The Massacre

The Massacre is a short two-reel Western directed by D. W.  Griffith for Biograph Studios in 1912.  For its day, the movie was a blockbuster, featuring top-notch actors, some of them already recognized as stars -- the film displays the talents of Blanche Sweet, the heroine of many early Griffith pictures, and a very young Lionel Barrymore.  Further, the picture is almost entirely shot outdoors in impressive locations and deploys herds of horses and armies of extras in its battle scenes.  Like many action films made today, the movie is almost all combat -- once, the characters are established, Griffith stages chases, ambushes, and two full-scale battles, all of this occurring in a picture that is less than 30 minutes long.

As with many Biograph pictures directed by Griffith, the movie's plot turns on two men, rival suitors, to the hand of the maiden who will be menaced at the film's climax.  The rivalry for the girl's hand is perfunctory -- after a couple of establishing tableaux, the maiden selects a lanky village boy wearing a black string tie over the rowdy buckskin-clad scout who has been courting her.  The scout returns to the army disconsolate.  Later, the spurned suitor, the scout, is instrumental in saving the young woman and her baby from an attack by marauding Indians, although he dies in her defense.  Many of the Biograph pictures still extant have this narrative framework -- rival suitors in which, perhaps, the braver and more worthy is rejected by the girl but, then, proves his mettle when the bad guys threaten.  It's a primitive plot device, but actually one that works very well and Griffith's Biograph pictures from 1909 to 1913 exploit this scenario extensively.  In some variants of this plot, the rejected swain becomes an alcoholic -- in other versions, the husband is afflicted with a mania for gambling or booze and becomes abusive toward his wife. In 1912, movies were young and everyone in them seems to be similarly young:  Blanche Sweet is a buxom teen-ager and the men all seem to be adolescents as well -- everyone is fresh and enthusiastic and movies of this period exude a palpable youthful energy.(Some of the extras with long moustaches like Yosemite Sam are obviously wearing exuberant make-up -- usually, the old men are just boys wearing grey wigs.  The Massacre perfects tableaux mise-en-scene:  Griffith devises complex compositions exploiting the deep-focus lenses used in silent film -- the images contain action a few feet from the camera as well as incidental details, sometimes in the remote background.  Each shot accomplishes one action or establishes one plot point generally without any analytical cutting (there are a few exceptions in The Massacre, a late example of the tableaux form evolving toward more analytical cutting).  The image typically becomes tedious to the viewer who, then, searches the borders of the frame or the depths of the tableaux for additional, interesting details.  Griffith devises his more complex compositions with multiple points of focus -- that is, groups of people arrayed across the screen at different locations so the viewer can sweep his eye to and fro within the frame.  The concept is a bit like a Brueghel painting, many small figures organized into interrelated knots of activity with peripheral details visible around the edges of the action that overtly motivates the shot.  In The Massacre, the two battle scenes are shot from a high, aerial perspective -- the combatants form different masses that sway back and forth, or attack (or retreat) in sinuous serpentine patterns.  Different skirmishes form points of emphasis in the image that coalesce and, then, dissolve. Scenes of the wagon train crossing the prairie consist of enormous gondola-shaped wagons with billowing canvas tops in the foreground, horsemen and people on foot moving diagonally across the wilderness and, then, far in the background more horseman and a herd of cattle kicking up dust that sprays around in the wind.  In the opening courtship scenes, the competing men gather around the heroine -- in the far distance, oblivious to the melodrama, chickens peck at the dust and dogs scamper around.  As you lose interest in the maudlin stuff happening in the middle distance, your eye can rove about and see the wind from 106 years ago tugging at the trees -- for some reason, Biograph films often seem to have been shot in conditions approximating a gale --  domestic animal in the background and pioneer buildings that seem eerily authentic. 

It is often alleged that Hollywood films were offensively racist in their depiction of Indians.  This is not the case in The Massacre.  In fact, the title of the film is ambiguous and, probably, refers to a massacre of Indians in their village, an unprovoked attack that compels the Chief to plot his revenge by launching a cavalry assault on the wagon train.  Before the army attacks, the village we see an Indian woman with a small baby on her back.  This shot links explicitly to the two close-ups in this movie -- both images of a small, fat little boy smiling at the camera.  (The child is the heroine's infant).  After the army attacks the Indians, Griffith shows us the battlefield -- a badly injured dog scuttles around in circles in the middle of the frame and it takes us a moment to notice that the Chief's wife and baby are sprawled in the shot's foreground, apparently dead and murdered by the United States cavalry.  As the wagon train courses westward, we see the long line of wagons from a hilltop -- first a couple of scraggly looking wolves look down on the procession, then, a disoriented bear appears, and, at last, an Indian warrior dressed in bison fur and wearing a horned helmet creeps to overlook.  After some business involving a rotund gambler (played by Barrymore) and a preacher, the Indians attack the wagon train.  The heroine's husband is gone for some reason.  The fight with the Indians evolves into a symbolic image that is fundamental to Griffith and his films -- barriers get knocked down, walls are smashed, and a little group of White Anglo-Saxons find themselves besieged, a mass of armed men protecting a pale maiden and a terrified infant at the exact center of a round, defensive formation.  In this film, the aerial perspective gives the fighting an inhuman and abstract appearance -- it's like a clash between groups of insects, two hives in combat.  The tangle of men surrounding the woman and infant are slaughtered one by one, until, at last, nothing remains but a matted, entwined heap of corpses.  This globular pile of torn flesh conceals, the way fruit hides a seed, the woman and infant.  When the last defender has perished, the cavalry appears and the Indians are driven away and someone plucks the woman and baby out of the heap of bodies.  Griffith uses close-shots sparingly -- he really hasn't yet mastered their emotional significance.  But in the battle scenes, his staging is grimly effective:  we see the frenzied maiden and the baby with a smoking gun discharging only a few inches away from the child's nose -- the infant is shrieking and writhing and the child's distress is authentic (it's clearly not feigned).  This sequence is Griffith's primal scene:  the cross-cutting between mounted men riding to the rescue and the ever-diminishing band of defenders who form a human wall around the object of their defense, the white maiden and plump baby boy.  In this greatest films, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, and Orphans of the Storm, Griffith reprises this thematic material again and again.  Even Broken Blossoms involves a brute smashing down walls that protect an increasingly hysterical teenage girl.  What gives Griffith's films their electric charge is that we can't be sure that the cavalry will always ride to the rescue.  In fact, some of the time, the rescuers arrive too late:  Battling Burrows beats his daughter to death after he smashes down the walls protecting her.  In a startling Biograph film, Death's Marathon, a man commandeers a car and hurtles to the rescue of a man who is grimacing at the camera, smiling in a sinister way as he flourishes a gun and threatens suicide.  The hero knocks down a door and enters the man's room just in time to see a great plume of smoke vomited out of the suicide's mouth -- he has fired the gun and killed himself and Griffith's frenzied cross-cutting and the wild car chase is all in vain.  Help arrives too late.