Biograph, 1909. Director: D.W. Griffith. Camera: Billy Bitzer, Arthur Marvin. Cast: Charles Inslee, Marion Leonard, George Gebhardt, Anita Hendrie, David Miles, Florence Lawrence, Dorothy West, John R. Cumpson, Linda Arvidson.
Richard Koszarski is one of our best film historians, and has been for decades. Any film enthusiast who has enjoyed his body of work can vouch for his meticulously thorough research, his masterful writing—and another characteristic trait: his passionate advocacy for the East Coast. A native New Yorker himself, Richard has long championed the important role of New York and New Jersey in American film history; not only during the formative years of the industry, but throughout the classic period. In books and articles he has celebrated the many accomplishments of this “Hollywood on the Hudson.” So it’s wonderful news, but hardly surprising, to learn that he has partnered with Kino Lorber to produce an exciting new Blu-Ray collection titled Made in New Jersey. This two-disc set brings together a rich sampling of films produced in and around Fort Lee, directly across the river from Manhattan, where many of the early American producers found locations and built production studios.
To make this collection even more exciting, one of the producers represented here is the Biograph company, where D.W. Griffith logged the first historic chapter of his career. Biograph did maintain a production facility in Manhattan, a small studio in the same building with its company headquarters on 14th Street, but routinely filmed exteriors across the river in Fort Lee. I’ve already commented in this space on the monumental work of Film Preservation Society to restore every one of Griffith’s hundreds of surviving Biograph films—but I’ll comment on it again; the importance of this undertaking cannot be overstated. This new Blu-Ray offers us two more tantalizing glimpses of FPS’ handiwork, bringing these essential films back to their full original visual clarity. The comedy The Curtain Pole has already been (deservedly) celebrated elsewhere, so I’m focusing here on the second entry, The Cord of Life.
Produced early in January 1909, about seven months into Griffith’s directorial tenure at Biograph, The Cord of Life is an early example of the suspense film, a genre that Griffith had pioneered and would develop to a peak of perfection. Here, as elsewhere, he places one character—a baby, in this case—in danger and obliges another character to race to the rescue. It’s not difficult to see why this film was selected for this collection; in the course of the hero’s frantic race to save his child, we get an unusually generous view of Fort Lee and its environs. As Koszarski’s liner notes inform us, these include what was then a recently erected Revolutionary War monument as well as a four-story apartment building that was well-known to the locals and a frequently used film location. Considering the town’s importance in film history at large, these scenes have an obvious documentary value.
But for the viewer who cares for Griffith’s films and the vital creative work he was performing at Biograph, that’s only the beginning. Many of what would become established conventions in the Biographs are already on display at this early stage, and clearly visible to most of us for the first time, thanks to this sparkling FPS restoration. The interiors are of course filmed in the 14th Street studio, which was actually a small and somewhat cramped space. The tight working conditions, illustrated in the accompanying production still, resulted in a standardized, straightforward compositional style that contrasted sharply with the free, flexible look of the exteriors, filmed with an unrestricted camera. These tight interiors became a uniform feature of the Biographs, and can be seen in The Cord of Life. (As can the omnipresent company logo! In these early years when film piracy was rampant, many companies protected themselves by inserting their trademarks in the films—not only in the opening titles, but in the scenes themselves. Biograph joined in this practice, and most of its films of this period depicted homes and offices tastefully decorated with the Biograph “AB” logo. As time went on the AB became more subtly absorbed into the scenery, but in The Cord of Life it’s so prominent that Griffith is practically daring the audience not to notice it.)
Beyond these matters, The Cord of Life fascinates with its snapshot of Griffith’s developing editorial technique in early 1909. The core of his suspense-film technique was his discovery of parallel editing, and in the next few years he would fine-tune this principle to a highly polished craft.
If one character was in danger and another was rushing to effect a rescue, Griffith discovered that he could cut repeatedly from one to the other until the audience was in a state of nearly unbearable suspense. In this film that principle was still in its rudimentary phase, but we can already see the director experimenting with it: the hero’s (Charles Inslee’s) distractions that momentarily impede his haste to reach his goal; the small incidents at his home that repeatedly threaten the infant child with danger before Inslee’s arrival. If the resulting film seems less exciting, to our eyes, than a later milestone like The Lonedale Operator, it’s important to remember that these techniques were still fresh and novel in 1909, and packed a real punch for their first audiences. Contemporary trade reviews confirm that audiences, and the reviewers themselves, were powerfully affected by the climactic scenes of this film.
All this is enhanced, on this disc, by a lively, compelling piano score by Donald Sosin. And it bears repeating that this fascinating little slice of film history is only one of fourteen vintage films, and two documentaries, included in this splendid collection. The viewer who loves early film could hardly ask for a more lavish package of delights.
