Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Griffith, Dickens, and the Politics of Composure

2009; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 124; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.375

1938-1530

Daniël J. Siegel,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

This essay interrogates Sergei Eisenstein's critique of D. W. Griffith's montage aesthetic, arguing that, in Griffith's Orphans 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's A 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.