Taking Naturalism to the Moving Picture Show: Frank Norris, D. W. Griffith, and Naturalist Editing

摘要

D. W. Griffith's engagement with American literary naturalism was a key influence on the filmmaker's developing conception of narrative. In 1909, Griffith released A Corner in Wheat, a film that adapted Frank Norris's short story ‘A Deal in Wheat’ and borrowed a key scene from Norris's historical epic, The Octopus. Griffith borrowed more than plot events from Frank Norris's writing: the Biograph masterwork also imported Norris's narrative style and its accompanying worldview. In The Octopus, Norris creates a novelistic version of what would come to be known as parallel montage to compare wealthy capitalists and the poor wheat ranchers they have exploited. However, he also ends the novel with the comment that individual lives cannot matter in the face of the temporal progress that sweeps them along. In A Corner in Wheat, Griffith embraces Norris's narrative technique and the perspective that encompasses it. However, when the native Kentuckian made The Birth of a Nation (1915), he would reject Norris's assertion that individual historical actors cannot matter, while retaining the narrative technique that carries with it that very implication. This article claims that parallel editing expresses formally naturalist beliefs in the subordination of individual agency to temporal progress. By reading The Birth of a Nation in terms of Griffith's earlier literary influences, this article argues that we should understand the film as a reflection of the filmmaker's exploration of different forms of causality and the relationship between human innovation and fate.