Le spéculateur en grains

(Note: This is the first of three short films by D.W. Griffith that I care to highlight by commenting on them. The others are "The Girl and Her Trust" and "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch".)

D.W. Griffith usually made only three types of films: melodramas, social commentary and suspense (usually either battle scenes or the last-minute rescue, or both). His features often contain all three genres. His films were often set during the Victorian age or the Civil War era, or some other turning point in American history. His films of modern setting drip of Victorian sentiments. Mostly, his films were theatrical (the stories, interior shots and acting, most consistently). Griffith's films are categorical because he, apparently, rarely used scripts and was the rare filmmaker that interacted with the scenarists, and thus invented the role of director.

"A Corner in Wheat" is simple: it is social commentary. Based on a Frank Norris story, the anti-monopoly narrative fits with a recurrent theme of Griffith's films--sympathy for the poor. (It's rather hypocritical, however, considering that Griffith worked for a member of the Motion Picture Patents Company.) The story, albeit better than its contemporaries, is not of much interest, or, rather, is not why I highlighted this short film.

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter crosscut scenes out of temporal order in "The Great Train Robbery". Parallel-action crosscutting as dissection of a scene with spatially separate actions appeared as early as 1907 in Pathé and Vitagraph films. The crosscutting in "A Corner in Wheat" is exceptional because it functions as contrast between the wheat magnate's dinner party and the wheat farmers not being able to afford bread at a market. I'm not sure who helped Griffith with the editing, but it was probably James Smith, as usual. The parallel editing is appropriately slow paced, so again in the comeuppance dénouement. As well, the final shot was a good attempt at poignancy. The rest of the photoplay, especially the camera positioning, is primitive.

Directors use the technique of freeze frames in movies to emphasize a crucial point where the picture pauses in midstream, somewhat like a photograph. The first film to use this effective cinematic tool was December 1909's "A Corner of Wheat." D.W. Griffith showed the despair of the poor effected by greed in his--and film's--historic freeze frame.

"A Corner of Wheat" marked Griffith's year-and-a-half of directing films. His innovations in cinematic techniques began to really pile up from this point. The movie highlights his now familiarity with cross-cutting and parallel editing, unfolding a story with two perspectives--here the ravenous rich contrasting against the despairing poor. The depth of field in the beginning and ending shots of the farmers walking towards the camera planting wheat reflect an understanding of using the entire frame to capture the essence of the atmosphere of the narrative.

This is the first time Griffith addressed social disparity and holding those responsible for such unfairness. Based on a 1902 Frank Norris book, "The Pit," Griffith was able to effectively slim down the novel into several concise scenes within a one-reel movie.

D.W.Griffith's condensed interpretation (14 minutes) of social conscious novelist Frank Norris's The Pit is an early and beautifully crafted example of what incredible influence film could exert in conveying its message to the masses.

A Corner in the Wheat is a clear and concise portrayal of Capitalistic greed as Griffith masterly employs the early tools of the trade to convey and condemn the repercussions of such action. It is early juxtaposition at its best as cross cuts between the have and have nots with well paced editing and striking compositions (the wheat field scenes are right out of Vincent Millette)that graphically illustrates the imperfection of the system.

There is a powerhouse finish rich in irony in this subversive work by the aristocratic Griffith that clearly must have inspired and influenced the work of the great Russian Socialist directors and by doing so adds final irony to this early work of pure cinema.

A Corner in Wheat is a little meditation on capitalism, derived from Frank Norris, weaving together narrative fragments linked by their relation to wheat. The film begins with farmers sowing grain and taking their meager harvest to market. Capitalist speculators engineer the "corner in wheat" of the title, establishing full control over the world's supply. We see, intercut with this coup and the main capitalist's ensuing celebrations, the effects on others: another speculator is ruined, the farmers return home empty-handed, the urban poor go hungry and begin to riot when bread becomes unaffordable. The riot is squelched, but the "Wheat King" meets with his just desserts, inadvertently buried under an avalanche of grain, while the farmers continue to toil.

7* (10* Rating System)

D. W. Griffith was still finding his feet as a film director when he made this early short for Biograph in 1909, but it's clear that he was already emerging as a leader among the pioneering directors in New York.

This is quite a macabre parable in which an unscrupulous tycoon suffers an ironic fate after cornering the world market in wheat and boosting his bank balance by $4,000,000 in the process. Many aspects of the film are still quite primitive by today's standards - particularly the fraught scene in the trading pit during which nearly everybody overacts outrageously so that the viewer doesn't know where to look.

The cross-cutting for which Griffith would become justly famous is in evidence here, but it's interesting that, instead of using it to heighten moments of tension or suspense, he uses successive shots to emphasise the contrasting lifestyles of the ruthless speculator who drunkenly toasts his good fortune at a banquet with his friends while the poor working masses suffer the economic fallout of his manipulation of the market.