A Film Canon

The apocryphal narratives of Judith provide the perfect subject matter for D.W. Griffith's melodramatic vision of the world. Not only is the distinction between inside and outside, domesticity and otherness, magnified to a wall "fifty cubits thick", but the titular heroine embodies the rationale for that divide, playing the virgin or the whore depending on what side she occupies (and her whole-hearted, if temporary, dedication to the latter is an index of Griffith's indebtedness to Thomas Bailey Aldrich's poem, rather than the original). To this end, Griffith makes the wall the anchor for most of his spectacular cross-editing, as well as his highly choreographed siege sequences, which reflect the influence of Italian and Biblical epics, and anticipate Intolerance. That said, these are also a mere instance of a more original attempt to taxonomise or conceptualise the crowd, whose other incarnations include the various agglomerations of Bethulians, whether wretched or worshipping, and Assyrians, who tend to be condensed to an orgiastic, decadent frenzy that will recur in Griffith's work. This all creates a sense of scale appropriate to his first attempt at a feature-length production, also evident in the unprecedented tendency to shoot on location. Even the ostensibly 'indoor' spaces (Bethulian courtyards, Assyrian tents) are, in effect, outside, engendering all the technical difficulties that that entails. It's also worth mentioning that, conversely, Judith's narrative is the perfect vehicle for melodramatic male debilitation, here clearly figured as castration, with Holofernes, whose decapitated body is traumatically discovered by his effeminate eunuch, seeming to embody the male counterpart to both virgin and whore, reinforcing the authority of the city wall even as he aims to undermine it.