Seymour Stern: American Film Critic, Guardian and Prophet
a Sony video & Hewlett Packard photosmart & scanner picture essay by Ira H. Gallen
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Seymour Stern Hollywood,
December 1931
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His lifelong pursuits led him toward some brilliant contributions in all these areas; they also led him astray in the directions of self-indulgence and frustration. His magnum opus on Griffith was never completed, and his increasingly insular ways detached him from many of his colleagues and public. Above all, his strange obsession with Griffith haunted his lfe, as it continues to haunt those who would follow his footsteps...
When I began my search for Seymour Stern and D.W. Griffith, I remembered what Griffith said about himself in 1916: 'About myself? The public cannot care about that topic; you cannot improve on what was written about a real man of note once: 'He was born; he grew up; he slept a little: he ate a little; he worked a little; he loved a little and then he died.'"
A man like Seymour Stern could not take such remarks seriouslv. But what, I wondered, ever happened to Stern's long-promised epic, Griffith: Master of Cinema, first announced in 1938 and never completed, I decided to learn more about these enigmatic men-subject and biographer. For this was not the only work of Stern's about Griffith that never appeared. There were others-such as Part II of Film Culture's series on Griffith and THE BIRTH OF A NATION (companion to Film Culture's celebrated article published in 1965); and yet another Film Culture number, announced in 1972, supposed to deal with Griffith's INTOLERANCE and the Triangle films. Seymour Stern held out a lot of promises. I wanted to find out why they were not kept.
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| Seymour Stern New York, 1972 |
I wrote my first letter to Stern on April 29, 1970. I did so after having read his Film Culture work and I felt that I had to learn more from the man who had such comprehensive knowledge seemingly at his finger tips. By the following year Stern and I had entered into an extensive correspondence and telephone call relationship. I had been working on a book covering Griffith's Biograph period with special emphasis on the 400 or so one and two-reel films that Griffith had directed for the studio prior to his work on THE BIRTH OF A NATION.
By the time that I first met Stern, my Griffith interest had branched out into an additional area, that of raising the funding to do a film on Griffith during my tenure as a college student. I had begun the process of amassing film copies of Griffith productions and felt that an interview with Stern was no longer urgently necessary. We planned to have our first get-together on February 28, 1971; fittingly the place was to be Greenwich Village's Elgin Theatre which was running a retrospective showing of THE BIRTH OF A NATION. It was my first viewing of THE BIRTH in a 35mm format, one that had been widely advertised as being the fullest version extant. Prior to this chance, my only closely comparable experience had been that of seeing the Metropolitan Museum's truncated 1931 sound version.
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| The Birth of a Nation |
The entire atmosphere that evening might have been lifted intact from an old Tod Browning movie: foggy night outside of an old movie palace that had seen its better years in a neighborhood noted for its decline. In this atmosphere, I stood waiting for Stern as the crowd came out following the showing. I saw a short, bold man in a trench coat seemingly copied from an old foreign-intrigue B-movie. He made me a bit nervous as he moved through the crowd obviously bent on a specific purpose. I couldn't help remarking to myself, half in jest, that he seemed to be either a pick-pocket or was awaiting his moment to expose himself to any one of a number of small groups that were avidly discussing the film.
Later, I realized that the man moving through the crowd was listening to what they had to say to each other. As the crowd thinned out, only he remained, seemingly digesting and cataloging the various snippets of discussion that he had been able to pick up upon. This was Seymour Stern.
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| Stern and friends, 1972 |
I had really expected a professorial type with the obligatory three-piece Brooks Brothers suit complete with coordinated accessories. A similar disorientation took place when, after we had met and exchanged cordialities, we returned to his room at the Chelsea Hotel.
Instead of the massive library-like shelves containing the classic editions of film techniques, there was only a one-room apartment with wall-to-wall boxes, trunks and filing cabinets. A small bed and a portable stove represented the sole concessions to a recognizable level of normalcy.
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I would not have been at all certain that this was the man were it not for the readily identifiable voice. As we got into our hours-long talk on Griffith, my uneasiness subsided almost entirely, to be replaced by the question, which remained unasked at the time, as to just what might be the treasures that were contained in all of the boxes, many more of which were still in transit to Stern's fairly new quarters at the Chelsea.