The Avenging Conscience

D. W. Griffith: The Avening Conscience (1914). Poster from IMDb.

Having recently seen this I did not visit the Sacile screening, but I include the Russell Merritt essay to have a complete run of the Griffith Project 8 program notes.

THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE (Majestic Motion Picture Co., US 1914)
The Avenging Conscience: or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'
    Dir.: D. W. Griffith; cast: Henry B. Walthall, Spottiswoode Aitken, Blanche Sweet, Josephine Crowell, George Siegmann, Ralph Lewis; 35 mm, 5078 ft, 85’ (16 fps), The Museum of Modern Art.
    English intertitles.
    Grand piano: David Drazin.
    Viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): The Griffith Project 8, 11 Oct 2004.

Russell Merritt [DWG Project # 510]: "Customarily, Griffith’s chroniclers treat The Avenging Conscience as a transitional work, the hurried contract picture finished in June 1914, just before The Birth of a Nation was put into production. Or it becomes yet another example of Griffith the forerunner, in this case with a film that anticipates the mise-en-scène and montage of French Impressionist cinema, the irrational psychology of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or the more elaborate subjective and allegorical sequences in Griffith’s own later work. Yet The Avenging Conscience can also be seen as an anomalous Griffith film, a rich one-of-a-kind, long overdue for serious critical study in its own right."

"Those who write about the film have, for good reason, invariably singled out the sequences dramatizing the Nephew’s mental breakdown. Those scenes represent a new direction for Griffith, who, for all his interest in dramatizing mental crises and subjective states at Biograph, had never before depicted a dream or vision; nor, for that matter, had he worked much with flashbacks. Access to the inner life of Biograph characters came from different sources, as we’ve seen in one-reelers as diverse as Sweet Revenge, The Summer Idyll, and What Shall We Do With Our Old? True, portraying characters in the midst of bad dreams, hurtful memories, and ecstatic visions were staples for Biograph leading players, but Griffith never before showed what the dream or memory-images themselves looked like. Even flashbacks, when they started appearing in his last year at Biograph, are unattached to a character’s mental projection. Judith of Bethulia marks the first and last Griffith Biograph to deploy a flashback that is unambiguously derived from a character’s thought process. And even that is a brief, conventional precursor to the flamboyant, diverse renderings of character psychology that erupt in The Avenging Conscience."

"What we see in The Avenging Conscience is Griffith drawing upon tactics he had deliberately avoided in his short films, devices that had become associated with the increasingly archaic practices of the non-continuous cinema – the tableau, allegorical characters, apparitions, and Biblical figures often rendered in multiple exposure, slow-motion, or with matte special effects. These were tools recently given new life by the spectacular success of the recent Italian imports, particularly Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? and Caserini’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (Cabiria would follow shortly). But, as if to accentuate the melodramatic excess of these older protocols, Griffith also creates psychological sequences driven by montage where the mise-en-scène is unmarked by any obvious form of graphic or optical distortion. Scenes of fire and brimstone co-exist with startling montage sequences where the mind responds to external stimuli. These latter are the sequences that, unsurprisingly, critics have found progressive and “cinematic”. When Mitry refers to the sophisticated psychological tension in the film, he has in mind Walthall responding to the micro close-ups of murderous ants or reacting nervously to close-ups of piercing eyes and pulsating objects (a swinging pendulum, a thumping foot, and a tapping pencil) during his interrogation."

"But highlighting the inner visions and dream symbolizations works a subtle distortion on the film, oversimplifying Griffith’s distinctions between fantasy and reality. The closer we get, the less stable and determinate the narrative in this strange film appears. The waking, so-called “real” world in the film is itself forever fragmenting, occupied by characters with unfixed identities who wander through ambiguous time zones. Even when taken as a film structured around the associative consciousness of a single character – Henry Walthall’s Nephew – The Avenging Conscience falls into a kind of epistemological vortex."

"We can start with the relationship between the Nephew and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is introduced as the historical source for the story, the author of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Annabel Lee”. The Nephew is initially represented as a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, but as the story unfolds, he becomes a character within a Poe story, and at times a surrogate for Poe, the sensitive neurotic artist par excellence who creates poetry out of his nightmares. The outside world works in similar flux. When we first meet the Nephew as an adult, the historical beaver hats and morning coats indicate an 1830s setting contemporaneous with Poe; but we move to an up-to-date village with a restaurant advertising for “Automobile Parties” and a garden party that combines allegorical dancing and a slang-talking American waitress with guests arriving in Victorian formal wear."

"And when we meet Annabel, the woman the Nephew loves, objective reality altogether blurs with assorted stages of projection. She is a woman with no name other than the one the Nephew has given her, taken from Poe’s famous poem. We are introduced to her as a mental projection, as complex as Griffith ever designed. The Nephew, in the midst of reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” stares hard at the frontispiece picture of Poe and pauses to think. We cut to Annabel in her room, who sits at a table to fondle and kiss a framed portrait of the Nephew. Back and forth between Nephew and Annabel until the Nephew puts down Poe’s picture and now starts to write his sweetheart a letter."

"By 1914, Griffith had long made a specialty of ambiguous cutaways that blended subjective with objective action, images that signaled mental projections as well as events that were actually taking place. But here Griffith ups the ante: Annabel, seen in the cutaway as a possible thought projection, reciprocates by projecting back to the Nephew, staring at his picture. The subject of a mental projection is caught in the act of having a mental projection of her own. But both characters operate inside a bell jar, seen as extrapolations from Poe’s pre-existing texts. What is the Nephew’s Annabel caught doing when he conjures her up? Re-enacting thoughts that Poe’s poet claimed his Annabel had for him: “And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me.” The Nephew’s Annabel will continue to follow the formula Poe has devised for her literary prototype: live in a kingdom by the sea and separate from her love when the Nephew’s highborn kinsman comes, and eventually jump to “… her tomb by the sounding sea”."

"Likewise, the Nephew is not merely inspired by the demented narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” to murder his Uncle and brick him up in a wall. He is re-enacting, apparently with no recognition, the events invented in his literary idol’s imagination. He sits in his study reading the first paragraph of “The Tell-Tale Heart” – “I think it was his eye!” – while his one-eyed Uncle sits glaring at him after scrutinizing his account books. In fact, it is not the Uncle’s eye that does him in. But by surrounding the Nephew with born-again Poe characters and actions, Griffith has given the Nephew’s sensitivities, actions, thoughts, and dreams a derivative, pre-patterned cast. What are the lines he reads? “The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.” Sharpened hearing, we soon learn, defines the Nephew, first italicized when Annabel stands outside, and he responds to a close-up of her foot tap-tapping at his chamber door. The murder – an act that is portrayed as both premeditated and spontaneous – gives way to fantasies that are themselves all secondhand, visions based on Poe writings and Victorian Bible illustrations. But more to the point, the representational blur between Poe and the Nephew gives The Avenging Conscience an uncanny aspect long before the Nephew starts hallucinating."

"The film is permeated by a crisis of perception that may bring it into the orbit of Caligari and the German unheimlich universe, or at least make comparisons between the two films useful. Like Caligari and its models, The Avenging Conscience is saturated with doubles and mirrors, characters existing as variations, their identities subject to a constant slippage. But in Caligari, the narrative instability is triggered by the characters doubling each other and events being set up as reflections and variations of prior events. Our inability to distinguish clear and fixed identities comes from the seemingly infinite variability and displacement of Caligari, Cesare, Jane, and Francis. In The Avenging Conscience, on the other hand, the confusing psychological constellations derive from the shifting relationships the fictional characters have with their Author and his Word, and between the shifting relationship between the Author and the unfolding story."

"Poe’s words, as we might expect from the Biograph director who sometimes constructed entire films around famous poems and song lyrics, are given a quasi-religious hagiographic status. The first quotation is photographed from an actual page of a Poe work, followed by an engraving of the author himself. From then on, the intertitles that quote Poe are set off from all other intertitles by a special typeface and unique border design. Further, the images that follow the Poe titles are almost invariably hyper-images: elaborate double exposures or mattes that not only highlight the fantastical in Poe’s writings, but also underscore their cultural importance. A quotation from “Annabel Lee” precedes the shot of Annabel posed beside a matted image of a moonlit sky seen through a window frame; the ghouls are models caught behind smoke effects – visualizations of a quotation from “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The hallucinations themselves, with their heavily moralistic tone and fiend imagery (Dante’s seventh circle as seen by the Iowa-stubborn residents of River City), actually have little to do with Poe. But Griffith co-opts and absorbs them into Poe’s fantasmagoria, as though Poe’s nightmare visions now had scriptural force. One of the ways that Griffith doubles Poe and the Nephew is by ending the film with the Nephew reading from his own newly published text. Now it is the Nephew’s Word that triggers the fantastical images. Inspired by his Poe-driven nightmare, the Nephew has finally attained Poe’s ability to conjure images with words of his own, images that counter the Biblical terrors of Golgotha and Hell with mythological images of pastoral rejoicing."

"It is not that Griffith has simply cobbled together a narrative from episodes in Poe’s stories. Poe’s authority is more elusive than that. Important plotlines and characters, ranging from the grocer and the maid to the blackmailing Italian, have nothing to do with Poe, any more than do the Uncle’s conversion scene with a baby or the shootout with the sheriff’s posse. It is more accurate to see Poe’s writings as pentimento traces that invade and control the film, then retreat and grow invisible, lurk and hide, or mutate and combine with other sources to create a protean vision of a hallucinatory world. As Claire Dupré la Tour (“The Written Word and Memory in Griffith’s Intolerance and Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc”, 1995–1996) and Miriam Hansen (“The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance”, 1989; Babel and Babylon, 1991) have shown, Intolerance – a film that begins with a hand opening a book – is the classic Griffith text governed by notions of deciphering and reading, where one text is superimposed over another to create resonating historical memory patterns. The Avenging Conscience provides a curious and heretofore unstudied precedent." – Russell Merritt [DWG Project # 510]