D. W. Griffith: The Adventures of Dollie (1908) (2017 digital scan 4K)

D. W. Griffith: The Adventures of Dollie (US 1908).

US 1908. Prod: American Mutoscope & Biograph Company.

    Dir: D. W. Griffith. story: ?. photog: Arthur Marvin. cast: Arthur Johnson, Linda Arvidson, Charles Inslee, Madeline West.

    Filmed: 18-19.6.1908 (Sound Beach, Connecticut). Rel: 14.7.1908. copy: DCP (4K), 12'04" (from paper print, 713 ft, 16 fps); titles: ENG. Source: Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, Culpeper, VA.

    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.

    Grand piano: Donald Sosin.

    Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in Italian, 5 Oct 2024.

Tracey Goessel (GCM, The Biograph Project 2024): "Here it is: the film that for those learning about silent films 50 years ago represented the alpha. (The efforts of Méliès and Porter were mere footnotes in this view. True cinema began with Griffith, and Dollie.) Subsequent scholarship has revised this simplistic school of thought, true. But there is no denying that Biograph was about to become the most innovative of studios, and it did begin here."

"Griffith sought advice from cameraman Billy Bitzer before filming. Bitzer wrote, “Judging the little I had caught from seeing his acting, I didn’t think he was going to be so hot.” (“Billy Bitzer – Pioneer and Innovator” [Part I], American Cinematographer, December 1964) We can only be grateful that Bitzer was wrong." 

AA: There is always a miraculous feeling of baptism viewing the first film directed by D. W. Griffith, similar with some early titles of the Lumière brothers and Jean Renoir's debut film La Fille de l'eau. (The) Adventures of Dollie is not a masterpiece, but there is already a genuine cinematic flow - even literally, because it is the drama of a little girl caught in a river. To a Nordic viewer there is also an affinity with our logrolling and rapid-shooting adventures.

There is something fresh and sacred in the experience. There is also a dark side. Already in Griffith's debut film a shadow of racist prejudice looms. The villains are nomadic Romani who abduct Dollie from her parents.

The print is superior to the ones we have seen before. Still struck from paper print materials, there is more nuance in the detail. For the first time I see the film with intertitles. They have been created for this edition by the Film Preservation Society with good taste and understanding.

...

I have seen (The) Adventures of Dollie a few times before, including in The Griffith Project (DWG 27) screening in Pordenone on 15 October 1997. It was a 35 mm print from a Library of Congress paper print, 15 min at 15 fps, titles missing, with Antonio Coppola at the grand piano. It was a print of somewhat low contrast, yet conveying texture and detail, "the beauty of leaves trembling in the wind". I was struck by the association with the saga of Moses. And also of an affinity with Jean Renoir's first film La Fille de l'eau where the orphan girl Virginia (Catherine Hessling) finds refuge with Bohemians.