December 4: Abraham Lincoln (1930 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★

There is some fun flair in Abraham Lincoln, but there isn't enough to redeem the film from its terrible script and the stilted acting.  From the love scenes through the public oratory and presidential decision-making, the language is poetic and the delivery, declamatory.  As Lou said, this film is a silent movie with sound.

It features Griffith using techniques that were innovative fifteen years earlier but old hat by this time.  There’s cross-cutting, which Birth of a Nation skillfully exploited in 1915; here, Griffith uses the same technique and for the same purpose, to contrast the North and the South and to show simultaneous action.  Lincoln also shows us extras-packed war scenes reminiscent of both Birth and Intolerance, and dissolves between scenes here suggest that the content of one shot lingers into the next.  For example, Lincoln’s distress at the death of Ann Rutledge dissolves into his virtual breakdown afterwards.  There’s also the technique of using a repeated image to convey a poetic meaning.  Intolerance repeatedly returns to the rocking cradle; here, we keep seeing a tracking shot of a landscape model, an image the film offers as symbolic.  And close-ups here lend intimacy and urgency, just as they did in Birth, Intolerance and Way Down East.  Whether it’s Lincoln’s seduction of Ann or the facial intensity of rebels plotting the assassination, close-ups of the actors’ faces bring us into the emotion of the scene.

Griffith adds at least one new element to some close-ups Lincoln that shows his direction hasn't completely ossified.  In a very contemporary and unexpected way, Griffith sometimes has his actors, in close-up, look directly at the camera and at us.  Our introduction to John Wilkes Booth has one such moment in it, which drives home to us the radical he is; likewise, Lincoln tells us at one point, eye to eye, that the Union will not be dissolved.  Such breaking the fourth wall shows a director at least modestly looking to vary his cinematic language.

Griffith also integrates camera movement especially well with the rhythm of a scene in this film.  At one point, the camera moves in on wedge Lincoln is using to split wood and then draws back to show us Ann watching Abe as he splits logs.  Then the camera moves in for their intimate dialog before it ultimately cuts to dialog with Abe’s employer.  This is a much more fluid camera than we see in early Griffith.  The scene of Abe’s proposal to Ann is even more lyrical and fluid.  As the scene opens, the camera follows a singing shepherdess walking a cow out through the pasture.  The camera then swings back across the field to close in on Abe’s proposal.  After Ann accepts, the camera swings back to the shepherd girl, who is just closing the gate and coming to the end of her song.  It’s a beautifully-edited sequence, a culmination of techniques Griffith used earlier.

There’s even a moment of German Expressionism in Abraham Lincoln.  Late in the film, a backlit Lincoln wearing a tall top hat descends narrow stairs toward the viewer with a child at each hand, a shot which carries an eeriness that doesn't appear in other Griffith work.  Here, the director is clearly trying out alternative ways of telling stories.

Unfortunately, for all the innovations big and small, Abraham Lincoln doesn’t engage an audience because its dialog is so literary and its acting so stiff and stagy.  It can have striking moments of historical accuracy, like the scene that shows the horse and buggy dirtied up with mud, but in cinema, Griffith had clearly done better work previously.