«Doesn't Dickens write that way?»
D.W. Griffith, the Biograph Company and an unusual picture
[1912] Scenarios that reached the Biograph offices, due to lack of organization, were sometimes weeks in reaching the proper department, but Mr. Griffith got first chance at After Many Years [a version of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden]. Both he and Mr. Dougherty thought it pretty good stuff, but the obvious emotional acting that had prevailed somewhere in every picture so far, was here entirely lacking. Quiet suppressed emotion only, this one had. But Doc [Mr. Dougherty] said he’d eat the positive if it wouldn’t make a good picture. So it was purchased.
But After Many Years, although it had no «action», and some of us sat in the projection room at its first showing with heavy hearts, proved to write more history than any picture ever filmed and it brought an entirely new technique to the making of films.
It was the first movie without a chase. That was something, for those days, a movie without a chase was not a movie. How could a movie be made without a chase? How could there be suspense? How action? After Many Years was also the first picture to have a dramatic close-up – the first picture to have a cut-back. When Mr. Griffith suggested a scene showing Annie Lee waiting for her husband’s return to be followed by a scene of Enoch cast away on a desert island, it was altogether too distracting. «How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.»
«Well», said Mr. Griffith, «doesn’t Dickens write that way?»
«Yes, but that’s Dickens; that’s novel writing; that’s different.»
«Oh, not so much, these are picture stories: not so different.»
So he went his lonely way and did it; did After Many Years contrary to all the old established rules of the game. The Biograph Company was very much worried – the picture was so unusual – how could it succeed?
It was the first picture to be recognized by foreign markets. When one recalls the high class of moving pictures that Pathé and Gaumont were then putting out, such as The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, this foreign recognition meant something.
Mrs. D.W. Griffith (Linda Arvidson), When the Movies Were Young, Dutton & Company, 1925.