Two Early Films by D.W. Griffith

In his early films, created during his collaboration with the Biograph company, D.W. Griffith often varied the same plot moves and schemes, while achieving great variety. Thus, two films of 1912, The Girl and Her Trust and The Lesser Evil, contain a very similar set of functions and devices, the distribution of which, however, leads to different semantic effects. Some of them — pointing to the possibility of a dual reading of the motivation of the characters and their psychology — unexpectedly anticipate the further development of cinema. As Roger Caillois writes in his notes on fantastic art, a necessary condition for the fantastic (or miraculous) is its involuntary nature, which often arises due to the contradiction between the openly formulated meaning and the elements that are not integrated into it. This observation can be extended to the whole realm of the aesthetic. At a time when cinema is taking its first steps and discovering elementary means of expression, Griffith’s psychological nuances seem redundant, premature, and therefore miraculous.