1. A 16mm projection print of Pippa Passes is owned by the Browning Institute and is available, for a modest fee, for the use of its members and others interested in the Brownings.

Incorporated in this article are portions of an introductory essay to the film, A Prologue to D. W. Griffith's Pippa Passes (1909) by Edward Guiliano, issued by the Browning Institute in 1975. We are indebted to Mr. Kemp R. Niver of Hollywood, Calif., for his graciousness and selflessness in helping us to acquire stills from the Griffith film, many of which appear in his own book, D. W. Griffith: His Biograph Films in Perspective (Los Angeles: [Historical Books], 1974).

2. New York Times, 10 Oct. 1909, p. 8; rpt. in MrsGriffith, D. W. (Linda Arvidson), When Movies Were Young (1925; rpt. New York: Dover, 1969), p. 129.Google Scholar

3. American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane, ed. Kauffmann, Stanley with Henstell, Bruce (New York: Liveright, 1972), p. 34.Google Scholar

4. A more complete text of the New York Times review, also rpt. in When Movies Were Young, pp. 130–31, is as follows: “‘Pippa Passes’ is being given in the nickelodeons and Browning is being presented to the average motion picture audience, which have received it with applause and are asking for more”. This achievement is the present nearest-Boston record of the reformed motion picture play producing, but from all accounts there seems to be no reason why one may not expect to see soon the intellectual aristocracy of the nickelodeons demanding Kant's Prolegomena to Metaphysics with the ‘Kritik of Pure Reason’ for a curtain raiser.

“Since popular opinion has been expressing itself through the Board of Censors of the People's Institute, such material as ‘The Odyssey,’ the Old Testament, Tolstoy, George Eliot, De Maupassant and Hugo has been drawn upon to furnish the films, in place of the sensational blood-and-thunder variety which brought down public indignation upon the manufacturers six months ago. Browning, however, seems to be the most rarefied dramatic stuff up to date.

“As for Pippa without words, the first films show the sunlight waking Pippa for her holiday with light and shade effects like those obtained by the Secessionist Photographers. Then Pippa goes on her way dancing and singing, the quarreling family hears her, and forgets its dissension; the taproom brawlers cease their carouse and so on, with the pictures alternately showing Pippa on her way, and then the effect of her ‘passing’ on the various groups in the Browning poem. The contrast between the ‘tired business man’ at a roof garden and the sweatshop worker applauding Pippa is certainly striking.

“That this demand for the classics is genuine is indicated by the fact that the adventurous producers who inaugurated these expensive departures from cheap melodrama are being overwhelmed by offers from renting agents. Not only the nickelodeons of New York but those of many less pretentious cities and towns are demanding Browning and the other ‘high-brow effects.’”

5. Mast, Gerald, A Short History of the Movies (Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1971), p. 59.Google Scholar

6. MrsGriffith, , p. 130.Google Scholar

7. MrsGriffith, , p. 97.Google Scholar

8. Biograph Bulletin, No. 280, 4 Oct. 1909; rpt. in Biograph Bulletins: 1908–1912, ed. Bowser, Eileen (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), p. 130Google Scholar. The text, written by Lee Dougherty, also appears in the Moving Picture World, 9 Oct. 1909, p. 499.

9. In addition to being the first film reviewed in the New York Times and containing a special lighting effect, Griffith's Pippa Passes has earned yet another lasting footnote in film history: Mary Pickford's first motion picture screen test was for Griffith as Pippa. Griffith spotted her one day at the Biograph studios and tested her for the role. As soon as the results were seen, Mary became a regular in the Biograph Company. Despite her favorable test, several months later, when Griffith was ready to begin filming Pippa Passes, he thought Mary had “grown a bit plump; she no longer filled his mental image of the type” (MrsGriffith, , p. 128)Google Scholar. Instead, eighteen-year-old Gertrude Robinson was cast as Pippa.

10. The additional cameramen were Arthur Marvin and P. Higginson. According to Kemp Niver, between them 1,258 feet of 35mm film were photographed, which was edited down to 983 feet for the release print (D. W. Griffith: His Biograph Films in Perspective, p. 116).

11. Although subtitles were commonplace at Biograph and throughout the rest of the industry long before Griffith started directing, he was late in adopting them. Kemp Niver, the restorer of the Biograph films in the paper print collection of the Library of Congress, writes that Griffith started “in mid-1909 to design his production for the inclusion of subtitles. He had added a single subtitle to one or two of his films prior to that time, but once he decided to make them a standard part of each film, subtitles remained an essential element of all his pictures.” (Niver, p. 121.)

12. Shot originally on 35mm film, the restored projection print is on 16mm film. Three hundred and sixty-four feet of 16mm film are extant. Therefore, in terms of 35 mm footage, just enough has been lost to accomodate the opening credits and four or five titles.

13. The duration of each shot is given in minutes and seconds (approximate) rather than in film footage, a less convenient measurement for general purposes.

14. This apparently published version of Pippa's song set to music is not recorded in any of the bibliographies and checklists of musical versions of Browning's work, including East's, SallyBrowning Music (Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library, 1973).Google Scholar

15. When Griffith suggested the effect he wanted to the Biograph people, including Billy Bitzer, they were highly skeptical. What Griffith wanted was to have Pippa's face, as she lay sleeping, to be gradually illuminated by morning sunlight while the room filled with light. According to Lillian Gish (who was not at hand in 1909), the desired effect was accomplished in this way: “Griffith had a sliding panel built into the wall of the set. Beyond it he mounted a powerful light. As Pippa lay sleeping on camera, the panel was lowered a crack, and the morning light Griffith had so adroitly created touched her face. She opened her eyes. The panel was lowered slowly, completely, until the room was flooded with light.” (The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me [Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969], p. 62.) Lights outside the window helped give the effect of a soft morning glow. Another account of the filming of the lighting sequence can be found in When Movies Were Young, pp. 128–29. Mrs. Griffith's more detailed explanation of how the lighting effect was engineered is the principal account, though it is not completely clear.

16. Similarly expressed by Wagenknecht, Edward and Slide, Anthony, The Films of D. W. Griffith (New York: Crown, 1975), p. 12.Google Scholar

17. We are indebted to Henderson's, Robert M.D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work, (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972)Google Scholar as well as Mrs. Griffith's When Movies Were Young for biographical information throughout.

18. Robert M. Henderson has published a list of the known authors, adaptors, and sources for films directed by D. W. Griffith during his Biograph period as an appendix to his D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).

19. For a discussion of the effect of the filming of Enoch Arden on the many stage adaptations, see Vardac, A. Nicholas's Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 69–73.Google Scholar

20. Billy Bitzer: His Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 67.

21. It is difficult to identify all of the actors in Pippa Passes by name since it was not till several years later that performances began to be credited in films. Although Mrs. Griffith implies that Henry Walthall appears in Pippa and Robert Henderson lists this film among his credits, it is unlikely that Walthall appeared in Pippa. Having tried, as best as we could, to identify the cast, we agree with the list published by Niver, Kemp (D. W. Griffith: His Biograph Films in Perspective, p. 116)Google Scholar; Gertrude Robinson, George Nicholls, Adele De Garde, James Kirkwood, Mack Sennett, Tony O'Sullivan, Linda Arvidson, Billy Quirk, Arthur Johnson, Marion Leonard, Owen Moore, and Clara T. Bracy.

22. Stage to Screen, p. 64. Throughout this paragraph we are indebted to Vardac's seminal study, especially to his Introduction.

23. “Possibilities and Probabilities,” Motion Picture Magazine, Oct. 1926, pp. 47–48; cited in Henderson, , D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work, p. 31.Google Scholar

24. From the unpublished manuscript play in the Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress, copyright 1907; cited by Henderson, in D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph, p. 20.Google Scholar

25. Browning was by no means alone as a writer of pre-cinema screenplays. One has only to examine the speeches of the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V to see the cinematic imagination in literature. Richard Wilbur makes a case for Milton's Paradise Lost as a work that is “genuinely cinematic” (“A Poet and the Movies,” Man and the Movies, ed. Robinson, W. R. [Baton Rouge: Louisiana Univ. Press, 1967], p. 224)Google Scholar; Francis Devlin makes a similar case for Tennyson, citing the “visual perspective and spatial movement” as the stuff of true cinema in the poems of 1842 (“A ‘Cinematic’ Approach to Tennyson's Descriptive Art,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 3 [Spring, 1975], 132–44); John Wain has said that Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts “anticipates the cinema because the imagination that went into its making was of the same kind that goes into the making of a film” (Introduction to The Dynasts [New York: St. Martin's, 1965 ], p. x).

26. All quotations from “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto” are taken from Browning: Poetical Works, 1833–1864, ed. Jack, Ian (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar; quotations from Pippa Passes are from The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. King, Roma A. Jr. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1972), Vol. 3 (Pippa is edited by Morse Peckham).Google Scholar