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| D. W. Griffith: Where the Breakers Roar (US 1908). |
US © 1908 American Mutoscope & Biograph Company.
Dir: D. W. Griffith. Story: ?. Photog: Arthur Marvin, Billy Bitzer. Cast: Arthur Johnson, Linda Arvidson, Florence Lawrence, Charles Inslee, Mack Sennett, Edward Dillon, Robert Harron, Harry Solter, George Gebhardt.
Filmed: 21.8, 25.8.1908 (NY Studio; undocumented beach location). rel: 22.9.1908.
Copy: DCP (4K), 10'04" (from paper print, 566 ft, 15 fps); titles: ENG. source: Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, Culpeper, VA.
Film Preservation Society (FPS) / Tracey Goessel / Digital scan, 2017. Given the absence of original intertitles, new ones have been written by the Film Preservation Society.
43rd Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone: Early Cinema – The Biograph Project.
Grand piano: Philip Carli.
Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in Italian, 11 Oct 2024
There is no credit information in the film itself, just the title card with the year of copyright and the name and the address of the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, like in The Adventures of Dollie.
Tracey Goessel (GCM/FPS The Biograph Project 2024): " Breakers has that glorious, sunny, by-the-sea quality that gives us the feeling of peeping through a time machine to a late August day in 1908. The presence of enlisted townspeople provides the wonderful sense of reality mixed with melodrama. Granted, the escaped lunatic provides a fly in the ointment (he breaks free of his guards on the only stage-shot scene: a painted backdrop of a stone building, helpfully labeled “Insane Asylum.”) "
" We can see Griffith stretching his creative muscles here. Long before The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), he gives us the prospect of the actor (madman Charles Inslee, clutching a knife) coming straight up to the camera. "
AA: Tom Gunning wrote a superb program note about Where the Breakers Roar for the Griffith Project. He registers the impressive use of the beach location shooting and the dynamic relation of actor movement and camera placement. He uses in a systematic manner the exit towards the camera with an effect of enlarging the actors – to express a sense of threat. Such an invasion of the space of the camera/spectator by a movement coming close to the camera was used in the early cinema of attractions, but Griffith uses this motion to create a sense of threat within the world of the story. Griffith thus translates visual attractions into narrative devices. – While the film is not based on actual parallel editing, Griffith does tell the story with two converging plot lines. – Griffith's control of space in the threatening sequences makes this an impressive stage in his mastery of visual storytelling. – "The transformation of the spectator's relation to this threat from the involuntary flinch at the action towards her and the laughter that follows of the cinema of attractions to an anxiety about the characters on the screen represents a key moment in the development of narrative cinema". (End of my Tom Gunning paraphrase).
This simple anecdote is based on the stark contrasts of life and death, love and madness, joy and murder.
Griffith is inspired by the natural light and beach fun in this outdoors sketch. Love, fun and games at the beach are interrupted by a lunatic on the loose from an insane asylum, armed with a knife.
Griffith's art of visual expression is developing, but the performances feel clumsy.
An ok – fair copy.
...
I saw Where the Breakers Roar in GCM's Griffith Project (DWG 47), mattina 15 October 1997 at Ridotto del Verdi on 16 mm at 566 ft /15 fps/ 9 min without intertitles and Antonio Coppola at the piano.
Moving Picture World synopsis from Biograph Bulletin, No. 172, 22 September 1908: "AN AGONIZING EPISODE IN A SEASIDE ROMANCE. When love is young, all the world seems gay; hence Tom Hudson and Alice Fairchild are carefree and happy as they join the little party for a outing at the beach. Though the young folks find great sport cavorting in the breakers. Tom and Alice are well content to sit on the sand under a sunshade and spoon. This induced their friends to tantalize them a bit, and seizing Tom, carry him into the surf and give him a ducking, promising the same treatment to Alice. She, however, leads them a merry chase."
"During the forenoon, a dangerous lunatic, who was being conveyed by keepers from the train to the asylum nearby, overpowers the keepers and escapes. Coming upon an Italian laborer in the road, assaults him and secures his stiletto. Armed with this he terrorized the neighborhood and comes onto the beach as Alice, playfully pursued by her friends, jumps into a puntboat to row out from shore. Before she is aware of it, she is driven to sea by this maniacal fiend, who is now brandishing the stiletto in a most terrifying manner."
"The keepers have now reached the beach and alarm the party by acquainting them with the real character of the girl's companion. A rowboat is procured, and the keepers, with Tom, start in pursuit. The fanatic makes a strenuous effort to outstrip them, but with poor success, until at length, finding his apprehension inevitable, leaps to his feet and is about to plunge the knife into the breast of the terror-stricken girl, when a well directed bullet from the keeper's gun fells him to the bottom of the boat. The poor girl is then taken to shore by Tom and revived by her girl companions. "
—Moving Picture World synopsis from Biograph Bulletin, No. 172, 22 September 1908
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