Griffith, Dickens, and the Politics of Composure

Abstract

This essay interrogates Sergei Eisenstein's critique of D. W. Griffith's montage aesthetic, arguing that, in Griffith'sOrphans of the Storm, historical perspective is constituted in opposition to (rather than as a result of) the forward surge of the film's montage. Griffith represents historical consciousness through the narrative figure of trembling, harking back to Charles Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities, another text in which the movements of history are registered on the bodies of witnesses who struggle to keep their composure. Both Griffith and Dickens construct a social world driven to extremes by competing ideological forces and imagine historical subjects whose reactions to emergency—witnessing and trembling—hold them apart from it. Ultimately, these gestures of response suggest a tendency in melodramatic texts to construct a normative subjectivity that resists the antithetical underpinnings of melodrama itself.