A Film Canon

Although various isolated examples of the point-of-view shot exist in cinema to date, Regeneration represents the first systematic attempt to cohere and aestheticise them, building a narrative around a series of gazes between Owen Conway (Rockliffe Fellowes), an urchin-turned-gangster, and Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson), a socialite-turned-charity worker, which, like so many melodramatic gazes, ultimately prove themselves capable of both generating conversion and replacing consummation; or, rather, fusing conversion and consummation. To this end, Walsh tends to restrict actual point-of-view shots for those moments at which the protagonists are most vulnerable or sympathetic - clearest in the opening sequence, in which ten-year old Owen watches his mother's funeral cart on the street below - extrapolating from them a series of surrogates that include irising, rudimentary 360-degree conversational editing, and occasional dollies, as well as the more general documentary imperative evident in the wealth of on-location shooting, naturalistic acting (at least from the leads), and transformation of Griffith's trademark vestibular spaces and locked doors into a grittier, more conspicuously slum-bound register. Even the necessary melodramatic spectacle is subordinated to this imperative - from the centrepiece of a burning ferry, couched in the observations of its victims, to the final showdown, which delightfully interrogates its deus ex machina, subtly acknowledging the conflict between the narrative requirement for revenge and the ideological requirement to trust in divine providence. The result is more crime melodrama than gangster film, as evinced in the complete lack of any paternalistic or protective charisma between Conway and his gang, who are never elevated to the status of surrogate family, nor characterised in any detail.