Edgar Allan Poe

Like many of the earliest Biograph shorts, the title cards for Edgar Allan Poe have gone missing. In the version they made available as an extra on The Avenging Conscience DVD, Kino decided against attempting a restoration. A wise choice; this motion picture has no need of words.

Although Griffith was yet to develop the advances to the editing process he is well known for, his staging of drama, his use of space and his handling of actors already placed him well ahead of his peers in making cinema a form of visual storytelling. Typically, a short like this might begin with a title card describing Poe as a struggling writer, but actually his conditions are adequately revealed to us through the small, dimly lit set, an interior which is made all the more confining by that sloping wall on the left of the frame. Also of note is the following scene in which Poe is turned away by the publishing house. Most directors of this time would directly show Poe talking to the publisher, but Griffith places another man (I assume the "resident poet" from the cast list) unconcernedly working away in the foreground. This touch, which would be unremarkable in a film made five years later, adds realism to the setting and the necessary tone of unpleasantness to the situation.

Griffith's shorts from 1909 vary immensely in quality, and some of his attempts at action episodes are appalling (see for example Voice of the Violin, released six weeks after this), but this understated drama is nicely suited to his abilities of the time, and satisfying on its own simple terms. It's ironic though that it draws from the life of one of Griffith's favourite authors, because its style owes more to theatrical traditions than the literary narrative techniques that would galvanise his later pictures.