sensesofcinema.

com
An Analysis • Senses of Cinema
Erik Ulman June 2001 Feature Articles Issue 14
23-29 minutes

D. W. Griffith
Introduction

To observe that the Biograph shorts of D. W. Griffith are among the most important
films ever made is nothing new. These works, and the great features to which they
lead, are familiar staples of historical surveys – their development (if not
invention) of parallel editing, of composition, of the dialectic of types of shot
(close-up vs. medium shot), of film acting, have been remarked upon repeatedly,
sometimes very perceptively. (1) Why, then, offer an analysis of A Corner in Wheat
(1909), one of the most famous of Griffith’s shorts? What need be said about this
film now?

There are, I think, several related justifications. One is purely personal:

although I had seen many of Griffith’s films over the last ten years, I only
recently saw A Corner in Wheat, was extremely impressed, and wanted to understand
why. Another is that art must be perpetually rediscovered, especially in a time as
accelerated and inattentive as ours. What T. S. Eliot stated in the 1930s is even
more urgent now: “Our effort is not only to explore the frontiers of the spirit,
but as much to regain, under very different conditions, what was known to men
writing at remote times and in alien languages.” (2) One of those remote times is
ninety years ago-nearly unimaginable in the aggressive present we inhabit; and one
of those languages is Griffith’s cinema, in some ways so familiar to us as a basic
grammar and vocabulary of our mediated experience, but also separated from us, not
least by its integrity, and by our desensitization.

There is much in A Corner in Wheat that has not been exhausted, that remains
thematically and formally fresh, even necessary. And yet most people are ignorant
of such riches, including those students and scholars for whom these works seem to
be dioramas of antiquated techniques, not living experiences. I hope to articulate
some of what is alive in this great film, both intrinsically and in its relation
with later work, especially that of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.
Action

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.

There are, then, three narrative strands. The farmers sow their seed, go to market,
return empty-handed, and toil more. The capitalist engineers his plot, succeeds,
ignores the defeated man’s plea, celebrates, and dies at the site of his wealth.
The urban poor go hungry, riot, and are defeated. No character from one strand
enters another, nor are any locations held in common among them. All that links
them is wheat-that and the force of Griffith’s juxtaposition and commentary. Gilles
Deleuze’s statement, derived from Eisenstein, that in Griffith the rich and the
poor are “treated as ‘two parallel independent phenomena,’ as pure effects that are
observed . without having any cause assigned to them” (3) is not true of A Corner
in Wheat. Griffith’s structure directly analyzes the connection, and alienation, of
rich and poor, and holds the actions of the former responsible, at least in part,
for the situation of the latter. What is remarkable is how Griffith does not merely
assert his message, but achieves it formally.
Structure: Juxtaposition and Commentary

Griffith structures A Corner in Wheat through juxtaposition of images (editing) and

commentary (intertitles). (I have included, as an appendix, a shot by shot
breakdown of the film for convenient reference.) The film’s editing has elicited a
great deal of analysis. As Tom Gunning has written, parallel editing is here not in
the service of suspense, interweaving “converging lines of action” and describing
“the same temporal trajectory”, instead, it “stresses comparisons and relations.”
(4) Usually Griffith uses parallel editing for the former: the intercutting of the
besieged family and the rescuing father in The Lonely Villa (1909) and the more
elaborate siege and rescue in The Birth of the Nation (1915) are the classic
examples. Here, however, Griffith is after something less visceral but more
profound, the creation not of sensation but of meaning: the audience realizes the
film’s implicit moral argument by assessing the relationship of adjacent,
contrasting shots. In other words, as Vlada Petric has pointed out, it “anticipates
Eisenstein’s intellectual montage.” (5) Further, the editing, as Gunning writes,
has special appropriateness in this film, as it represents the “new topography” of
modern capitalist economics, and its “lack of face-to-face encounters with the
forces which determine our lives.” (6) The best example of this is the sequence
depicting the Wheat King’s celebratory banquet, in which his luxurious consumption
is set against the impoverishment of the farmers and the urban poor (shots 9 though
18). The contrast between plenty and need is immediately clear; yet Griffith
somehow avoids belaboring the obvious, the overt manipulation which makes
Eisenstein’s adaptation of the same technique in October (1928) so distasteful.
Perhaps this is because Griffith lets the intercut strands follow independent
narrative logics, rather than subordinating one as a mere symbolic commentary on
another; and because of the tact of Griffith’s long shots.

Although other Griffith films will surpass A Corner in Wheat for excitement, none
will improve on its capacity to advance an argument, to present ideas as well as
feelings. Only in Intolerance (1916) will Griffith attempt fully to integrate such
“intellectual montage” with the more sensational editing of his rescue sequences:
his aim there is to provoke in the audience both a comparative interpretation of
different epochs as well as the excitement of their rhythmic convergence. Grand and
profound as Intolerance is, the effect there is not wholly under control (the
Huguenot story is not equal to the modern or Babylonian stories, some of the
transitions seem arbitrary). A Corner in Wheat lacks Intolerance‘s range; but
everything in it functions with great focus and efficiency.

Many have commented on the editing in A Corner in Wheat. However, I have not seen
much discussion of its titles, which are also of great importance: they are often
ironically dissonant with the image that they accompany, and underscore the
alienation of capitalism from the actual conditions of life from which it profits.

Of the film’s 32 shots (not counting the opening title), 8 are texts-7 titles, and
1 telegram; and most of these are early in the film, articulating its structure.
Shots 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 are all titles introducing images, and three of these
titles relate to their accompanying image with overt irony, establishing a
discrepancy between expectation and fulfillment that will resonate throughout the
film. The first title merely introduces the Wheat King; but the next, shot 5, reads
“The Final Threshing.” What is depicted, however, is not the threshing of wheat,
but the activity in stock market: the title generates a literal expectation that
instead resolves as a metaphor for the market’s energy and ruthlessness. Similarly,
shot 9-“The Gold of the Wheat”-and shot 11-“The Chaff of the Wheat”-also do not
depict the wheat itself, but set up the contrast between the luxurious rich and the
urban poor. Again the wheat in the titles is not literal but metaphorical, and
suggests how the wheat’s significance in the capitalist economy becomes
generalized, to the extent that human beings are functions of the abstract economy
of wheat, not the wheat in the service of human beings.

After establishing these sites and associations, Griffith turns away from titles to
develop the narrative within the independent strands: the contrast between the
celebration of the Wheat King and the misery of the poor does not require further
commentary. Especially striking in this sequence is shot 14, which is a static
tableau of a bread line. It is not a freeze frame: rather, the actors stand
motionless, a jarringly non-naturalistic effect that presents the image as a
symbolic summation of the poor’s condition. After cutting back to the King’s
banquet, Griffith supplements this image of urban misery with the misery of the
returning farmers as well.

Now Griffith reintroduces titles, as shots 17 and 19. The first one is baldly
descriptive: “The High Price Cuts Down the Bread Fund.” Shot 18 repeats shot 14:
now, however, the shot is set in motion, as though the descriptive title has
detached the image from its symbolic space and returned it to reality. The second
title brings back the metaphorical strain of the earlier titles, but now combines
it with literal meaning as well. “A Visit to the Elevators” suggests exactly what
we are about to see: a tour of the grain silo to view the source of wealth.
However, Griffith precedes this literal fulfillment of the title with a shot in
which the Wheat King’s wife (?) and friends visit the King’s office and suggest the
tour. This intervening shot suggests a metaphorical reading of the title: the
capitalists are also “elevators,” that is, people who have inflated (elevated)
prices for their gain. This double meaning triggers the film’s denouement: it is as
though the estranged metaphorical reading now matches the literal one, and the
alienation between them, felt so poignantly early in the film, can be resolved.
This resolution is the death of the Wheat King, in which the substance whose
abstraction as market value (emphasized by one other title-the telegram informing
him of his cornering the market in shot 24) kills him in all its hitherto ignored
palpability. Griffith’s intelligent cultivation and deferment of expectations
through titles has built much of the resonance for this peripeteia by amplifying
both the metaphorical and the mutual significance of what we have seen. The titles
are not merely labels but another strand in the film’s complex polyphony.
Film-Historical and Social Resonance: Lang, Dreyer, Straub and Huillet

One source of interest of A Corner in Wheat is its use by later filmmakers. I have
mentioned Eisenstein’s extension of Griffith’s principles of thematic montage; but
there are other successors. Not only the theme of capitalist excesses, but the very
appearance of the capitalists and the chaos of the stock market recur, for example,
in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922). Lang’s scene is structured very
differently, around dynamic editing that has its roots in later Griffith; whereas
Griffith’s is a single static shot. However, both directors vividly convey the
market’s confusion-Lang by subjecting us to its accelerating rhythm, its sudden
wrenching reversals, Griffith by filling the image with more than the eye can
comfortably take in: there is so much to see that one may initially miss the entry
and decisive presence of the Wheat King, or the fainting man who will later beg for
the King’s mercy, or the man who underlines the arbitrariness of the market with a
coin toss to determine who bids. The formal choices of both Lang and Griffith
reflect different stages of film technique, but are equal in power and critical
incisiveness. The Wheat King’s death in the avalanche of wheat is also the model
for the end of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), in which the evil doctor suffocates in
a torrent of flour. The similarity of situation only underlines the differences:
Griffith’s effect is a necessary one, absolutely justified thematically; whereas
Dreyer’s effect is shockingly incongruous: its poetic justice operates on a
metaphorical level (pure white nutriment vanquishes vicious parasite) that is both
richer and less precise than Griffith’s.
Most interesting, however, and indicative of what I find most alive in this film,
are Griffith’s anticipations of the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.
(Straub and Huillet are on record as admiring the film: they requested, for
example, that it be one of the movies by other filmmakers shown at their New York
retrospective in 1982. (7)). Griffith’s film is characterized by a striking use of
different spaces, natural and artificial; types of action-literal (as in shot 2-see
below), “acted,” and static-symbolic; and levels of action linked only by thematic
relevance, not by actual contact. This variety opens a remarkable structural
flexibility, in which narrative is in the service of intelligence, not the
opposite. As such, it is the direct precursor of The Bridegroom, the Comedienne,
and the Pimp (1968), which differs from Griffith only in its more oblique
principles of association among its elements, and in its greater and more
systematic heterogeneity. Straub and Huillet juxtapose a documentary shot of
prostitutes on a Munich street with a condensed stage play about exploitation and
betrayal, and follows these with a stylized narrative of a prostitute’s marriage
and liberation from her pimp. These separate meditations on prostitution and
society are not intercut, as in Griffith, but simply paratactic; but in both, the
juxtaposition of different views of the same subject, treated in different styles,
allows the audience to interpret the work’s meaning actively. Just as Griffith sets
the real space of the farm against the shallow sets of the other scenes, so Straub
and Huillet intensify such dichotomy into dialectic by confronting street
documentary with filmed theater. Similarly, Griffith’s static tableau calls
attention to its artificiality as a way of impressing its symbolic value, much as
the end of Straub and Huillet’s film foregrounds its implausibility to suggest a
different and more active symbolism. (8) One might even compare Griffith’s use of
titles to articulate the film’s meaning with the partially illegible Mao quote that
serves as a backdrop to Straub and Huillet’s stage play, which also holds the
action at a critical distance and foregrounds the audience’s act of interpretation.

Another direct anticipation of Straub and Huillet is in Griffith’s image (Shot 2)

of the farmers and horses in the field, sowing and plowing. It is a daring image,
lasting over a minute, confronting the viewer with the real time of the action-a
perfect example of Bazinian morality. Griffith does not merely depict, and subject
us to, the tedium of labor, but transfigures it into a revelation of space: the
farmers and horses move toward the camera from extreme long shot through medium to
medium close and then out of the frame, past the camera on our left. Then they
return back into deep space, while the horses, which have been following them,
continue to advance toward us before turning back themselves. Not only does
Griffith break with the proscenium as fully as possible and reveal the whole range
of space as the cinema’s domain, but he creates, in the counterpoint of advance and
retreat, and in the suspense of distance and nearness (as in the Arrival of a Train
[1895] of the Lumières), just enough spatial complexity to captivate attention,
make it alert. The effect is very near an extraordinary shot in Straub and
Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late (1981), in which Egyptian farmers approach the camera
from a great distance and pass by. This shot is a space in which “the people,”
about whom the narration is concerned but who are usually absent from or incidental
to the visible landscapes, come into view; and it is also a moment of considerable
suspense-will the image cut away before the people reach us? how long will they
take? This suspense is based not on trickery but on patience, and on curiosity
about how perception measures space and time. Griffith stands directly behind this
attentiveness.

In any case, both Griffith and Straub and Huillet avoid sterility in their appetite
for a dialectic between reality-the indexical nature of the image-and formalism-the
image’s stylization and tendency to abstraction. (9) Paradoxically, in their work
obtrusive form may let reality speak for itself. Further, the “primitive”
restriction of means-a function of technical development in Griffith’s cinema, a
voluntary choice for Straub and Huillet-becomes not poverty but wealth: what few
choices are available are made to concentrate as much meaning as possible. The
absence of a moving camera for Griffith, for instance, means that shots must be
designed for maximum efficiency, and accounts for both the generous density of the
images and the precision of the compositions. I have already cited Shot 2, but will
again emphasize how captivating is its counterpoint of action in real time: it both
captures the hopelessness and monotony of the farmers’ condition and transcends it
by awakening us to the beauty and intricacy of the real.

A last and crucial kinship between A Corner in Wheat and the work of Straub and
Huillet is in the use, and function, of structural dissonance. The death of the
Wheat King rhymes with the mob’s raid on the bread shop: they are directly
juxtaposed, and both are turning points in their respective strands. But Griffith
frustrates the analogy: while poetic justice destroys Hammond, the mob’s attempt to
get something to eat is thwarted by the police; and their defeat is echoed in the
last shot (32) of the sower, now alone, bereft of companions and horses. The death
of the Wheat King may be deserved, but is not sufficient to right the wrongs that
he and the system he represents have caused: misery continues, the social order
remains unimproved. In fact, Griffith underlines the sower’s desolation: he is
wearier, more isolated, worse off than in shot 2.

Barton Byg, writing of Straub and Huillet’s Introduction to Schoenberg’s

Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene (1972), observes, “There is no
‘resolution’ in their work . but [it] implies a resolution outside the work
itself.. [The] subject of this ‘resolution’ is outside the work of art but implied
by it-is its utopian aspect.” (10) This is precisely true of Griffith’s film as
well: Griffith’s unfulfilled parallelism, his deliberate frustration of the mutual
determination implicit in his cross-cutting, posits the answer to the social
dilemma that he depicts outside of the film, in society itself. Formal openness and
political meaning become one and the same. One thinks of Straub’s comment about the
corruption represented in Machorka-Muff (1962), his similarly inconclusive first
film: “The avenger is in the audience.” (11) In Griffith, as in Straub and Huillet,
form has social implications and consequences; and Griffith’s question, and rebuke,
to society remains, thanks to formal daring and to capitalism’s continuing
callousness, as much a challenge now as almost a century ago.
Appendix: Shot Breakdown

After the opening title, A Corner in Wheat consists of 32 shots. The action
transpires in several locations: a real farm and several sets representing the
office of the “Wheat King,” a bread shop, a banquet hall, and a grain elevator.

1. A farmer slowly and repeatedly sifts grain with his hands, talking with his
wife. He picks up the bag of grain, leaves with an older farmer, while wife and
daughter look on.
2. The two farmers casting grain, in extreme long shot, followed by another farmer
with their work horses. They move into the foreground and off screen, and then
return into extreme long shot; the horse follows.
3. A title: “The Wheat King. Engineering the Great Corner.”
4. An interior: the Wheat King instructing his cohorts in their office. He stands,
making a gesture of resolve; the others leave to do his bidding.
5. Title: “In the Wheat Pit. The Final Threshing.”
6. The stock market, dense with people speculating. The Wheat King enters and
leaves; a man faints, ruined by the bidding.
7. Title: “His Answer to the Ruined Man’s Plea. ‘Get it in the pit where I got
it.'”
8. The Wheat King’s headquarters. Their mutual congratulations are interrupted by
the ruined man, who is summarily and uncharitably dismissed.
9. Title: “The Gold of the Wheat.”
10. A sumptuous banquet: the King enters, offers a bold toast to general acclaim.
11. Title: “The Chaff of the Wheat.”
12. A bread shop. Three customers: a man buys, a woman underpays and is called back
to pay full price, a mother can not afford the bread, and leaves. They are referred
by the proprietor to a placard: “Owing to the advance in the price of flour, the
usual 5 ¢ loaf will be 10¢.”
13. The King’s banquet: he smokes a cigar.
14. The bread shop: a static tableau of an impoverished bread line.
15. The banquet: the King nods in response to several women’s comments.
16. The farm. The woman and child point off screen left; the farmers return, empty-
handed and despondent.
17. Title: “The High Price Cuts Down the Bread Fund.”
18. The static tableau in 14 recurs, and is set in motion: the poor approach the
proprietor for their welfare bread, but only the first four or five receive it: the
others are turned away.
19. Title: “A Visit to the Elevators.”
20. The office: the wealthy women enter to visit the King and his colleagues; they
consult and leave together.
21. A grain elevator. One worker on screen, another enters with the guests.
22. The floor of the elevator: grain pours in from off screen upper right.
23. The women look into the grain pit; a worker brings the Wheat King a telegram.
24. A close-up of the telegram: “Mr. W. J. Hammond. Dear Sir-You have control of
the entire market of the world. Yesterday added 4 million to your fortune.
Sincerely, [signature] Accountant.”
25. The King makes a gesture of triumph, loses balance, and topples into the pit.
26. Within the pit: the King lands, grain pours onto him.
27. A policeman at the bread shop talks with the nervous proprietor. Many poor
enter, rioting: the policeman and another hold them back, with clubs and guns
drawn.
28. The King’s hand is buried in wheat.
29. A worker leads the King’s friends back into frame, and they leave.
30. In the office, the women and the King’s colleagues notice his absence- alarmed
they go out.
31. They enter the grain elevator, as the King’s corpse is dragged by a rope out of
the pit; a woman (his wife?) mourns.
32. The farm. As in shot 2, but now only one solitary man wearily casts grain from
long shot to relative nearness, then turns back. Fade out.
Endnotes

Only after writing the bulk of this essay did I encounter two valuable analyses
of A Corner in Wheat: Tom Gunning’s chapter in Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The
Griffith Project, Volume 3 (London: British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 130-41; and
Helmut Färber, A Corner in Wheat von D. W. Griffith 1909: Eine Kritik (München-
Paris: Helmut Färber, 1992). Gunning’s discussion of the film’s sources and editing
and Färber’s commentaries and shot analysis are very useful and thorough
scholarship; however, I altered little in my more amateur text after consulting
them, with a couple of obvious exceptions. I wish I had had access to Vlada
Petric’s monograph on the film, since her essay on Griffith in Richard Roud, ed.,
Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), pp. 449-62, has
been of considerable use to me in thinking about Griffith.
Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1959, p. 341.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1-The Movement Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997, p. 149.
Gunning in Usai, p. 135.
Petric in Roud, p. 458.
Gunning, p. 136.
For the full list, see Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films
of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Berkeley: University of California, 1995,
p. 20.
See Gilberto Perez’ lovely account of the film’s ending in The Material Ghost.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998, pp. 321-3.
See Perez again for a discussion of “index” and “icon,” pp. 32-4.
Byg, p. 156.
Byg, p. 72.