ABSTRACT

This chapter explores films from the 1930s that deal with Abraham Lincoln not only for their portrayal of an American president, but as the survival and transformation of a mode of symbolic and emblematic imagery associated with silent film. As the first full decade of sound film in the United States, the 1930s represent the crowning period of the Classical Hollywood Cinema, establishing American movies as a continuity-based narrative form centered on psychologically motivated characters and action-driven plots. The chapter offers a plea for recognition of the power and expressiveness of the symbolic image in American cinema as demonstrated by the portrayal of the Lincoln Image by John Ford and D. W. Griffith. Abraham Lincoln nearly recreates the assassination of Lincoln at Ford's theater, which had marked the midpoint of Griffith's earlier epic of Ford's theater, which had marked the midpoint of Griffith's earlier epic of Civil War and Reconstruction. The symbolic mode of Abraham Lincoln formed a key aspect of Griffith's act of transmitting a legacy to a new era.