By Bibi Berki.
Griffith’s singular essay about the future of the cinema is a far more complex and layered piece than might seem immediately obvious.”
It’s a risky business playing the soothsayer. Nonetheless, the director DW Griffith had a crack at it in 1924 with a magazine article called The Movies 100 Years From Now. (1) At times far-fetched, at others insightful, this curiosity of an essay is now a useful artefact of film history as we view it from the other end of his prognostications. But what prompted a man held in such high regard by his peers to produce this parlour trick? And how seriously did he expect to be taken when, for example, he insisted that by 2024 films would be responsible for the end of all global conflict? If ever a set of predictions should not be taken at face value, but placed in a historical and personal context, then these are probably they.
David Wark Griffith was considered a genius by his fellow filmmakers, hailed as a pioneer, the father of film. But by 1924 his greatest successes were behind him, and he was tasting critical failure as a director for the first time. That year his two big releases – the War of Independence epic, America, and the romantic drama, Isn’t Life Wonderful – were financial flops. At the same time, he was having to relinquish his Mamaroneck studio, just five years after he’d created it on a rural estate outside New York. He was in debt and losing grip of his artistic independence. In July 1924 it was announced that the father of film was being taken on as just another staff director at Paramount. (2)
The year might have been difficult for Griffith, but it was positively turbulent for the industry. Smaller film companies were fighting for their lives as studio amalgamations were creating dominant new players in the market. Audiences were becoming more sophisticated and studios had to embrace new technologies to keep them coming. Which brings us to sound and, on the face of it, Griffith’s most mind-boggling prediction.
“There never will be speaking pictures,” he insists.
Bold assertion of fact or impassioned wishful thinking? By 1924, there was little doubt that sound movies were on the horizon. It wasn’t as if going to the movies had been a silent affair in any case, with cinema-owners often enhancing the viewing experience with live sound effects. The conundrum with sound had been synchronizing recordings with the action on screen, something Leon Gaumont managed to achieve with his Chronophone as early as 1902, with commercial rivals working on their own versions. By 1924, the prolific American inventor Lee De Forest was demonstrating his Phonofilms (short sound movies and news reels) in movie theatres around the USA.
For Griffith the only sound coming from a screen should be orchestral. In a hundred years, he wrote, the three principle people involved in film-making would be “the author first, the director and music composer occupying an identical position in importance”. The commissioned musical score was already a facet of early cinema; the composer Joseph Carl Breil had composed the music for Griffith’s career-defining epics Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).
Music, as I see it within that hundred years, will be applied to the visualization of the human being’s imagination… There is no voice in the world like the voice of music. To me those images on the screen must always be silent. Anything else would work at cross-purposes with the real object of this new medium of expression. There will never be speaking pictures.
We do not want now and we never shall want the human voice with our films.”
Put into the context of an imminent sound revolution, Griffith’s words take on a very personal resonance. His wistful appreciation of the silent film is tinged with the horrible prospect of his work becoming obsolete. Similar apprehension troubled the big film companies, which were facing the double threat of waning audience interest and potentially wasted investment in a backlog of silent movies. Within two years of his article, the first film using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system – Don Juan (1926) – came out, and a year after that, The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie.
While Griffith can’t for the life of him see how it will be possible to “synchronize the voice with the pictures”, he has less trouble visualizing the advent of colour. The practice of tinting – “made by the use of gelatines on the film or by the use of varicoloured lenses which fly before the film” – are simply no good, he says. One day the industry will “develop a film so sensitive that it will record the natural tints and colours as the picture is being photographed”.
Griffith is not writing from the realm of wild imaginings. As long as there have been moving pictures, there has been colour. He himself developed a way of projecting colour directly onto the screen in movie theatres. But in the latter 20s and early 30s the technology really took off. Just as Griffith pointed out, the gels and lenses of early coloured film would give way to more complex processes. By the 20s, companies such as Cinechrome, Busch Colour and Raycol were offering film-makers a range of tones under the two-colour system. Grifith may well have already seen some early colour productions, including the first ever feature using the Technicolor two-colour process, The Toll of the Sea, in 1922.
Alongside lifelike colour would come depth and perspective. “The moving canvas will not appear flat,” he says, apparently suggesting three-dimensionality. “From the standpoint of naturalness, motion pictures one hundred years from now will be so nearly like the living person or the existing object pictured that you will be unable, sitting in your orchestra seat, to determine whether they are pictures or the real thing.”
Not that sitting in an orchestra seat will be a prerequisite to film-watching. Griffith suggests that “every home of good taste” will be showing motion pictures in miniature and that one day watching films on trains, planes and steam ships will also be the norm.
Although it could be argued that many of the technical advances Griffith foresees were already in development, his views on the social and cultural importance of films come from somewhere more instinctive and personal. Films, he says, will simply get better, more popular and more important. Novelists will devote their time to writing for the medium and there will be a whole new discipline – the study of film history.
He foresees an industry whose practitioners have “grown up” in terms of their various skills, collaborating to produce a “more natural, dignified, sincere result”. No longer concentrated in Hollywood, it will flourish in countless other cities, mainly outside New York (just like his own Mamamoreck base). It sounds like he’s predicting the end of the studio system – and the rise of the freelance – just as that very system is getting going.
In short then, cinema screens will be bigger, the picture quality like real life, the music soaring (the actors silent), the stories like novels, the experience intellectually valuable and socially binding. But he has to bring us down to earth. There’s a high price for all the time, effort and expertise it takes to make moving pictures. “Prepare for a small-sized shock,” he warns his readers. “The average supposedly high-class film play in 2024 will be on view at not less than $5 a seat.”
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So, what about movies and world peace?:
In the year 2024 the most important single thing which the cinema will have helped in a large way to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the civilized world all armed conflict… With the use of the universal language of moving pictures the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been established throughout the earth.”
This is the opening salvo in his essay, the first of his predictions, setting an unexpectedly moral tone to the entire article. Witnessing the daily lives of people from other cultures, he explains, will necessarily bring about a state of equality. And if there is any conflict, “it will be waged on a strictly scientific basis”, governed by rules to which both sides must comply.
“I am not smiling with you now,” he says. “I am quite sincere.”
Griffith’s extravagant claim – even when he’s conscious of our smiles – brings us right back to wondering at his motives in writing this article. One explanation could be that it is a publicity stunt, part of the necessary round of attention-grabbing for his film projects that year. Did the commercial and critical failure of America push him to assert himself in print as a director of stature and authority?
But there’s another potential explanation and it lies in the memoirs of the actress, Lilian Gish, who worked with Griffith from his early days at Biograph and starred in his blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915). Gish idolized the director and her autobiography – written 20 years after his death – is as much a tribute to him as it is an account of her own career. When it comes to the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation, she has things to say.
The film ignited intense feelings from the very start. Praised as technically brilliant and largely patronized by white audiences, it was also found deeply offensive by America’s black population. The protests and the political attacks by “a host of important liberals” raised bigger issues of censorship, claimed Gish, and left Griffith not only defending his film but, she says, free speech.
Mr. Griffith reacted to the violence and censorship with astonishment, shock and sorrow. Not even he had realised the full power of the film he had created, a film that raised the threat of legislation for national censorship. Then slowly his reaction turned to anger. His personal crusade to protect his films began with the Birth and lasted until his death… He fought by way of newspapers, magazines and speeches.” (3)
Could it be that Griffith’sarticle – which appeared in the highly-regarded general interest magazine Collier’s – was one example of this “crusade? That when asked to produce an amusing piece on the future of the cinema, he couldn’t help but lay out his credentials as a lover of peace and tolerance – his belief in a “brotherhood of man”? In other words, is this essay one of the on-going ways he sought to defend himself and protect his legacy?
He only mentions one film in the entire article and that’s The Birth of a Nation. Its continued following, he says, is an illustration of the growing popularity of moving pictures. He describes how its revival in 1922 was as successful as its first showing. What he doesn’t mention is how this revival also sparked a wave of protests outside screenings, exactly as it had before.
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In the end, Griffith’s singular essay about the future of the cinema is a far more complex and layered piece than might seem immediately obvious. Whatever his motivation, however much of himself he puts into it – however much controversy he leaves out – it tells us far more about his time than ours. He has taken up the challenge to predict the future and barely concealed within it his own predicament and preoccupations. Which makes sense, given the impossibility of the task. “The motion picture is a child that has been given life in our generation,” he writes. “We poor souls can scarcely visualize or dream of its possibilities.”
Endnotes
1) Griffith, DW, The Movies 100 years From Now, originally printed in Collier’s, May 3, 1924, pp 7 and 28. Reprinted in Harry M. Geduld ed, Film Makers on Film Making, Statements on their Art by Thirty Directors, Penguin Books, London, 1967, pp 61-67.
2) Gish, Lillian, Lilian Gish, The Movies, Mr Griffith, and Me, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1969, p 262.
3) Ibid p 161.
Bibi Berki is a London-based writer, producer and journalist. Her work has appeared in many UK publications and her podcast series, The Kiss – The Women who Made a Movie Masterpiece, was featured in a 2021 BFI Blu-ray.