The Lonely Villa
R: David Wark Griffith. D: David Miles, Marion Leonard, Mary Pickford u.a. P: Biograph. USA 1909

The Lonedale Operator
R: David W. Griffith. K: Billy Bitzer. D: Blanche Sweet, George Nichols. P: Biograph. USA 1911

The Girl and Her Trust
R: David W. Griffith. K: Billy Bitzer. D: Dorothy Bernard, Wilfred Lucas. P: Biograph. USA 1912

Close-up from The Lonedale Operator

“The non-seen, or the badly-seen, appears in its true colours: a monkey-wrench instead of a revolver. A rhyming effect, too: with the revolver, held by the young man, which re-establishes the distribution of objects according to that of sex.
But this close-up, the only one of the film, also acknowledges an added meaning, stemming from the rhymed difference which it inscribes between the man and the woman: it unites, as if over and above the action which reforms it, the couple, by isolating fragments of their bodies which suddenly seem to be made, despite the contrast in the clothes (smooth white of the bodice, black and white stripes of the shirt), of a continous material, wherein can be read the subject of the fiction, in the meaning of the principle which determines it.”
Raymond Bellour: To Alternate/To Narrate. In: Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (ed.): Early Cinema. Space Frame Narrative. London 1990, p. 374

A Beast at Bay
R: David Wark Griffith. D: Mary Pickford. P: Biograph. USA 1912

TRAUM UND EXZESS, S. 280

Further links:

• Griffith-12: Go West!
• Griffith-11: Telephone Stories
• Griffith-10: Doublings
• Griffith-09: Narrative Montage
• Griffith-08: Intellectual Montage
• Griffith-07: Outside, Inside – Transitions
• Griffith-06: Figure and Space, Inside
• Griffith-05: Locked In
• Griffith-04: Figure and Space, outside
• Griffith-03: Psychologically Ambivalent
• Griffith 02: Close-up