’s adaptation is much less constrained by the biblical tradition. As has been noted elsewhere, the subtitle of Griffith’s Modern Prodigal establishes that the story will be told in ‘symbolism’ and the initial shots of the film confirm the parameters of the adaptation: the idyllic portrait of the mother and son gives way to a shot of a road down which the ‘prodigal’ walks in the direction of the city in the distance.59 In sharp contrast to previous cinematic versions which delight in the dissipated decline of the prodigal, Griffith elides it altogether, cutting immediately to a shot of the prodigal returning along the road dressed in prison stripes, evidently on the run from the law. That his return home does not represent the welcome ultimately afforded the biblical Prodigal is clear from the vacant house and the fact that he then eats ‘the food of pigs’, a clear allusion to the biblical account (Luke 15:16). Yet if Griffith was interested in realising the parable in a new and contemporary context, The Modern Prodigal also displays Griffith’s desire for this adapted and modern parable itself to disclose its own analogical potential by introducing a separate storyline whose opening shots evoke again an idyllic picture of family relationships. Thus, already by 1909, Griffith had been awakened to, and begun to experiment with, the analogical possibilities of gospel narrative in parable form. 58

59

It appears to have been staged in America well before the turn of the century and was revived from 1909 with Mme Pilar Morin in the title role at New York’s Liberty Theatre in 1910 and at the Carnegie Lyceum as late as 1912 (MPW (6 July 1912)). For more on the influence of pantomime on the early cinema see B. Brewster and L. Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an analysis of this film in the context of Griffith’s evolution of filmic structure, see J. Jesionowski, Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 134–6.

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If The Modern Prodigal offers evidence of the analogical impulse in Griffith’s earlier work, another antecedent from the world of literature, not mentioned in previous discussions of the film, should be noted. By 1905, Elizabeth Lee’s English translation of I.N.R.I., a German novel by Peter Rosegger, had been published both in London (Wyman and Sons) and in New York (McClure, Phillips and Co.). The book’s subtitle, ‘A Prisoner’s Story of the Cross’, reflects the novelty of Rosegger’s treatment –the gospel narrative is presented as flowing from the pen of a condemned prisoner, Konrad Ferleitner, sitting in his jail cell. Beginning with the pronouncement that Ferleitner will hang, the opening chapter moves swiftly to his incarceration, carefully concealing the nature of the crime while allowing one of his guards to wonder, ‘how this gentle creature could have committed such a crime’.60 Calling for a priest, the condemned man relates the early death of his parents and the loss of a brother, an apprenticeship with a joiner which fails due to an excess of reading and dreaming and a period of wandering which leads to Hamburg. Recalling that he fell in with Anarchists, Konrad also admits to shooting someone with a revolver – an act which he grudgingly admits is deserving of his sentence: Quite correct. Isn’t it ‘A life for a life’? It is written in the Bible. Just that, no more. They must take mine. But they must do it unexpectedly, suddenly. Just as I meant to do to him. Otherwise it won’t be fair. (pp. 11–12)

Moments later, Konrad asks for a copy of the gospels, recounting that ‘My mother had one and used to read it aloud and explain it.’ When the priest maintains that the Scripture ‘must be explained by experts’ and instead sends him a prayer book and religious manuals, Ferleitner’s only comfort is his mother’s relating of sacred stories from the life of Jesus. When the judge appears with news that an appeal of Konrad’s conviction is before the King, Konrad asks for paper, ink and pens and, seeing a vision of Jesus in his cell, commits himself to writing the story of Jesus: if it was not always the historical Jesus as Saviour, it was the Saviour in whom men believed become historical, since he affected the world’s history through the hearts of men . . . We read in the Gospels that Jesus appeared at different times and to different men in different forms . . . As long as it is the Jesus of love and trust, it is the right Jesus. (p. 29)

Impressed by Konrad’s literary efforts, the priest disappears in search of a title and a publisher and returns with ‘Glad Tidings’. Confusing the title of 60

Peter Rosegger, I.N.R.I.: A Prisoner’s Story of the Cross, trans. E. Lee (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1905), p. 6.

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the book with news of his release, Konrad stumbles and then, still basking in the spiritual redemption affirmed by the priest, dies peacefully. That Griffith’s modern story and its conclusion bear more than a passing resemblance to Rosegger’s novel can hardly be doubted. Both focus on the fate of a young man who arrives in the city and falls in with the wrong sort of people; in both cases, the young man is implicated in a killing – a crime for which both men are pronounced guilty by the judicial authorities. In both the viewer/reader’s knowledge that the men are not guilty in the usual sense (or indeed in ‘the Boy’s’ case, at all) justifies the efforts of others to seek a reprieve for the condemned, and in both cases the reprieve arrives, even if for Konrad the pardon is a spiritual rather than a literal one. Most crucially of all, Konrad’s contrasting of the ‘justice’ of the Old Testament lex talionis with the law of love associated with the gospel fully anticipates the drawing of this same parallel as Griffith effects the transition between the concluding courtroom drama and the Judaean story.61 If Griffith’s debt to Rosegger for particular details and analogical inspiration seems evident, the narratival innovations reflected in Griffith should not therefore be discounted. Not content with presenting merely a modern and Judaean story, as does Rosegger, Griffith multiplies the potential analogical permutations by adding medieval and Babylonian narratives as well. Moreover, whereas Rosegger subordinates the gospel retelling to the modern story of the prisoner’s redemption, Griffith’s presentation of twice as many stories boldly eschews any explicit structural integration of his four storylines – a decision which was to have important ramifications for the reception of the film itself and eventually the development of the genre. In its opening months, Intolerance appeared to be well on its way to replicating – or indeed even exceeding – the extraordinary box-office success of The Birth of a Nation. Following its premiere on 5 September 1916 at the Liberty Theater in New York, where it would run for a month, the film played to packed houses around the country, including a four-month run in Chicago, where earnings for the same period of time surpassed those of The Birth of a Nation.62 While in February of 1917 Wark Productions was still trumpeting in the Dramatic Mirror that twelve roadshow companies were 61

62

While Griffith’s apparent use of Rosegger’s I.N.R.I. was no more credited than Blackton’s earlier and much more extensive dependence on Lorimer and Reeves’ The Shepherd King, it is one of the previously unappreciated ironies of the development of the biblical film that the absence of such acknowledgement may well have played a part in encouraging the credited adaptation of both literary works in the 1920s. As they did in Milwaukee, where it ran for two weeks. For fuller discussion of where the film was shown in 1916 and for how long, see Drew, Intolerance, pp. 115–19.

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touring Intolerance with great success, already by May of that year there were indications that the first flush of success at the box office would not last long, and certainly not nearly so long as that of The Birth of a Nation. As is often the case, the factors which contributed to Intolerance’s lack of staying power at the box office were various. At the time of its release, the San Francisco Bulletin’s reviewer celebrated the relevance of the film’s theme to what was still a European war: ‘Babylon is striving to conquer Babylon today in Europe and both are falling.’63 By April of 1917, however, Europe’s war had become America’s as well and Intolerance’s anti-war sentiments may well have lost their resonance in the upsurge of patriotic sentiment which accompanied the American mobilisation. Moreover, in the increasingly conservative domestic climate of the late 1910s, Griffith’s continued support for progressivism may have played its own part in Intolerance’s dramatic decline in popularity.64 Yet subsequent critical discussion of the film has often preferred to attribute Intolerance’s ‘failure’ to the film’s own artistic failings, including most prominently the analogical structure with its four discrete storylines from differing historical periods.65 Indeed, criticism of the film’s narrative ambition is not difficult to find amongst contemporary reviews, including that of the New York Times, which insisted that the French scenes and those of the life of Christ, despite their artistic merits, ‘do nothing but add to the general confusion and might well be eliminated’.66 Alexander Woolcott’s subsequent review in the same paper four days later concluded that ‘unprecedented and indescribable splendour of pageantry is combined with grotesque incoherence of design’.67 Enthusiastic about each of the elements in themselves, Photoplay Magazine’s reviewer lamented the resulting combination: An attempt to assimilate the mountainous lore of this sun-play at a sitting results in positive mental exhaustion. The universally-heard comment from the highbrow or nobrow who has tried to get it all in an evening: ‘I am so tired!’ . . . In all probability, ‘Intolerance’ will never attain the popularity of ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ It has not that drama’s single, sweeping story. It appeals more to the head, less to the heart.68

Johnson’s reporting of audience ‘fatigue’ in terms of interpretive exhaustion and his remarkably prescient explanation of Intolerance’s comparative 63 65 66 67 68

San Francisco Bulletin (19 October 1916). 64 Drew, Intolerance, pp. 126–32. For a history of critical reflection on the novel structure of Intolerance from the time of its premiere, see Leondopoulos, Moving World, pp. 4–20. ‘Intolerance Impressive’ (review), NYT (6 September 1916), 6. A. Woolcott, ‘Second Thoughts on First Nights’, NYT (10 September 1916), 5. Julian Johnson, Photoplay (December 1916), 77–8.

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failure in terms of a lack of a ‘single, sweeping story’ do offer admittedly anecdotal evidence that Griffith’s four-part analogical structure was an impediment to audience enthusiasm. Yet, as has been noted elsewhere,69 the novelty and ambition of this structure was also saluted by a number of reviewers at the time, including the San Francisco Chronicle’s Walter Anthony, who celebrated its analogical complexity in terms of a Beethoven symphony: It is handled in four streams of pictorial counterpoint. And like good polyphony, each melody or theme is the equal of any of the others. And, to continue the musical simile, each is complete in itself, though woven into the web of the whole.70

While Terry Ramsaye’s more famous musical classification of Intolerance as the cinema’s first ‘film fugue’ some ten years later did not prevent him from judging the film a failure,71 the positive appraisal of Griffith’s structural novelty amongst contemporary reviewers is better represented by The New York Dramatic Mirror’s Frederick James Smith, who celebrated the revolutionary nature of Griffith’s interweaving of four plots.72 That Griffith’s analogical innovations were celebrated by some and lamented by others at the time will help to make sense of the different trajectories upon which the biblical film would travel until the end of the silent era. Indeed, while Griffith’s mounting of unprecedented spectacle would prove to be his most famous legacy to the development of the biblical film, we will see that it was the ideological freedom of his cinematic interpretation and above all the novelty of this analogical hermeneutic which were to have the most immediate impact on the biblical films produced after the Great War. 69 70 71 72

Drew, Intolerance, pp. 115–19 offers a helpfully balanced picture of Intolerance’s critical reception at the time of its release. W. Anthony, San Francisco Chronicle (10 October 1916). T. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1925 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), p. 758. Drew, Intolerance, p. 120.

chapter 7

‘She came close to his bed’: vamps and other leading ladies

Perhaps the most telling evidence that Griffith’s Intolerance was perceived – even by the director himself – to be less than the sum of its parts was Griffith’s decision to re-release a re-edited version of the Babylonian story as The Fall of Babylon in the summer of 1919. That this re-release sank without trace at the box office, however, reflects the fact that in the years immediately following Intolerance, the historical film, and with it the biblical film, had all but gone out of fashion. That the genre did not disappear entirely in America in the late 1910s is due largely to the efforts of William Fox and others associated with the studio which bore his name. Having been instrumental in breaking the monopoly which the Motion Picture Patents Company had held over the American film market, Fox began production of his own films in 1914 in order to ensure a ready supply of product for his six film exchanges and the many theatres he leased. After purchasing the former Éclair studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Fox premiered his first production, Life’s Shop Window, in November 1914. The fact that Fox himelf censored the more risqué moments of the novel on which his film was based hints at his concern to establish both his credibility and his respectability as a producer in the industry. Thus it is not surprising that his next eleven productions were adaptations of plays, some of whose runs on Broadway will have provided Fox’s films with an abundance of advance publicity in the boroughs of New York. where so many of Fox’s own theatres were located. In addition to adaptations of contemporary or recently written plays, Fox began to produce adaptations of classic literary and operatic subjects such as Anna Karenina (1 April 1915), Carmen (2 November 1915), Romeo and Juliet (1916) and eventually, in 1917, a film set in the ancient world, Cleopatra (1917). Fox entrusted Cleopatra, along with many other films, to his leading director, Canadian-born J. Gordon Edwards, whom Fox had earlier sent to Europe, perhaps in preparation 197

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for directing such productions. While Edwards’ Cleopatra was always likely to eclipse the spectacle and production values of Helen Gardner’s earlier and more modest Cleopatra (1912), Fox was never likely to license an expenditure sufficient to rival Griffith’s Babylon or Pastrone’s Rome. Fox did, however, have one advantage over Griffith and Pastrone – an asset which persuaded Fox to return to antiquity before any other major studio. Her name was Theda Bara.1 In 1914, having plied her acting trade on the stage with no great success, Theodosia Goodman got her break in films when, at the age of twenty-nine, she was discovered by Fox director Frank Powell. Appearing as an unnamed extra in Powell’s The Stain, Theodosia DeCoppet (now adopting her mother’s maiden name as her stage name) so impressed Powell and Fox himself that they were persuaded to cast her in the lead role of Powell’s next film, A Fool There Was, a film based on the Emerson Browne stage hit of 1909–10. Like the play, the film’s prime attraction was a female vampire, who preyed not on the blood, but merely on the happiness and well-being of her male victims by means of her seductive powers. Recognising the publicity which both the role and a typecast actress might generate, Fox’s publicity men persuaded the rather unremarkable Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati, Ohio, to be recreated as Theda Bara, the daughter of Theda De Coppet, a player on the French stage, and Giuseppe Bara, an Italian artist, whose adventures in Egypt had allegedly supplied his young daughter with an education in all thing exotically and dangerously Arabian.2 In A Fool There Was, Bara’s ‘vamp’ is unintentionally offended by the wife of a diplomat, John Schuyler, and takes her revenge through her husband’s seduction, sealed in a fateful scene which includes Bara’s first but not last utterance of the now eternal phrase, ‘Kiss me, my fool!’ Powerless to do otherwise, Schuyler abandons his family and his senses in a protracted drunken love affair, which leads him first to the French Riviera and then back to New York, where, despite his wife’s plea to return and his momentary promise to do so, he is unable to escape the spell of Bara’s vamp. She moves on to other men, while he is left to crawl through an open railing at the top of the stairs and fall to his death. Captivated by the ‘vamp’ role and persuaded by Bara’s carefully tended persona, audiences could not get enough of either in the years and films which followed. Indeed, so quickly and completely did Bara become 1 2

For more on Bara’s early years see R. Genini, Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1996), pp. 1–20. See ibid., p. 19.

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identified with the ‘vamp’ – a word which had only gained currency in the preceding few years – that Fox was required to seek out and develop new vehicles for his diabolically irresistible leading lady. Casting Bara in historical and literary roles such as Carmen and Cleopatra not only offered her and her paymasters a much-needed opportunity to display her vampish qualities in a different genre, it also allowed Fox the opportunity to breathe new life into the biblical film, which Intolerance seemed to have exhausted. Given Fox’s established preference for films adapted from the stage, it is hardly surprising that Edwards’ search for a suitable subject for Bara’s particular talents led him to Salomé. Productions of Salomé had been turned out a remarkable rate by European studios between Stacia Napierkowska’s first turn as the dancing diva in Capellani’s Salomé (Pathé, 1908) and her reprise of the role in Ugo Falena’s La Figlia de Herodiade for Film d’Arte Italia in 1916. By contrast, after Blackton’s own 1908 release of Salomé or the Dance of the Seven Veils (Vitagraph), ‘Salomania’ waned to such an extent that American producers had failed to produce another version until Theda Bara brought her back to the screen in Edwards’ production. Despite the undoubted attraction of Salomé’s history on stage, the Fox film sought to differentiate itself from previous productions by foregrounding its dependence not on Wilde, or on the gospel, but on the account offered by the ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Like Griffith had done two years earlier, Edwards chose to license his own elaboration of the biblical episode by citing a source no less ancient than the New Testament, if perhaps less well known to the average cinema-goer, then or now. Yet the dependence of Edwards’ scenarist, Adrian Johnson, on Josephus was not merely for show. While the biblical emphasis on Salomé’s dance and the theatrical evolution of her agency in loving and then destroying John the Baptist offered ample opportunity for Bara to ‘vamp’, Johnson prefaces the Baptist’s entrance with a sequence which derives but also dramatically departs from Josephus’ account of Herod in Antiquities 15–18. Josephus has in fact little to offer apart from confirming the gospels’ suggestion that Herodias had married Herod Philip and then – contrary to Jewish tradition – divorced him while he was still living to wed his brother Herod Antipas. Josephus also notes that Herodias’ daughter Salomé had herself then married Philip, tetrarch of Trachonitis and then eventually another of Herod the Great’s sons, Aristobulous, to whom she bore three sons. Josephus’ Antiquities is, however, far more forthcoming on the subject of another Salomé, namely, the sister of Herod and thus the aunt of the younger Salomé’s successive husbands. It is Josephus’ account of this Salomé which supplied the raw materials which Johnson reworked as a

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vehicle for Theda Bara’s ‘vamp’. Thus, just as Josephus’ Herod marries Mariamne, so Johnson’s Herod marries Miriam. Whereas Josephus’ Salomé is Herod’s sister, Bara’s Salomé is instead his cousin, yet in both ancient text and modern moving pictures Salomé poisons her brother Herod against his beloved wife, Mariamne, leading to her death. While Josephus’ Herod elevates to the high priesthood Mariamne’s brother, another Aristobulous, who then is subsequently drowned, in the film it is Bara’s Salomé who not only persuades Herod to elevate the fictional Prince David (the rightful heir to Herod’s throne) to the same office, but also secretly convinces Sejanus (who appears elsewhere in Antiquities) to drown the Prince/priest. Filling out his portrait of Herodias’ daughter Salomé with details supplied by Josephus’ account of Herod’s sister of the same name, Johnson created a role which offered more space than any previous production had for Bara to play Salomé as the ‘Most ruthless woman of the ages – the world’s wickedest vampire.’3 While Griffith had managed to adorn his Babylonian story with visibly naked women, Bara’s minuscule (yet less revealing) costumes quickly enraged censors in various jurisdictions – thanks in large part to the potency and predatory quality of Bara’s particular brand of sex appeal (Figure 7.1).4 Salomé may thus legitimately lay claim to being the first biblical film to be banned in some American jurisdictions, but then never before had a biblical film been constructed and marketed so intentionally as a vehicle for a single star. Such an approach was increasingly common following the expiry of the Edison Trust (MPPC) and the rise of Fox and other independent studios in Hollywood, but Theda Bara was soon to become a victim of her own enormous success. While the reviewer for the New York Times praised the Fox production for its ‘richnesss and extended pageantry, sumptuousness of setting and color details’, Theda Bara as Salomé was, simply, ‘all that those who have seen her in other films might expect – every minute the vampire, in manner, movement and expression’.5 Having created a persona from which men could not escape, eventually neither could Bara herself, and her career rapidly declined. While her first appearance in a biblical film was thus also her last, Salomé was sufficiently successful that Fox and Edwards sought out another biblical seductress as subject and another sensual starlet to play her. 3 4 5

So proclaimed the two page spread advertising the film in MPW (4 January 1919), 16–17. For more on the censors’ response to Bara’s tendency to wear very little on screen, see Genini, Theda Bara, p. 46. New York Times (7 October 1918), 11.

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Figure 7.1 Theda Bara, the consummate vamp, in the title role of Salomé (Fox, 1918).

Originally signed by Vitagraph, Betty Blythe made her debut for that studio in His Own People (1917) and remained with the firm until 1919. Her final three films for Vitagraph (Fighting Destiny, Beating the Odds, The Man Who Won, all 1919) were directed by Paul Scardon, whom Blythe went on to marry before returning to work in James Horne’s Occasionally Yours (1920) and a series of productions by lesser studios. Blythe’s return to prominence began with her role as a banker’s mistress in Fred Niblo’s Mother o’ Mine (1921) for Ince’s production house, after which J. Gordon Edwards persuaded Fox to offer her the title role in his upcoming The Queen of Sheba. Running to nine reels (more than 2,500 m), Edwards’ Queen of Sheba predictably offers a far more elaborate story than Andréani’s earlier La Reine

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de Saba (Pathé, 1913), beginning with the crowning of Solomon and the enmity it engenders in his brother Adonijah (1 Kings 1–3). Yet if Virginia Tracy’s first script for Fox begins in a biblical fashion and includes cameos of recognisable characters such as ‘David’ and ‘Beth-sheba’, the shift in scene to Sheba offers Edwards ample opportunity for narrative novelty. When King Armud, the conqueror of Sheba, gathers the young women to his harem, a sister of one seeks vengeance on the King by seducing and then killing him on their wedding night. While Andréani’s Sheba also causes the tragic death of a courtier (Horan) entranced by her charms, the knowing and premeditated nature of Blythe’s ‘Queen’ as she seduces and then kills the King on his wedding night, reflects the legacy of the Bara-esque vamp. Yet, if the arrival of the Queen of Sheba at Solomon’s court prompts the predictable jealousy of Solomon’s fictional Egyptian Queen ‘Amrath’, Blythe’s vampishness immediately begins to fade. Far from seducing Solomon to destroy him, Blythe’s Sheba falls deeply in love with him, culminating in a love scene which goes well beyond the intimacy implied in Andréani’s earlier film, when it is later made clear that they have conceived a child. When the jealous Amrath’s Egyptian father threatens war if Solomon takes Blythe’s Queen as his wife, a vamp in the mould of Bara might have done her best to contrive Solomon’s destruction. Instead Blythe’s gracious Queen retreats to Sheba with her newborn son. When the son is sent by his mother to Solomon after four years and is promptly abducted by the jealous Adonijah, who then marches on Solomon, the Queen of Sheba leads her armies to rescue her lover and her son, before, finally, as in Andréani’s film, returning home to Sheba. Indeed, that Blythe’s Sheba ends up anything but the vamp is confirmed by the short, recently rediscovered clip of The Queen of Sheba6 in which she clings to Solomon in a manner which suggests that she is a woman in need of male protection. While Blythe’s co-star, Fritz Lieber, was no stranger to Edwards’ historical efforts for Fox – having played Caesar to Bara’s Cleopatra (1917) and then Louis XI in If I Were King (1920) – it was clear from the film’s promotion that the largely deshabillé Blythe was to be the main attraction. Thus, for instance, the ad for the film in The Columbia Evening Missourian promoted the first ever ‘super-feature’ to be shown at the city’s Hall Theater as ‘The Queen of Sheba, featuring Betty Blythe – the love romance of the

6

The clip, originally mistakenly attributed to Cleopatra (1917), but subsequently identified by Nancy Kauffman as belonging to Edwards’ Queen of Sheba at George Eastman House, may be viewed at: http://www.archive.org/details/Cleopatra1917.

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most beautiful woman the world has ever known.’7 While the initial ad for the film in the 8 September issue of Paris Kentucky’s Bourbon News mentioned both ‘Betty Blythe and Fritz Lieber’, the ad four days later in the same paper was more finely calibrated: ‘last chance to see “Queen of Sheba” with the Alluring Betty Blythe’. With Blythe herself later recalling that ‘I wear twenty-eight costumes and if I put them on all at once, I couldn’t keep warm,’8 it is hardly surprising that such costumes (Figure 7.2) did not escape the attention of, for instance, the reviewers of Photoplay: Sheba is very beautifully realized in the person of Betty Blythe. Gorgeous as her costumes are there seems to have been little need for a garb designed to call conspicuous and continual attention to certain portions of her anatomy; it would have been no treat for the Shebans and nowadays it is downright indelicate. And how are we to realize a ‘moral’ from a young woman who marries a king only to assassinate him, whatever his record as maladminisrator and roue?9

Even as the reviewers noted the ‘Baraesque’ nature of the production, and weakly protested Blythe’s sexual predations, their ill-concealed disappointment in the weakening powers of Blythe’s vamp is reflected in their conclusion that if ‘Theda had been there Solomon would have gone home with her to walk the pet elephants in the cool of every tropic evening’ (p. 68). If Fox and Edwards hoped that a less scandalously behaved Sheba might be forgiven for being no less scantily clothed than Salomé, then they will have taken encouragement from the Moving Picture World’s review, which suggested that the critics would indeed be less likely to take offence, because ‘there is never a suggestion of the vamp in one of her poses or gestures’.10 While Queen of Sheba may have lacked Bara’s star-power and depraved sexuality, Fox ensured that the film would live up to the billing of a ‘superspectacle’. The splendour of Blythe and her many costumes undoubtedly contributed to the effect, as of course did the sets, which were constructed for the purpose on the studio lot. Despite his inability to enlist actual Arabs and shoot on location in Egypt, as Andréani had done, Edwards made much of the spectacle of the (Californian) desert and the caravan which passes through it en route to and from Sheba. However, the spectacle which captured the audience’s imagination above all else was the chariot race between the Queen of Sheba and Vashti in Jerusalem. If the shooting of 7 9 10

8 Columbia Evening Missourian (28 August 1922), 4. Brownlow, Pioneers, p. 118. Photoplay (July 1921), 60. According to Janiss Garza, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/106984/The-Queen-of-Sheba/ overview, accessed 21 May 2013.

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Figure 7.2 Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba (Fox, 1921).

the race scenes was not without hazard or indeed actual injury,11 the pain must have been eased by glowing reviews such as the following, which appeared in The Providence News: The chariot race between Sheba and Vashti, with 5000 people looking on and the love of Solomon at stake, is the piece de resistance of ‘Queen of Sheba’ . . . the race, presenting as it does something altogether new in motion 11

For Blythe’s colourful account of the production, see Brownlow, Parade, pp. 381–3.

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picture effects, is the feature of the play that is being talked about most. At times 10 chariots and 40 horses dash abreast around the great arena, a new photographic device making it possible for cameras to following [sic] them all the way around and showing all the action close up. The arena or hippodrome was constructed specially for this production . . . the track is 150 feet wide and is in the form of a vast ellipse, 1250 feet by 3100 feet, surrounded by an inner and an outer wall, and a huge colonnade of 75 pillars, behind which in the picture 5000 people are grouped.12

While the review’s lapse into the statistics of spectacle almost certainly discloses a dependence on Fox’s own publicity material, there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of audience enthusiasm at the display offered up by Edwards. That such chariot races belonged not to Solomonic Jerusalem but to Greece and Rome of a later period did not interfere with viewers’ appreciation any more than did Tracy’s elaboration of the love affair (and love-child) of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. When The Queen of Sheba failed to live up to expectations – suffering the indignity of having its roadshow tour cut short – it was clear that Fox was going to need to offer something new and different to persuade audiences to return to the Bible.13 Considering Fox’s long track record of adapting stage productions for the screen, it is not surprising that they were drawn to Lorimer and Reeves’ stage-play The Shepherd King (1903) which had been so well received in New York and then on tour in the early years of the century. While Blackton’s use of The Shepherd King as the basis for his Saul and David (1909) had, as we have seen, not been credited, Fox instead sought to capitalise on the success of the stage version in his marketing of Edwards’ film. Unfortunately, The Shepherd King is yet another of the many Fox films yet to be recovered (and is unlikely to be so), but the incipient shot list furnished by the copyright deposit description allows some understanding of how the film was related both to the play and to Blackton’s previous effort at adaptation, some fourteen years earlier.14 At a length of nine reels, The Shepherd King had a similar running time to Queen of Sheba and allowed for a much fuller adaptation of the Lorimer/Reeves play than Blackton had been permitted. Thus, whereas the play and Blackton’s earlier film introduce the principal characters and the beginning of David and Michal’s love in an opening scene at the house of Jesse, Edwards begins the story proper with a scene loosely adapted from 1 Samuel (10, 13) which is elaborated in 12 13 14

The Providence News (R.I.) (29 October, 1921), 8. For evidence and discussion of the film’s failure to perform, see Hall and Neale, Epics¸ p. 50 (and p. 273, n. 58). The Shepherd King (1923), copyright deposit description, LOC.

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order to introduce the main characters apart from David: Goliath, the Philistine giant; Saul, the King who begins his own disqualification for the throne by failing to wait for Samuel, the prophet, to arrive; Saul’s son Jonathan and daughters Merab and Michal; and Doeg, the Edomite, a captain of Saul’s army but secret enemy of all Israelites apart from Merab for whom – as in the play – he has a love which will be unrequited. Only after this initial scene does Edwards shift to the house of Jesse in order to introduce David and his family, including his brother Ozem (1 Chronicles 2:15), and their treasured maidservant, the fictional Adora. Like Blackton’s film, but in much greater detail, Edwards’ film develops the play’s considerable interest in Doeg’s unrequited love for Merab, who, when her own love for David is spurned, seeks to destroy the love between David and Michal which is at the centre of the play and both screen adaptations. Whether or not the relative paucity of intertitles in the Blackton film suggests that Saul and David, like the later Life of Moses, came with an accompanying lecture, the absence of such lectures by 1923 explains, at least in part, the increased number of intertitles in The Shepherd King. That there were, however, no fewer than 249 of them (as indicated by the copyright description) reflects the marked proliferation of intertitles of this sort in the final decade of the silent era.15 Indeed, even allowing for the far greater length of The Shepherd King (2528 m), an average of one intertitle every thirty seconds represents a dramatic advance on that found in Blackton’s Saul and David (300 m) whose mere nine intertitles appear on average every two minutes. Moreover, whereas Blackton’s much less frequent intertitles have the character of a summary of the tableau which follows (e.g. ‘The Anointing of David’, ‘Saul’s Jealousy of David’), even the copyright description’s incipient intertitles establish that the vast majority of Tracy’s intertitles for Edwards’ film are devoted to dialogue – hardly surprising given Edwards’ attempt to sustain the various intrigues of war and love found in the stage-play which lies behind the film.16 Like the biblical narrative itself (1 Samuel 17: 34–36), the Lorimer/Reeves play has David’s killing of the lion recounted rather than actually depicted – though in a departure from the biblical text David’s slaying of the lion saves Michal from certain death and prompts her explanation to her brother 15 16

See Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 90–6, who notes the increasing frequency and prolixity of intertitles between 1918 and 1926. See ibid., p. 93, who illustrates the shift from narrative to dialogue intertitles by contrasting Vitagraph’s 1911 adaptation of Vanity Fair – in which only one of the thirty-seven intertitles is devoted to dialogue – with the 1922 adaptation of the same title, in which nearly two-thirds of the cards are dialogue intertitles.

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Jonathan. Blackton’s film unsurprisingly prefers to diplay the spectacle of the scene itself, complete with an unconvincing stuffed lion. While in both the play and Blackton’s film the audience may only imagine the impact of David’s stone, given that the giant’s death and beheading take place safely off stage, Edwards seizes the opportunity (much as Andréani had in 1910–11) to fell Goliath in spectacular fashion. That this last scene at least left some impression is suggested by the reviewers of Photoplay: The story of David, the militant psalmist, done very well indeed by an Italian company – with Violet Mersereau of erstwhile American fame – as the heroine. A Biblical theme made very real, except for some of the battle scenes which are badly directed. Often it’s quite impossible to tell who shot what off of who’s head, but the David-Goliath fight is well staged and convincing. An interesting effort.17

While the film is initially praised, the review’s muted verdict hints at the challenges Edwards’ film faced in winning over audiences. Like The Queen of Sheba, the film was marketed as ‘the World’s most famous romance’,18 yet in spite of the success of Lorimer and Reeves’ production some twenty years earlier, Fox seems to have overestimated the fame of David and Michal’s romance, perhaps because the biblical tradition’s lasting memory is of enmity between the two. While the additional interest of Adora’s patient infatuation with David and immunity to the affections of his brother Ozem might well be dismissed as an innocent and non-contradictory elaboration of the biblical text, the reconstructing of Saul’s loyal servant Doeg (1 Samuel 21–2) as his inveterate enemy may well have seemed less so. Moreover, if Blackton’s immediate return to more ‘faithful’ treatments of the biblical tradition following his own adaptation in 1909 reflects a lack of audience resonance with more elaborate departures from well-known biblical stories, it is hardly surprising that Edwards’ fuller treatment of the same play was unable to generate much enthusiasm. That the ‘American fame’ of the headline star, Violet Mersereau, was merely ‘erstwhile’, according to Photoplay, highlights Edwards’ inability to depend on The Shepherd King’s leading lady to attract the audiences that the badly behaved Bara and barely clothed Blythe had in previous productions. Whatever the competence of the Italian supporting cast, the fact that none were mentioned by name suggests that their names were unlikely to be recognised by Photoplay’s readers in any case. Indeed, if Fox had learned from the Bara years that Mediterranean, exoticism might sell films, 17

Photoplay (February 1924), 88.

18

See, for instance, The Daily Times (Beaver, Pa.) (4 April, 1924), 8.

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including biblical ones, the studio appears to have forgotten that such a strategy depended more on their manufacture and marketing of star quality than the authenticity of the European pedigree per se – all of which suggests that The Shepherd King’s drawing power would need to be generated by other means. The other means upon which Edwards appears to have been depending was the spectacle created by shooting The Shepherd King on location in the Middle East. With Fox’s blessing and perhaps his lingering memory of the Italian epics of the teens, Edwards travelled with his crew to the Mediterranean to shoot both Nero (in Rome) and The Shepherd King largely in the ‘Holy Land’. As we have seen, Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross (1912) and Andréani’s La Reine de Saba (1913) had sought to capitalise on the public perception of ‘location’ as a guarantor of authenticity – a perception which had been fostered by the visual artists of the nineteenth century. Yet, perhaps as a result of the logistical difficulties of sustaining a large production, the practice of shooting biblical films ‘on location’ had not persisted. Indeed, while Palestine of the 1920s might furnish various suitably ‘authentic’ backdrops, its lack of antiquities of the sort found in Rome and the inability to easily construct sets (e.g. the hippodrome) of the scale used in The Queen of Sheba may have left viewers and perhaps Edwards himself wishing that he had remained in the Californian desert rather than decamping to a Judaean one. Comparatively unadorned with convincing battle scenes or the spectacle of scale offered by Edwards’ own previous biblical productions, the film’s use of location to scale new heights of versimilitude in the biblical film may even have worked against it. While it is not provable, neither is it inconceivable that the perception of the radical ‘faithfulness’ of the Middle Eastern settings will have highlighted the film’s extensive rewriting of the history of David, whose story – unlike that of Griffith’s Belshazzar or Cyrus – was amongst the best known and best loved narratives of the Old Testament. A possible concern over the lack of spectacle offered by Palestine may explain in part the extraordinary fact that the opening sequence of The Shepherd King was shot not in Palestine at all, but in Egypt. Visual proof of the fact is offered to the audience by the fading in and out of long shots of crowds and camels passing through the desert against the backdrop of that quintessentially Egyptian antiquity, the Sphinx.19 Despite Edwards’ use of intertitles to position this brief Exodus as prefatory to the story of David, the 19

The last of the initial eight shots of the film.

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extraneous character of the sequence – and its already iconic status in the silent cinema – establishes beyond doubt Fox’s use of it to add to the spectacle of the film. What made such an addition all the more attractive was the ‘Egyptomania’ which had swept across Europe and America in the wake of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun at the beginning of November 1922. Already in Europe by this time, Edwards could have been forgiven for feeling that his decision to shoot his biblical film on ‘location’ was a prescient one. If the otherwise inexplicable inclusion of the Egyptian sequence has all the appearance of a promotional afterthought, the publicity generated by Fox to advertise The Shepherd King lends credence to the suggestion (Figure 7.3). Not content to include merely the pyramids, the Fox poster also depicts the Sphinx and even the Exodus of the Hebrews, complete with camels. The strained effort of the film itself to connect all things Egyptian with the narrative of David is reflected in the poster’s attempt to leverage popular fascination with Carter’s discovery. If so ancient and marvellous a spectacle as ‘Old King Tut’ would himself marvel at Fox’s new film, then The Shepherd King must be truly unforgettable – or so the promotional logic of the poster suggests. The deployment of such a strategy is attested by the film’s promotion and reception in local movie houses, as may still be seen in this thinly veiled advertisement published in the Cairns Post (Australia) under the title of ‘Shepherd King produced near Pyramids’: Now that King Tut-ankh-Amen has been exhumed after 3000 years of mummified slumber, the eyes of the world are centred on the Nile country. Unusual interest, therefore attaches to the fact that the William Fox special photoplay, ‘The Shepherd King’ was filmed in Egypt, many of the scenes being taken in the Valley of the Kings on almost the exact spot where scientists and archaeologists are bringing to light relics of the ancient glory of the Pharaohs.20

If Fox and local movie houses became convinced that the recipe for The Shepherd King’s success lay in appealing to the film’s ‘many’ Egyptian scenes, the fact that only eight of the copyrighted total of 1,220 shots were actually filmed in Egypt suggests that, in the end, the film itself may have been the victim of Fox’s marketing success. Indeed, that the visible figures on the firm’s poster are exclusively women in various states of undress suggests Fox’s further efforts to exploit audience expectations of the genre 20

Cairns Post (Australia) (13 May 1926), 3.

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Figure 7.3 Making the most of ‘Egyptomania’. Publicity poster for The Shepherd King (Fox, 1923).

fostered by the studio’s own previous productions. Unfortunately, the absence of ‘The Shepherd King’ himself from the poster promoting his own film was itself prescient – for Edwards’ Shepherd King with its minor Moses was to be largely forgotten in the wake of the altogether more

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spectacular Exodus which appeared one month later, courtesy of C. B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments. To fully understand this latter film, however, we must return to Europe, where the biblical film had been belatedly rediscovered. Even as Intolerance was beginning to fail at the American box office in the spring of 1917, the European premiere of the film in London prompted a chorus of critical and even political acclaim.21 While here too Intolerance’s success was short-lived, it was when the film eventually migrated further east to Russia (via Berlin), that it finally found an audience which was sympathetic to both Griffith’s progressive politics and his avant-garde aesthetic. With the crucifixion scene eliminated, the film was shown throughout Russia by both movie houses and travelling exhibitors, with each sequence finding some resonance with audiences eager to find common cause with oppressed workers elsewhere, resentful of royalist excesses and persuaded that their own priests were not to be trusted.22 While Eisenstein’s reflections on Griffith have cemented the latter’s legacy and its influence on the development of the then still-nascent Russian national cinema,23 the influence of Intolerance in central Europe – at least on the biblical film – should not be underestimated. As the 1920s beckoned, film-making in Austria was in robust health thanks in large part to the industry and investment of Count Alexander Kolowrat-Krakowsky. An Austrian nobleman, Kolowrat’s interest in films (announced as early as 1911) had blossomed during the war as first a serial, then war actualities and finally a newsreel were filmed and distributed. A corporate alliance with the German firm headed by Oskar Messter and the construction of significant studio facilities in Vienna positioned SaschaFilm AG (established 10 September 1918) as the leading power in the Austrian film industry as Europe was gradually released from the grip of the Great War.24 In neighbouring Hungary, the instability associated with the rapid rise and equally tempestuous demise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic encouraged an exodus of the country’s film talent across the border toward the capital of its old imperial ally. Amongst the early arrivals in Vienna was Mikhaili Kertesz, the evolution of whose name from Kertesz 21 22 23 24

See Drew, Intolerance, pp. 136–9 for a useful discussion of the foreign reception of Intolerance. For discussion of the impact of Intolerance on Russian cinema see J. Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 142–3. Eisenstein, ‘Dickens’. For Curtiz’s life and work in Hungary and arrival in Austria see R. Noizet, Tous les chemins mènent à Hollywood, Michael Curtiz (Paris/Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1997), pp. 15–29, and J. C. Robertson, The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtis (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 5–6.

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to Courtice and eventually Michael Curtiz reflects the cultural mobility of a career which included sojourns in Austria, Scandinavia and, eventually, the United States. Accompanied by Lucy Doraine, the actress who had become his wife, Curtiz was soon employed by Sascha-Film, premiering his first film for the firm, Die Dame mit dem schwarzen Handschuh, in Vienna in November of 1919. By then they had been joined in Vienna by Curtiz’s compatriot Alexander Korda and his actress-wife Maria, and on 3 December 1920 Korda premiered his own first film for Kolowrat’s company, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Other Korda films followed, including A Vanished World, in which, not for the last time, the director would turn his attentions to the sea and shipboard life as the setting for modern melodrama. The film tells the story of a high-born naval officer who abandons his career for the sake of a showgirl. When he takes to the high seas with her, the journey descends into betrayal and mutiny. Yet if, as has been suggested, the ‘Vanished World’ of the film is an allegory of the fall of the great Hapsburg Empire, with the captain caught between the constraints of his class and threatened by the mob25, it offers us a glimpse of an incipient tendency toward analogy which was to come into full view in Samson und Dalila (1922), the film which would follow not long after Korda’s exit from Kolowrat’s stable. Precisely when Korda set his heart on a film of the scale of Samson und Dalila is unclear, but the suggestion that his parting company with Kolowrat was not unrelated to this ambition is far from implausible.26 Perhaps like Andréani and Griffith before him, Korda chafed at the bit when his biblical ambitions were not matched by Kolowrat’s willingness to invest in a production the scale of which would easily outstrip that of Korda’s previous efforts. Indeed, insult may have been added to injury for Korda if, as with Andréani and Griffith, the money being witheld from him was being made available for more expensive and extensive productions under the direction of someone else. In the case of Korda, that someone else seems most likely to have been the compatriot who had preceded him in coming to Vienna, Michael Curtiz, who persuaded Kolowrat to fund his own double-barrelled biblical spectacle, Sodom und Gomorrha. While the decision of both Korda and Curtiz to pair a modern story with an Old Testament narrative likely reflects in part the influence of Intolerance and the warm European reception of his modern and Babylonian stories, we will see that further inspiration appears to have been offered by another literary source indigenous to Europe, namely, Rosegger’s novel I.N.R.I. In 25

C. Drazin, Korda: Britain’s First Movie Mogul (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 45.

26

Ibid., p. 47.

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any case, the shared background of the two directors and their common embrace of an analogical structure would invite comparison of their two films, even if Sodom und Gomorrha and Samson und Dalila had not had their respective premieres in Vienna in October and December of 1922. Alexander Korda’s Samson und Dalila signals its analogical intention from the start by offering intertitles which invoke the memory of Manoah, his wife and their child (citing ‘Judges 13’) in ‘this, the twentieth century’. The modern story is introduced with a sequence of cuts between, on one hand, the assembling of opera directors at the very grand house of an opera singer Julia Sorel in an upmarket part of the city and, on the other, Julia’s own arrival in a run-down district at the house of a Jewish rabbi and her mentor, Eliezer. Crediting him with her recent operatic success as ‘Queen of Sheba’, Julia asks him to relate to her the story of Samson and Delilah. While the rabbi confirms his lack of interest in the theatre and his credentials as a ‘thinker’, he proceeds to oblige, introducing the story as belonging ‘to an age crammed with war and lust of Empire’; this is followed by a transition to the first scene of the biblical sequence. Given this introduction, it is hardly surprising that Korda’s biblical sequence bypasses the annunciation and birth of Samson, which had featured in Capellani’s Samson (1908). Instead, the viewer is offered initial shots of Delilah’s boudoir, the arrival of an abundance of food, the spectacle of a wakening Delilah and an intertitle, which offers a summary of her character: ‘Wanton, and dead to all love save that which was abject. She shut herself out from all that was good on earth.’ In an apparent illustration of the point (and the film’s indebtedness to Intolerance’s temple of love), Maria Corda’s Delilah frolics amidst fountains and pools, before the action moves to the spectacle of the Philistine assault on the Israelite city of Gaza. While the modest scale of Gaza’s walls and the military action against it is more comparable to that found in Judith of Bethulia than Intolerance, the internal shots of Gaza and the entrance of the conquering King of the Philistines and Delilah – the ‘mistress of the Philistines’ – on a palanquin are considerably more impressive in scope, approaching, if not quite equalling, that of Griffith’s Babylon. The seductive spectacle of physical beauty is foregrounded in the sequence in which Samson and Delilah catch sight of each other, beginning with the following intertitle: ‘Then Samson saw Delilah. And to him her beauty eclipsed all other light.’ Following a series of close-up and mid-close-up shots of each in turn, a subsequent intertitle appears: ‘And Delilah saw Samson. And these were Jehovah’s words: “I God created man. I placed him in a paradise and then planted the tree of Evil so that he might eat.”’ While the invocation of Genesis might seem more

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appropriate in association with Samson’s viewing of Delilah than vice-versa, the reference to the ‘man’ eating from the tree signals the role to be played by Corda’s Delilah, even if such a Genesis reference has no place in the biblical tradition of Judges 13–16. To an extent not seen before in the biblical film, Korda makes a spectacle of the male form in a state of undress which is not only unprecedented but also unequalled by Delilah herself in this and other scenes. Angered by Samson’s (and perhaps Delilah’s) ogling, the Philistine king orders Samson to be whipped, but Delilah and the camera watch on with admiration as Samson leads the Philistine soldiers on a merry chase, battering them repeatedly with ease. Further spectacle derived from the biblical tradition is offered by Korda when Samson’s rocky hiding place is sought out by his friend, who finds him subduing a live – and indeed surprisingly lively – lion (Judges 14:5–6).27 When the friend returns to Delilah with news that Samson will come for her at midnight, and when Delilah relays this news to the King of the Philistines, Samson finds himself walking into a trap, which he proves well able to escape even with Delilah over his shoulder. With Delilah agreeing to go with Samson willingly if he will spare the life of the King, whom Samson is about to strike, the completing of their escape allows further opportunity for Samson to display his battle skills and enormous strength as he removes the gates of Gaza (as per the biblical text) and ingeniously uses one of them to shield their retreat from the arrows being loosed at them from the Gazan ramparts. Delilah’s unanswered request for the secret of his strength leads only to Samson’s wistful caress of her hair before he proceeds to dispatch a representative sample of 1,000 Philistine troops by means of enormous boulders hurled from a great height. After the Israelites in Gaza also overpower the King of the Philistines, this initial biblical sequence ends with the arrival of Samson and an apparently triumphant Delilah making sport of the humiliated King. Thus Korda’s abundance of film allows him to devote unprecedented attention to his elaboration of how Delilah and Samson come to be associated with each other. The subordination of the ancient sequence to the modern narrative is signalled by a transition back to the house of Eliezer, where Julia Sorel stops the rabbi and insists by means of successive intertitles that: ‘We modern women know how Delilah learned Samson’s secret!’ ‘She hoodwinked Samson by chicanery and the modern woman does likewise!’ Initial proof of her knowledge is offered to the viewer when she returns to the directors of 27

See, for instance, the apparently sedated lions in Nonguet’s Les Martyres chrétien (1903) and the clearly stuffed version in Edwards, The Shepherd King (1923).

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the opera gathered at her house and insists in preparation for her opening night in the title role that, ‘I am Delilah.’ Further evidence of Julia Sorel’s cruel imperiousness is supplied in successive sequences in which she spurns the longstanding interest of the besotted Prince Feodor Dimitri and then refuses to sing alongside the recently recruited and unknown tenor Ettore Ricco. Despite an anarchist’s attempt on the Prince’s life which leads to the halt of the opera’s premiere, he extends an invitation to Julia to join him for a party on his yacht after the performance. The ship unexpectedly slips its berth and Sorel soon discovers that the Prince has taken her captive (as Delilah had been) in an effort to persuade her to become his wife. When the disappearance of the lifeboats and the sudden appearance of a well-dressed stranger the following morning prompts an inquisition, the cook reveals in a flashback sequence how he allowed the man to board before leaving port. The man’s confession that he is an anarchist and has brought a bomb on board leads to a frantic but vain search by the crew before Julia resolves to wrest the secret from the man. As she begins to do so, an intertitle, ‘And Delilah threw out her net to ensnare Samson’, announces a second transition to the ancient storyline. The biblical storyline resumes with Samson entertained by dancing girls at the top of a long flight of steps, at the bottom of which stands a jetty where a boat bearing Delilah soon arrives. Mounting the steps and discarding her wrap, Delilah dances seductively before Samson and then slips away to her boudoir, where she lies down on the bed to await Samson’s arrival. In the sequence that follows, he persuades her that it is ‘new ropes’ which will subdue him, but then proceeds to ‘brake them like thread’ in a clear reproduction of Judges 16:12 (KJV). A further series of shots and intertitles drawn nearly verbatim from Judges 16:15–16 concludes with Delilah finally cutting off Samson’s hair in triumph before an intertitle, ‘And her soul was blacker than Egypt’s night’ – presumably a reference to the plague of the firstborn – signals a transition from Delilah’s reunion with the Philistine King to Sorel’s seduction of the anarchist. When the ‘anarchist’ quickly yields the location of the bomb, Sorel delights in her victory, concluding triumphantly: ‘And so my friend, you are just like other men. A flattering tale – a kiss and a smile and Samson’s strength disappears.’ An earlier intertitle’s announcement of ‘The Last Act’ now followed by Sorel’s mention of ‘Samson’ prompts a curiously knowing response from the anarchist: ‘Not so fast . . . the last act has yet to be played! . . . and you forget that Samson’s hair began to grow again . . .’ which in turn leads via a further intertitle to the conclusion of the biblical

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sequence. While passing over the cruel spectacle of Samson’s blinding, Korda’s repetition of the by-now iconographic image of the blind and abused Samson at the grindstone is supplemented by the novel appearance of Delilah to plead for forgiveness. Her entreaties are spurned by Samson, who nearly throttles the scantily clad Delilah before throwing her roughly to the ground. The final sequence of shots and intertitles drawn very closely from Judges 16:26–30 leads to the concluding action of the biblical story, in which the Temple of Dagon collapses in appropriately spectacular fashion as shots of destruction are intercut with views of the dead. A final transition to the modern story reveals that the anarchist has lied to Julia about the location of the bomb, which thus remains undiscovered, prompting the Prince to threaten to shoot him. As the anarchist produces the cylinder everyone flees, apart from Julia, to whom he hands it and invites her to open the top. When she does so, she discovers the wig worn by the young tenor Ettore Ricco, spurned by Julia on opening night: ‘A wig, dear lady. The modern Delilah must be careful of the modern Samson; his strength may sometimes lie in a wig.’ Impressed with Ricco’s vanity and desire to teach her a lesson, she pledges her future to him, at which point the Prince wryly concludes that he prefers assassins to actors and orders the ship to return to port. Korda’s depiction of the biblical story of Samson and Delilah offers a Griffith-like spectacle of scale and setting with displays of male violence, female beauty and material destruction which unsurprisingly far outstrip earlier productions of the subject. Feuillade’s novel focus on Delilah’s greed in his 1910 film is abandoned as Korda’s film returns to the traditional depiction found in Capellani’s Samson – Delilah as seductress. In its drawing of this portrait, the film proceeds largely along the path of faithful elaboration, complicating both her motives in seducing Samson and her reaction after she has done so. While the King of the Philistines had featured in Capellani’s earlier production, he is now more fully developed, and Samson himself is furnished with a friend, if only to offer the camera an alternative focus and aid the minimal plot development. More interesting is the narrative structure of the film, which departs from Griffith’s more purely analogical and parallel structure by narratively subordinating the biblical sequence to the modern story. This is, of course, accomplished first and foremost by having the initial segment of the biblical story not merely shown to the viewer, but ‘told’ to Julia by the Rabbi Eliezer within their conversation. In contrast to Intolerance, which eschewed any explicit narrative integration within the diegesis of his film, such a structure establishes not only the subordination of the biblical sequence, but also the

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religio-didactic context in which the ancient narrative is presented to the modern character and indeed the viewer. Julia Sorel’s declaration of her understanding and indeed embodiment of Delilah (‘I am Delilah’) is both evidence of her learning and a function of the incorporation of the operatic/ theatrical representation of the biblical tradition as a plot element within the filmic narrative. Yet Julia’s unwillingness to allow the rabbi to conclude the story suggests that Julia’s biblical education remains unfinished. That it is in fact the artistic performance of the tradition (i.e. biblical opera) that will enable Julia to truly learn the lessons of biblical antiquity is made clear in the final segments of the biblical and modern stories, as we have seen above. Knowing of Delilah’s seductive ways, Julia Sorel employs similar techniques but must be reminded of the final triumph of the biblical Samson by a modern one intent on teaching her a lesson. The crucial function of the modern performance of the biblical text (i.e. the Bible of the theatre/ cinema) in making the biblical tradition meaningful for modern interpreters is highlighted by Ettore Ricco’s confession when confronted by Julia: Yesterday an unknown tenor, today Julia Sorel’s partner on the stage and perhaps . . . You refused to act with me on the stage so I made you play Delilah to my Samson in real life!

Empowered by his theatrical peformance to ‘play’ Samson in ‘real life’, Ricco reveals to Sorel’s modern Delilah the educational end of the biblical story, in the hope that his partnership with Delilah on stage might be translated into ‘real life’. While this hope is realised when Julia introduces Ricco to the Prince in the final scene as her ‘partner on stage . . . and in life’, the parallels are, in truth, far from ‘perfect’ and not least in this final calculation: whereas the ‘happy’ end of the biblical Samson consists purely of the revenge accomplished in his self-destruction, the modern Samson Ettore returns to port with his Delilah, presumably to live happily ever after. If, as we have seen, Korda’s Samson und Dalila displays a development of Griffith’s analogical structure, the same might be said of Curtiz’s Sodom und Gomorrha, which appeared the month before Korda’s film and had been much longer in the making. Curtiz’s admiration of Griffith’s Intolerance had become increasingly clear, with several of his films displaying tell-tale signs, including Boccacio (1919) and most obviously Cherchez la femme (1921), whose Griffithian influence manifests itself in a structure not dissimilar to Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921) with stories set in the eighteenth century, Japanese middle ages and the Turkish empire.28 Armed with this 28

Noizet, Tous les chemins, pp. 26, 28.

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experience, Curtiz shortly thereafter decided to take Intolerance on at its own game, by pairing a modern story with a ‘biblical’ one, told on an epic scale intended to rival Griffith’s Babylonian sequence. Curtiz begins his modern sequence by introducing the film’s leading characters, including first and foremost ‘Mary Conway’ (played by Curtiz’s own wife, Lucy Doraine), who is both muse and model for the sculptor who loves her, Harry Lighton. Encouraged by her mother to abandon Harry, Mary is instead soon engaged to Jackson Harber, a former lover of her mother, who is only too happy to write the latter a cheque in exchange for her daughter’s hand. Much like Griffith’s modern story, Curtiz’s sequence is furnished with the spectacle of high society entertainment as displayed in a long sequence of large-scale choreographed dance scenes at Harber’s palatial residence. Resisting the advances of the older Harber, Mary appears to enjoy torturing Harry, who in his desperation shoots himself in front of her. Momentarily chastened by what she has done, Mary’s subsequent yielding to her fate is then signalled by an intertitle: ‘And now all the best in me has died, and all the evil awakened! Sin take what course you will!’ (author translation). Much like Korda’s summary of Julia/Delilah’s depravity (see above), this intertitle serves to establish beyond doubt the immoral character of the female lead. Into the midst of the continuing festivities (in which women dancing continues to feature prominently), Harber’s son Eduard returns home from Cambridge University, accompanied by one of his tutors, a priest. Mary’s mariage de convenance and attempts to seduce the innocent young man Eduard find their ancient parallel in the first of the film’s ancient sequences, set in Syria. In the first of her two ancient roles, Lucy Doraine now plays the Syrian (occasionally Assyrian) Queen, Lia, who mirrors the modern Mary by forming a mercenary allegiance with the Ammonite King. So too the beautiful but dangerous Queen destroys the life of the young jeweller from Galilee (with all its Christian associations) who comes to save her from her own people, who are in revolt at her decadent lifestyle.29 In the modern sequence, Mary goes one better by also attempting to seduce Eduard’s guardian priest, whose disgust at the orgiastic indulgence of the festivities he finds in the house of Harber is expressed in a subsequent 29

The shortened version of the film included in the DVD produced by Filmarchiv Austria (2008) does not contain the ‘Syrian-episode’ included in the original cut and the film’s fullest reconstruction, undertaken in 1995. For an excellent discussion of the relationship of Sodom und Gomorrha’s ancient sequences to the biblical traditions see R. Heilmann, “‘That Old Time Religion”: Der Einsatz von Mythen am Beispiel des Films Sodom und Gomorrha’, in Armin Loacker and Ines Steiner (eds.), Imaginierte Antike: Österreichische Monumental-Stummfilme (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002), pp. 93–110.

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intertitle: ‘Blessed is the hand that sweeps across a wretched world, ripe for destruction.’ Retreating to the summer house, where father and son have both been invited to seek her out, Mary falls asleep. Awakened by Eduard, the two are then caught by Harber senior, who is killed in the subsequent struggle. For her part in the killing, Mary is sentenced to death but is visited by the priest as she awaits her execution. Infuriated by her continuing wickedness, the priest exclaims by means of successive intertitles: Woe to you, miserable world, you new Sodom and Gomorrah! You are ready to be destroyed. In your palaces wicked orgies are celebrated as once they were in the city of Lot!

Unlike Intolerance (though very much like Edwards’ last film for Fox) the intertitles in Curtiz’s film are, as this one is, overwhelmingly devoted to dialogue. As in Intolerance, however, intertitles are used in Curtiz’s film (as in Korda’s) to make explicit the analogical points of contact between the discrete stories. Nevertheless, like Korda (whose ideas may have been derived from him), Curtiz departs from Griffith’s more simple juxtaposition of parallel stories by subordinating the following biblical sequence to the modern story. Curtiz’s transition to the biblical sequence from a close-up of the priest and the resumption of this image at the biblical sequence’s conclusion confirms that the ancient sequence displayed to the audience is being recounted to the condemned woman by the priest – and is thus embedded within the modern narrative which encapsulates it. Even more explicitly than the Rabbi of Korda’s Samson und Dalila – who is not allowed to finish the biblical story – the priest’s ‘speaking’ of the ancient sequence in Curtiz’s film not only serves to anchor it securely within the diegesis, but also encourages the construal of the sequence itself in homiletical terms, as we shall see. That the visual sermon will concern itself with the narrative found in Genesis 19 is made clear by the title of the film itself. The selection of the Sodom and Gomorrah episode suggests that Curtiz understood, as Griffith and Edwards had, that the more laconic and brief the biblical narrative, the more scope there is for elaboration which would not offend. Indeed, the minimal characterisation of Lot, his wife and the two warning angels found in Genesis 19 offered Curtiz’s scriptwriter, Ladislaus Vajda, ample opportunity for embellishment, particularly in ways which would enhance the fullness of the analogy with the modern story. Moreover, this analogical quality is repeatedly re-emphasised as the viewer recognises that those playing the parts of Mary, Harry and the Priest reappear in the biblical sequence as Lot’s wife (later named as Sarah), Lot himself and the film’s now solitary angelic messenger.

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Figure 7.4 Lot’s wife Sarah revels in her powers of seduction. Sodom und Gomorrha (SaschaFilm, 1922).

The biblical sequence begins with predictable scenes of decadent indulgence in the city of Sodom with Doraine’s Sarah revelling in the attention of her mirror and an assortment of male acolytes as she prepares herself for the ‘Feast of Astarte’. Indeed, while Vajda’s version of Lot’s wife will eventually look back and be turned into the proverbial pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26), this solitary suggestion of her recalcitrance in the biblical tradition turns out to be just the beginning of Lot’s wife’s failings in Sodom und Gomorrha’s ancient sequence. Inviting her husband to ‘Come and share the pleasures that await in the Temple of Astarte’, Sarah is immediately rebuffed by Lot, who proves that he lacks nothing of the righteousness attributed to him by the biblical tradition by reminding her that the God of Abraham does not look favourably upon ‘strange/foreign gods’. Her admission that Astarte is her God thus confirms Sarah’s status as full-blown idolator and the worst of sinners. Much as the Mary of the modern story is carried away from Harry by other men, so too Lot’s wife revels in the attentions of the men of the city, who are themselves captivated by her seductive beauty and charm (Figure 7.4) and sweep her away to the Temple of Astarte – affording the opportunity to display to best advantage both the spectacle of cultic

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infidelity and the set on which architect Julius von Borsody and his assistants had long laboured. While the efforts expended by Griffith to reproduce the authentic architectural and artistic detail of his Babylon are noticeably absent from Borsody’s Sodom, the Jugendstil architecture is striking and no less monumental. Moreover, the scale of the set – built on the vacant ground at Laarberg because the Sascha studio lot at Sievering was too small – concedes nothing to Griffith’s Babylon, offering equal opportunity for depth of shot and the assembling of a cast no less large. If the arrival of the idol of Ishtar in Babylon had offered Griffith opportunity for the spectacle of the cultic parade, the arrival of the idol of Astarte in Sodom offers the viewer considerably more of the same, with its extreme long shots of a sea of worshippers rising and falling in waves of adulation as they stream towards the enormous temple of the goddess.30 Curtiz intercuts the long shots of the cultic pageantry of Sodom with a sequence depicting Lot’s encounter with a divine messenger. While the biblical Lot encounters the angels in the city gate (Genesis 19:1), in Vajda’s script they encounter him in earnest prayer to his God outside the city. As in the biblical tradition, Lot’s offer of hospitality to the angel is accepted with the intimation that the city is not otherwise safe for strangers. Tipping his hat to the offer of a foot-washing in Genesis 19:2, Vajda has Lot preparing to do exactly that when they arrive at his house – an arrival which is noticed first by the men of Sodom and then by Lot’s wife as she is sprawled on the steps and in the midst of seducing a young man. When the men of Sodom insist that Lot’s stranger be handed over to them, Vajda’s Lot attempts to pacify them not with the biblical offer of his two daughters (which is omitted as either indelicate or an undesirable complication) but by distributing gold. Meanwhile, Lot’s wife continues her seductive ways by accusing the angel of only coming to Sodom in order to meet her. Much like the priest (played also by Michael Varconi) the angel resists her, encouraging her to tremble at the name of God. Instead, the mob breaks in and seizes the angel, extending the angel’s arms in a cruciform manner, before leading him to the altar of Astarte, where he is tied to a stylised cross. As she kindles the flame at the feet of the angel’s cross, Lot’s wife taunts him in a fashion reminiscent of the angelic appearance in the fiery furnace of Daniel 3:25: ‘Prove to me in these flames that you are an angel’ – a challenge which he takes up by promptly disappearing and reappearing elsewhere in Sodom, which is the cue for the city’s destruction. If the scale of Sodom’s set 30

Where Griffith’s use of the camera in the pageantry sequence of the Babylonian story is striking and innovative, Ucicky’s camera in Sodom und Gomorrha remains largely fixed throughout his biblical sequence.

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Figure 7.5 The angel heralds the explosive destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom und Gomorrha (Sascha-Film, 1922).

design and construction rivals the spectacle offered by Griffith’s Babylonian sequence, the divine judgement of the city offers Curtiz the opportunity to eclipse all previous efforts at mounting a display of destruction in a biblical film. Central to Curtiz’s display is the unprecedented use of controlled explosions to depict the raining down of ‘sulfur and fire’ (19:24) which leads to the destruction of the city (Figure 7.5). Scenes of mass exodus, as the people pour out of the city – throwing themselves over walls and swimming in desperation – are intercut with the detonation of explosives buried within the ground and distributed throughout the set, with the climax arriving in the demolition of the massive temple of Astarte itself, following scenes of its evacuation. While the biblical Lot tarries on account of the reluctance of his sons-in-law to leave Sodom (19:14, 16), Vajda’s more simple plot has Lot insist that he would rather die than abandon the woman he loves, eventually finding and carrying away his stunned wife from under an arch just before it explodes and tumbles to the ground. Having escaped the city’s judgement, Lot’s wife cannot escape her biblical fate, however, and Lot is left to lament

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the saline statue of his wife, whose brilliant white appearance offers an ironic contrast to the darkness of her deeds. As with Salomé, whose slight disparagement in the gospel had been radically expanded and exploited by Edwards, so too the biblical tainting of Lot’s wife facilitates Curtiz’s further vilification of her as not merely an idolatress, but also a wanton seductress – which serves to legitimate and explain a biblical punishment which might have appeared excessive to some, attributed as it is by the text to nothing more than her nostalgic backward glance at her home (19:26). While the depiction of Lot’s wife allows Curtiz to include the unredeemed femme fatale, the embedding of the ancient sequence within the modern story means that her death is not in vain and may be redeemed in the modern story, to which the film now reverts. Indeed, as the face of the Priest reappears, the end of his exposition of the sacred text is signalled by his exorting of Mary Conway to apply it to her own situation: ‘You ought to listen to the word of the one who wanted to save you . . .!’ Her executioner’s arrival and her journey to the place of her execution allow the suspense to build further, before the action cuts back to Mary waking from her sleep in the summer house to discover that the ancient sequence and the killing of Harber itself have been but pedagogical premonitions. Indeed the efficacy of the homiletical dream is confirmed by Mary’s immediate departure from Harber’s house, which facilitates both the eventual reconciliation of father and son – erstwhile rivals for her affection – and Mary’s attendance at the bedside of the recovering sculptor Harry, with whom she is finally reconciled as the film ends. The fact that Curtiz’s Sodom und Gomorrha is a far larger film than Korda’s Samson und Dalila – not only in footage/running time but also in terms of scale of set and visual spectacle – should not be allowed to distract us from the films’ significant similarities, most of which will be obvious. Whereas Griffith had displayed the horrors of the battle itself in his Babylonian analogy, both Korda and, on a far larger scale, Curtiz bring to the silent screen the spectacle of destruction as it had never been seen before in the biblical film. That two central European films, made within a few short years of the end of what was then the most destructive war in human history, should do so is of course hardly unexpected, nor should we be surprised that the means of destruction in such films reflects the horrors of the war itself. Both Korda and especially Curtiz exploit the pyrotechnical developments facilitated by the war to create an unprecedented spectacle of explosive destruction of a city and its people. The unpredictable, unobservable and unpreventable causes of such explosive destruction offered Curtiz an ideal means of reproducing the spectacle of a

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destruction which is not wrought by human hands, but divinely orchestrated as a means of punishment – a notion which was far from unthinkable in the aftermath of the Great War. Griffith’s particular interest in socio-political issues which made Intolerance popular with Russian audiences is far less visible in either Curtiz’s film or even in Korda’s, where the anarchists and the Prince who is their target are shown to be equally ineffectual and irrelevant to modern times. Instead, both films reflect a concern with the conventions of the romantic melodrama inflected by the lingering interest in the femme fatale, seen most clearly above in Fox’s Salomé and The Queen of Sheba. In both Curtiz’s film and Korda’s the danger posed by Lot’s wife and Delilah is not limited to their predatory sexuality, but also to their imagined idolatry, manifest in the temples of Astarte and Dagon respectively. In Lot’s wife, for the first time, and in Delilah, for by no means the first time, Curtiz and Korda found female biblical subjects ripe for elaboration in ways which they hoped would appeal to modern viewers. Yet if in both Samson und Dalila and Sodom und Gomorrha the biblical women must be punished for their sins of idolatry, their redemption is ensured by Korda and Curtiz’s respective evolutions of Griffith’s analogous narrative structure. Both Hungarian directors abandon the complexity of Griffith’s four narratives in favour of only modern and biblical stories. Both offer a much more precise and explicit web of analogies between the biblical and modern scenarios. Perhaps most significantly of all, both films create a narrative structure which intentionally positions the biblical narrative as a text whose visual exposition by a religiously sanctioned authority (priest, rabbi) allows for it to be applied to the modern cinematic situation and by implication the life of the viewers themselves. While the two films’ pairing of spectacular Old Testament scenes and modern stories betrays the influence of Intolerance, their subordination and narrative integration of the ancient sequence within the modern story was anticipated by – and perhaps borrowed in part from – Rosegger’s novel I.N.R. I, whose influence on Griffith himself seems likely. Of the two Hungarians, Korda’s debt to the impulse of Rosegger’s novel is clearer, given that the modern stories of both are animated by the spectre of assassination motivated by the political cause of the anarchist movement – remembered with no affection following the war for its perceived part in causing it. As we have seen, in Rosegger’s novel, the priest’s reluctance to disclose the biblical tradition results in an encounter with the biblical text mediated only by Konrad Ferleitner’s memory of his mother’s telling of the sacred stories (see Chapter 6 above). By contrast, in the Austrian films, the priestly mediation of

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the scripture, whether by means of preaching or reading it, reflects a more developed sense of clericalism. The suggestion that Korda and Curtiz were inspired by Rosegger’s novel – distributed in German-speaking lands from 1905 – is encouraged by the recollection that within a few months of the Austrian films’ respective Viennese premieres it was announced that the film rights for Rosegger’s novel had been purchased by the German Neumann Productions.31 Under the supervision of Robert Wiene, the acclaimed director of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and former employee of Sascha-Film, I.N.R.I. was shot in the summer of 1923, with the trade press reporting a cast of 600 – many of whom are used to populate the mass crowd scenes of the Sermon on the Mount and the Entrance into Jerusalem.32 Unlike Rosegger’s novel, whose first nine chapters are devoted to the birth and early years of Christ, Wiene offers a very brief and stereotyped treatment of the Annunciation and the Nativity and only a slightly fuller scene of Jesus teaching in the temple. The portrayal of Jesus’ ministry and death then follows, with its most dramatic departures from the tradition of Pathé’s Passion being its extended depiction of Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount and, most strikingly of all, its reflection of German Expressionist filmmaking of the period. While somewhat muted by the inheritance of earlier cinematic and painterly portraits of Jesus, Wiene’s film nevertheless displays the use of light and shadow, the large dark eyes of Jesus and non-realist mise-en-scène which are the visual hallmarks of a movement which includes amongst its classic films Wiene’s own The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).33 As has been observed elsewhere, Judas enjoys a prominence within the film which exceeds even his enhancement in Rosegger’s novel. Like Rosegger’s Judas, Wiene’s Judas betrays Jesus as a means of forcing the latter’s hand in the service of Judas’ own overweening and worldly ambition.34 Yet Wiene goes further in consistently setting Judas apart from the other disciples, not least in the scene of the Sermon on the Mount, when at its end Judas steps forwards and says in an intertitle: ‘Let us spread the news each man to his neighbour – for this is truly the Messiah!’ Apart from embracing and even enhancing the conventional depiction of 31 32

33 34

Die Lichtbild-Bu¨hne (27 January 1923). While the discussion of the film itself here reflects the author’s viewing of a print at the BFI, the discussion of the production and reception of the film depends on U. Jung and W. Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari: the Films of Robert Wiene (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999). See I. Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow (London: Wallflower Press, 2008). See Jung and Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari, p. 107.

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Jewish opposition to Jesus,35 and its depiction of the mass crowd scenes, the film is also notable for its inclusion of a ‘modern story’ which, while now lost, apparently largely followed Rosseger’s source, including having Ferleitner die in his cell.36 Unfortunately, Wiene’s modern story had no more happy a fate than Ferleitner, falling foul of the Censorship Board in Berlin, according to the minutes of a meeting held in November, a month before the film’s premiere.37 Faced with criticism of his depiction of political assassination, Wiene’s response was apparently robust and uncompromising, yet the overwhelming silence from reviewers regarding the modern story suggests the probability that the modern story was rarely if ever shown in Germany or indeed beyond its borders. To discover why the European contribution to the analogical biblical film has been largely ignored in English-speaking scholarship, we must return to America, where, in the very same month Wiene’s I.N.R.I. was released, the first of Cecil B. DeMille’s many biblical films also had its premiere. 35

36 37

See R. Zwick, ‘Antijüdische Tendenzen im Jesusfilm’, Communicatio Socialis 30 (1997), 227–46, and on this film more specifically, Zwick, ‘“Un film d’humanité”: La Figure du Christ dans I.N.R.I. (1923) de Robert Wiene’, in A. Boillat et al. (eds.), Jésus en représentations: De la Belle Époque à la postmodernité (Gollion: Infolio Éditions, 2011), pp. 221–46, and Zwick, ‘Friedensbotschaft in unfriedlichen Zeiten: I.N.R.I. (1923) von Robert Wiene’, in P. Hasenberg et al. (eds.), Spuren des Religiösen im Film:Meilensteine aus 100 Jahren Kinogeschichte (Mainz: Grünewald, 1995), pp. 96–9. According to Die Lichtbild-Bu¨hne (29 December 1923), 15. Though cf. Jung and Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari, p. 112, n.30. Ibid., pp. 109–11.

chapter 8

‘But Pharaoh hardened his heart’: Exodus and Egypt

By the end of the 1920s Cecil B. DeMille’s reputation would be strongly associated with the biblical film, but it should be remembered that, as the decade began, DeMille’s only previous attempt in the direction of the bigbudget epic had been Joan the Woman, a biopic of Joan of Arc released in 1916 to critical acclaim and box-office mediocrity.1 In the late 1910s, Famous Players-Lasky persuaded DeMille to focus his attention on social comedies such as Don’t Change your Husband (1918), Male and Female (1919) and Why Change your Wife? (1919) – films which offered DeMille an opportunity to hone his talent for creating sumptuous sets and lavish productions in which he could exploit the rapidly changing attitudes toward sex and gender roles on the eve of the Jazz Era.2 When the opportunity arose to produce a bigger picture, DeMille arrived at his subject, The Ten Commandments (1923), by means of an audience competition, which was launched in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and ran from 4 October to 1 November 1922, attracting submissions from across America and beyond.3 Awarding $1,000 to those who had suggested the theme of the Ten Commandments and lesser prizes to others who had mentioned it in passing, DeMille was to begin work on the project in the New Year, following the completion of Adam’s Rib and Jeannie MacPherson’s return from holiday. Conveniently, news of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb was published in The Times of London later in November,4 sparking a worldwide interest in things ancient and Egyptian which would endure for several 1 2 3 4

R. S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), pp. 101–2. For a useful anthology of seminal and significant scholarship in this area see J. Bean and D. Negra (eds.), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). Los Angeles Times (19 November 1922), ii, 1. Six out of the eight winning entrants lived in California. ‘An Egyptian Treasure: Great Find at Thebes: Lord Carnarvon’s Long Quest’, London Times (30 November 1922).

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years – a fact which was not lost on Edwards, who was, we may recall, already in the Middle East and about to begin work on The Shepherd King. There was thus plenty of encouragement, if any was needed, for DeMille and MacPherson to ensure that an Egyptian interest featured prominently in their treatment of the Ten Commandments. The head of Famous Players, Adolph Zukor, made it clear to his partner, Jesse Lasky, that The Ten Conmmandments would need to have a ‘tremendous love story’ to overcome the handicap of ‘Egyptian and Palestine atmosphere’ which DeMille was insisting upon. That this atmosphere would need to be recreated in California, rather than Egypt itself, appears to have been one of several concessions DeMille made to Zukor as the cost of DeMille’s ambitions began to become clear. On 10 May 1923 the director made another, waiving his usual financial guarantees, which appears to have placated Zukor sufficiently for the latter to approve a budget of $750,000. Much like the Egyptian set, which began to take shape less than two weeks later in the desert near Guadalupe, DeMille’s budget would mount dramatically as he constructed a veritable city in the desert for the production. When the film eventually appeared, the studio happily publicised the scale of its investment: The set built in representation of the famous Egyptian citadel measured seven hundred and fifty feet in width and was one hundred and nine feet in height. It was approached by an avenue lined by twenty four Sphinxes, each of which weighed over four tons. The front of the city covered nearly three times the area occupied by Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, the most notable movies structure, heretofore. The work required 55,000 feet of lumber – enough to build fifty ordinary five-room bungalows – three hundred tons of plaster, 25000 pounds of nails and seventy five miles of cable and wire.5

While the precise details of the evolution of MacPherson’s script are elusive, the fact that DeMille had finished shooting the desert scenes at Guadalupe by the end of June confirms that MacPherson had already by then settled on a structure which included both the biblical sequence of the Exodus and a modern story. According to MacPherson’s own account, she had contemplated a complex structure involving numerous stories which would illustrate the breaking of the commandments, but in the end resorted to the more simple structure of the biblical prologue to a modern story.6 That she 5 6

Pictures and Picturegoer (April 1924), 9. J. Macpherson, ‘How the Story Evolved’, Ten Commandments (1923) Souvenir Program, clipping file, AMPAS. DeMille’s use of flashbacks had allowed him to insert ancient orgiastic scenes in Male and Female (1919) and Manslaughter (1922).

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was inspired, however, by Curtiz’s use of precisely such a structure in Sodom und Gomorrha is entirely likely. While some American reviewers had been impressed with the scale of the Austrian production and the architectural accomplishment of the Temple of Astarte,7 others complained of the corpulence of the female lead8 or the style of acting.9 Yet, The Ten Commandments’ pairing of an ancient and modern story suggests at least an awareness of Curtiz’s film, which had its American premiere as the much-reduced Queen of Sin on 26 March 1923, while MacPherson’s was working on the scenario for the Ten Commandments.10 Even as James Cruze’s epic western Covered Wagon was earning considerable sums for Famous Players-Lasky in the summer of 1923, DeMille was already over budget and well on his way to a total spend of $1.4 million. While DeMille offered to purchase the still-unfinished film from the studio, Zukor was persuaded against it – a decision which would pay off handsomely when the film went on to earn more than $4 million at the box office after its premiere at Los Angeles Grauman Theatre on 4 December 1923. Unlike either Korda’s or Curtiz’s films, DeMille begins The Ten Commandments with the biblical story rather than his modern one. Yet, as in Korda’s Samson und Dalila, the initial intertitles frame the analogy drawn by the film between the ancient context of Exodus and the modern situation of San Francisco in the 1920s. Like Edwards’ Shepherd King, DeMille’s biblical prologue begins with the children of Israel in Egypt, yet whereas Edwards’ Exodus lasts less than a dozen shots and even fewer minutes, DeMille’s portrayal lasts nearly one hour. As has been noted by others, DeMille’s filmmaking in his prologue reverts to that of an earlier era, depending more heavily on a primarily static camera, slower editing and the more frequent use of the long shot in order to capture the sheer scale of the sets and the enormity of the cast.11 Adding to the impact of the DeMillean display was the film’s conspicuous use of colour in the biblical prologue, achieved by means of the innovative two-strip Technicolor and more expensive Handschiegl processes.12 Seducing the viewer from the start with a spectacle to rival Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Sodom und Gomorrha (1922), DeMille seeks to numb 7

Harrison’s Reports (17 November 1923), 183. Var (19 March 1923), 33. See also Photoplay (July 1923), 14, where the verdict was succinct: ‘The Queen of Sin – Not sinful but awful. The Queen’s sin is weight.’ 9 C. S. Sewell, MPW (7 April 1923). 10 Much reduced in length from eighteen reels to eight for its American release as The Queen of Sin, within two weeks of its premiere Variety had passed its verdict: ‘Queen of Sin Prize Flop’, Var (5 April 1923), 31. 11 Higashi, American Culture, p. 182. 12 Ibid., pp. 184–6. 8

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Figure 8.1 Detail of Israel in Egypt (Poynter, 1867).

the viewer to the substantive eclipse of the narrative in the rest of the prologue. Thus The Ten Commandments (1923) leaves Moses’ own origins, his escape to Midian and his return to Egypt utterly unreferenced. Instead DeMille’s opening scenes linger on the spectacle of suffering: first that of the Israelites whipped into submission by their Egyptian taskmaster, then the oppression of one unfortunate, crushed beneath the weight of a giant sphinx as it is wheeled across the sand. While it has been noted elsewhere that the visual inspiration for DeMille’s opening scene is Poynter’s painting Israel in Egypt (1867), with its rolling sphinx, Egyptian palanquin and enslaved Hebrews,13 this does not exhaust the painting’s influence (Figure 8.1). DeMille also seizes upon Poynter’s depiction of a fallen slave being offered some water by a woman in the foreground of the painting as a means of introducing into his filmic narrative, the character of Miriam, who cries out to her God for deliverance. While Blackton (1909–10) and 13

See, for instance, J. Humbert, C. Ziegler, M.Pantazzi, Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730–1930 (Paris and Ottawa: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux/National Gallery of Canada, 1994), p. 514.

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Feuillade (1910) had, as we have seen earlier, both made a point of dramatising the bond of Pharaoh to his firstborn son in order to heighten the tragic/melodramatic quality of this sequence, in DeMille’s version Pharaoh’s own son responds to Moses’ warning of the death of the firstborn by confronting Moses with a toy whip which he uses to lash the prophet.14 As Moses and Aaron depart from the presence of Pharaoh, the firstborn continues to use his whip and then concludes by throwing it after him. Here, too, DeMille’s inspiration is a small detail from Poynter’s painting: at the left edge of the canvas, on the lap of Pharaoh’s wife atop her palanquin, stands a small child whose raised hand bears a toy-sized whip identical to that borne by the taskmaster pictured in the foreground with the fallen slave and the woman bringing him drink. Having demonstrated the debauchery of the Egyptians first in the worship of their gods, and then in the exhibitionism of their women as they dance before the Pharaoh, DeMille depicts the death of the firstborn. While Feuillade and Blackton both offer a depiction of the plague itself and its consequence for the people, DeMille’s focus is exclusively on Pharaoh’s response to the death of his son – with DeMille’s depiction of Pharaoh and his dead son betraying the persistent influence of Alma-Tadema’s Death of the Firstborn seen in earlier versions of this scene.15 All of this, however, is mere preface to the heart of the prologue which depicts at great length an Exodus and Egyptian pursuit of unprecedented cinematic proportions. Along with the extreme long shots, which picture an unending stream of Hebrews against the vast expanse of the desert, DeMille offers close up shots of the spectacle of Hebrew humanity and especially the ‘children’ of Israel on their travels – the young atop camels, walking with the small animals and a mother carrying a small lamb. In portraying the pursuit of the Egyptians, DeMille makes full use of the advances in cinematography to capture the speed and drama of the chariots as they race, not round Edwards’ Californian hippodrome, but through the desert dunes. The fiery halting of the Egyptians leads to the inevitable parting of the sea – yet another opportunity to showcase the ambition and accomplishments of DeMille’s special effects department. That the appropriate audience response to such a display is wide-eyed wonder is reinforced by a succession 14 15

The Ten Commandments (1923), copyright deposit description, LOC, 1: ‘the first-born of Pharaoh, a boy of six, who reflects in every action the arrogance and tyrannical power of his father’. While Higashi, American Culture, p. 180 makes much of the ‘definitive’ illustrations of Doré and their influence on DeMille’s film, this suggests an underestimation of the variety of fine art traditions which we have seen to have influenced the biblical film. Indeed, the clearest evidence of painterly influence on DeMille’s Egypt is to be found in Poynter.

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of shots of Israelites gazing in rapturous astonishment at the spectacle unfolding before them and the viewer. Indeed the giving of the commandments themselves is hardly less spectacular, and the interpretive decision to cross-cut the giving of the stone tablets to Moses at the top of the mountain with the idolatrous worship of the golden calf at the bottom creates both a strong sense of simultaneity and a relentless alternation of spectacle. The intercutting of sex and cultic ceremony in The Ten Commandments (1923) is anticipated by DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus (1917) – in which he cross-cuts the scene of an illicit sexual liaison with that of a wedding – but the alternating of verbal and visceral spectacle is especially noteworthy in light of recent discussions of the relationship between the filmic word and image.16 In contesting the traditional devaluing of the filmic word (over against the filmic image) in some scholarship of the silent era, it has been noted that intertitles in fact became both more prolix and more frequent until a decline on both counts at the very end of the silent period. At the same time, as we have seen in earlier chapters, the narrative intertitle – which describes (and was often perceived to pre-empt) the following visual action – increasingly yielded ground to intertitles devoted to dialogue.17 It is further confirmation of DeMille’s nostalgic style in his biblical prologue that intertitles are remarkably few and far between, particularly considering the relatively late date of production (1922–3). Moreover, the intertitles which do appear are not devoted to dialogue but consist primarily of narrative descriptions – most of which are attributed (occasionally disingenuously) to the biblical text itself or composed of archaising language evidently intended to sound ‘biblical’. Yet, the absence of dialogue from the intertitles must be set alongside DeMille’s treatment of the ten commandments (or ‘ten words’ in the Jewish tradition). The film suggests that, as divine dialogue, DeMille’s ten commandments cannot be contained within the space conventionally allocated for dialogue (i.e. the intertitle) and can only be articulated properly by means of the ‘true’ filmic language (i.e. the image). Thus each commandment explodes from the sky in turn, growing from an invisible point in the outer galaxy and racing toward the viewer until the words of the commandment fill the frame to the accompaniment of incendiary clouds and fireworks (Figure 8.2). By setting apart the Word as spectacle rather than mere intertitle, DeMille ensures its juxtaposition with (and condemnation of) that ‘other’ spectacle of sex and idolatry with which it is intercut. Thus, following the 16

Elliott, Novel/Film.

17

Ibid., pp. 90–3.

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Figure 8.2 The spectacle of the Word on Sinai. The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1923).

giving of the initial two commandments at the top of the mountain and an intervening intertitle, the action moves to the foot of the mountain and the spectacle of the unfolding apostasy. As in the biblical narrative, DeMille’s Moses – ably assisted by Joshua – receives the divine Word and then confronts the human apostasy. However, whereas in Exodus 32 Aaron alone facilitates the creation and worship of the golden calf, in the script written for DeMille by his screenwriter and mistress, Jeannie MacPherson, entirely novel roles are created for Dathan and Moses’ sister Miriam – whose respective rebellions against the authority of Moses and their dire consequences appear much later in the biblical narrative itself (Numbers 12 and 16) and are very different from those found here.18 Fading in from black, DeMille reveals a scene of frenetic activity in which Aaron works to complete the golden calf while Miriam is enlisted – again without biblical precedent – as his glamorous assistant, depositing Hebrew jewellery into the cauldron of metal which boils at her feet. To the lower right of the frame, a woman lies on her back, arms extended towards Miriam, 18

For an alternative analysis of this scene in German, see B. Dijkstra, ‘Die Domestizierung der Vampirin’, in B. Dijkstra (ed.), Das Böse ist eine Frau: Männliche Gewaltphantasien und die Angst vor der weiblichen Sexualität (Reinbek: Rohwolt Verlag, 1999), pp. 435–41.

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ostensibly offering her jewellery and, by extension, perhaps herself, given the orgiastic character of the scene as a whole.19 At this moment, however, Miriam is distracted by the arrival of Dathan, who, having handed over a bowl of jewellery to Miriam, displays an overtly sensual interest in her hair. When the scene is resumed following the delivery of further commandments atop Sinai, Miriam confirms the eroticising of her hair by using it suggestively to polish a calf that owes more to phallic anatomy than ancient Egyptology. Joshua intervenes – again without biblical precedent – to confront the debauchery, but Miriam summons Dathan, whose speedy arrival and dispatch of Joshua confirms that the former remains firmly under Miriam’s spell. DeMille then cuts to a mid-close-up of Miriam continuing to favour the calf with her hair, emphasising at the same time Miriam’s embracing of herself as an object of desire and sexual spectacle. Dathan’s hand, an extension and physical illustration of his gaze, reaches down toward Miriam and her hair. She watches (and evidently enjoys) him watching her before the action cuts away, leaving her tantalisingly out of Dathan’s reach. When the action resumes again following the delivery of further commandments, a long shot enables DeMille to depict the mass of people preparing to worship the now completed calf, which takes centre stage. Miriam begins a solo dance in view of the people (including Dathan) and the viewer, but a point-of-view shot from Miriam’s perspective proves that she has eyes only for the calf, which is now the object of her devotion.20 Proof of the seductive influence of Miriam’s exhibitionism is furnished not only by the people’s subsequent dancing frenzy, but also by Dathan’s attempt to attract Miriam’s attention with a further offering. Yet again, however, Dathan must content himself with Miriam’s intoxicating locks, which he finally manages to grasp, before the action cuts away again. When the sequence resumes again at the foot of Sinai, the platform on which the calf sits is hoisted onto the shoulders of several burly Israelites so that it may be paraded before the worshipping brethren. Miriam initially walks in front of the calf, her back to the camera, a smoking incense pan held high above her head, but almost immediately she herself is hoisted onto the platform with the calf, in an almost identical fashion to the elevation of Lot’s wife on her way to the idolatry of Astarte in Sodom und Gomorrha. While the spectacle of the procession is supplemented by the garland borne by dancing 19 20

DeMille’s depiction of female homoeroticism in the context of sexual debauchery may also be seen in the revelry scene in Joan the Woman (1916) and the bacchanalian orgy of Manslaughter (1922). Miriam here echoes the role of the Chief Dancer in the orgy scene from Manslaughter and the part played by Martha Graham in the Babylonian flashback from Male and Female.

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Figure 8.3 Miriam on display. The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1923).

girls,21 the camera inexorably cuts in to a mid-close-up of Miriam continuing to lavish her attentions on the calf as she revels in her self-exposure – making a literal spectacle of herself before the people and the camera (Figure 8.3). It is at this moment in the sequence that DeMille’s Miriam admirably illustrates the coincidence of spectatorial and diegetic gaze: the gaze of the spectator and that of the male (and in this case female) characters combined without disrupting the verisimilitude of the narrative.22 Here, yet again, DeMille eschews the classical cinema’s preference for and increasing adoption of a voyeurism in which the filmic spectacle, the one being seen, is narratively ignorant of being observed. Miriam is, by contrast, manifestly aware of being seen and, within the narrative at least, fully complicit in her own exhibition. As such she reflects a voyeurism which is associated with the theatre – a voyeurism which is ceremonially self-concious, involving the 21

22

The dancing girls and garland were present already in the earliest film depiction of the Moses tradition, La Vie de Moïse (1905), and indeed in the Western pictorial tradition long before that. See, for instance, Nicholas Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633–4). As seminally and convincingly illustrated by L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975), 6–18.

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viewer as a member of the audience (as DeMille certainly does here).23 If others are correct to suggesting that early cinema seems closer to the theatrical version of voyeurism with its self-concious exhibitionism, we have still further grounds for suggesting that DeMille’s 1923 scene of the golden calf is consciously adverting to the cinematic tradition of an earlier era.24 Following the giving of yet more commandments, the calf and Miriam’s devotion to it are elevated still higher – now to a rocky crag, frame left – where the spectacle is fixed and yet more visible to the crowd, who, of necessity, turn their collective gaze upwards, not to the God at the peak of Sinai, but towards the golden calf on the crag. The literal ‘heightening’ of the spectacle is reinforced by Miriam’s disrobing to the extent allowed by 1923 standards of ‘decency’ and her offering of a libation to the calf in the form of a cup of wine – the remaining contents of which Miriam flings onto the frenzied crowd below. With the final fellatio-like kissing of the calf’s snout, Miriam thus consummates her affections for the calf in full view of camera and crowd before the camera cuts to a demonstration of how this sexual spectacle stimulates the people to ever-greater depths of orgiastic indulgence. In a representative shot we see one man take a woman by force from another man before they agree to share her – one kissing her mouth, the other lapping wine off her feet.25 Finally Dathan himself moves to sate his lust and consummate his own desire for Miriam, but, as he lays hold of her, his eyes grow wide with horror as he discovers that Miriam’s hand and arm have become leprous26 – the spectacular object of his desire suddenly transformed into a no less spectacular object of horror. Miriam herself visibly recoils from her own flesh, once the reality of divine judgement penetrates her post-coital trance. The biblical and narrative climax of the scene quickly follows with Moses’ return and the spectacle of violence – seen first in Moses’ angry shattering of the stone tablets, then in the divine destruction of the calf itself (by means of stone-shattering lightning) and, finally, in the implicit punishment of the idolaters.27 23 24 25

26 27

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 43–5, 61–6, 93–6. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 35–6. While Birchard, DeMille’s Hollywood, p. 195, remains unconvinced of the director’s alleged foot fetish, DeMille’s explicitness here does perhaps lend weight to the suggestion in light of other scenes such as Mary Pickford’s cleaning of the nun’s boots in The Little American and the maid’s painting of Gloria Swanson’s toenails in The Affairs of Anatol. In the ‘modern story’ which follows the ‘biblical prologue’, the inveterate sinner (‘Dan McTavish’) contracts leprosy from his Eurasian mistress. It is perhaps not surprising that DeMille prefers to pass over the less easily digestible spectacle of internecine Israelite executions present in the text, in favour of introducing the spectacle of sex despite the latter’s absence from the text.

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Even a passing familiarity with the ancient narrative (Exodus 31–2), from which DeMille’s scene is apparently derived, is sufficient to establish its limited warrant for the sexual spectacle supplied by DeMille. Yet the reference to the Israelites’ nakedness (32:25) and the association of calves with ancient fertility cults and rituals in the ancient Near East lends a veneer of credibility to such an interpretation.28 When the text of Exodus 32:6 says that the Israelites arose following meat and drink ‘to play/revel’, it offers DeMille the opportunity to amplify the visible exhibition of cultic infidelity with an altogether more visceral spectacle of sexual display and excess. And, of course, it was precisely this kind of temptation – to seduce the audience with spectacle – that DeMille was unable to resist, seduced as he was by the nostalgic and ‘primitive’ spirit of the cinema of attractions. What is truly fascinating about DeMille’s golden calf scene of 1923, however, is that, even as it serves up remarkable sexual spectacle, it cannot fully resist the seduction of spectacle itself by cinematic story – the story being in this case that of Miriam and Dathan. While both characters are introduced early in the opening sequences of DeMille’s ‘Biblical Prologue’ (Miriam, as the ‘Sister of Moses’, Dathan as ‘The Discontented’), and Miriam appears to lead the worship, there is nothing in the ancient narrative, nor in the opening sequences of the film itself, to prepare the viewer for their involvement in the golden calf scene. Rather than competing with the spectacle of sex conjured up by DeMille’s visual feast, MacPherson’s story of the calf’s seduction of Miriam and the latter’s seduction of Dathan in fact animates and adds allure to the spectacle from the very beginning of the sequence. Thus, when Miriam turns her attention from the women on their backs, it is only to tempt Dathan with her hair, which she then takes great pleasure in devoting to the calf instead of him. Compelled by Miriam to dispatch Joshua, Dathan can only watch her watching him, much to Miriam’s enjoyment. While he is allowed to entrance himself temporarily in her hair, Miriam delights in offering herself to everyone but Dathan, first in the procession and then by disrobing on the crag, where the spectacle of her finally sating her bovine lust leads Dathan and the Israelites to do the same. Most crucially of all, however, MacPherson’s unbiblical story of seduction saves DeMille’s equally unscriptural sexual spectacle by providing an appropriate ending to the sequence. The proof that Miriam is ultimately responsible for the idolatrous and sexual sin of Dathan and the people is 28

For an example of such an interpretation see R. W. L. Moberly, At the Mountain of God: Story and Theology in Exodus 32–34 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983), pp. 46–56.

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furnished by her punishment with leprosy – a punishment whose own spectacular qualities ensure that the eyes first of Dathan, then of the viewer and eventually of Miriam herself grow wide with horror. As in Numbers 12 – the obvious source of Miriam’s punishment – so too here, it is Miriam alone who bears the punishment, with Dathan escaping unscathed (much as Aaron does in Numbers 12 and here). In Numbers 12:15, Miriam is eventually cleansed of her leprosy and readmitted to the community. Here, while DeMille’s Miriam pleads for mercy, Moses never grants absolution, leaving the viewer with no evidence that Miriam’s sin has been or will ever be forgiven. Like Korda’s Delilah and especially Lot’s wife in Sodom und Gomorrha, Miriam’s punishment is what permits the graphic depiction of her idolatry and seductive ways in the first place. Along with the divine punishment of the idolaters (for which see further below), it was precisely this kind of ending – the kind of ending in which the sinner clearly does not live happily ever after – which ensured that DeMille and MacPherson’s spectacle of sex and seduction at the foot of Mount Sinai succeeded in titillating, but not alienating, cinema-goers of the early 1920s. While an awareness of spectacle is arguably present within the ancient text itself, DeMille’s particular visualisation of the golden calf scene might also be related to wider questions of iconoclasm embedded deeply within Western religious traditions courtesy of the prohibition of graven images (Exodus 20:4): 4

You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:4 NRSV).

It may be possible to detect a deeper-seated motivation for DeMille’s displacement of the ancient narrative’s focus (the worship of the graven image) with fleshly spectacle and wanton seduction. From one vantage point, given that the biblical text itself ‘constructs’ the golden calf as an image of the Israelite god (as opposed to an ‘other’ deity), DeMille effectively re-enacts the ancient apostasy by constructing his own ‘calf’ for production purposes – leaving the director’s essential métier of imagemaking to sit in irreducible tension with the aniconism of passages such as Exodus 20:4 (see above). By interposing ‘Miriam-as-sexual-temptress’ between the viewer/people and the golden calf, DeMille effectively displaces – or at least largely obscures – the discourse of image-making. In so doing, it might be argued that DeMille attempts to mask his ultimate role within the production – not as the divine director, but as the Aaronic

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actor – producing endless images expressly designed to elicit the praise and worship of the people. Yet, if DeMille’s biblical prologue manages to equal or even exceed the quantity and quality of spectacle served up by Curtiz’s Sodom und Gomorrha and even Griffith’s Intolerance, it is perhaps suitable that the moment of transition to the modern story is itself a moment of spectacular punishment for sins committed. Passing over the biblical account of Moses grinding the golden calf and forcing the people to drink it (32:20), DeMille ends the biblical sequence with a lightning strike and a pyrotechnical effect which explodes the rock on which the calf stands, causing it to crash spectacularly to the ground below. Again, rather than depict the internecine Levite slaughter of the offending Israelites (so Exodus 32:27–8), DeMille follows the destruction of the calf with a second lightning strike in the direction of the people and a subsequent shot of the dead amidst the rubble. As in Sodom und Gomorrha, DeMille’s depiction of violence and judgement not only capitalises on increasingly and literally explosive special effects, it also exploits such effects in depicting a violence and judgement which are divinely inflicted, even if they are at variance in this respect from the biblical tradition. It is at this point in the film that DeMille fades from the chaos of Sinai to the opening scene of the modern story, in which an elderly mother, Mrs McTavish, sits at the kitchen table with her two grown sons, Dan and John, reading from a family bible and concluding with Exodus 32:28, which is provided in an intertitle: ‘– And there fell of the Children of Israel that day, about three thousand men.’ Like the rabbi in Samson und Dalila and the priest in Sodom und Gomorrha, the elderly Mrs McTavish mediates the ancient biblical tradition to the modern world inhabited by her two sons – embedding the ancient narrative within the modern story. Whereas Korda’s rabbi replies to a request for a story, and Curtiz’s (presumably Catholic) priest provides a homily to a condemned woman as a prelude to the last rites, DeMille’s scene situates this mediation within the Anglo-American Victorian practice of the family Bible reading.29 The perspicuity and applicability of the ‘unmediated’ text – a particular refraction of the reformed principle of sola scriptura – is then exemplified in the scene which unfolds. Even before Mrs McTavish concludes her reading and returns the family bible to its place on the mantel above the fire, it is clear 29

See further, F. Knight, The Nineteenth Century Church and English Society (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 37–40, and Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 67–102.

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that one of her sons, Dan, has little time for what has been read. In addition to his mocking of the ten commandments as ‘Victorian’ and ‘bunk’, Dan unashamedly expresses his devotion to his ‘Golden Eagle’, the $5 gold coin which hangs from a chain around his neck. Despite or perhaps because of his mother’s insistence that such idolatry will lead towards the calamity of the golden calf, Dan hastily constructs an altar to his ‘Golden Eagle’ atop the family bible complete with ‘incense’ furnished by his half-smoked cigarette. Given the positioning of the bible (typically along with a candle) at the heart of the ‘altar’ of Victorian Christian homes, such a parody confirms Dan’s attack on the centrality of the Bible within the domestic sphere.30 Disgusted, his brother warns that the ten commandments ‘pack a wallop’, but when Dan insists he doesn’t believe in God, his mother requires him to leave the house despite the late hour and pouring rain. That all three members of the family have understood the biblical tradition per se is clear from their animated interaction, but their engagement with the tradition and each other introduces the modern story’s probing of the extent to which the ten commandments really are relevant to the modern world inhabited by Dan and John McTavish. After retreating to a diner, Dan eventually returns home to find Mary, a hungry, down-at-heel young woman who had attempted to steal a sausage from his plate at the diner and subsequently sought shelter from the rain in his brother’s carpentry shop. While both brothers are soon attracted to Mary, John quickly concedes her to his brother when it is clear that she has eyes only for Dan. When she and Dan are caught dancing on Sunday by Mrs McTavish, she brandishes the Bible, but is then in turn challenged by John, who resists his mother’s legalism by contesting her rigorist interpretation of the Sabbath as excluding fun. Announcing their plans to marry, Dan leaves the family home with Mary on his arm, proudly declaring his intention to ‘break all ten of your commandments and we’ll finish rich and powerful – with the world at our feet!’ MacPherson’s Christ-like characterisation of John is confirmed by his mother’s encouragement of her son that some of the best people in the world are humble carpenters. Meanwhile Dan’s building business expands by corrupt means – his further failure to ‘honour his mother’ exemplified in his embarrassed inability to find a place to hang his mother’s portrait in his new and palatial accommodation. Dan makes plans to build a church on unsafe ground using inferior building materials, enlisting his brother as 30

See C. McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 84–5.

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chief carpenter, despite the latter’s reservations about rumours that Dan is illegally importing jute for his plaster. When Dan accuses John of ‘coveting his wife’, John’s admission that he does love Mary and his warning that Dan should not neglect his wife prepares the viewer for Dan’s affair with Sally Lung, the ‘half French, half Chinese’ beauty who has stowed away with his illegal shipment of jute. While Lung is luring Dan to her apartment, a suspicious Mary visits the church and takes in the view of the city from the top of the building site in the company of John. As she sees Dan getting into a car with the mystery woman, Mary confirms his characterisation by wryly observing that he has one commandment left to break – thou shalt not kill. That the viewer will not have to wait long is suggested when concrete crumbles beneath Mary’s foot, allowing the Christ-like John to save her from her fall and to announce his intention to save others from a church compromised by his brother’s corruption. When the action resumes in Dan’s office later that afternoon, Dan’s proud defence of his corrupt building practices is intercut with his mother’s unaccompanied visit to the building site, where a portion of the south wall adjacent to a sculpture of the ten commandments collapses and kills her. If this spectacular divine judgement of Dan’s idol to corrupt greed offers a parallel to the violent overthrow of the calf, then John’s bearing of his mortally wounded mother’s body – arms splayed pathetically – is evidently intended to evoke the bearing of the dead firstborn to Pharaoh, who is, like Dan, temporarily broken by the sight. While his dying mother confesses her legalism and lack of love, Dan is reminded of his sin by the miraculous appearance of the Word (‘Thou shalt not steal’) on the sculpture of the stone tablets which has not fallen. Dan’s descent toward his doom is hastened when – desperate for cash – he visits Sally Lung’s apartment to retrieve the pearls he had given her. When Lung threatens to disclose Dan’s illegal jute trafficking, he finally breaks the ‘Red Commandment’ (so the preceding intertitle) by shooting her in cold blood. Returning to his apartment, Dan recoils from the prospect of his own leprosy in a self-evident allusion to Dathan’s belated recognition of his own seduction by the sexually dangerous Miriam. When the police arrive to arrest Dan on suspicion of murder, Mary is persuaded to hide him and help him escape before she follows him down the path of no return. Caught by brother John as she leaves him a parting token of their unrequited love, Mary seeks a second redemption and cleansing from the curse of leprosy from John, who opens the bible with her and reminds her that ‘there is only one man who can help you – a Man you have forgotten’. As John continues to read to her, the action cuts to Dan’s vain attempt to

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escape the authorities through stormy seas in his speedboat, aptly named Defiance. After the stalled boat is thrown against towering cliffs, and just before a shot of Dan’s dead body on the rocky shore, DeMille cuts to an intertitle bearing the words of Matthew 16:26: ‘For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul’ – an extradiegetical citation of the gospel which foreshadows what should be understood as the film’s brief gospel epilogue. What John reads from the gospel is clarified by the first of two intertitles from Matthew 8:2–3: ‘And behold, there came to him a leper, and worshipped him’, before DeMille cuts to a shot of a stable in which Jesus sits with his back to the camera as a woman approaches. A mid shot of the woman reaching out to Jesus is sandwiched between intertitles of her pleading request and his positive answer (Matthew 8:3) before a cinematic sleight of hand facilitates the disappearance of a stylised leprosy from the woman’s arms. Her collapse in adoration at Jesus’ feet facilitates the transition back to Mary resting at John’s feet, where he continues to read, and, as the light comes up, it becomes clear first to Mary and then to John that ‘in the LIGHT, it’s gone’, as her own skin appears clear and unblemished. In considering DeMille’s primary biblical story of the Exodus, it is worth noting the continuing interest in the biblical femme fatale, initiated in earnest after the war by Edwards’ biblical films for Fox and subsequently embraced, as we have seen, by both Curtiz and Korda in their biblical sequences of 1922. As with Curtiz’s Sarah and Korda’s Delilah, however, the sin of DeMille’s Miriam is not limited to a predatory and manipulative sexuality, but extends to idolatry – that most notorious of all biblical apostasies – and still worse to the leading of others into idolatry. Yet if in these respects DeMille’s biblical sequence is very much of its time, in other ways it harkens back to Griffith’s Intolerance. Among the biblical films inspired by Intolerance’s narrative structure, DeMille’s Ten Commandments is unique in accompanying its modern story with sequences from both the Old and New Testaments. If, as we have argued, Intolerance’s departures from biblical tradition in both Testaments were not held against him because of the overwhelming scale of spectacle Griffith mounted, this is all the more true of DeMille’s Exodus sequence. While it cannot quite equal the sheer scale of Griffith’s Babylonian story, DeMille’s Exodus far exceeds it in terms of the sustained succession and intensity of spectacles offered over the course of its one-hour running time. Indeed, to an extent unseen since the films at the turn of the century, DeMille’s Exodus sequence largely abandons the ‘telling’ of the biblical story in favour of a ‘showing’ worthy of the cinema of attractions at its most

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‘monstrative’. Thus, whereas the biblical sequences of Korda, Curtiz and even Griffith include considerably more narrative interest alongside their spectacle, DeMille’s Ten Commandments relies to a far greater extent on its modern story to supply the story and ‘tremendous love interest’ which Zukor had insisted upon (and DeMille had promised) as a means of overcoming what Zukor saw as the handicap of DeMille’s commitment to recreating an ‘Egyptian and Palestinian atmosphere’.31 Yet the modern story itself is no more a tremendous love story than it is primarily or even significantly concerned with the predatory sexuality of women. Instead, it is devoted to demonstrating that –in the words of F. C. Nelson of Lansing Michigan, winner of first prize in the Los Angeles Times’ audience contest – ‘You cannot break the Ten Commandments – they will break you.’ Here, too, perhaps, DeMille’s film shares more with Griffith’s Intolerance than has been previously recognised. For all of Moses’ deliverance of the Israelites, DeMille’s ending of the Exodus sequence with a vision of overwhelming judgement and punishment for sin reflects what Protestant theology would consider the ‘first use’ of the law, namely its punitive function, in convicting, condemning and in the end destroying the sinner, or at least any sense of righteousness.32 If Intolerance is sceptical of the Old Testament Law and especially critical of the Pharisees’ rigorist and morbid legalism, which Griffith saw as exemplary of his film’s theme, John’s challenging of his mother’s puritanical sabbatarianism, her own dying admission that she has not loved enough and John’s warning that his mother uses the cross as a whip all betray a comparable reservation regarding the Law and its vulnerability to abuse. Given MacPherson’s own Scottish ancestry, it is surely not incidental that she christens the elderly legalist mother as ‘Mrs MacTavish’ – identified in the Photoplay edition of the film based on MacPherson’s script as ‘an exemplar of Covenanter piety’. First emigrating to Ulster and then on to America in the nineteenth century, the Covenanters had brought with them from Scotland a Presbyterian theology steeped in the Calvinism transmitted by John Knox.33 That MacPherson’s understanding of such a heritage resonated with the theme of Griffith’s film is best illustrated by her characterisation of Mrs MacTavish’s religious attitude as ‘rock-bound intolerance’.34 Such a view gleans support from a reflection on the fate of DeMille’s contrived Miriam: indicted by the Law for her depravity but even more her 31 32 33 34

Telegram, Zukor to Lasky (19 April 1923), Jesse Lasky 1923 folder, DMA, BYU. See, for instance, J. Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville: WJK Press, 2008), pp. 138–9. For a wide-ranging and accessible history of the Covenanters in America, see Thomas Davis, John Calvin’s American Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2010). The Ten Commandments (1923), copyright deposit description, LOC.

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idolatry, she suffers the punishment of leprosy borrowed from the book of Numbers (12). While DeMille’s Moses brings judgement, he never grants absolution, and in the case of Miriam, the viewer is offered no assurance or indeed even suggestion that Moses can facilitate the forgiveness necessary to cleanse her of her sin and her leprosy. Contrast this with the final gospel sequence in which a woman with leprosy (rather than a man as in Matthew 8:2–3) has only to ask Jesus to cleanse her and it is done – proof that, while the law has the power to break, only the gospel of Christ has the power to heal. If the eventual refashioning of the film’s ostensive theme of law into grace allows it to transcend the inherently negative critique of Intolerance, it does so in part thanks to DeMille’s departure from Griffith’s four-part purely analogical narrative construction. After his success with the biblical epics of the 1950s, DeMille would express the view that Griffith’s narratological ambition had been the downfall of Intolerance: Intolerance unfortunately was the picture really that broke him, because he [i.e. Griffith] made a dramatic error that should never be made. In other words he told four stories under the guise of one, and consequently all four failed.35

Yet, as we have seen, DeMille’s own film includes three stories drawn largely from the same sources and periods as Griffith’s film and indeed in not dissimilar proportions.36 Such a fact can only be reconciled with DeMille’s judgement of Griffith’s failure by a recognition of how MacPherson’s script evolved the analogical structure which had already been modified in the films of Korda and Curtiz. Like Sodom und Gomorrha and Samson und Dalila, DeMille’s Ten Commandments lessens the hermenutical demands on the viewer, subordinating the biblical sequences to the modern story by means of an authorised mediator. Yet in true Protestant fashion, the mediatorial function in DeMille’s film is democratised. On the one hand, Mrs MacTavish’s puritanically legalistic rendering of the Law contributes to her son Dan’s demise and falls on Mary’s deaf ears. On the other, at the end of the film, brother John – belatedly but finally disclosed as the Baptist – uses the words of the gospel to point Mary to the truly salvific Word-madeflesh of Christ. Thus, unlike the Mary of Sodom und Gomorrha and Julia of 35 36

G. C. Pratt, ‘Forty Five Years of Picture Making: An Interview with Cecil B. DeMille’, Film History 3 (1989), 133–45 (137). Just as in Intolerance, where the modern story is the longest, with the Babylonian ‘Old Testament’ story next in running time and the Judaean story by far the most slight, so too is this pattern found in DeMille’s Ten Commandments.

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Samson und Dalila, both of whose rehabilitation arises from the cautionary tales of Old Testament Law-breakers, DeMille’s Mary is redeemed by the spectacle of graceful New Testament healing. Thanks to a heavily promoted premiere, an extensive programme of road shows throughout 1924 and 192537 and extended runs in local theatres, DeMille’s Ten Commandments scored an enormous success at the box office.38 Yet if the critical adulation accorded the Exodus sequence and the largely lukewarm reception of the film’s ‘modern story’ have been well chronicled elsewhere,39 a representative review hints at the way in which DeMille’s film resonated with at least a portion of the millions who viewed it in the years immediately following its release: It is an interesting phase not only of the motion picture industry, but of the thought of the day that this beautiful and remarkably striking sermon should have been the work of a director known throughout the amusement world for cynical brilliancy . . . ‘The Ten Commandments’ is an extraordinary spectacle and a wonderful sermon . . . If the public will not accept this lesson in the form of a drama so splendid and so vivid, then the outlook is discouraging indeed.40

While due care must be exercised in drawing conclusions based on the inevitably selective evidence furnished by the DeMille archive, among the hundreds of letters received from ‘ordinary’ viewers of the film, a remarkable number attest to the reception of The Ten Commandments in precisely such homiletic terms. For instance, a letter from Byron Hovey, an ‘assistant minister’ in Los Angeles, concludes that: ‘The religious tone and the moral lesson was compelling and the picture is one which should be seen by all the church people of the city. It was more than a picture, greater than art, it was a sermon.’ If other ministers in Los Angeles were given complimentary tickets by Grauman theatre, as Hovey evidently was, it is perhaps not surprising that their gratitude might encourage such praise, yet Hovey was not the only minister to compare the film with a sermon.41 That lay people too received the film in similarly homiletical terms is confirmed by 37

38 39 40 41

That these road-shows extended far beyond America is suggested by an inter-office communication indicating more than ten road-shows of the film in Australia with plans to mount similar efforts in the Far East, Ten Commandments correspondence, DMA, BYU. Simon Louvish, Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), pp. 224–5, calculates that the picture finally grossed $4.5 million dollars. See, for instance, Louvish Golden Calf, p 225. Higashi, American Culture, pp. 190–1. ‘The New Commandments’, Los Angeles Times (7 December 1923), ii, 4. See, for instance, among the correspondence relating to the film in the Ten Commandments correspondence (DMA, BYU) the letters from Rev. Marie Becker of Los Angeles, Arthur W. Brooks, assistant minister at St Chrysostom Chapel, New York City, and Charles Leitzell,

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this even more enthusiasic, though far from unique, endorsement from Mr A. G. Sylvester in a letter dated 18 March 1924: ‘I believe the Ten Commandments will accomplish more real and lasting influence for good in the lives of men and women than all of the sermons preached in a decade.’ That the film was not merely a sermon itself, but worth more than ten years of sermons, is itself faint praise compared to the feelings of a retired minister of twenty years, one J. Thomas Munford, of Cedar Rapids, whose letter of 19 August 1925 hints at the visual impact of the film: I have heard many sermons, but I SAW this one, and I am sure that it was the best one I have ever seen or heard. This great production has a purpose that runs through it from first to last, and I do not see how a person can witness it and not make the resolve to at least try to be a better man or woman.

That DeMille’s ‘purpose’ might not merely impress serving and retired ministers but in fact move the masses is suggested by yet another letter, from someone within the film industry, Robert T. Kane, written on 24 November 1923: The more I think of it the more I am impressed with the Ten Commandments. When I left the theatre I had a feeling of wanting to go to church and pray and the funny part is that I am going to.

By accompanying his visually spectacular reading of the sacred biblical text with an application of the truth of both Old Testament and New Testament texts in the context of the modern world, DeMille had, for some at least, managed to produce a sermonic masterpiece with the power to move real people to reform. Having grown up as the son of an Episcopal lay reader, it is hardly surprising that the spiritual and financial ‘success’ of his first cinematic sermon would eventually encourage DeMille to step into the moving picture pulpit again before the end of the silent era. If DeMille’s Ten Commandments had little to fear from Edwards’ miniExodus in The Shepherd King, which had sunk beneath the cinematic surface by early 1924, in October of that same year another altogether more impressive Exodus appeared on European screens. Undeterred by the failure of Sodom und Gomorrha/Queen of Sin in America, and perhaps encouraged by the subsequent success of DeMille’s Ten Commandments, Curtiz persuaded Kolowrat’s Sascha-Film to fund an even more lavish and expensive spectacle in a further attempt to crack the lucrative transatlantic market. The result was Die Sklavenkönigin (The Slave Queen), an adaptation minister of First Methodist Episcopal Church, Los Angeles, whose letter dated 24 May 1924 includes the following affirmation: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that I believe it would be fully as effective as any sermon any pastor would preach.’

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of L. Rider Haggard’s novel Moon of Israel, which had been published in Britain in 1918. Haggard, a writer of adventure novels – many of which were set in Africa and some in antiquity – had already been adapted for the screen courtesy of Fox, who had eventually paid the author £5,000 for plagiarising his Cleopatra in their production of the same name (1917).42 Keen to avoid the same mistake, Curtiz secured the film rights to Moon of Israel and enlisted Haggard to pen the intertitles. Subtitled ‘A Tale of the Exodus’, Haggard’s novel is set during the period of the Pharaoh known from antiquity as Seti II (nineteenth dynasty and thirteenth century bce). Ana – a fictional elaboration of the nineteenthdynasty scribe Ani, author of the eponymous papyrus of antiquity – introduces the principal characters and supplies the novel’s first-person narratorial perspective. Merenptah, the reigning Pharaoh, insists that Seti marry his half-sister Userti (historically Twoseret) as a prelude to his accession to the throne of Egypt instead of Seti’s cousin and rival Amenmeses. Seizing on both the suggestion of conspiracy and the lack of detail furnished by the historical record of New Kingdom Egypt, Haggard situates the Hebrew captivity during this period, allowing him to introduce the fictional character of Merapi, a Hebrew beauty of the tribe of Levi, who is saved from death by the princely Seti as she vainly attempts to shield her father from the abuse of the taskmasters. Some time later, Merapi is saved again by Seti, who binds her wounded foot and delivers her back to Goshen, where the Prince sees at first hand both the oppression and faith of the Hebrews. When Seti is set upon by Hebrews offended at his incursion into their ‘temple’, it is Merapi’s intervention which now saves Seti’s life but results in her exclusion from the Hebrews and her presence at the Egyptian court, where she and Seti fall in love. This turn of events, along with Seti’s unwillingness to accede to the punishment of the Hebrews, leads to his displacement in favour of Amenmeses, who presides over the oppression in earnest of the Hebrews, incurs the plagues, leads the pursuit of the Hebrews and perishes with his army in the sea. Blamed for the ‘defeat’ of Egypt and facing death, Merapi is saved by Seti again, before the latter is belatedly declared Pharaoh. Yet the death of Seti and Merapi’s (Egyptian) firstborn in the final plague, Merapi’s death and then Seti’s own disclose the novel’s basic character as one of ill-fated romance. That Haggard’s story of ancient romance might appeal to Curtiz and Kolowrat in 1924 is not surprising given the evolution of Edwards’ biblical films for Fox during the late 1910s and early 1920s. In these films, we have 42

Philip Leibfred, ‘H. Rider Haggard on the Screen’, Films in Review 46, nos. 7–8 (September 1995), 20.

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seen that the narrative focus on the biblical ‘vamp’ (e.g. Salomé) had at least partially given way to increasingly romanticised female biblical characters such as Edwards’ Queen of Sheba and, especially, Michal in The Shepherd King. Here, too, the sexually predatory and idolatrous anti-heroines of Delilah (Korda), Lot’s wife (Curtiz) and Miriam (DeMille) seen in 1922 and 1923 now give way in Curtiz’s Die Sklavenkönigin to a female character, Merapi, who despite her strength is evacuated entirely of vampish qualities. Indeed, whereas Delilah and Lot’s wife serve pagan gods, and the latter presides over the attempted burning of an angel, in Die Sklavenkönigin it is rather Merapi herself who is nearly burned by the pagan Egyptians for her Hebrew faith (interpreted by the Egyptians as witchcraft). Rather than vamp, Merapi is very much presented as a victim of the prejudices of both Egyptians and Hebrews, neither of whom can comprehend her romantic involvement with Seti.43 As in earlier treatments of Esther (Feuillade, 1910; Andréani, 1913), Merapi’s beauty, strength and involvement with a pagan potentate are displayed within a story which includes the deliverance of the Jews/ Hebrews. Like Esther, whose uncle Mordecai is an accomplice and the beneficiary of her success, so too Merapi’s uncle defends her loyalty to the Hebrews in an intertitle following her removal to the Egyptian court, insisting that she ‘is no traitor and will shield the Hebrews from Pharaoh’s revenge’. That it is necessary for her uncle to defend her, however, reflects the extent to which the complexity of Merapi’s characterisation in both Haggard’s novel and Curtiz’s film eclipses that of Esther in the biblical narrative. Like Esther, Merapi is loved and admired by her pagan prince; unlike the biblical and cinematic incarnations of Esther, however, Haggard’s Hebrew Merapi is clearly equally enamoured with the Egyptian Seti. That a Jewish heroine might have feelings for a pagan prince finds little support in the Scriptures, but the presence of precisely such a complication in Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914) offers an initial clue that the influence of Griffith on Curtiz’s film is far greater than has been previously acknowledged. In Aldrich’s play and Griffith’s film, Judith’s feelings for Holofernes are sufficiently strong that a visual reminder of the suffering he has inflicted on the Bethulians is required to persuade Judith to eventually kill the pagan King. In Haggard’s novel and Curtiz’s film, however, the still more modern 43

Ines Steiner, ‘Das “Alte Ägypten” als vertrautes Fremdbild der Moderne in Die Sklavenkönigin’, in Armin Loacker and Ines Steiner (eds.), Imaginierte Antike: Österreichische Monumental-Stummfilme (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002), pp. 332–3, rightly contrasts the characterisation of Merapi as a strong woman with the femmes fatales of Delilah and Lot’s daughter.

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Hebrew Merapi is thoroughly compromised by the depth of her romantic attachment to the Egyptian Prince Seti. Indeed, as will be made clear below, in other respects, the characterisation of the female roles and the narrative development of Haggard’s novel and Curtiz’s film reflect not Griffith’s Judith, but rather Intolerance in its various aspects. That Griffith’s Babylonian story in particular has exercised considerable influence is suggested first by Curtiz’s emendation of Haggard’s subtitle (‘A Tale of the Exodus’) in favour of ‘A Tale of Ancient Egypt’. Just as the biblical account of the fall of Babylon becomes the pretext for Griffith’s depiction of the splendour of Babylon, so too for Curtiz, the Exodus serves as the narrative spine around which Haggard’s tale of Egypt – published the year after Intolerance reached London – is wrapped. In the case of Merapi, the similarity to Intolerance is evident first and foremost in terms of her appearance. In sharp contrast to the beautifully and/or barely clad femmes fatales of earlier biblical films, Merapi makes her initial appearance in the ‘sack-clothes’ of the Hebrew slaves and with hair cut short in the ‘modern’ style, rather than left long in the spirit of traditional Jewish ‘beauties’ of the silent cinema. In both respects, it has been observed by others that the image invoked is strikingly similar to that of the Mountain Girl in Intolerance’s Babylonian story.44 The similarities do not end there, however, for if the Mountain Girl is not Hebrew, the title given her by Griffith makes it clear that neither is she from Babylon. Arriving in Babylon, the Mountain Girl’s wildness and indeed foreignness are evident, not least in her unglamorous appearance and her flouting of conventions. It is not long, however, before she has become one of the city’s stoutest defenders, willing to kill to save it, or perhaps better, him – that is Babylon’s princely Belshazzar – who in delivering her from the marriage market earns the undying affection which will ironically lead to her death. Seti too delivers the wild and foreign Merapi from – among many other unhappy ends – a conventional match with the Hebrew Laban, earning her undying affection in turn and her willingness to, like the Mountain Girl, take up arms in defence of her prince.45 Yet, if in Merapi’s beginning she strongly resembles the Mountain Girl, in the end, she also reflects the woman whom Intolerance’s Belshazzar truly loves, the Princess Beloved. While the intertitles make it clear that the 44 45

Ibid., pp. 326–7. The Mountain Girl’s race to deliver the news of the threat to Babylon is followed by her use of the bow and arrow in its defence. Not only does Merapi warn Seti that the Hebrews will seek to kill him following his uninvited incursion into the Hebrew temple in Goshen, she also intervenes to kill the Hebrew, narrowly preventing Seti’s death.

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Princess Beloved is no less ‘foreign’ to the royal court than the Mountain Girl or Curtiz’s Merapi, the acculturation of the Princess, accomplished by means of Belshazzar’s love, is illustrated by her opulent adornment in the fashion of Babylon. That she and her God have not been accepted by the high priest of Bel-Marduk is, however, fully evident and plays a pivotal part in the downfall of her adopted culture. In a strikingly similar fashion, the integration of the ‘foreign’ Merapi into the apparatus of Egyptian royal life is signalled by the transformation of her wardrobe from sackcloth to the epitome of Egyptian elegance.46 Yet like Belshazzar’s Princess Beloved, Merapi’s own theological and cultural incompatibilities with the Egyptian priestly hierarchy also lead to her own destruction and (according to the jaundiced view of the Egyptian hierarchy) the exacting of a terrible toll on the Egyptians themselves. The consolidation of the Babylonian story’s principal female characters in the figure of Merapi also helps to make sense of the depiction of Die Sklavenkönigin’s Seti. Just as Griffith’s Belshazzar is willing and able to take up arms in a just cause (i.e. the defence of his people) so too is Seti not incapable of vigorous and indeed violent action when necessary (in defence of Merapi and other ‘innocents’). Previous allegations of Seti’s feminisation,47 however, may also be better understood in the light of Griffith’s Belshazzar, who, as we have seen, has eyes only for the Princess Beloved. Indeed, we have observed that Griffith’s Belshazzar is studiously uninterested in the orientalised spectacle of the female form, which is thus supplied primarily for the benefit of the viewer rather than him. This same trait is fully displayed in the Seti of Haggard/Curtiz, who shows no interest whatsoever in the beautiful and powerful Userti, whom his father, Merenptah, intends for him to marry. Indeed, that Seti is quite unlike his father, or Amenmeses, who is preferred to be Pharaoh, is clear from the outset of the film. Following the opening scenes of pageantry and spectacle of court entertainments, Seti’s adviser Pambasa asks whether Seti is weary, to which the latter responds: ‘Weariness is a sickness from which only cowards, children and the mad are preserved’ (author translation). While in Haggard’s novel Pambasa seeks to invigorate Seti with the promise of jugglers and dancers which would have pleased his grandfather Rameses, Seti declines even the latter: ‘They do not delight my heart who want no 46 47

For discussion of the Madonna-like appearance of the later Merapi’s wardrobe, see Steiner, ‘“Alte Ägypten”’, p. 346. The similarity observed by Steiner (ibid., p. 298) between a reclining Seti and the sculpture of the recumbent Cleopatra is illuminating, but must be considered alongside other aspects of his portrayal.

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naked women prancing here.’ In the film, the same sentiment is more economically expressed by Seti’s dismissal of the women who dance in his chamber, in favour of admitting the Scribe Ana with the promise of a story. Rather than a ‘feminisation’, the lack of interest of both Griffith’s Belshazzar and Curtiz’s Seti in the spectacle of other women reflects first and foremost the singularity of their affection for their respective love interests within the film. Moreover, while Merenptah and Amenmeses bear the mantle of Pharaonic malevolence toward the Hebrews, which will lead to their own destruction and the latter’s deliverance, Seti’s preference for story and disavowal of the spectacle supplied by Curtiz’s Egyptian court reflect the fundamentally sympathetic portrayal of him and his own sympathy for the people of Merapi, the Hebrews. If Feuillade’s L’Exode was, in 1910, the first and thus, in some sense, most daring depiction of the ‘Egyptian tragedy’ of the Exodus, Haggard’s novel and Curtiz’s film offer a fuller and still more sympathetic treatment, which we have argued shares much with Griffith’s radical rewriting of the fall of Babylon and its sympathy for the prophetically tolerant martyr Belshazzar. Whereas in Haggard’s novel this sympathy for the erstwhile enemy of the Hebrews leads to an emphasis on the destructive impact of the Exodus on Egyptian culture and nation, Curtiz’s film offers an Exodus which is more interested in its redemptive results for the Hebrews.48 That Curtiz’s sympathetic treatment of the Egyptian enemy did not lead to a de-emphasis of the Hebrews’ redemption has been plausibly attributed to the director’s own possible Jewish ancestry and to Sascha-Film’s interest in appealing to an American market which was by now more sensitive to Jewish concerns.49 Yet at least part of the explanation may be much simpler. Haggard’s novel, Moon of Israel, does not depict the Exodus and parting of the Red Sea in any detail, yet if Curtiz was to eclipse his own Sodom und Gomorrha and more particularly DeMille’s film, he could hardly afford to pass over the opportunity to film these scenes. Having spent considerable effort and money in order to do so, it is not surprising that these sequences within the film are sufficiently long to allow for the Exodus from Egypt and the parting of the sea to be displayed to best advantage. Thus if it is in these scenes that Curtiz’s sympathies with the redemptive aspects of the Exodus tradition are most evident, it is perhaps to be explained less by the director’s ideological interest than by his evident impulse to display. This impulse to display is by no means limited to the Exodus sequence (to which we will return), but is found amply illustrated throughout the 48

Ibid., pp. 271–5.

49

Ibid., pp. 295–6.

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film. Constructed in Laarberg, Curtiz’s Egyptian sets, if not quite equal in size to those of the earlier Sodom, do still offer a suitably exotic and expansive backdrop for his tale of ancient Egypt. The pageantry of the royal court and its entertainments are visible at the outset when initially disavowed by Seti and again in Amenmeses’ coronation procession and the extraordinary complexity and opulence of the costumes and accoutrements of Pharaonic high culture exceed Curtiz’s earlier efforts. If the presentation of Userti and, latterly, Merapi herself, supply the obligatory spectacle of the elaborately ornamented female form, the initial introduction of the enslaved Merapi – primitively underdressed and the object of the Egyptian taskmaster Khuaka’s lustful gaze – offers a variation on the theme. This variation, in which the display of the female form is explicitly for the pleasure and profit of men’ is most visible in the ‘marriage market’, a sequence which furnishes further evidence of the influence of Griffith’s Intolerance. The broad steps and platform at the heart of the marriage market’s mise-en-scène in Curtiz’s film might have been borrowed directly from the Long painting (A Babylonian Marriage Market) which evidently inspired Griffith, but the strongest indication of the specific influence of Intolerance lies not in the mise-en-scène, but in Curtiz’s treatment of the scene. As we have seen earlier, Belshazzar’s own interest in the Babylonian marriage market lies not in the spectacle it offers the buyers within the scene and the viewers in front of the screen, but only in the opportunity it offers him to deliver the Mountain Girl from its oppressive constraints. In the case of Die Sklavenkönigin, Seti’s own lack of interest is made even more clear by the fact that he and his scribal companion, Ana, merely pass by the scene, confirming his virtue while furnishing the viewer with clear evidence of the debauched and mercantile display of the female form associated with oriental cultures by the visual tradition. The extraordinary spectacle of destruction conjured by Curtiz two years earlier in the judgement of Sodom is reproduced on a briefer but hardly less dramatic scale in Merapi’s confrontation with the Egyptian religious establishment in the Temple of Amun. To an even greater extent than in Sodom und Gomorrha and Samson und Dalila, the object of destruction – the massive statue of Amun – is a cultic one. That this destruction is also divinely wrought further enhances the resemblance to these earlier scenes and the archetypal one of cultic destruction within the Exodus tradition, namely that of the Golden Calf. If, in its violent illustration of the Hebrew deity’s supremacy, the destruction of the Amun-idol in Die Sklavenkönigin offers a functional parallel to the DeMillean prologue’s depiction of the

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Figure 8.4 The Egyptians swallowed by the return of the Red Sea. Die Sklavenkönigin/The Moon of Israel (Sascha-Film, 1924).

golden calf episode, Curtiz’s reproduction of the Red Sea scene offers an even more lavish illustration of the same sentiment and evocation of the Exodus. The chief architect of DeMille’s version of the scene, Roy Pomeroy, accomplished the Hebrew passage through the sea and the subsequent destruction of the Egyptian army by means of the Williams process – marrying location shots of Hebrews and Egyptians streaming across the desert floor of Guadalupe with studio footage of water pouring and retreating over gelatinous walls intended to resemble the parted sea. Curtiz’s own version of the scene (Figure 8.4) was not dissimilar in technique and depended on Artur Berger’s construction of a water ditch 8 metres long and 1 metre deep into which 50 cubic metres of water were released.50 For one Austrian reviewer, at least, the effect created was striking – indeed, sufficiently so that when DeMille’s own version of the scene subsequently reached Vienna in 1925 it was found wanting: ‘we have already 50

For more details of the techniques involved see Artur Berger, ‘Elementarkatastrophen im Filmatelier’, Mein Film, 114 (1928), 7–8. For the comparison between the technical aspects of the respective scenes of DeMille and Curtiz, see Steiner, ‘“Alte Ägypten”’, pp. 258–69.

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seen the passage through the Red Sea done better in our own Viennese film’.51 Indeed, for the reviewer of Berlin’s Filmwoche, the nearly simultaneous arrival of the films invited a fuller comparison: Some scenes are directly and confusingly similar, above all in the case of the crossing of the Red Sea, whose presentation and features are at least as impressive as [DeMille’s Ten Commandments]; while the latter has essentially adhered closely to the biblical text, [this Austrian film] appeals more to the viewer’s heart by adopting as its primary theme, the love story of an Egyptian prince and a beautiful Jewess.52

While the reviewer does not specify which other scenes he found to be similar, obvious candidates include the depiction of the stream of Hebrews on their journey from Egypt to the sea as well as the initial scenes of suffering with their foregrounding of Miriam/Merapi’s attempt to save a man from the whips of the Egyptian taskmasters. One less obvious, but still noteworthy, similarity between DeMille’s Ten Commandments and Curtiz’s Die Sklavenkönigin is their belated incorporation of an allusion to the Christ narrative. If DeMille reflects Griffith’s Intolerance in concluding his film with a visual example of the triumph of the healing power of the gospel over hyperlegalist interpretations of the Law, Curtiz’s interest is rather in the Passion. Haggard’s novel specifies only that Merapi is to be burned on a ‘vast pyre of wood’, but in the film version of the scene Merapi, dressed in white, is fixed on a cross in preparation for her immolation, much like the angel of Curtiz’s Sodom und Gomorrha. Indeed, Curtiz offers a still fuller depiction of Merapi’s ‘Passion’ by prefacing her ‘crucifixion’ with an enactment of her very own Way of the Cross, which Curtiz intercuts with shots of Seti and Ana’s frantic journey to save her from this unhappy fate. Unlike the novel, where a broken Merapi is saved from the cross only to die three days later, Curtiz concludes with the reunion of the couple whose romance has animated the film. The review’s noting of the ‘biblical’ similarities between The Ten Commandments and Die Sklavenkönigin invites a closer consideration of the contrast drawn between the literalism of the former and the ‘love story’ of the latter. If, as we have seen, DeMille’s interest in the biblical traditions of the Exodus lies almost exclusively in the spectacle which it allows him to mount in his biblical prologue, this is hardly less true of Curtiz’s Die 51

52

Quoted from Paimann’s Filmlisten (1925), as cited by Barbara Pluch, ‘Der österrichische Monumentalstummfilm: Ein Beitrag zur Filmgeschichte der zwanziger Jahre’, Ph.D. dissertation, Vienna, 1989, p. 83 (author translation). Review in Die Filmwoche (5 November 1924) (author translation).

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Figure 8.5 Seti and Merapi. Die Sklavenkönigin/The Moon of Israel (Sascha-Film, 1924).

Sklavenkönigin. As in The Ten Commandments, Curtiz passes over the story of Moses’ early years, his killing of the Hebrew, his sojourn in the wilderness, divine calling and prolonged plaguing of Pharaoh in favour of a focus on the archetypal spectacle of the Exodus. True to its subtitle, the tale told by Die Sklavenkönigin is that of Egypt, but if this story is ancient in its miseen-scène, it is hardly less modern in sentiment than DeMille’s own modern story. Despite their respective settings in ancient Egypt and modern San Francisco, the tales told by DeMille and Curtiz are both fundamentally love stories and cautionary tales. The terrible toll taken upon Curtiz’s ancient Egypt dramatically illustrates the dangers of crossing the Hebrew God, while the destruction of Dan and his corrupt cathedral disclose DeMille’s equally didactic insistence on the dire consequences of disregarding the Hebrew Law. Yet in both ancient Egypt and modern San Francisco romance triumphs as both Merapi and Mary are saved yet again by Seti and John, the righteous men who love and are loved by them (Figure 8.5). Thus whatever the superficial differences between DeMille’s Ten Commandments and Curtiz’s Die Sklavenkönigin, their fundamental

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similarity may be seen in their shared commitment to ‘show’ the ancient spectacle of the Bible and at the same time to ‘tell’ a story which is distinctly modern in sentiment. If Curtiz’s subordinating of the biblical sequence to the modern story of Sodom und Gomorrha had anticipated – and in all likelihood influenced – DeMille’s own approach in the Ten Commandments, the Hungarian director’s adapting of Haggard’s novel the following year reflects his subsequent calculation that it was rather the integration of modern sentiment and story alongside and within the structure of ancient biblical spectacle which offered the more promising prospects for the development of the biblical film. The completion and European release of Die Sklavenkönigin in October 1924 – nearly a year after the American premiere of DeMille’s Ten Commandments – offered ample evidence of the courage of Curtiz’s convictions and its initial reception suggests that his approach was not without appeal.53 Following its premiere in London in January 1925 (now bearing the English title The Moon of Israel), an American correspondent had the temerity to suggest that: ‘In direction and production, MOON OF ISRAEL is strong enough to enter into competition with THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, anywhere in the world, even in the United States.’54 That the correspondent was not alone in this judgement is suggested by the purchase of the film’s American and Canadian distribution rights shortly thereafter by Famous Players-Lasky (a.k.a. Paramount) – not in order to facilitate its competition with DeMille’s still highly profitable Ten Commandments, but almost certainly to pre-empt it.55 While Zukor’s interest in the film was sufficient for it to be included in an April 1926 notice of Paramount’s coming attractions,56 the American rights were subsequently sold to FBO Pictures Corporation, a company with a track record of distributing foreign productions in America. By the time The Moon of Israel received its premiere New York’s Roxy Theatre on 25 June 1927, DeMille’s film had long since racked up the vast majority of its eventual box-office takings. That Curtiz’s Moon of Israel might have eroded that film’s profitability if allowed to compete directly with it is suggested by 53

54 55 56

For an excellent survey of the American reception of the Austrian historical epics of the early 1920s, see J.-C. Horak, ‘Österreichische Monumentalfilme in Amerika’, in Armin Loacker and Ines Steiner (eds.), Imaginierte Antike: Österreichische Monumentalstummfilm (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002), pp. 63–76. Review, newspaper clipping, possibly Chicago Tribune (4 February 1925), Moon of Israel file (AMPAS). The purchase of the rights by Paramount/Famous-Players was noted in the Los Angeles Times (25 March 1925), A9 and in the pages of MPW (2 May 1925), 70. MPW (24 April 1926).

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the film’s favourable comparisons with The Ten Commandments when it was finally seen on American screens. In addition to the inevitable noting of the similarity of the respective Red Sea scenes,57 the reviewer of the Boston Globe noted the superiority of Curtiz’s handling of the massed crowd scenes: Particularly fine are the so-called ‘mob scenes’ where thousands of extras raise their hand in praise of God, or shrink from the dread power of the Egyptian rulers. Practically every spectacle-film from abroad excels in these mob scenes, which appear to be vaster and more extensive than most of the similar scenes made in Hollywood. At any rate, these scenes are almost unforgetable [sic] in their magnificence and are well worth seeing.

The close association of the spectacle of the massed crowds with the biblical film may also be seen in the frequent noting of total cast size for Curtiz’s film, the estimates of which in the American press range from 25,000 to 50,000.58 But if the scale of Curtiz’s spectacle was favourably compared with American productions such as DeMille’s Ten Commandments, so too was his abandonment of the analogical ancient/modern structure: This show has many points of similarity with the DeMille production of ‘The Ten Commandments’ including the Red Sea sequence but it seems that ‘Moon of Israel’ is from a dramatic viewpoint a better show, at least the continuity is smoother, perhaps because there is no modern story attached to this version.59

With Curtiz’s biblical spectacle judged to be the equal of DeMille’s and his narrative integration of modern sentiment praised as an improvement over DeMille’s unremarkable ‘modern story’, FBO and the director himself may well have had high hopes for a healthy return on their substantial investment. That The Moon of Israel failed to replicate the box-office success of DeMille’s Ten Commandments, however, is hardly surprising. Having relentlessly roadshown DeMille’s Ten Commandments and then put it on general release in local theatres across America, Paramount had effectively ensured that, whatever The Moon of Israel’s virtues, it was eventually released by FBO in 1927 into a market suffering from an advanced case of Exodus exhaustion. While Zukor’s delaying tactics thus meant that The Moon of Israel was recognised less widely and more belatedly than Curtiz might have hoped, 57 58 59

See, for instance, the reviews found in the Boston Globe (9 August 1927), 8, and the Washington Post (5 December 1927), 22. For the lower and higher figure see, respectively, Jewish Advocate (4 August 1927), 2, and Baltimore Afro-American (7 January 1928), 7. Washington Post (28 November 1927), 16.

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the film did secure its director’s prospects in America, thanks to a private viewing in the Paramount vaults the year before by Frank and Harry Warner. With Harry having already met Curtiz in Paris, the Warner Brothers were so impressed with their viewing of The Moon of Israel that they offered Curtiz a contract in March of 1926 to come to Hollywood to work for them – which he duly accepted, arriving in California via New York later that summer.60 Given that it was Curtiz’s biblical spectacle which persuaded Warner Brothers of his talent, there is a ring of truth to the director’s own subsequent suggestion that he was lured to California with the promise that another biblical spectacle, Noah’s Ark, might be his first Hollywood picture. Nevertheless, Curtiz’s immediate assignment to direct The Third Degree instead is consistent with Warner Brothers’ reluctance to invest in big-budget spectacles in 1926–7. Indeed, three more films of both modest budget and limited ambition would follow from Curtiz before the studios’ mounting profits – including those produced by the part-talkie The Jazz Singer (1927) – made it possible for him to demonstrate in Noah’s Ark the talent for which he had become known in Europe. By the time he did so, however, DeMille had once again stolen a march on the newcomer, releasing The Kings of Kings – a film which was not only DeMille’s final biblical effort of the silent era, but the cinema’s last silent version of the life of Christ. 60

For detailed discussion of Curtiz’s transition from Europe to Hollywood, see Robertson, Casablanca Man, p. 12.

chapter 9

‘The end of these wonders?’: the triumph of spectacle

Despite the continuing box-office success of The Ten Commandments at the end of 1924, Zukor’s patience with what he perceived to be DeMille’s profligacy was also at an end, and early in the New Year DeMille’s contract was terminated. By February a new company, Cinema Corporation of America (a subsidiary of the Producers Distributing Company), had been formed which would allow DeMille and Jeremiah Milbank, an investment banker, philanthropist and devout Christian, to produce pictures under the banner of the director’s own Cecil B. DeMille Pictures Inc.1 Like Curtiz, DeMille’s new situation had been secured, according to the director himself, by promises of a biblical picture, apparently based on the life of Christ, but, also like Curtiz, DeMille would be made to wait for his chance.2 Other pictures followed instead, including Road to Yesterday, with its singularly impressive head-on train collision, but little else which resonated with the viewers – so few of whom turned out that for the first time a DeMille film made a loss.3 Following the far more successful The Volga Boatman, DeMille’s opportunity to turn to the Bible again arose. In locating a subject, DeMille returned to the idea of the audience competition which had launched The Ten Commandments (1923). Of the more than 35,000 proposals, 14 per cent were biblical, and of these, 157 were reported to have favoured the subject of the Flood, which was subsequently endorsed by DeMille in April of 1926. Yet by the following month DeMille’s Deluge was dead thanks to the discovery that Warner Brothers’ plans for Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark had already been filed with the Hays Office.4 Undeterred by the poetic justice of Curtiz now pre-empting his own plans, DeMille turned his attention from the Old Testament to the New and the single most filmed biblical subject of the silent period, the life of Christ. 1 2

Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010) pp. 212–13. Louvish, Golden Calf, p. 243. 3 Ibid., pp. 244–7. 4 Ibid., pp. 255–6.

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The subject and title of ‘King of Kings’ were suggested in studio writer Denison Clift’s memo to DeMille dated 26 May 1926,5 but the basic idea had already been mooted in a letter to DeMille from a viewer of The Ten Commandments, dated 29 December 1923. While the bulk of the letter is given over to praise of The Ten Commandments and its director, it concludes with: ‘You should have at least one more vision of The Greatest picture yet to be produced. The Resurrection. Modernized. Think it over.’6 It is of course entirely likely that the admirer’s suggestion was itself prompted, at least in part, by The Ten Commandments’ inclusion of the scene of Jesus’ healing of the leprous woman – a scene which establishes DeMille and MacPherson’s interest in the cinematic depiction of the Christ as early as 1923. Indeed, this early evidence enhances the credibility of DeMille’s own claim that Jeremiah Milbank’s financial backing was secured by DeMille’s aspiration to ‘make a film on the life of Christ’.7 That DeMille did ‘think over’ in what ways his Jesus might be modernised is suggested by the recollections of D. A. Lord, the Catholic priest recruited among others by DeMille to advise on his film: The two-part story of this film success [i.e. The Ten Commandments] led Mr. De Mille to plot a similar two-part story for The King of Kings. The first part would be the story of Christ; the second, the story of a modern man trying to live like Christ. But they had already discovered by the time I arrived that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were deceptively slim volumes. Even by the most careful picking and choosing of incidents they could never conceivably complete the story of Christ in less than a hundred thousand feet of film.8

With The Ten Commandments continuing its extraordinary performance at the box office, DeMille might indeed have been forgiven for commissioning Macpherson to create another modern analogue to the biblical narrative. That he did not may suggest, as Lord indicates, that a modern story could not be accommodated alongside the epic scale of DeMille’s biblical ambitions, but it may also indicate that DeMille was aware that The Ten Commandments’ success was not in fact due to the modern story, but largely in spite of it – a conclusion seemingly confirmed, as we have seen, by the warm reception eventually accorded Curtiz’s abandoning of the modern story in The Moon of Israel. Shooting of the Galilean scenes of The King of Kings on Catalina Island began in late August 1926, but by November the spiralling cost of DeMille’s 5 7 8

Box 261, DMA, BYU. 6 Ibid. Despite Louvish, Golden Calf, p. 243, doubting DeMille’s memory of the incident. D. A. Lord, Played by Ear: The Autobiography of Daniel A. Lord, SJ (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956), p. 280.

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biblical ambitions and his dwindling funds once again threatened to derail the production altogether. When the salvation of a much-needed injection of capital appeared on the horizon in the shape of Pathé, DeMille, in a telegram sent on 8 November, made no attempt to hide his disdain for the once great firm, which was still rich in cash, but much reduced in caché, not least in America: ‘I cannot see that Pathé would bring anything of value to the merger excepting a name which has stood for cheap pictures and seven hundred thousand cash.’9 It is unclear whether anyone at the time appreciated the irony that DeMille’s own life of Christ and the final such film of the silent era would only be completed thanks to the involvement of Pathé, the French firm which had, more than any other, become associated with cinematic lives of Christ from the advent of the cinema. Indeed, as we will see, the similarities between DeMille’s film and Pathé’s much earlier efforts would not end there. As 1926 ended, DeMille was still shooting, but with far more film than he could use, significant pruning was required over the early months of 1927 in order to prepare the film for its respective premieres in Los Angeles in April and New York in May. Given the increasing prominence of love stories in the biblical film in the 1920s – whether interpolated into the ancient biblical sequence or set alongside it in a ‘modern story’ – it is hardly surprising that MacPherson’s original script called for a romantic storyline involving Judas and Mary Magdalene. Judas had continued to fascinate makers of biblical films since Lavedan’s original screen play for the Film d’Art production Le Baiser de Judas (1908) with its radically expanded portrait of the erstwhile disciple. While the notion that Judas’ motivation for his betrayal of Jesus might be his love for Magdalene had already been explored in Paul Heyse’s German Maria von Magdala (1903),10 DeMille likely derived his inspiration from a later film, Mary Magdalene (Kennedy Features, 1914), which may well also have inspired Febo Mari’s Giuda (1919).11 Footage of MacPherson’s Judas–Magdalene storyline appears to have originally amounted to some 2,500 feet; its eventual and dramatic reduction is described by Father Lord with his usual panache: We sat together looking at the twenty-five hundred feet of the Judas-Magdalene sequence already shot. It was De Mille at his most De Mille-ish. A Roman banquet with roistering drinkers, dancing girls, ballets, animals on the prowl, zebras harnessed to a chariot, and a Mary Magdalene, played by the beautiful but soon-to-disappear Jacqueline Logan, who combined the charms of 9 10 11

For discussion of the merger and formation of PDC-Pathé including the views of DeMille seen in his telegrams, see Eyman, Empire, pp. 238–43. See I. Maisch, Mary Madalene: The Image of a Woman through the Centuries (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1998) pp. 120–3. Dumont, L’Antiquité, p. 394.

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The Bible on Silent Film generations of females of the fatal stripe. I winced . . . We were sitting watching rushes one evening, when Mr. De Mille leaned over and touched my hand. ‘He is great, isn’t He?’ he said. ‘Warner?’ I asked, pretending not to understand that he had capitalized the pronoun. ‘Jesus,’ he replied. ‘He is great.’ There was a long pause, and then he spoke very quietly. ‘I doubt if we shall need the story of Mary Magdalene and Judas.’ I grinned at him through the dim light of the projector. ‘That is the wisest decision you have made,’ I answered . . . The Judas-Mary Magdalene story was trimmed down to a scant two hundred and fifty feet, and Christ was the hero who needed no fiction, no love story beyond His own historic love for mankind, no support by secondary personalities who, in His presence, faded to unimpressive or acted-upon shadows.12

However the decision was finally taken to dramatically diminish the romantic storyline of Judas and Mary Magdalene, the film itself does bear witness to this curtailing of the romantic interest. The opening scenes of the film largely answer to Lord’s description of Magdalene the courtesan, but we will see that this reflects the film’s wider commitment to spectacle – in this case, the spectacle of the dangerously and decadently sexual woman. While the Magdalene’s first encounter with Jesus in the film is still prompted by her jealousy of Judas’ devotion to Christ, the absence of the Judas–Magdalene affair itself is testimony to the footage that was dropped. Indeed, the Magdalene’s immediate conversion to Christ allows DeMille to fall back on more conventional characterisations of Judas as motivated by frustration with Jesus’ resistance to worldly kingship and, in the end, as in the biblical text, simple greed. While DeMille’s abandonment of the Judas–Magadalene love story during the film’s editing undoubtedly spared the blushes of his more conservative viewers when the film premiered, still further trimming was required as the film began to be roadshown, thanks to the ire it had aroused within the Jewish community. Rabbi J. M. Alkow of California had been enlisted to advise during the production, and DeMille, in his initial reading of the script with cast and crew, had emphasised that ‘it was not really a matter of the Jew having persecuted Jesus, it was Rome’.13 Indeed, DeMille might have been forgiven for thinking that his film would escape Jewish censure altogether when, shortly after the New York premiere, he received a telegram from Rabbi Edgar Magnin, a member of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-defamation League, congratulating him on a picture which Magnin believed would ‘exercise a spiritual and wholesome effect upon all who will have the privilege of witnessing it’.14 By September, however, Magnin’s tune had changed dramatically. 12 14

Lord, Played by Ear, pp. 281–283 13 Transcript, meeting (23 August 1926), Box 282, DMA, BYU. Telegram, Magnin to DeMille (24 April 1927), Box 282, DMA, BYU.

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Attempting in another telegram to persuade DeMille to moderate his depiction of Caiaphas’ part in the crucifixion, Magnin suggests that it would be ‘both in your interest and in the cause of the Jews of the world to strike out the words “Crucify him” [in the mouth of Caiaphas] entirely’.15 Magnin’s dramatic U-turn reflects the opposition which had steadily mounted in some Jewish circles since the film’s premiere. Of course, the casting of the Jewish father and son, Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut, as Caiaphas and Judas had not helped. Moreover, the depiction of Caiaphas as primarily responsible for the death of Jesus had caused sufficient consternation to prompt a committee – which included various rabbis and Boris Bogan, president of the B’nai B’rith – to suggest changes.16 By late December, following further pressure, DeMille conceded to several changes and even the elimination of certain elements in the prints used in the roadshows.17 In addition to substantial changes to the Pilate scene, and the toning-down of details in the scenes of the scourging and crucifixion, various titles were modified, including the one which introduced Caiaphas. While in the original title Caiaphas is introduced as one ‘who cared more for Revenue than for Religion – and saw in Jesus a menace to his rich profits from the Temple’, in the later title Caiaphas is instead ‘an appointee of the Roman government, and arch-enemy of Jesus. Upon him rests the responsibility for the world’s supreme tragedy.’18 It is hardly surprising that dissatisfaction lingered in some quarters within the Jewish community even after such changes were made, for if the modified title no longer trades on the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew, and appears to subordinate Caiaphas to a higher authority, it nevertheless retains the notion of the Chief Priest’s inveterate opposition to Jesus and even emphasises both his sole responsibility and the scale of his sin. Indeed, such modifications do little to disrupt the general tenor of DeMille’s depiction, whose original intent can be discerned by considering the 155-minute print which was seen at the premiere, prior to the changes which were forced upon it, first in response to objections and then eventually due to the need to reduce its overall length for the film’s general theatrical release. In the sequence where Caiaphas and his colleagues gather to plot Jesus’ downfall, the venality of the Jewish elite – expunged from the intertitle – is 15 16 17

18

Ibid. For extended accounts of the Jewish reception of the film and DeMille’s reaction, see Eyman, Empire, pp. 244–8. See Richard Maltby, ‘The King of Kings and the Czar of all the Rushes: The Propriety of the Christ Story’, in M. Bernstein (ed.), Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 80–2. See Eyman, Empire, p. 248.

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nevertheless emphasised by the Chief Priest’s table, filled with coins. While the episode in which Jesus escapes a trap with the famous words ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25) had never appeared in previous cinematic lives of Christ, it offered DeMille the perfect means to foreground the plotting of the Chief Priest and his confederates, the Pharisee and the Scribe (Mark 11:27 and 12:12), which DeMille does by offering three separate shots of the Chief Priest and his colleagues laughing evilly. Later in the film, an intertitle announces: ‘Then came Jesus to Jerusalem – and the High Priest was filled with madness and pondered what he might do to Him (Luke 6:11).’ While Luke mentions only the ‘Pharisees and the teachers of the law’, this introduces another scene of plotting by the Chief Priest facilitated by the arrival of the ‘woman taken in adultery’, which is seized upon by DeMille’s Chief Priest as another means of entrapping Jesus. While John 8 mentions entrapment (v. 6), DeMille again replaces the ‘Pharisees and the teachers of the law’ (v. 3) with the Chief Priest and elaborates the scenario by which the trap is laid. Recalling that Griffith was the first to include this episode in his Judaean story invites comparison with DeMille’s version. As in Griffith’s scene, those who prepare to stone the woman in DeMille’s version are not merely the undifferentiated Jewish mob. In Griffith’s case it is two Pharisees who take centre stage, while in DeMille’s scene it is the Pharisee and the Scribe (as minions of the Chief Priest) who take the lead. That in both versions the respective Pharisees stand longest in judgement on the woman confirms their vilification by exploiting the gospel’s implication that the youngest and most judgemental are the last to leave the scene (8:9). Yet DeMille’s version goes still further by including a shot of another of the Chief Priest’s colleagues, at the beginning of the scene, swapping stones with a neighbour having found the latter’s stone to be heavier and presumably capable of inflicting more damage. Such a narrative touch serves to confirm the DeMillean caricature of the Jewish elite who will eventually demand Jesus’ execution. Confirmation of the influence of Griffith’s Judaean story is supplied when DeMille’s Pharisee declares: ‘God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are!’ While the title’s citation of Luke 18:11 acknowledges that this line is drawn from outside the episode of the woman taken in adultery (John 8), there can be little doubt that its inclusion here was inspired by its only other appearance in a cinematic life of Christ in the silent era, namely, Griffith’s Judaean story, where it too serves as a means of vilifying a Pharisee. The cataloguing of DeMille’s demonisation of Caiaphas and the Jewish elite has been undertaken elsewhere and finds parallels in the German

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productions of the 1920s, Der Galiläer and I.N.R.I.19 Yet, given the demonstrable parallels between DeMille’s and Griffith’s depictions of the Jewish opponents of Jesus, it is worth beginning with a brief consideration of the relationship between the two films. Like Griffith’s Judaean story (but few other films in the silent era), DeMille’s The King of Kings commences not with the birth of Jesus, but rather his ministry. As we have seen earlier, even what remains of Griffith’s ‘life’ of Christ reflects his interest in depicting Christ as both a champion of tolerance (in, for instance, the Wedding of Cana) and a victim of the intolerance of the Pharisaic and broader Jewish populace of his time. In DeMille’s much more substantial treatment of the life and death of Christ, the Jewish opposition to Jesus appears initially to be more carefully circumscribed. Thus when Jesus purges the temple of traders, Caiaphas’s intervention is motivated by the profit he gleans from the corrupt trade. When Jesus promises to rebuild the temple in three days, it is Caiaphas who laughs contemptuously, and when the masses praise Jesus in the temple, it is Caiaphas who looks away in disgust. In contrast to Griffith, whose primary concern is to illustrate his theme of intolerance, DeMille’s enhancement of Caiaphas as foil to Jesus reflects his need to extract every ounce of dramatic material from the gospel narrative itself especially in light of his abandonment of subsidiary storylines and indeed a parallel modern story. Construed in terms of the moral polarisation of melodrama: the darker Caiaphas is painted, the lighter and brighter Jesus will appear. Yet, in the end, DeMille cannot or will not entirely limit the vilification of the Jewish opposition to Caiaphas alone. While it is Caiaphas who orders the bribery of a mob to agitate for Jesus’ crucifixion, and while one man insists, ‘Ye cannot bribe me a Jew to cry for the blood of an innocent brother,’ the scramble for coins among his colleagues suggests that the vast majority are more than happy to be bought. A subsequent shot on the Way of the Cross confirms this by picturing a man casually fingering his coin in response to a woman’s questioning of what Jesus had done wrong. While it is Caiaphas who first cries, ‘Crucify him,’ these words – which eventually offended Magnin – are also placed by DeMille in the mouths of others by means of a repetition of a title bearing John 19:6. Moreover, while DeMille’s Caiaphas seeks to assume sole responsibility for ‘the world’s supreme tragedy’ with the prayer ‘Lord God Jehovah, visit not thy wrath on Thy people Israel – I alone am guilty!’ the wider sequence suggests otherwise. That he is not alone in his 19

A. Reinhartz, ‘Caiaphas on Camera’, in D. Shepherd (ed.), Images of the Word: Hollywood’s Bible and Beyond (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), pp. 131–48.

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guilt is thus proven by the toll taken on the wider populace when the reference to an earthquake in Matthew 27:51 is transformed by DeMille, as we will see, into a sky-splitting, earth-renting scene of divine destruction. Given Griffith’s own negative portrayal of the Hebrew/Jewish tradition in Intolerance and our discovery of a not dissimilar sentiment in DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923), it is small wonder that DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) prompted a Jewish backlash the likes of which had not been seen since Griffith’s Judaean Story. Nor is it a surprise that DeMille’s film prompted the following telegram from Griffith himself: I want to congratulate you on your marvelous achievement in producing The King of Kings. It is not only an exquisitely beautiful production but the value to the motion picture industry on the whole is so enormous that I think it is impossible to calculate.20

If the narrative development of DeMille’s ‘beautiful production’ depends in some measure on the persistent desperation of Judas and the ugliness of Caiaphas and the other Jewish leaders in their interaction with Jesus throughout the film, other characters fare much better and appear very nearly as often. Foremost among the latter is the character of Mark, depicted by DeMille as a young boy and often as a spectator. Introduced as ‘Young Mark . . . healed by the Great Physician; and destined to be one of the FOUR to write the immortal Gospels’, the boy bears witness to Jesus’ power before both the enquiring crowd and the Pharisee, who asserts that Jesus is not from God. Initially depicted as a carefree and even mischievous boy, DeMille’s Mark offers to help a blind girl find Jesus so that she may see, which she soon does. Mark joins others in watching as Jesus escapes the Pharisees’ efforts to entrap him on the subject of Roman tax, and then Mark resumes his evangelist work by encouraging the children (who are not to be hindered) to come and see Jesus as well. When Jesus raises Lazarus, Mark is there watching the miracle unfold, coming to the side of Jesus, who in turn puts his arm around him as the shot fades to black. Protected initially from the spectacle of the woman taken in adultery, Mark struggles on tiptoe to see, but he is again at the front of the crowd who sing Jesus’ praises in the temple and he also fights against the party which comes to seize Jesus in Gethsemane. As Jesus stumbles under the weight of the cross, it is DeMille’s Mark who makes the initial effort to help him and then through his tears persuades Simon to shoulder the burden by insisting in an intertitle that ‘If I was as big a man as thou art, I would carry his cross for Him!’ When Jesus 20

Cited in Eyman, Empire, p. 243.

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appears to his disciples following the resurrection, it is Mark who bursts through the door to see, and then, when Jesus commissions Peter to ‘feed my lambs’, it is the young Mark who rushes to Jesus and embraces him. Finally, as Jesus bids farewell to his followers, DeMille includes a shot of Mark gazing at Jesus full of reverent love. The enhancing of the character of the young Mark offers a further illustration of DeMille’s comparatively restrained narrative elaboration of the gospel. Rather than developing an alternate storyline for the young Mark, DeMille exploits the absence of Mark within the gospels in order to use the character to add narrative detail – though almost always within and rarely, if ever, contradicting, the structure of the gospel accounts. That Mark is primarily constructed as spectator or onlooker hints at DeMille’s interest in affording the viewer a life of Christ of unprecedented spectacle – an interest confirmed when his film is compared with, for instance, Robert Wiene’s I.N.R.I., one of the few major cinematic lives of Christ to appear in the 1920s prior to DeMille’s film. Among the most enduring legacies bequeathed to the biblical film by European historical and biblical films was the spectacle of massed and often carefully choreographed crowd scenes. In Wiene’s I.N.R.I. this is best exemplified in the extreme long shots of the Sermon on the Mount, in which the crowd covers the entire mountain and, at the Sermon’s conclusion, surges toward Jesus at the top of the mount. Wiene also gathers large crowds on the slopes of Golgotha, but even this scene cannot compete with his depiction of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Cutting regularly from long shot to extreme long shot, Wiene captures the streaming mass of people waving palm fronds as it flows through the city gates and into the deep space of the massive set. DeMille’s largest crowd scenes are also associated with the celebration and adoration of Jesus in Jerusalem (and later his vilification), yet DeMille’s shots of the former are not so long, and are intercut with closer shots of individual adulation from the crowd. That the crowd’s celebration of Jesus takes place in the temple rather than during Jesus’ ‘Entry into Jerusalem’ is due to DeMille’s omission of this latter scene altogether – a decision arising from the director’s conviction that in this instance Jesus ‘did something we cannot show on the screen, the picture of [a] heroic conqueror entering a city on a donkey’.21 This indication that DeMille had thought long and hard about the expression of display within the film is confirmed by the ways in which The King of Kings broke new ground in integrating innovative species of spectacle within the Jesus film. 21

Transcript, meeting (23 August 1926), Box 282, DMA, BYU.

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Indeed, DeMille’s efforts in this direction are already visible in the opening sequence set at the villa of the courtesan Magdalene – not least in the use of vivid two-strip Technicolor, which appears elsewhere only at the end of the film: the pink sea of female flesh including Logan’s Magdalene (complete with bejewelled brassiere) and other women and men in various states of undress are punctuated by the deeper red tones of the Magdalene’s cape, which hint at the debauched nature of the revel as it unfolds. While DeMille’s usual predilections are manifest in the effete men who populate the hall, his debt to Griffith (and before him Pastrone) is most visible in the equally colourful animals, including the curious monkey and, most of all, the requisite leopard, which Magdalene summons to nuzzle in an act of feline suggestiveness (see back cover). Clearly DeMille was not the first biblical filmmaker to display the spectacle of the sexualised woman. Rather, his innovation lies in his insistence on incorporating it into a cinematic version of the life of Christ. By contrast, even some of the earliest films of Christ had included the attraction of live animals, primarily in relation to the nativity. The Exodus from Egypt in The Ten Commandments had demonstrated DeMille’s facility in this respect, and in The King of Kings he does not disappoint. Deprived of the opportunity to display animals associated with the nativity, DeMille makes up for it by providing the exotic creatures of the courtesan (including a team of zebras to pull her chariot). Griffith’s earlier use of doves to symbolise the innocence of both Jesus – in the Judaean story’s scene of the Wedding at Cana – and the Christ-like Belshazzar in the Babylonian story is the most likely explanation for the proliferation of doves in The King of Kings. Not only does a dove appear in the workshop where Jesus finds his father making crosses, one also appears in the upper room following the conclusion of the sharing of the bread and wine, as Jesus prepares himself and his disciples for his death. Doves then feature prominently again in the resurrection sequence, where DeMille includes shots of them on the branches outside the tomb. Confirmation of the significance of the doves for DeMille is supplied in the scene of Jesus driving the money-lenders out of the Temple, where a man insists in an intertitle: ‘I buy this dove for sacrifice and thou cheatest me . . .’ Quite apart from illustrating the corruption of Caiaphas’ temple, the intertitle suggests a strong association of the dove with the sacrificial act of Christ on the cross. Christ’s release of the doves in a flurry of wings is but a part of DeMille’s depiction of the exodus of animals precipitated by Christ’s cleansing of the temple and its courts: cattle and sheep flow out of the temple in great herds and flocks, and indeed DeMille even offers the viewer a glimpse of those who have been left behind, skinned and hung, as if in an abattoir.

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If DeMille willingly embraces the opportunity to depict the violence of the Passion itself as earlier filmmakers including Wiene do, The King of Kings goes still further, seizing upon the taking of Jesus in the garden to mount a pitched battle between Jesus’ followers and his would-be captors, shot first at extreme long shot to capture the scale of the battle and then at closer range to demonstrate its intensity. Biblical films had exploited the spectacle of mass battle scenes already before 1910, yet again DeMille is the first to incorporate an extended depiction of such a scene within a film of the life of Christ. Far more extended, and no less unique, however, is DeMille’s portrayal of the violence which follows Christ’s death on the cross. We have seen already that in the 1920s and beginning especially with Curtiz’s Sodom und Gomorrha, the depiction of human violence against others in the biblical film began to be accompanied by portrayals of cataclysmic destruction of the natural and human environment. Having made much of the divine judgement of the Israelites in the aftermath of the golden calf episode in his Ten Commandments, DeMille, again for the first time in a Christ film, finds an opportunity to offer a similar species of spectacle in The King of Kings. Following an intertitle noting that darkness was upon the land from the sixth to the ninth hour, the scene at Golgotha becomes increasingly dark and wind-blown, causing fear among the people assembled. This itself is without precedent in the depiction of the crucifixion in the silent era, but merely introduces still more innovations. The first of several shots of lightning appear, while Caiaphas’ hat is blown off as he and the other Jewish leaders attempt to calm the crowd.22 Following the actual death of Jesus, the associated intertitle (‘It is finished . . .’) and further shots of lightning, the people begin to flee in the now gale-force winds (Figure 9.1). Still more lightning is followed by a shot of Judas hanging and the intertitle: ‘And the earth quaked and the rocks were rent . . .’ (Matthew 27:51), which in turn introduces spectacular scenes of the opening of massive crevasses into which the rock from which the Scribe clings and the tree from which Judas hangs tumble precipitously. The soldier’s declaration that ‘Truly this MAN was the son of God . . .’ is followed by a sequence in which Caiaphas, having reached the temple, prays for relief from the wrath of God – which is, of course, one interpretation of Matthew 27:51. If further lightning striking the veil and its rending in two appears to suggest that Caiaphas’ prayer has not been heard, or at least 22

The King of Kings (1927) marked the major film debut of Howard Anderson Sr, the special effects artist who had first worked with Thomas Ince as early as 1918 and went on to found the firm in which his son and grandson would continue his work throughout the twentieth century.

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Figure 9.1 Cataclysm at the crucifixion. The King of Kings (Pathé Exchange, 1927).

has been heard too late to save those who have been destroyed in the earthquake, Mary’s prayer, immediately following, ‘O God, give us back the Light’, appears to be more effective and allows DeMille one final spectacle, not suggested in the biblical narrative: the clouds break, and a shaft of light illuminates only the cross of Christ. As in The Ten Commandments, where darkness, howling wind, human destruction, lightning and even the cleaving of rocks are deployed to depict divine judgement on a cataclysmic scale, so too the spectacle of divine and catastrophic judgement is elaborated in The King of Kings in unprecedented fashion in the Christ film of the silent era. If the sequence described above offers extraordinary spectacle, it was evidently designed by DeMille to mark the utterly extraordinary – indeed miraculous – nature of the Christ who is crucified. In this DeMille was not alone, for in I.N.R.I. it had been noted that Wiene sought to have ‘the magic of the Jesus figure’ become manifest in the reaction of the masses that surround him.23 While this reaction is seen in response to Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter, Wiene’s depiction of the miraculous Jesus proves to be more the exception than the rule. Indeed, the crowd’s astonishment at the 23

Jung and Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari, p. 106.

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raising of Jairus’ daughter is no greater than their amazed response to I.N.R. I’.s Sermon on the Mount – a scene whose lack of action and excess of dialogue had not recommended it to earlier directors of the silent era. Again, unlike Maître’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1914), Wiene does not depict the spectacle of the dove’s descent at Jesus’ baptism, preferring instead to have John the Baptist recount it to his amazed listeners. That the approach in The King of Kings could hardly be more different is illustrated by DeMille’s frequent depiction of healing episodes from the gospels and indeed invention of others which are without basis in the New Testament.24 Thus, not only is the young Mark portrayed as having been healed by Jesus, he also leads the young blind girl so that she too may be healed. Like Mark’s own healing, Jesus’ healing of her has no basis in the gospel tradition, yet it facilitates the audience’s own experience of the wondrous power of Jesus as DeMille’s gentle fade from black causes the viewer to see Jesus through the eyes of the little girl as her sight is restored. A further opportunity to display the miraculous healing power of Jesus is afforded when Peter cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant (John 18:10). Olcott’s earlier treatment of the scene (From the Manger to the Cross, 1912) had been very much in passing, and shot at a distance which precluded close inspection, while in Maître’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1914) Peter’s attack is in fact pre-empted by Jesus before the damage can be done. DeMille’s close up, by contrast, allows a full demonstration of the power of both Jesus and DeMille’s special effects team as the skin is healed before the viewer’s eyes, much like the arms of the leprous woman in the gospel epilogue of The Ten Commandments. The raising of Lazarus too had featured frequently amongst Christ films since its debut in the Höritz Passion Play (1897), yet DeMille insists on lingering on the scene at far greater length than previous filmmakers. While the director does not develop a melodrama around Lazarus’ death, the stricken man’s miraculous awakening takes place very slowly indeed, allowing the viewer to register and share the onlookers’ astonishment at a spectacle whose supernatural character is enhanced by the halo which appears over Jesus’ already luminous figure by means of cinematic effect. Undoubtedly DeMille also underlines Jesus’ supernatural quality in ways which are less spectacular, though no less astonishing. After seeing Jesus conjure a Roman coin out of a fish, two soldiers try without success to replicate the feat. So too, Simon of Cyrene gazes in astonishment at the preternatural 24

Tatum, Jesus, p. 51, who also rightly observes the significance of the healing of the little blind girl as a means of introducing Jesus to the viewer.

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power of the slight and scourged figure of Jesus when Simon’s own human strength is only barely sufficient to lift the cross Christ has carried.25 Yet, far more often, DeMille’s portrayal of the spectacle of the supernatural is accomplished by means which are specifically ‘cinematic’, even and indeed especially when they are without precedent in the gospel narratives. Thus in the scene of the woman taken in adultery, while Jesus writes words in Hebrew, a cinematic sleight of hand transforms the words into their English equivalents (e.g. murderer, adulterer) – a transformation accomplished for the benefit not of the ancient onlookers, for whom the English is an unintelligible anachronism, but for the viewer, who is invited to be astonished at the perspicuity of the Word facilitated by DeMille’s miraculous mastery of the medium of film. Most striking of all, however, is DeMille’s creative use of cinematic light effects to disclose the spectacle of the supernatural. For instance, at the conclusion of the Last Supper, when Peter returns to the upper room, the chalice from which they have all drunk is endowed by DeMille with a penumbra of light, rendered all the more captivating by the darkness in which the room is otherwise shrouded. Just as Jesus’ halo of light underlines his mystical and divine qualities, so too does that of the cup confirm the mystical and divine qualities of the wine which becomes the blood. In the following agony of the garden, whereas Wiene’s Jesus is left to his own devices, the shaft of light which illumines DeMille’s supplicant Jesus both reflects and transforms the spectacle of the cup-bearing angel which is a fixture of, among others, Pathé’s films of the Passion. Perhaps DeMille’s most potent exploitation of the spectacle of the special light effects at his disposal is, however, to be seen in the sequences devoted to Christ’s resurrection and his subsequent appearance to his disciples. Of the gospel accounts of the resurrection, only Matthew (28:2–3) suggests the supernatural means by which the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb was moved: an earthquake announces the descent of an angel with an ‘appearance like lightning’ who rolls back the stone and sits on it. As in the scene of the agony in the garden, DeMille dispenses with the angelic figures which had featured in successive Pathé versions of the scene in favour of Howard Anderson’s wonderworking light, which begins as a point of light on the circular stone and then gradually spreads outwards until the entire surface is illuminated. DeMille cuts between the radiant stone and the Roman soldiers’ growing astonishment and fear as they eventually flee. To complete the supernatural effect, the ropes 25

It is possible that this wonder in DeMille’s more Protestant King of Kings (1927) is the functional replacement of the miracle of Veronica’s veil, which, while enshrined in the Catholic tradition, is not included within the canonical gospels.

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Figure 9.2 Christ appears after his resurrection. The King of Kings (Pathé Exchange, 1927).

which bind the glowing stone suddenly fall to the ground as the stone, of its own volition, rolls to one side, revealing the source of the light, the illuminated Christ clothed in white, who begins then to walk toward the camera. Following the women’s arrival at the tomb and encounter with Christ, the action moves to Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to the disciples, who, according to John 20:19, were in a room whose ‘doors were locked for fear of the Jews’ (NRSV). Like some of the Gospel’s earliest readers, DeMille seizes on the suspicion that when Jesus ‘came and stood among them’ (v. 19), he did not enter the room by normal means. Howard Anderson’s skills again are well displayed, as the door – whose design bears a cross – also begins to radiate from the cross outwards until it is blindingly white. Again, throughout this sequence DeMille cuts away to capture the astonished reactions of various disciples as they and the viewer observe the the gradual diminishing of the light and the disclosure of the risen and miraculously radiant Christ now within the room in front of the still-locked door (Figure 9.2). Adding lustre to the miracles of light and indeed to the resurrection and post-resurrection sequences as a whole is DeMille’s resumption of the dramatic use of colour with which he begins the film. Thanks to the innovative use of colour by Pathé and its pioneering and persistent

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distribution of successive versions of La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ on both sides of the Atlantic in the first decade of the cinema, the spectacle of colour itself was strongly associated with early cinematic versions of the life of Christ. In light of this, DeMille’s use of colour to enhance his integration of unprecedented spectacle – both in the courtesan’s villa at the beginning and in the moments of supernatural splendour at the end – suggests the reversion to earlier (cinematic) traditions seen already in his The Ten Commandments. Such a reversion to earlier modes of representation driven almost exclusively by an impulse to display is confirmed too by DeMille’s effective abandonment of story in The King of Kings. Clearly, DeMille’s film displays greater narrativity than the pageant of discrete tableaux characteristic of Pathé’s successive versions of La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ up to and including Maître’s version in 1913/14. However, on closer inspection, the superficiality of such narrativity is betrayed by DeMille’s use of Mark and Caiaphas primarily as a means of facilitating the transition between, or elaboration of, scenes of otherwise unadulterated spectacle. Some of these disclose DeMille’s attempt to make even more wondrous the well-known wonders of the cinematic Jesus tradition (e.g. the raising of Lazarus, the resurrection), but the pervasiveness of DeMille’s vision is seen also in his introduction of ‘miracles’ into scenes which had lacked them (e.g. the Last Supper, the woman taken in adultery). Moreover, DeMille insists on exploiting ‘miraculous’ moments in the gospels which had never before featured within the cinematic tradition (e.g. the cataclysmic destruction following Jesus’ death and his postresurrection passing through a locked door). Thus, in sharp contrast to Wiene’s I.N.R.I., DeMille’s The King of Kings draws inspiration from and brings to a culmination the cinematic tradition whose origins we chronicled in the opening chapter of this book – a tradition in which the viewer’s experience of the miraculous Messiah is inextricably bound up with their experience of the miracle of moving pictures themselves. It is thus perhaps somehow fitting – despite DeMille’s own reservations – that Pathé, the firm responsible for some of the first silent films of Christ, should have also had its name on the last such film of the silent era. Despite persistent opposition from some Jewish and even Christian quarters, DeMille’s The King of Kings was widely praised for Warner’s performance in the title role and for the reverential quality of the film as a whole.26 Even a

26

For extensive citation and discussion of contemporary reviews of the film, see Louvish, Golden Calf, pp. 263–4, and Tatum, Jesus, pp. 54–8.

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critic such as the New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall, so often unimpressed with DeMille, concluded: So reverential is the spirit of Cecil B. DeMille’s ambitious pictorial transcription of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Man, that during the initial screening at the Gaiety theatre last Monday evening, hardly a whispered word was uttered among the audience. This production is entitled The King of Kings, and it is in fact, the most impressive of all motion pictures.27

If DeMille’s Jesus was more miraculous than any before him in the silent period, does Hall’s assessment of DeMille’s Jesus, ‘the man’, suggest an attempt to make him more manly as well? Such a suggestion is supported by previous observations of the similarity between Jesus’ ‘vigorous cleansing’ of the temple and a comparable description of the scene found in Bruce Barton’s best-selling book The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (1925).28 Yet our analysis confirms earlier suggestions that any such influence of Barton’s Jesus is incidental at best.29 More significant is Hall’s description of DeMille’s mode of depiction in terms of a ‘pictorial transcription of the life of Jesus of Nazareth’. The choice of ‘pictorial’, while perfectly admissible in the vocabulary of film criticism of the 1920s, evokes the persistent memory of the iconic images drawn from Western art and the European illustrated bibles which we have seen to lie behind the earliest and subsequent films of the life of Christ and indeed other biblical subjects. While DeMille’s film is less specifically and directly indebted to such pictorial traditions than, for instance, Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross (1912), there is little doubt that Warner’s radiant Christ resonates with particular devotional images of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.30 Furthermore, that DeMille’s pictures supply, in Hall’s words, a ‘transcription’ only enhances the impression of The King of Kings’s reception in terms of the great Victorian bible from which John McTavish reads the gospel in the biblical epilogue of DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. When coupled with DeMille’s unprecedented embrace of the miraculous Jesus, it is hardly surprising that such a reverential and ‘pictorial transcription’ not only impressed the critics, but also performed well at the box office.31 27 29 30

31

NYT (20 April 1927). 28 Maltby, ‘King of Kings’. See Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, pp. 22–3. While Babington and Evans, ibid., pp. 110ff. discuss the influence of nineteenth-century bibles on The King of Kings, their unwillingness or inability to draw specific demonstrable parallels between particular works of art and specific scenes in DeMille’s film robs their argument of some of its penetration. The profitability of the film is difficult to determine given that various other costs relating to DeMille Pictures were apparently carried on the books relating to the picture. Eyman, Empire, p. 249,

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With the original winner of DeMille’s idea competition, Noah’s Ark, finally in production under his direction, Michael Curtiz and his employers at Warner Brothers must have been bullish about their prospects of replicating the success of DeMille. Yet in light of the critical praise for Curtiz’s abandoning of the ‘modern story’ in The Moon of Israel, and DeMille’s following suit in The King of Kings, it is worth considering why in Noah’s Ark Curtiz was persuaded to revert to the pairing of biblical and modern stories adopted in his earlier Sodom und Gomorrha. While the latter failed to win over American critics, Curtiz and his Warner Brothers’ masters may have reasoned that its narrative structure was not primarily to blame. Moreover, DeMille’s success with precisely such a twinning of ancient and modern tales in The Ten Commandments (1923) furnished Curtiz and Warners with recent and indisputable proof that this structure itself was no obstacle to attracting the American audiences. Indeed, while the script for Noah’s Ark was penned by Daryl Zanuck, the influence of DeMille’s Ten Commandments and Curtiz’s prior efforts in Sodom und Gomorrha are writ large across Noah’s Ark, even in the much-curtailed form in which it survives.32 Like The Ten Commandments, Noah’s Ark begins with a biblical sequence, the opening title of which references the divine promise to never again destroy the world (Genesis 8) following Noah’s deliverance from the Flood. The eponymous hero is then pictured as a tiny figure sacrificing in the foreground of a shot in which the Ark perched at the top of Ararat looms extremely large, announcing both the focus and the scale of the film’s ambition. In a sequence illustrating the wickedness associated with the building of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11), workers are crushed by a falling stone, and an intertitle announces: ‘Gold became man’s only God and Money his only king.’ Curtiz’s unexpected interpolation of a golden calf scene into a depiction of Babel not only reflects the status of the golden calf as the archetypal symbol of biblical idolatry, it also offers advance notice of the film’s intention to draw on a wide range of biblical traditions from well beyond the Flood narrative, including those of Moses. Whereas DeMille’s biblical prologue occupies the first hour of The Ten Commandments, Curtiz’s biblical preface in Noah’s Ark is much shorter, allowing him to begin the film in earnest with the modern story much as he

32

estimates its probable cost at $1.2 million against an eventual gross (by 1952) of $3.4 million. Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 5, also note with due caution that Findler’s rental figures for The King of Kings (up to 1931) totalled $1.5 million. According to Robertson, The Casablanca Man, p. 16, the film premiered in 1928 at its full 135-minute length but had been cut down to 105 minutes for general release in 1929 and then to 75 minutes for its re-release in 1957. The present discussion is based on Warner Brothers’ attempted restoration of the film to its 1929 general release length.

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had done in Sodom und Gomorrha. The transition is accomplished by means of an action-match transition from a man greedily fingering ancient jewellery in the ‘biblical sequence’ to a trader fingering a ticker tape on the floor of a stock exchange in the 1920s. Yet, when the stock trader confronts and then shoots a man who has betrayed him, this sequence itself gives way – by means of the dying man’s delusional reminiscences of his sins – to the film’s actual ‘modern story’ set in Europe during the Great War. Transporting the viewer from contemporary America to war-torn Europe, Zanuck’s modern sequence begins on a train speeding from Paris to Constantinople on the eve of the Great War in 1914. Among the travellers is a man whose ‘prophetic’ status is marked not only by his rough and bearded appearance but also by the bible he clutches and then opens to read; when his earnestness, piety and belief in God are mocked by several of his fellow travellers, including a well-dressed Russian, his warning (‘Peace brother, lest He show himself . . .’) is immediately followed by the shot of a bridge collapsing as a prelude to the train itself hurtling off the tracks and into the dark canyon below. Attempting perhaps to better DeMille’s own highly praised train-crash scene in The Road to Yesterday, Curtiz’s train wreck is positioned as a spectacular demonstration of divinely ordained destruction – of the sort seen already in his Sodom und Gomorrha and soon to be reprised in the biblical sequence of the Deluge. Along with the Russian and the pious man, the opening sequence also introduces two young American men, Travis and Al, and a beautiful young German entertainer, Marie. With the help of a third man, the two Americans prise Marie from the wreckage and take shelter along with the Russian in a lodge near the French border. Here, Travis fights to save Marie from the predations of the Russian before fleeing the lodge along with Marie and Al to Paris. There Travis eventually chooses his love for Marie over his loyalty to Al, who enlists as the Americans enter the war. Seeing Al among the marching troops, however, Travis eventually enlists himself, but ends up accidentally killing Al in an ill-fated attack on a German position. Months later, at a town on the Belgian front, Marie is spotted by the lecherous Russian as she dances, and when he propositions her, she seeks to escape under cover of darkness. The Russian catches her making a run for it, and, framing her as a spy, persuades the military authorities to execute her. Much like the innocent Merapi in Sodom und Gomorrha, Marie is tied up to a cross for her execution, not in this case by immolation but by firing squad. As the condemned Mary of Sodom und Gomorrha’s modern sequence is visited by the priest, so now the Marie of Noah’s Ark also receives her ‘last rites’ from the pious man on the train, now revealed to be a man of the

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cloth. Included in the firing squad, Travis recognises his beloved Marie as he takes aim and rushes to her side to embrace and kiss her and yet again deliver her from death. With the Russian continuing to insist that she must die, incoming shells destroy the building and bury them in rubble. While the couple, the priest and the Russian survive, they discover themselves to be trapped, prompting a pedagogical peroration from the minister which in a succession of intertitles clarifies the film’s operative analogy: The Flood – it was a Deluge of Water drowning a World of Lust! The War – it is a deluge of Blood drowning a World of Hate! The Flood and the War – God’s Almighty Parallel of the Ages.

Unlike the Catholic priest of Sodom und Gomorrha, who offers a homily, Curtiz’s less clerical man of the cloth in Noah’s Ark opens his bible and reads from the King James Version of Genesis 6:5: ‘And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ In the first, but not the last, of the film’s novel textual effects, the words of the page dissolve into burning flames, and then into a view of the ancient idols of Akkad, signalling the beginning of the ‘biblical’ sequence proper. Like Griffith’s Babylonian sequence, Curtiz turns for his ancient story to Mesopotamia, but in doing so shows far less interest than Griffith did in attempting to recreate anything resembling the ancient culture as it had been reconstructed by historical and archaeological enquiry. Curtiz’s christening of the monarch of his pagan culture as ‘King Nephilim’ is clearly inspired by the reference to a group – either sons of God or their offspring – who are mentioned in Genesis 6:1–4 prior to the Flood narrative itself. Yet the erroneous use of a plural ‘Nephilim’ as a singular proper noun points toward the superficiality of the film’s interest in the biblical narrative per se. That King Nephilim’s kingdom is unlikely to engender the Judaeo-Christian viewer’s sympathy becomes clear when an intertitle near the beginning of the sequence announces that the King has ‘led his people from Jehovah to worship the false God Jaghuth’. The unlikelihood of audience sympathy grows still greater when Nephilim himself announces: ‘When the next cycle moon rises from out the Syrian hills, we shall sacrifice to Jaghuth the fairest virgin of our people.’ Unconstrained by Griffith’s conversion to Babylon or L. Rider Haggard’s sympathy for Egyptian culture, Curtiz is free to revert to a pastiche of pagan clichés as a backdrop to the story of Noah, his family and their salvation. While the ‘moon’ rising from out the Syrian hills and the mention of the sacrifice of a virgin reflects a plot element at least paralleled – and probably inspired – by the Egyptians

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near-sacrifice of Merapi in The Moon of Israel, it is rather the biblical sequence of Sodom und Gomorrha which will have more in common with that of Noah’s Ark. The King’s invocation of the pagan cult licenses Curtiz’s depiction of the processional pageantry which had featured prominently in his previous films and drew fundamental inspiration from Intolerance’s Babylonian sequence. Here the spectacle of the royal palanquin and pagan idol, filmed as always in long and extreme long shot, demonstrates the virtuosity of Curtiz as master of mass crowd shots. Not content with such displays however, Curtiz’s characterisation of pagan sinfulness eclipses even that of licentious Sodom and Gomorrha as an intertitle, ‘Nor were the Gods of war forgotten who delighted in victims tortured’, introduces the spectacle of physical torture. Men are hauled up into the air by their ankles, followed by a very brief scene intended to illustrate that ‘maidens who rebelled against Jaghuth’s laws were branded with the mark of slavery’. If such displays suggest Curtiz’s Akkad compares ‘favourably’ with DeMille’s Egypt in its embrace of idolatry and violent oppression, the final shots of people laid low by the consumption of too much food and drink demonstrates Curtiz’s commitment to go one better. That this is quite unlike the celebratory hospitality of Griffith’s Feast of Belshazzar and much more reminiscent of traditional depictions of the latter scene is made clear again by the intertitle (‘Those that dwelt in poverty were gorged that day by the King’s bounty . . .’), but primarily by the larger sequence of which it is a part. In sharp contrast to the urban scenes of pagan godlessness, Noah and his family are introduced by Curtiz in a bucolic scene resembling the idyll of the American family farm. Quite apart from the intertitles, which underline his righteousness, Noah’s holiness is powerfully suggested by the fact that he is played by Paul McAllister, cast also in the role of the priest in the modern story. The casting of Guinn Williams as both Al and Shem and George O’Brien in the roles of Travis and Japheth reflects Curtiz’s practice of double-casting already established in Sodom und Gomorrha as a means of enhancing the analogical connection between modernity and antiquity. Curtiz’s camera tilts upward from the base of an enormous Californian sequoia tree, arriving finally at a shot of the brothers, whose status as ‘mighty men’ (so the intertitle) is confirmed by the display of glistening male flesh as the biblical lumberjacks struggle manfully with the oversized tree. If the spectacle of the masculine body had not been an unknown quantity within the biblical film up until this point – thanks largely to the depiction of Samson and Goliath since the first decade of the cinema – it is here for the first time that we find a fully realised eroticisation of male flesh to rival the sexualised display of the female form seen

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so often in the biblical film. Curtiz completes his double-casting by introducing Dolores Costello as Miriam, the handmaid of Noah’s household and ‘beloved of Japheth’ – just as Costello’s modern character Marie is beloved of Travis. The love interest between maid and biblical son – seen previously in Edwards’ The Shepherd King (1923), where Adora’s love for David is unrequited – facilitates the creation of a romantic storyline of which the biblical narrative, unsurprisingly, knows nothing. The quality of Japheth’s love is immediately demonstrated when Miriam falls and scrapes her knee and Japheth fusses over her injury – another narrative detail drawn unmistakably from The Moon of Israel, where Seti also tends to Merapi’s injured foot. Yet if the parallel is striking and will be evident again in subsequent scenes, the difference too is worth noting, for whereas Curtiz lingers on the Seti/Merapi scene at great length, in Noah’s Ark Japheth’s tending to Miriam is reduced to a single shot and its narrative development is over almost before it begins. However cursorily established, this romance is immediately threatened by the arrival of Akkadian soldiers in search of a virgin to be sacrificed. Already informed by an intertitle that the soldiers are drunk, viewers’ judgement of their depravity is confirmed by their leering at Miriam, who sits working at a loom. While the elderly Noah seeks to save his daughter, he is cruelly abused, much like the elderly father of Merapi in The Moon of Israel, yet again, whereas the latter scene is developed at length as a key moment in the developing romance of Seti and Merapi, in Noah’s Ark the ‘story’ is reduced to the simple spectacle of violence. As the King of Akkad approves the sacrifice of the captive Miriam, Japheth arrives to save his beloved and, after he has struggled with the soldiers, the couple hug and kiss as they are reunited. Yet the reprieve is only temporary as the couple are separated again – Miriam to be sacrificed and Japheth to be punished for his defiance. That the site of Japheth’s punishment is announced in an intertitle as ‘The Golgotha of Akkad’ signals Curtiz’s desire to construct the scene as Japheth’s own Passion. While this appears very much as a tactic designed to resonate with DeMille’s King of Kings – which was undoubtedly still being shown in cinemas at the time – the scene as a whole is primarily inflected by its resonance with the Old Testament’s own redemptive sufferer, Samson (Figure 9.3). In response to the king’s command, and in preparation for Japheth’s servitude until death at the millstone, Curtiz produces a scene in which Japheth, like Samson, is blinded. While the blinding of Samson had been passed over entirely by Alexander Korda in Samson und Dalila, Curtiz’s treatment shares much with, for instance, Capellani’s far earlier Samson (1908), in which the spectacle of the blinding commands its own tableau. In Capellani’s tableau – though not in paintings of the scene by Peter Paul

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Figure 9.3 Japheth as a well-muscled Samson. Noah’s Ark (Warner Brothers, 1928).

Rubens or Rembrandt (1636) – the knife is superheated in a brazier, and so too in Curtiz’s scene the horror of the blinding is enhanced by the use of fire. Like Capellani’s Samson, Japheth recoils in horror at the sight of the red-hot poker, but Curtiz exploits two decades of developments in cinematography by using a point-of-view shot to better allow the viewer to share Japheth’s horror. The iconography too of the millstone to which Japheth is chained shares more with earlier cinematic versions of Samson than the scene produced by Curtiz’s compatriot Korda and is further confirmation of Curtiz’s reversion to the early cinema’s mounting of the biblical spectacle of ‘Samson-like’ suffering. If the embellishment of Japheth’s story consists of ‘Samson-like’ spectacle, the divine instructions to Noah (Genesis 6:13–21; 7:1–4) – supplied without context in Genesis – are conveyed by Curtiz in terms which are unmistakeably Mosaic. As Curtiz’s Noah ascends the heights of the biblical sounding ‘Tersgah’ (cf. Tirzah, Gerzim), both he and the viewer are treated to a series of lightning strikes, one of which sets alight a bush, which proceeds to burn brightly in an Exodus-like fashion. Predictably Noah drops to his knees and raises his hands, but the lightning continues, striking the rocky face of the mountain, upon which two stone tablets immediately appear. The optical effects continue as (English) words illuminated by

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Figure 9.4 A miniature Noah receives divine instructions both illuminated and alight while the bush smoulders in the foreground to the left of the frame. Noah’s Ark (Warner Brothers, 1928).

flames now appear on the tablets, conveying the divine commandments (KJV) to Noah regarding the ark and the deliverance of his family and the animals (6:14,17,18) (Figure 9.4). By means of a further special effect, the tablets are revealed to be pages in a book, which turn of their own volition as further divine instructions are delivered. As in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, where the divine commandments escape the constraints of the intertitles and command their own visual representation by exploding out of the sky, Curtiz too makes a spectacle of the Word – indeed even more so than DeMille – by his presentation of the divine commands to Noah as the words of a stone book whose animation and illumination bespeak its supernatural character. If such an approach answers in a quite different, but no less appropriate, way to Mordaunt Hall’s description of the late biblical film as ‘pictorial transcription’, the subsequent sequences continue to display the influence of DeMille in Mosaic mode. The spectacle of ancient building – a staple of the cinematic Exodus inherited by DeMille from Blackton’s Life of Moses – appears here not as labour forced by the Egyptians, but as the American/Hebrew frontier family working together to ‘raise’ the ark, with elephants bearing wood and

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glistening male muscles mixing pitch. While the Genesis narrative makes no mention of outside interference in the building of the Ark, Curtiz exploits the ancient and influential tradition that Noah endured mockery and violent opposition33 in order to construct a sequence which further demonstrates his indebtedness to the cinematic Exodus tradition. Thus, when a well-armed mob arrives at the building site, pelting the builders with stones and promising to destroy the still-unfinished Ark, Noah appeals to God, and a wall of fire springs up between the Ark and the Akkadian antagonists, offering the very same protection it afforded the Hebrews of the Exodus when threatened by pagan Egyptians in both Curtiz’s own Moon of Israel (1924) and DeMille’s earlier Ten Commandments (1923). Due appreciation of the spectacle is modelled by the Akkadians, who bow in fear and amazement, before the action cuts back to the choreographed spectacle of the court of Nephilim. Scantily clad female dancers accompany an equally under-dressed Miriam as she mounts the steps in preparation for her sacrifice, but the archer’s stringing of his bow to execute her signals the beginning of the Deluvian judgement. As in DeMille’s scenes, the cataclysmic (super)natural disaster begins with an increasingly violent wind,34 which blows the temple doors open, giving entrance to Noah, whose prophetic staff and message are worthy of Moses, as shown in the intertitle: ‘Repent of your sins, oh people! Jehovah may yet withold his wrath!’ When an unrepentant King Nephilim orders that Noah be seized as well, the latter escapes back through the doors, but there is no escape for the unlucky archer whose attempt to shoot Miriam is pre-empted again, this time by the intervention of the divine lightning, which soon also strikes the idol of Jaghuth. As to some extent in DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) – where lightning does for the Temple veil – and in both Curtiz’s Moon of Israel, and DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923) – where the images of Amun and the Golden Calf are felled – here the lightning serves to illustrate the spectacle of supernatural judgement of a suspect cult. Here, however, the spectacle extends to the destruction of the Temple itself, whose columns now collapse in a fashion worthy and indeed reminiscent of the Philistine Temple of Dagon, which had appeared as early as Pathé’s Samson et Dalila (1902) and as recently as Korda’s version of the 33

34

That Noah’s unabashed righteousness prompted the (perceived) threat of lethal violence was suggested in antiquity by, for instance, Josephus, Antiquities 1:74. For the articulation of this motif in medieval times see B. Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003) pp. 104–5. Intertitle: ‘From the four corners of the earth mighty tempests rose. God’s wrath rode upon the winds.’

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Figure 9.5 The inundation of Akkad. Noah’s Ark (Warner Brothers, 1928).

scene in 1922. With the scenes of catastrophe safely projected onto a screen behind her, Miriam escapes unscathed apart from her veil, whose victimisation by the wind facilitates the further display of her feathered brassiere. Miriam collapses as the wind is joined by rain which the still-shackled Japheth confirms is the ‘wrath of a just God, smiting thee, O Akkad!’ Scenes of the fleeing people and the city’s destruction are now intercut with the Noachic salvation, as pairs of various species are seen leaping, wandering and sprinting through forest scenes in a succession of shots which are themselves intercut with very effective and extremely long shots of a hillside crawling with creatures in search of higher ground. An intertitle announces that the Akkadians too seek the shelter of ‘the Ark that they had once called “Noah’s Folly”’ – a fact then confirmed by a shot of a rain-filled sky and the people’s flight up the hill as the water pursues them. As the Flood finally arrives in earnest, Curtiz exceeds even his own spectacular destruction of Sodom und Gomorrha by inundating not merely the miniature of Akkad but also the set and cast with torrents of water which sweep away Miriam and complete the collapse of the temple (Figure 9.5). A final lightning strike shatters the millstone, freeing Japheth, who then stumbles blindly in search of his beloved Miriam, praying by means of an

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intertitle that ‘these sightless eyes of mine’ would be divinely directed to her. As Japheth continues his search, further proof of Curtiz’s incorporation of diverse biblical traditions is offered when the now bedraggled King Nephilim is taunted by one of his subjects with the jest of Elijah from 1 Kings 18: ‘Call again on your great god Jaghuth – perhaps he sleepeth!’ Drawn by the sound of each other’s voices, Japheth finds Miriam, though not before both their clothes have been sufficiently soaked to allow the viewer a further appreciation of what little flesh has not already been revealed. Final shots of Akkad’s watery destruction then begin to be intercut with shots of the interior of the Ark, where animals are tended and Noah prays. It is not long before the prayers of the evidently righteous man are answered as Japheth – still carrying Miriam – outstrips the clambering Akkadians and arrives at the ramp of the Ark. Confirmation of Japheth’s salvation arrives when a beam of light from heaven announces the restoration of his sight – a final miracle in keeping with the interest we have already seen in DeMille’s biblical films of the 1920s in depicting the miraculous healing power of the divine. That this power will also bring destruction is finally confirmed when King Nephilim’s own attempts to get into the Ark fail; he manages to open a window but then slips out of sight beneath the waves of the rising waters, upon which the Ark now finally begins to float. As Noah prays in gratitude, Curtiz returns to the modern story, where the bearded priest (played also by McAllister) concludes his reading of the story of the Bible and supplies, by means of successive intertitles, a final homiletic application: That was the end of a world made of lust and sin – God made his covenant and the rainbow appeared in the heavens . . . Above this deluge of blood, and the graves of ten million men, shall not the rainbow of a new covenant appear – the covenant of peace?

That some of the survivors will at least have a happy ending is confirmed when rescuers break through the rubble to deliver the couple and the cleric himself. Yet, if the couple’s escape – in both ancient and modern stories – is a sign of divinely wrought salvation, so too the otherwise inexplicable death of the lecherous and lying Russian as the rescuers arrive is a sign that the divinely wrought destruction of King Nephilim may also take its toll on modern evil-doers. Moreover, when the survivors emerge from the rubble to discover that the Armistice has been signed and the war is over, both this and the attendant signs of jubilation are interpreted by the cleric in another succession of intertitles as ‘the beginning of the rainbow – the fulfillment of the sacrifice . . . war is now an outlaw and will be hunted from the face of the

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earth. Those ten million men have not died in vain.’ Given the diversity of biblical traditions drawn upon in Noah’s Ark, it is somehow fitting that in the final intertitles of the film the priest prophesies the end of war in words which appear to echo the fearful protest of the Bible’s first murderer, Cain: ‘Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth . . . and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’ (Genesis 4:14 KJV). Neither Curtiz nor Warner Brothers could have imagined that it would take little more than a decade for the priest’s optimism to be betrayed by the outbreak of a war which would engulf the world in still greater destruction. Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark finally received its premiere at Grauman’s Theatre in Los Angeles on 1 November 1928, yet beneath the congratulatory veneer of Photoplay’s review of an advance screening of the film, there are already suggestions that the biblical film was running out of steam.35 The review begins with an endorsement of the film’s super-production status by citing the usual hallmarks of lengthy preparation, large cast, ‘massive’ and ‘realistically impressive’ sets and wondrous ‘flood scenes’. While the reviewer thus insists that the ‘Biblical sequence’ does not disappoint, the need for such an insistence is clearly related to the reluctant admission that the film is ‘historical, allegorical, symbolical etc.’ Moreover, the piece quickly moves on to a lengthier review of the ‘modern sequence’, in which the war episode is ‘all one could ask’ and the love story and performances of O’Brien and Costello are praised. That interest in the spectacle of the biblical sequence was already waning is also suggested by the fact that the still which accompanies the review pictures a spiritual moment between the Priest and Marie from the modern sequence, rather than the spectacle of the biblical story. While a half-hour was cut from the film after the premiere, the response of the New York critics to the film’s general release in the spring of 1929 did not augur well for its performance at the American box office.36 The modern story failed to impress and was criticised for plundering the plot of King Vidor’s enormously successful war film The Big Parade (1925), while the pastiche of Old Testament spectacle was derided as ridiculous and idiotic.37 Given that only the first few minutes of the film are set in the 1920s, one reviewer’s assessment of the film’s parallel structure in terms of ‘Moses vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’ hints at a genre in imminent danger of selfparody. That a reviewer might associate Noah’s Ark with Moses is, of course, hardly surprising given the extensive incorporation of elements drawn 35 36

Photoplay (October 1928), 53. See the digest of New York reviews discussed in Noizet, Tous Les chemins, p. 149.

37

Ibid.

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explicitly from the cinematic tradition of the Exodus to which both Curtiz and DeMille had so recently contributed. Yet if the golden calf, the giving of the commandments to Noah and the fiery protection of the Ark are unmistakeably Mosaic, Curtiz is no less obvious in his adorning of the biblical sequence with traditions associated with that equally longstanding hero of the silent biblical film, Samson. In order to understand these unexpected departures, it is necessary to offer some general reflections on the evolution of Curtiz’s approach to the biblical film. Following Sodom und Gomorrha’s pedagogical subordination of an overtly spectacular biblical sequence to a modern sequence shaped by the conventions and concerns of contemporary melodrama, Curtiz’s Die Sklavenkönigin/The Moon of Israel offered audiences an adaptation of Haggard’s modern/ancient love story permeated with the biblical spectacle associated with the Exodus of the cinematic tradition. Yet it seems likely that the two-part structure of DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923) – itself indebted to Curtiz’s own Sodom und Gomorrha – persuaded the émigré director to return to such a structure. Subordinating the biblical sequence to the modern story through a priestly reading of it (as in The Ten Commandments), Curtiz follows DeMille in fully exploiting the conventions of romantic melodrama while injecting into his modern story moments of spectacle (e.g. the train crash) much like DeMille does (e.g. the collapse of the church wall, the crash of the speedboat). Moreover, as in DeMille’s Ten Commandments, so too in Noah’s Ark it is the modern story which serves primarily to meet audience expectations of narrativity, thereby creating space within the biblical sequence for spectacle to reign supreme. That spectacle’s triumph is untrammelled in the biblical sequence of Noah’s Ark can hardly be doubted and is best exemplified by the depiction of the Flood. Supplemented only with various optical effects, the scenes of the Deluge of Akkad represent the culmination of the depiction of spectacular divine judgement inaugurated by Curtiz himself in Sodom und Gomorrha. Indeed, the hazards involved in orchestrating the sequence apparently caused Hal Mohr to leave the cinematography in the hands of Barney McGill, and the subsequent injuries which justified Mohr’s concerns only add to the mythos of Curtiz’s commitment to unleashing a flood of biblical proportions.38 But our analysis of the film confirms that Curtiz’s realisation of biblical spectacle in Noah’s Ark is by no means limited to the flood scene, but is rather visible throughout the film. Indeed, while the romantic storyline of Japheth and 38

This is enhanced still further by the unsubstantiated rumours that more than one person had lost their life during the filming of the Deluge sequence (so, Brownlow, Parade, p. 324).

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Miriam may at points display an indebtedness to Seti and Merapi’s romance in The Moon of Israel (1924), its slenderness in comparison suggests a closer parallel to Griffith’s much earlier Judith of Bethulia (1913). Like Curtiz’s Miriam, Griffith’s Naomi is also snatched away from her Hebrew people near the beginning of Griffith’s films and held captive by a pagan king intent on her exploitation or worse. Like Curtiz’s Miriam, Griffith’s Naomi is also returned to her people through the efforts of her beloved young man, Nathan, who, like Japheth, risks life and limb to recover her. Curtiz’s reversion to a much earlier and restrained approach to narrative elaboration fits comfortably with the means by which he furnishes Noah’s Ark with a spectacle which exceeds even his own and DeMille’s previous efforts. In an effort to surpass the display offered by previous biblical films including The King of Kings, we have seen that Curtiz chooses to supplement his extraordinary flood sequence with a pastiche of the best-known spectacles of the biblical tradition, drawn from not only the depictions of Moses and Samson, as we have seen, but even the Passion of the Christ, through the mention of the ‘Golgotha of Akkad’. Such interpenetration of biblical traditions is visible already in, for instance, the cruciform pose adopted by Stephen as he is stoned in Le Martyre de Saint Etienne, but in Noah’s Ark it reaches its logical conclusion. After thirty years of biblical films, Curtiz and Zanuck evidently decided that the variety and enormity of spectacle expected by viewers of biblical films could no longer be supplied by a single biblical narrative – not even one as spectacularly well furnished as the Genesis account of the flood. Mindful of the potential pitfalls of deviating too dramatically from a biblical story whose very attraction was premised on its familiarity, Curtiz and Zanuck follow DeMille’s Ten Commandments in effectively relegating story-telling proper to the ‘modern story’. This leaves them free to elaborate the basic Noah narrative with spectacular scenes which, while not indigenous to Genesis, are nevertheless native to the sacred scripture which had been familiar to viewers of silent biblical films for more than three decades. Given the range of biblical subjects produced in the ‘silent’ era, it is striking that the two final biblical films of this era, DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) and Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark (1928), largely revert to Moses, Jesus, Samson and, to a lesser extent, the Feast of Belshazzar. That these very subjects are precisely the ones which appeared first on American and French screens around the turn of the century can hardly be a coincidence. Indeed, such an observation is fully compatible with – and is perhaps explained by – our discovery that the triumph of spectacle over story in the biblical film was very nearly as complete at the end of the silent era as it was at its inception.

‘The end of these wonders?’: the triumph of spectacle

289

This conclusion may well also help to explain the seemingly curious fact that, while the epic – even in its historical guise – continued to flourish in the shape of films such as The Sign of the Cross and The Last Days of Pompeii well into the 1930s, the end of the silent era seemed to signal the decline of the biblical film itself, until its resurrection in the 1950s and 1960s. In seeking to explain why no major American studio attempted a feature-length film focused on Jesus between DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) and Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1960), various factors have been suggested. While both the introduction of the Production Code by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1930 and the advent of the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1934 may have contributed to a reluctance to depict biblical subjects in particular ways,39 it is safe to say that various forms of spectacle might well have been mounted without fear of censorship. Moreover, in due course it would be DeMille’s return to the biblical genre which would help to break the code itself. Alternatively, some have attributed the hiatus in Christ films to the enduring appeal of DeMille’s film and Warner’s portrayal of Jesus.40 It is true that DeMille himself endeavoured to ensure that the film circulated as long as possible and was still donating his share of the proceeds to charity more than two decades later.41 Indeed, even in 1961, the year that Ray’s King of Kings appeared, DeMille’s film was sold to Modern Sound Pictures, who continued to make the film widely available.42 Yet, such an explanation does little more than beg the question of why the film’s appeal was so enduring and why three decades passed before there was a significant return to the Christ as a subject in its own right. In a variation on this same theme, it has also been suggested that the appearance of Ray’s King of Kings two years after DeMille’s death in 1959 illustrates the deterrent influence of DeMille’s legacy in Hollywood. Yet this is difficult to square with the fact that the Old Testament biblical film had been revived (by DeMille among others) a full decade before DeMille’s death. While it has also been suggested that a preference for more domestic subjects militated against the epic treatment of biblical subjects between the wars, this fails to account for the fact that historical epics – including some set in the ancient world – continued to be produced in Hollywood and elsewhere. Indeed, if such films were less common than in previous periods, perhaps

39 40 42

Tatum, Jesus, pp. 59–60; Reinhartz, Jesus, p. 15. Stern et al., Savior, p. 62; Solomon, Ancient World, p. 183. Birchard, DeMille’s Hollywood, p. 226.

41

Eyman, Empire, p. 249.

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in part due to the economic travails of the 1930s, one must still explain why biblical subjects fell so dramatically out of favour.43 In seeking to add to the above explanations, it should be remembered that, while the final biblical film of the period, Noah’s Ark, was initially conceived by Curtiz as a traditional silent film, it did not end that way. Warner Brothers’ advances in sound technology – exemplified most famously in The Jazz Singer (1927) – not only funded Curtiz’s expensive production, they also overtook the production itself, when the studio decided to make Noah’s Ark a part-talkie as well. Crucially, it is worth noting that the ‘part’ of Noah’s Ark to which the ‘talking’ was added was not the biblical sequence, but the modern one – and in sequences which include, for instance, the romantic conversation between Costello’s Marie and O’Brien’s Travis. That Warner Brothers should have taken such a decision should by now be hardly surprising. Having reverted to a radical embrace of spectacle at the expense of story, the biblical portion of the film had no need of the primary blessing bestowed by the advent of sound, namely, the enabling of actors to deliver actual dialogue. Indeed, the fate of the biblical spectacle appears to have been sealed by an unhappy conspiracy of circumstances: just as sound arrived to radically transform the cinema’s capacity to tell a story, the story of the biblical film was overwhelmed by the triumph of spectacle. With narrative elaboration either relegated to a modern story or abandoned altogether for biblical stories too well known and/or too sacred to tolerate it, the biblical film at the end of the silent era apparently collapsed under an excess of the very spectacle which had attracted the earliest filmmakers and their audiences. When American audiences and critics were unable to take seriously Noah’s Ark, the greatest biblical spectacle that had ever been filmed, Curtiz must have thought that the biblical film as he knew it was dead. Indeed, given the lack of favour his biblical films had found in his adopted homeland, it is perhaps not surprising that Curtiz would never return to the genre he thought he had buried. Instead, in the 1950s, it would fall to his great rival DeMille to resurrect the genre and, in so doing, remind both studios and audiences that, like Jairus’ daughter, the genre of the biblical film was not dead at all, but only asleep. 43

Babington and Evans, Biblical Epics, p. 5.

Afterword

This first attempt at chronicling the history of the Bible on film in the silent era began with the earliest cinematic representations of the Passion of the Christ, a narrative whose familiarity and sanctity offered the ideal means of demonstrating and legitimating the revolutionary capacity of the nascent medium of moving pictures. Initially appearing as typological vestiges of the medieval Passion tradition, Old Testament subjects emerged in their own right just after the turn of the century thanks to the pioneering efforts of Pathé-Frères and directors such as Ferdinand Zecca. Like the illustrated bibles they sought to animate, we saw that these short films consisted of a series of tableaux which did not tell the sacred stories so much as illustrate their most spectacular and miraculous moments by means of an increasing range of cinematic trucs. We have argued that the eventual production of such films in America by Vitagraph and its leading director, Stuart Blackton, reflected the increasing narrativity and progressive cinematography of the transitional era, with the radical elaboration of the earlier French model of discrete tableaux facilitated by increased running times. We suggested furthermore that the resumption in earnest of French interest in the biblical film at the end of the decade offered audiences on both sides of the Atlantic the opportunity to experience familiar and not-so-familiar biblical subjects inflected by the French legacy of ‘biblical tragedy’ (so Gaumont’s Feuillade) and the contemporary domestic melodrama (so Pathé-Frères’ Andréani). Under the influence of Italian films such as Quo Vadis? and Cabiria, Griffith developed the species of spectacle by now indigenous to the biblical film (e.g. opulent mise-en-scène, pageantry, orgiastic indulgence, female sensuality, violence) on a scale which was to prove as definitive for the subsequent development of the genre in the silent era, as would Griffith’s analogical approach to illuminating the relationship of antiquity 291

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to modernity. We documented the use of biblical films by William Fox to establish his studio as a serious producer in the post-war period, exploiting the appetite for the biblical vamp/femme fatale, with its twin attractions of female display and predatory sexuality – a phenomenon we detected also in the biblical films produced in Austria in the early 1920s. The contribution of these latter films to the continuing development of Griffith’s analogical pairing of modernity and antiquity was highlighted as a prelude to our discussion of DeMille’s first production of The Ten Commandments, a film whose ultimately negative evaluation of Old Testament legalism, we argue, resonates with Griffith’s Intolerance. Our comparison of DeMille’s film with Curtiz’s film of the Exodus and Egypt suggests that, while the former largely relegates narrative elaboration to the ‘modern story’ and the latter to its ‘tale of Egypt’, both films do so to make room for a retrograde focus on the biblical film as spectacle. This trajectory is traced through the final two biblical films of the silent era, with DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) and particularly Noah’s Ark (1928) exemplifying the triumph of spectacle over story in the biblical film at that very point in the cinema’s history when the advent of sound allowed it to begin to tell stories like never before. If even the broad outline of such a history is to eventually command any breadth of scholarly assent, it will need to be tested by further research. While we have offered what we hope to be a representative survey of the contribution of key directors, producers and national cinemas to the development of the biblical film, predictable limitations of space have prevented a truly comprehensive coverage. Further and fuller attention to the biblical film as it is be found in the output of various directors, studios and indeed national cinemas (e.g. Italian, German, etc.) treated only briefly or not at all in the present work will undoubtedly serve to clarify or indeed substantially qualify some of the conclusions reached in the present work. While we have also attempted to canvas a broad range of biblical subjects, the popularity of particular subjects during the silent era (e.g. Salomé) would seem to warrant specific investigation in its own right. Most pressing of all is the need for a fuller treatment of the depiction of Christ in the silent cinema, a requirement which will hopefully begin to be satisfied by a forthcoming volume of collected essays on the subject. Other topics requiring further attention include (but are by no means limited to): the impact of pre-cinematic representations of the Bible in the nineteenth century and their influence on the cinema; the extent to which biblical films are stylistically conservative; the conditions of

Afterword

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production and reception of biblical films; the relationship of biblical films to particular theological traditions and the impact of biblical films on the teaching and understanding of the Bible in the first three decades of the twentieth century. One final area for further research is the relationship between the films studied here and those produced by explicity Christian filmmakers (see Lindvall’s Sanctuary Cinema (2007)). A significant desideratum for further scholarly progress is easier access to the films themselves for teachers and researchers. With notable exceptions (e.g. Gaumont’s La Vie du Christ (1906) and Pathé’s La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (1907)), the few silent biblical films currently available commercially derive from the period after 1912. While it is not impossible that commercial enterprises may be persuaded to issue DVD editions of some early biblical films or collections of them, a more promising solution is exemplified by the Gaumont Pathé Archives’ inclusion of biblical films in their programme of digitisation. If other archives could be encouraged to follow suit, it would radically democratise an area of research which will otherwise remain the preserve of those with easy access to key physical archives. Turning to the sound era, it is perhaps worth noting that the final argument offered by this book – that an excess of spectacle in the biblical film at the advent of the sound era led to its extended dormancy – sits comfortably with the observation that the most significant biblical film produced in America between 1929 and 1949 was probably Warner Brothers’ The Green Pastures (1936). The film follows Marc Connelly’s Pullitzer prize-winning play of the same name in embedding its biblical sequences in a modern story, now set in the 1930s. The film further emulates Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark by drawing, in its biblical sequences, on material from a wide variety of biblical traditions, including, among others, those of Moses. Yet, if such similarities underline the legacy of the silent biblical spectacle, it is worth reflecting on why the ridicule garnered by Noah’s Ark’s excess of spectacle was never visited upon The Green Pastures. At least one answer to this question is suggested by the film itself and more specifically by its eschewal of the very forms of spectacle under which Noah’s Ark had collapsed and in which DeMille’s King of Kings was fossilised. Instead The Green Pastures situates both its modern and biblical sequences in the vernacular black culture of the American South of the twentieth century, replacing both the spectacle and silence of the final biblical films of the silent era with a culturally specific and very vocal hilarity. While such a move does not represent the full flowering of parody, there can be little doubt that The Green Pastures’ radical departure from what had gone before is as sure a

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sign of the genre’s exhaustion at the end of the silent era as was the appearance of Monty Python’s Life of Brian following a long line of earnest cinematic depictions of Christ in the 1960s and 1970s.1 If such an observation lends further support to our final argument, it perhaps also suggests that this book’s chronicling of the evolution of the biblical film in the silent era will require a revisiting of the renaissance of the genre in the sound era and a fresh evaluation of the history of the genre as a whole. 1

For which see Tatum, Jesus, and L. Baugh, Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-figures in Film (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997).

Filmography

While the index includes all films (biblical and non-biblical) mentioned or discussed in this book, the following filmography lists the biblical films chronologically by year of release. We have included the original titles (and those of the English-language release where relevant), the associated director and/or production firm and some indication of where/how the surviving listed films have been viewed (or may be). For the fullest and most up-to-date record of archival holdings of these films, readers are referred to the FIAF ‘Treasures’ Database, accessible through research institutions around the world. It is hoped that a web-based database focused on the Bible and the moving image (akin to the comparable database relating to Shakespeare maintained by the British Universities Film and Video Council) will be developed in due course. In the meantime, see Hervé Dumont, L’Antiquité, for the fullest list of biblical films at the time of writing.

1897 La Passion du Christ (Albert Kirchner/Léar, La Bonne Presse; presumed lost) Passion Play (as given at Höritz) (William Freeman (?), Klaw and Erlanger; presumed lost)

1898 The Passion Play of Oberammergau (Eaves and Hollaman, Eden Musée; presumed lost) The Passion Play (Siegmund Lubin, Lubin Films; presumed lost) La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ (George Hatot, Lumières; LOC, AFF)

1899–1900 La Vie et Passion du Christ (Gaston Breteau, Pathé; BFI) 295

296

Filmography

1902 L’Enfant Prodigue (Ferdinand Zecca, Pathé; ESM) Samson et Dalila (Ferdinand Zecca, Pathé; BFI) La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Ferdinand Zecca/Lucien Nonguet, Pathé; BFI, LOC)

1903 Moses in the Bullrushes (British Gaumont; presumed lost) The Good Samaritan (British Gaumont; presumed lost)

1904–5 Joseph vendu par ses frères (Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn, Pathé; BFR) Le Jugement de Salomon (Pathé 1904/5; FRL) Le Festin de Balthazar (Pathé 1904/5; BFI) Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Lucient Nonguet (?), Pathé 1904/5; BFI) La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905; BFI) La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, with supplementary scenes (Ferdinand Zecca/Lucien Nonguet, Pathé; BFI, LOC)

1906 La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (aka La Vie du Christ) (Alice Guy, Gaumont; DVD: Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913)

1907 La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Ferdinand Zecca, Pathé; DVD: Image) Ben Hur (Sidney Olcott, Kalem; DVD: Grapevine) L’Enfant Prodigue (Michel Carré, Jean Benoit-Lévy)

1908 Samson (Albert Capellani, Pathé; BFI) Salomé or the Dance of the Seven Veils (Stuart Blackton, Vitagraph; BFI) David and Goliath (Sidney Olcott, Kalem)

Filmography

297

Le Baiser de Judas (Armand Bour, Film d’Art; ESR) Le Christ et la pécheresse (Gaumont) La Naissance de Jésus (Gaumont) Retour de l’enfant prodigue (Gaumont) Salomé (Albert Capellani, SCAGL) Giuditta e Oloferne (Mario Caserini, Cines; BFI) Salomé (Ugo Falena, Pathé; ITG)

1909 The Life of Moses (Stuart Blackton, Vitagraph; LOC, MOMA) Saul and David (Stuart Blackton, Vitagraph; BFI, ITG) The Judgment of Solomon (Stuart Blackton, Vitagraph; BFI) Jephthah’s Daughter: A Biblical Tragedy (Stuart Blackton, Vitagraph; BFI) L’Aveugle de Jérusalem (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont; BFI) Judith et Holophernes (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont; BFI) Joseph vendu par ses frères (George Berr, Film d’Art; BFI) L’Enfant Prodigue (George Berr, Film d’Art; FRB)

1910 Caïn (Éclair; ITG) Esther (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont; BFI, GPA) Le Festin de Balthazar (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont; BFI). Les Sept Pêchés capitaux (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont; BFI) L’Exode (Louis Feuillade, Gaumont; BFI) Athalie (Michel Carré, SCAGL; BFI) La Samaritaine (Film d’Arte Italiana /Série d’Art Pathé frères; FRL) Herodiade (Georges Hatot, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, Éclair; presumed lost) La Fille de Jephté (Léonce Perret, Gaumont) La Resurrection de Lazare (Georges Hatot, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, Éclair; FRB)

1911 La Parabole de l’enfant prodigue (Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, Éclair; BFI) David et Goliath (Henri Andréani, Pathé; BFI) Moïse sauvé des eaux (Henri Andréani, Pathé; BFI)

298

Filmography

Jaël et Sisera (Henri Andréani, Pathé; BFI) David et Sau¨l (Henri Andréani, Pathé; presumed lost) 1 Maccabei (Enrico Guazzoni, Cines; BFI) Giuseppe ebreo (Cines; BFI)

1912 Caïn et Abel (Henri Andréani, Pathé; BFI) Le Martyre de Saint Étienne (Henri Andréani, Pathé; FRB) Le Sacrifice d’Abraham (Henri Andréani, Pathé; GPA) La Mort de Sau¨l (Henri Andréani, Pathé; LOC) Le Sacrifice de Ismaël (Henri Andréani, Pathé; presumed lost) Le Jugement de Solomon (Henri Andréani, Pathé; GPA) From the Manger to the Cross (Sidney Olcott, Kalem; DVD: Image) Satana (Luigi Maggi, Ambrosio; BFI) Star of Bethlehem (Lawrence Marston, Thanhouser; http://thanhouser. org/films/star.htm)

1913 La Reine de Saba (Henri Andréani, Pathé; BFI) La Fille de Jephté (Henri Andréani, Pathé; BFI, FRB) Rébecca (Henri Andréani, Pathé; presumed lost) Esther (Henri Andréani, Pathé; CF) Joseph, fils de Jacob (Henri Andréani, Pathé; CF) La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Maurice André Maître, Pathé; CF) Absalon (Henri Andréani, Pathé; CF)

1914 Judith of Bethulia (D. W. Griffith, Biograph; DVD: Bach Films) Mary Magdalene (Kennedy Features)

1916 Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, Triangle/Wark; DVD: Kino) La Figlia de Herodiade (Ugo Falena, Film d’Arte Italiana; ITG)

Filmography

299

1918 Salomé (Gordon Edwards, Fox; presumed lost) The Queen of Sheba (Gordon Edwards, Fox; presumed lost apart from clip viewable at http://www.archive.org/details/Cleopatra1917)

1922 Samson und Dalila (Alexander Korda, Corda Film; BFI) Sodom und Gomorrha (Michael Curtiz, Sascha-Film; DVD: Filmarchiv Austria)

1923 The Shepherd King (Gordon Edwards, Fox; presumed lost) I.N.R.I. (Robert Wiene, Neumann Productions; BFI). The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, Famous Players-Lasky; DVD: Paramount)

1924 Die Sklavenkönigin (Michael Curtiz, Sascha-Film; BFI / American release: The Moon of Israel, FBO; 1927)

1927 The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, Pathé-Omni; DVD: Criterion)

1928 Noah’s Ark (Michael Curtiz, Warner Brothers; DVD: Warner Classics)

1936 The Green Pastures (Marc Connelly and William Keighley, Warner Brothers; DVD/VHS: Warner)

Bibliography

CATALOGUES AND SELECTED UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Margaret Herrick Library) Macpherson, J., ‘How the Story Evolved’: Ten Commandments (1923), souvenir programme, Ten Commandments clipping file. Newspaper clipping, possibly Chicago Tribune (4 February 1925); Moon of Israel file. American Mutoscope and Biograph catalogue supplement (#1) April 1903, http:// hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore00000001079.Book.17704. Bousquet, Henri, Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914, Bures-sur-Yvette: Éditions Henri Bousquet, 1994–2004. http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydouxPathé.com/. British Gaumont catalogue (1902–3), Early Rare British Filmmakers Catalogues 1896–1913, reel 2, microfilm, BFI. DeMille Archives, Brigham Young University

Inter-office communication, correspondence file. Letters received relating to The Ten Commandments (1923), correspondence file. Telegram, Magnin to DeMille (24 April 1927), Box 282. Telegram, Zukor to Lasky (19 April 1923), Jesse Lasky 1923 folder. Transcript, pre-shoot meeting, The King of Kings (23 August 1926), Box 282

Gunning, Tom, ‘Attractions and Narrative Integration,’ Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Los Angeles, 23 May 1991. Lubin Catalogue, 1905, Edison Papers, http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore0000 0001079.Book.000050730. Lubin Passion Play Lecture, 1905, http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore000000 01079.Book.000050991. Lubin Lowry, Emily, ‘Life of Siegmund Lubin’, Theatre Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia, typescript, n.d.

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Scripture index

19:16, 55 19–20, 54–5 20, 232 20:4, 238 21:24, 187 32, 56–9, 233–8 32:20, 239 32:27–28, 239 32–34, 119 Numbers 12, 233, 238, 244 13, 16 13-14, 107 16, 233 21, 16 Deuteronomy 8:3, 54 34:5, 58 Judges 4-5, 141–2 11, 69–70 13, 65, 213 13–16, 214 14:5–6, 214 15-16, 43 16:5, 106 16:12, 215 16:15–16, 215 16:21, 280 First Samuel 1:12-15, 1 10, 205 13, 205 16:19, 67 17, 66 17:34–36, 206 18, 142 21-22, 207 22, 142 24, 143

Genesis 4, 24, 137 4:14, 286 6:1–4, 278 6:5, 278 6:13–21, 281 7:1–4, 281 8, 276 11, 276 16, 143 19, 219–23 37, 149–50 39:10, 151 39:11, 151 41-46, 151 Exodus 1:11–14, 75 1:12, 75 1:15–22, 78 1:15–2:10, 25 2, 136 2:1, 77 2:2–11, 79–85 2:3–7, 41, 45–7 2:9, 85 2:11–4, 88 3:1–4, 47–50 3:2, 111 3:3, 48 7-14, 76 9:18–35, 109 11-12, 109–16 12:30, 116 12:37, 116 14, 16 14:10–31, 50–2 14:19, 111 15:20–21, 51 16, 16 16–17, 52–4 17, 16

311

312 First Kings 1–3, 202 3:16–28, 68 10:1-13, 144–7 10:13, 146 18, 285 Second Kings 11, 65 First Chronicles 2:15, 206 Esther 2:8, 104 Daniel 3:25, 221 5, 101–4 6:22, 49 Judith 7:7, 164 7:17, 165 14:6-7, 167 Matthew 2:16–18, 25, 79 4:4, 54 8:2–3, 242, 244 11:19, 173 12:21, 264 16:26, 242 17:1–9, 29 17:5, 32 17:6, 30 23, 24 26, 16 27, 24 27:22-28, 187

Scripture index 27:51, 266, 269 28, 16 28:2–3, 272 Mark 9:2–8, 29 10:13-14, 174 11:27, 264 12:12, 264 12:17, 264 Luke 6:11, 264 9:28–36, 29–30 15:11–32, 192 18, 172 20:25, 264 23:34, 99 John 1:1, 11 2:1, 172 2:11, 172 3, 16 6, 16, 24 8, 264 18:10, 271 19:6, 265 20:19, 273 First Corinthians 10, 24 10:4, 16 Second Timothy 3:16, 90 Hebrews 11:23, 25, 116

General index

Athalie (Racine, 1691), 118 audience competition, 227, 259

1 Maccabei (Cines, 1911), 158 Aaron, biblical character, vii, 57, 58, 110, 112, 115, 116, 122, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 231, 232, 233, 238 Abel, biblical character, 18, 106, 138 Abel, Richard, 3, 5, 6, 44, 45, 61, 96, 111, 124, 133, 146 Abraham, Claude, 119 Absalom, biblical character, 143 Absalon (Pathé, 1912), 143 acting, 97, 168 Adam, biblical character, 18, 140 adaptation, 9 history of Esther, 100–1 Feast of Belshazzar, 100–1 Judith, 100–1 literary, 9, 193, See also I.N.R.I. (Rosegger) musical, 9 pictorial, 9, 120–2, 231 theatrical, 67–8, 197, 198–200, 205–7 A Fool There Was (Fox, 1915), 198 Alexandre, René, actor, 146 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 26, 38, 122 Altman, Rick, 31 Ambrosio, Italian production company, 123, 136, 154, 157, 298 Ammann, J. J., 14 Amram, biblical character, 125–34 A Narrow Escape (Pathé, 1908), 135 Anderson, Howard (Sr), 269 Andréani, Henri, director, 10, 125–53 Andréani Films, French production company, 153 Andrews, Lew, 54 Anna Karenina (Fox, 1915), 197 Anthony, Walter, 196 anti-Jewish portrayal, 188–90, 264–6 anti-legalism, 186, 194, 240, 244–5, 292 Athalie (Pathé, 1911), 95

Babington, Bruce, 3, 4 Bach, Alice, 1 Baltimore Afro-American, 257 Bara, Theda, 198–200, 207 Belshazzar, biblical character, 101–4, 118, 176–90, 288 Benoit-Lévy, Édouard, 95 Bentley, T., 56 Berger, Artur, 253, 307 Bernardini, A., 157, 301 Bible, as mediated text, 224, 239, 244–6, 277, 278, 285 Bible ‘De Sacy’, 10 Bio, xii, 89, 90, 91, 105, 117, 125, 134 Biograph Bulletin, 37 Birchard, R. S., 227, 236, 289, 302 Bitzer, Billy, 178, 307 Blackton, Stuart, director, v, 4, 10, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 152, 158, 165, 166, 194, 199, 205, 206, 207, 230, 231, 282, 291, 296, 297 Blythe, Betty, 201–5 Boccacio (Sascha, 1919), 217 Bogan, Boris, 263 Boillat, Alain, 43 Bondanella, Peter, 159 Boston Globe, 257, 307 Bour, Armand, 96 Bourbon News, 203 Bousquet, Henri, 41 Bowser, Eileen, 72, 73, 85, 94, 160, 302 Brewster, Ben, 192 Brill, Lesley, 181 British Gaumont, British production company, 37

313

314

General index

Britt, Brian, 4 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 18, 307 Brooks, Peter, 126 Brown, Karl, 177 Brownlow, Kevin, 160, 177, 178, 183, 203, 204, 287, 302 Buchanan, Judith, 100, 157, 162 Cabiria (Itala, 1914), 159, 177, 178, 179, 291 Caiaphas, biblical character, 18, 262–6 Cain, biblical character, 18, 106, 136–41, 286 Caïn et Abel (Pathé, 1911), 136–41 Cairns Post, 209 Campbell, Richard, 3, 7 Capellani, Albert, director, 65, 106 Carmen (Fox, 1915), 197 Carou, Alain, 95 Carr, Harry, 189 Carré, Michel, director/writer, 118, 192 Caserini, Mario, director, 101, 157 catalogues, 8 American Mutoscope and Biograph, 17 Lubin, 29, 62 Pathé, 41, 45, 51, 53, 57, 127, 142 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 119 Cherchez la Femme (Sascha, 1921), 217 Chicago Tribune, 256, 300 Childs, Brevard, 24, 302 church as venue for exhibition, 38, 71, 73 figures, as consultants, 89–92 Ciné-Journal, xii, 99, 108, 125, 153, 307 cinematography camera movement, 80, 87, 132, 139, 144, 149, 171, 177 point-of-view, 164, 172 shot distance, 69, 72, 82, 87, 117, 132, 149, 155, 174, 176, 229, 267, 271, 279 shot length, 69 tricks. See tricks; cinematic vignette, 106 Cines, Italian production company, 101, 123, 157, 158, 159, 162, 297, 298 Cleopatra (Fox, 1917), 197 Cohen, J., 25 Coissac, Guillaume Michel, film historian, 11 Collins, Alf, director, 38 Columbia Evening Missourian, 202, 203 Connelly, Marc, 293 copyright deposit descriptions, 8, 205, 231, 243, 301 Corda, Maria, 213 Cosandey, Roland, 2 Curtiz, Michael, director, 3, 10, 211, 212, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 229, 239, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252,

253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 290, 292, 293, 299, 305 Cyrus, biblical character, 101–4, 177, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 208 Daniel, biblical character, 101–4 Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Pathé, 1904–5), 44 Dathan, biblical character, 234–7 David, biblical character, 66–8, 142, 205–7 David and Goliath (Kalem, 1908), 66 David et Goliath (Pathé, 1911), 125 David et Sau¨l (Pathé, 1911), 142, 298 Davis, Thomas, 243 Davis, Tim, 2 Debona, Guerric, 2 Delilah, biblical character, 43, 106, 212–17 DeMille, Cecil B., director, 4, 7, 10, 227–46, 282, 292 Dickens, Charles, 190 Die Dame mit dem Schwarzen Handschuh (Sascha, 1919), 212 Die Königin von Saba (Goldmark, 1875), 146 Die Lichtbild-Bu¨hne, 225, 226 Die Sklavenkönigin/Moon of Israel (Sascha/FBO, 1924/1927), 4, 246–58, 260, 280, 283, 288 Dijkstra, B., 233, 307 Doeg, biblical character, 206 Don’t Change your Husband (Paramount, 1918), 227 Doré, Gustave, vi, 21, 26, 27, 33, 38, 44, 59, 108, 111, 231 dramatic arts, 9, 96–8, 119 medieval, 24 Drew, William, 185, 189, 194, 211 Dumont, Hervé, 3, 7, 44, 261 Eckhardt, J., 29 Éclair, French production company, 123, 124, 125, 136, 197, 297, 306, 307 Edden, Valerie, 25 editing, 80 parallel action, 82 shot length, 80, 87, 229 Edwards, J. Gordon, director, 24, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 219, 223, 228, 229, 231, 242, 246, 247, 248, 280, 299, 303 Eisenstein, Sergei, director, 190 Eli, biblical character, 1 Elijah, biblical character, 18, 285 Elley, Derek, 3, 44 Elliott, Kamilla, 206, 232, 303 Elsaesser, Thomas, 126 Erdman, A., 56 Esau, biblical character, 106

General index Esther, biblical character, 18, 104–5, 248 Esther (Gaumont, 1910), 104–5 Esther (Pathé, 1913), 149, 181 Evans, Peter, 3, 4 Eve, biblical character, 18, 140 Exum, Cheryl, 106 Eyman, Scott, 259, 261, 263, 266, 275, 289, 303 Fairservice, D., 160, 167, 303 FBO, American production company, 256 femme fatale, 10, 141, 142, 198–200, 202, 224, 292 Fescourt, H., 13 Feuillade, Louis, director, 10, 13, 98–122, 135–6 ‘Le Film Esthétique’, 99–100, 105, 120 Film d’Art, French production company, 95, 123, 139 Filme d’Art Italiano, 123 footage expanded, 72, 144, 153, 159 reduced, 153 Ford, C., 65 Forshey, Gerald, 3 Fox, American production company, 10, 196–209 Fox, William, viii, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 209, 219, 224, 242, 247, 292, 299 From the Manger to the Cross (Kalem, 1912), 2, 64, 144, 155, 173, 271 Gaudreault, André, 2, 5, 44, 155 Gaumont, French production company, 3, 10, 41, 98–122 Gauntier, Gene, 144 Gauthier, Philippe, 155 Genini, R., 198, 200, 303 George Kleine, American distribution company, 59, 61 Gish, Lilian, 169, 191, 303 Giuda (Mari, 1919), 261 Giuditta (Giacometti, 1857), 157 Giuditta e Oloferne (Cines, 1908), 101, 157 Giuseppe ebreo (Cines, 1911), 158 Gledhill, E., 126 glorification/apotheosis of biblical character, 57, 70 Goliath, biblical character, 66, 207 Goodall, Frederick, 38 Gourmont, Rémy, 134 Grace, Pamela, 2 Griffith, David Wark, director, 7, 10, 160–96, 291 Guazzoni, Enrico, director, 158, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 298 Gunning, Tom, 2, 5, 69 Guy, Alice, director, 98

315

Haggard, L. Rider, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 254, 256, 278, 287 Hall, S., 160, 205 Haman, biblical character, 118 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 9, 101 Hannah, biblical character, 1 Hanson, B., 179 Harrison, L. R., 168 Harrison’s Reports, 229, 300 Hart, G., 85 Hatot, Georges, director, 41, 98, 123, 124, 125, 295, 297 Heilman, Robert, 136 Heine, Heinrich, 100 Heintzelman, M. J., 14 Henabery, Joseph, 178 Herod, biblical character, 18 Herr, Mireille, 100, 119 Higashi, Sumiko, 4, 229, 231, 245, 303 historical research, 185 Holloway, Ronald, 2 Holofernes, biblical character, 101, 118, 161–9 Home Sweet Home (Majestic, 1914), 191 Honneur de Père (Pathé, 1905), 134 Horak, J.-C., 256, 308 Höritz Passion Play (Klaw and Erlanger, 1897), 13–29, 271 appearing in Biograph catalogue (1903), 35 Passion play from which adapted. See Passion plays prefatory scenes reduced, 36 scenes, 18 Humbert, J., 230, 304 I.N.R.I. (Neumann, 1923), 225–6, 267, 270 I.N.R.I. (Rosegger), 193–4, 224 illustrated Bibles, 9, 108, 111, 240, 275 Indiens et Cowboys (Pathé, 1903), 134 intertitles, 75, 80, 105, 127, 129, 171, 206, 215, 232, 242, 263, 285 dialogue, 70, 76, 206 Intolerance (Triangle, 1916), 2, 170–96, 211, 244, 252, 264–6 Babylonian story, 176–90, 249 Judaean story, 170–6 medieval story, 170 modern story, 170 Isaac, biblical character, 18 Israel in Egypt (Poynter, 1867), 230 Jacobs, Lea, 192 Jael, biblical character, 141–2 Jaël et Sisera (Pathé, 1911), 141–2 Jairus, daughter of, 270 Japheth, biblical character, 279, 280–1

316

General index

Jasset, Victorin-Hyppolyte, director, 123, 124, 125, 297 Jefford, Clayton, 2 Jephthah, biblical character, 69–70 Jephthah, daughter of, biblical character, 69–70 Jesionowski, J., 192, 304 Jesus Christ, 8, 99, 124–5, 170–6, 225, 242, 260–75, 288 Jewish Advocate, 257, 300 Jewish opposition to Jesus, 176 depiction of, 170–6, 262–6 Joan the Woman (Paramount, 1916), 227 Jocheved, biblical character, 76–86, 125–34 John, the Baptist, biblical character, 199 Johnson, Julian, 189, 190, 195 Joseph (son of Jacob), biblical character, 18, 149–52 Joseph fils de Jacob (Pathé, 1913), 149–52 Joseph vendu par ses frères (Pathé, 1904), 44, 58, 59 Joseph vendu per ses frères (Film d’Art, 1909), 149 Josephus, Flavius, 199 Judas, biblical character, 18, 96–8, 225, 261–2, 263 Judith, biblical character, 101, 142, 161–9, 248 Judith and Holofernes (Aldrich, 1896), 163 Judith et Holophernes (Gaumont, 1909), 101, 135–6 Judith of Bethulia (Aldrich, 1904), 163–4 Judith of Bethulia (Biograph, 1914), 3, 161–9 Judson, P., 14 Jung, U., 225, 226, 270, 304 Keil, Charles, 69 King James Version (1611), 10 Kinnard, Roy, 2 Klaw and Erlanger, American production company, 23, 169 Klein, L., 106 Knight, F., 239 Kolowrat-Krakowsky, Count Alexander, 211, 212, 246, 247 Korda, Alexander, director, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 223, 224, 225, 229, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 248, 280, 281, 283, 299, 302 Koszarski, R., 169 L’Amour et Psyche (Gaumont, 1908), 99 L’Assasinat du duc de Guise (Film d’Art, 1908), 95 L’Aveugle de Jérusalem (Gaumont, 1909), 99 L’Enfant Prodigue (Benoit-Lévy, 1907), 95 L’Enfant Prodigue (Pathé, 1902), 41 L’Orange, H. P., 59 La Bonne Presse, 11 La Civilisation à travers les âges (Star-Films, 1907–8), 136 La Figlia de Herodiade (Film d’Arte Italia, 1916), 199 La Mort de Sau¨l (Pathé, 1912), 143, 298

La Naissance de Jésus (Gaumont, 1908), 99 La Passion du Christ (Léar, 1897), 41 La Reine de Saba (Gounod, 1865), 146 La Reine de Saba (Pathé, 1913), vii, viii, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 162, 202, 208, 298 La Resurrection de Lazare (Éclair, 1910), 124–5 La Vie de Moïse (Pathé, 1905), 44–60, 61, 73 La Vie du Christ (Gaumont, 1906), 41, 98, 124 La Vie et la Passion de Jésus-Christ (Lumière, 1898), 41 La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Pathé, 1902–5), 20, 42 La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Pathé, 1907), 62–3, 64, 156 La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Pathé, 1913), 154, 175, 271 Lacassin, Francis, 99 Lasky, Jesse, 227, 228, 243, 256, 299, 300, 301 Lavedan, Henri, 96–8 Lazarus, biblical character, 18, 124–5, 266, 271 Le Baiser de Judas (Film d’Art, 1908), 96–8, 261 Le Bargy, Charles, 95 Le Christ et la pécheresse (Gaumont, 1908), 99 Le Detective (Pathé, 1906), 134 Le Festin de Balthazar (Gaumont, 1910), 101–4, 180 Le Festin de Balthazar (Pathé, 1904), 44 Le Jugement de Salomon (Pathé, 1904), 44, 68 Le Jugement de Salomon (Pathé, 1912), 143 Le Martyre de Saint Étienne (Pathé, 1912), 142 Le Sacrifice d’Abraham (Pathé, 1912), 143 Le Sacrifice de Ismaël (Pathé, 1912), 143 Léar (aka Albert Kirchner), director, 11 lecture, 9 lecture, accompanying, 22 Caïn et Abel (1911), 140 Höritz Passion Play (1897), 20–2 La Vie de Moïse (1905), 45 The Life of Moses (1909–10), 71, 92–4 The Passion Play (1898), 30–2 Leibfred, Philip, 247, 308 Leondopoulos, Jordan, 170, 181, 184, 190, 195, 304 Les Sept Pêchés capitaux (Gaumont, 1910), 105–8, 119, 136–41 L’Exode (Gaumont, 1910), 108–22 Leyda, J., 190, 211, 304, 307 Lieber, Fritz, 202 Life’s Shop Window (Fox, 1914), 197 location shooting, 137 California, 253 Catalina island, 260 Egypt, 143–4, 150, 208 France, 154 Fontainebleau, 137

General index Palestine, 208 Jerusalem, 144 Vienna, 253 Long, Edwin, 38 Long, Frederick, 180 Lord, D. A., 260 Los Angeles Times, 189, 227, 243, 245, 256, 307, 309 Louvish, Simon, 245, 259, 260, 274, 304 Lowry, E., 29 Lucas, Hardin, 189 Lumières, French production company, 41 Lutte pour la vie (Pathé, 1907), 135 Maccabaeus, Judas, biblical character, 158 MacPherson, Jeanie, 227, 228, 229, 233, 237, 238, 240, 243, 244, 260, 261 magic lantern, 9 Magnin, Edgar, 262 Maisch, I., 261, 304 Maître, Maurice André, director, 154, 274, See also La Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Pathé, 1913) Majestic, American production company, 169 Male and Female (Paramount, 1919), 227 Maltby, Richard, 263 Maria von Magdala (Heyse, 1903), 261 Mark, biblical character, 266–7, 271 Martha, sister of Lazarus, biblical character, 124 Mary, Magadalene, biblical character, 261–2 Mary Magdalene (Kennedy Features, 1914), 261 Mary, mother of Jesus, biblical character, 154, 172 Mary, sister of Lazarus, biblical character, 124 Maspero, Gaston, egyptologist, 121 Mayer, D., 162, 163, 305 McDannell, Colleen, 239 McMahan, Alison, 41, 98 Méliès, Georges, director, 33, 136 melodrama, 132, 291 as theorized by Singer, 126–7 child threatened, 79, 112, 113, 125–34, 143, 164 domestic, 77, 111, 112, 136–41, 152 emotion, 133, 139 fraternal tension, 137, 143, 150 in French cinema (1900–10), 134–5 maternal rivalry, 143 moral polarization, 149 romantic, 88, 147, 151, 183, 202, 207, 228, 248, 255, 261, 280, 284–5 suspense, 130 Merab, biblical character, 206 Mersereau, Violet, 207 Metz, Christian, 236, 305 Michal, biblical character, 66–8, 142, 205–7 Michelakis, Pantelis, 2, 3 Milano, Italian production company, 123

317

Milbank, Jeremiah, 259, 260 Miriam, biblical character, vi, vii, viii, 27, 40, 41, 46, 51, 76–86, 125–34, 164, 200, 230, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 248, 254, 280, 283, 284, 285, 288, 303 Moberly, Walter, 237 Moïse (Chateaubriand), 119 Moïse sauvé des eaux (Pathé, 1911), 125–34 Moon of Israel (Haggard, 1918), 247 Moses, biblical character, 9, 18, 25–7, 47–60, 70–94, 108–16, 125–34, 234–7, 276–90 Moses in the Bullrushes (British Gaumont, 1903), 41 Mounet-Sully, Jean, 96–8 MPW, xii, 23, 63, 67, 71, 72, 73, 75, 90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 105, 117, 123, 125, 132, 134, 136, 139, 140, 143, 168, 189, 192, 200, 203, 229, 256, 308, 309, 310 Muir, L., 16 Mulvey, Laura, 235, 308 Musser, Charles, 5, 6, 12, 64 Napierkowska, Stacia, dancer/actor, 102 Neale, S., 160, 205, 305 Nebuchadnezzar, biblical character, 106 Niver, Kemp, 17, 21, 29, 35, 37, 38, 305, 310 Noah, biblical character, 18, 24, 276–90 Noah’s Ark (Warner, 1928), 3, 276–90 non-biblical characters, 67, 147–8, 164–6, 176–90, 191, 199, 201–5, 249–51, 277–8 Nonguet, Lucien, 102 NYC, 61 NYDM, xii, 29, 71, 117, 118, 169, 178 O’Dell, Paul, 191 objections of Jewish authorities, 262–3 Olcott, Sidney, director, 2 Osarphis (Nadal, 1728), 119 Pantazzi, M., 230 parallel plotlines, 168 parallelism, narrative, 190–6 eschewed in The King of Kings (1927), 260 I.N.R.I. (Neumann, 1923), 225–6 Intolerance (Triangle, 1916), 195 Noah’s Ark (Warner, 1928), 276 Samson und Dalila (Korda, 1922), 213, 217 Sodom und Gomorrha (Sascha, 1922), 218 The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1923), 244–5 Paramount, American production company, viii, 256, 257, 258, 299 Partee, J., 243 Pasler, Judith, 100

318

General index

Passion plays, 9 Höritz, 17 Oberammergau, 9, 14, 15, 23 Pathé-Frères, French production company, 3, 7, 10, 41, 61–3, 123, 261, 291 Pauvre Mère (Pathé, 1906), 134 Pearson, Roberta, 4, 64, 90, 121 Perret, Léonce, actor/director, 103 Peter, biblical character, 13, 18, 267, 271 Peters, Madison, clergy, 89–92 Petrie, G., 190 Pharaoh, biblical character, 75, 76, 108–16, 128 Pharaoh, daughter of, biblical character, 76, 132 Pharaoh, son of, biblical character, 113–16, 231 Pharisees, biblical characters, 171, 173, 266 Philadelphia Inquirer, 21, 23, 309 Philadelphia Public Ledger, 17, 21, 28, 309 Philadelphia Record, 17, 19, 20, 309 Photoplay, 189, 190, 195, 203, 207, 209, 229, 243, 286, 308 Pickford, Mary, 236 Pictures and Picturegoer, 228, 300 Pilate, biblical character, 13, 18, 263 Pippa Passes (Biograph, 1909), 191 Pitts, Michael R., 3, 7 Potiphar, wife of, biblical character, 150 Poussin, Nicholas, 25, 108 Prométhée (Gaumont, 1908), 99 Queen of Sheba, biblical character, 201–5 Querelle Enfantine (Lumière, 1896), 40 Quo Vadis (Cines, 1913), 159–60 Quo Vadis (Pathé, 1901), 41 Racine, Jean, 9, 118 Ramsaye, Terry, 196, 305 Raven, M. J., 120 Rébecca (Pathé, 1913), 148, 153, 298 Redi, Ricardo, 42 Reinhartz, Adele, 1, 2, 171, 173, 265, 289, 305, 309 Rembrandt, 100 Repas de bébé (Lumière, 1895), 40 Retour de l’enfant prodigue (Gaumont, 1908), 99 Richardson, W. H., 189 Robert, Valentine, 43, 45 Roberts, I., 225 Robertson, J. C., 258 Roman soldiers, biblical characters, 174 Romeo and Juliet (Fox, 1916), 197 SCAGL, 65, 95, 123 Sadoul, George, 11, 41 Salomé, biblical character, 56, 198–200 Salomé (Fox, 1918), 198–200 Salomé (Pathé/SCAGL, 1908), 102, 199

Salt, Barry, 69, 75 Samson, biblical character, 43, 212–17, 280–1, 288 Samson (Pathé, 1908), 65–6, 213 Samson et Dalila (Pathé, 1902), 43, 283 Samson und Dalila (Korda, 1922), 212–17 Samuel, biblical character, 1 San Francisco Bulletin, 195 San Francisco Chronicle, 196 Sascha Film, Austrian production company, viii, 211, 212, 220, 221, 225, 246, 251, 299 Satana (Ambrosio, 1912), 154 Saul, biblical character, 67, 106, 143, 206 Saul and David (Vitagraph, 1909), 125 Schatzberg, W., 225, 226, 270, 304 Schickel, Richard, 169, 188, 306 Schildkraut, Joseph, 263 Schildkraut, Rudolph, 263 Schnoor von Carolsfeld, Julius, 26, 38, 45–50, 55, 108 Sheba, queen of, biblical character, 144–8 Shem, biblical character, 279 Shepherd, David, 45, 85, 98, 121, 165 Simon of Cyrene, biblical character, 174, 266 Singer, Ben, 126, 142 Sisera, biblical character, 141–2 Slide, Anthony, 64 Sodom und Gomorrha (Sascha, 1922), viii, 217, 218–24, 229, 234, 238, 239, 244, 246, 251, 252, 254, 256, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284, 287, 308 Solomon, biblical character, 68–9, 144–8, 201–5 Solomon, Jon, 3 spectacle, viii angels, 48, 55, 111, 138, 157, 272 animals, 172, 177, 183, 214, 268, 284 as theorized by Babington and Evans, 4–6 battle, 141, 161, 165, 179, 213, 269 chariot, viii, 75, 109, 179, 183, 203, 204, 205, 261, 268 race, 205, 231 colour, 117, 229, 268, 273 costume, 101, 202, 252 crowds, 158, 174, 176, 225, 257, 267, 279 dancing, 56, 103, 162, 182, 215, 218, 231, 234, 283 emotion, 69, 70, 76, 82, 133, 138, 139 feasting, 56, 101, 103, 104, 112, 160, 161, 213, 279 healing, 271, 285 idolatry, 232–4, 252, 279 infant, 39, 40, 47, 78, 130, 164 lighting, 271–3 lightning, 281, 283 location. See location shooting

General index miraculous, 43, 50, 103, 214, 244, 269–70, 271–4, 283–5 music, 144 pastiche of, 286–7, 288 procession, 51, 68, 76, 103, 104, 144, 213, 231, 234, 252, 279 sensuality, 38 female, 38, 44, 104, 162, 181, 200, 202, 214, 234–6, 252, 262, 268, 283 male, 214, 279, 283 set design, 43, 159, 161, 178, 203, 228, 252 violence, 44, 75, 78, 103, 125, 127, 130, 137, 160, 162, 230, 279, 280–1 death, 52, 103, 112, 113, 147, 216, 239 destruction, 44, 57, 160, 166, 216, 239, 252 divine judgement, 277, 283–5, 287 human sacrifice, 280, 283 pyrotechnics, 239 Štábla, Zdeněk, 34 Steiner, Ines, 218, 248, 250, 253, 308, 310 Stempel, T., 163, 306 Stephen, biblical character, 142 Stern, Richard, 2 Stokes, M., 160, 161, 306 Strauven, Wanda, 5 Sue, Eugène, author, 106 Summers, Rollin, 96 Susanna, biblical character, 106 Swanson, Gloria, 236 Sweet, Blanche, 160 tableaux vivant, 17, 42 Tatum, Barnes, 2, 170, 171, 174, 176, 271, 274, 289, 294, 306 Terrible Angoisse (Pathé, 1906), 134 The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (Biograph, 1913), 160 The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915), 169 The Covered Wagon (Famous Players-Lasky, 1922), 229 The Daily Times, 207 The Daughter of Jephthah: A Biblical Tragedy (Vitagraph, 1909), 69–70 The Death of Pharaoh’s Firstborn (Alma-Tadema), 120–2 The Good Samaritan (British Gaumont, 1903), 38 The Green Pastures (Warner, 1936), 293 The Jazz Singer (Warner, 1927), 258 The Judgment of Solomon (Vitagraph, 1909), 68–9 The King of Kings (Pathé Exchange, 1927), 260–75, 288

319

The Life of Moses (Vitagraph, 1909–10), 4, 45, 70–94, 108–14, 125–34 The Man Nobody Knows – A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Barton, 1925), 275 The Modern Prodigal (Biograph, 1908), 192 The New York Clipper, 61 The Passion Play (Lubin Films, 1898), 34, 43, 62 The Passion Play of Oberammergau (Eaves and Hollaman, 1898), 28–9 The Prince and the Pauper (Sascha, 1920), 212 The Providence News, 204, 205 The Queen of Sheba (Fox, 1921), 201–5 The Road to Yesterday (DeMille, 1925), 259, 277 The Shepherd King (Fox, 1923), 205–11 The Shepherd King (Lorimer and Reeves, 1903), 67–8, 205–7 The Star of Bethlehem (Thanhouser, 1912), 64 The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1923), 3, 4, 227–46, 260, 269, 274, 276–90 The Volga Boatman (DeMille, 1926), 259 Tintoretto, 24 Tissot, J. J., 21, 24, 38, 121, 144, 145, 154, 172, 174, 309 tragedy, 9, 113, 117, 118, 158, 291 tricks, 33 cinematic, 33, 47, 50, 70, 111, 138, 232, 242, 254, 269–70, 271, 273, 276–90 theatrical, 34, 47, 54, 269–70 Tutankhamun, discovery of tomb, 209, 227 typology, 23–5, 52, 53 Ulmer, Rivka, 25 Uricchio, William, 4, 64, 90, 121 Van der Stichele, Caroline, 2 Var, xii, 91, 117, 229 Vardac, Nicholas, 126, 190 VB, xii, 71, 121 Vitagraph, American production company, vi, vii, xii, 4, 10, 63–5, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 105, 106, 109, 121, 123, 139, 140, 166, 199, 201, 206, 291, 296, 297, 303, 306, 309 ‘Quality films’, 4, 64, 70 Warner Brothers, American production company, 258, 259, 276 Warwick Trading Company, British production company, 35 Washington Post, 257, 303 well, 164, 165

320

General index

Why Change your Wife? (Paramount, 1919), 227 Wimmer, F., 47 Woods, Frank, 163 Woolcott, A., 195, 310 Wyke, Maria, 2, 3

Zanuck, Daryl, 276, 277, 288 Zecca, Ferdinand, director, 63, 106, 154, 291 Ziegler, C., 230 Zukor, Adolph, 228, 229, 243, 256, 257, 259, 300 Zwick, Reinhold, 2, 226, 306, 310