Symbolic effects taken over from conventional literary and artistic tradition continued to make some appearances in films during these years. In D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914), the title “The birth of the evil thought” precedes a series of three shots of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an insect, though at a later point in the film when he prepares to kill someone these shots are cut straight in without explanation. Possibly as a result of Griffith's influence, 1915 was a big year for symbolism, allegories, and parables in the American cinema. Films following this route invariably included female figures in light, skimpy draperies, and indeed sometimes wearing nothing at all, doing “expressive” dances or striking plastic poses in sylvan settings. Titles include Lois Weber's Hypocrites, Vitagraph's Youth, someone else'sPurity, and so on. The Primrose Path starts with a large painting illustrating the concept, which dissolves into a replica of the same scene with actors posed, and then they come to life, as these would soon become popular aspects of film making. This is then amplified by closer detailed live action representations of stations on “The Primrose Path”. An interesting German example from a few years later is Robert Reinert's Opium (1919), which has some notable innovations in the use of Insert shots to help convey the sensation of the drug reveries. These are travelling landscape shots taken from a boat going down a river, and they are intentionally shot out of focus, or underexposed, or cut into the film upside down.
Symbolist art and literature from the turn of the century also had a more general effect on a small number of films made in Italy and Russia. The supine acceptance of death resulting from passion and forbidden longings was a major feature of this art, and states of delirium dwelt on at length were important as well. The first Russian examples were all made by Yevgeni Bauer for Khanzhonkov during the First World War, and include Grezy, Schastye vechnoi nochi, and Posle smerti, all from 1915. These to some extent live up to the promise of the `decadent' aesthetic suggested by their titles; Daydreams, Happiness of Eternal Night, and After Death. Schastye vechnoi nochi includes a visually very striking vision of a medusa-like monster superimposed on a night-time snow scene, and *Posle smerti*has a somewhat subtler dream vision of a dead girl, picked out by extra arc lighting, walking through a wind-blown cornfield in the dusk. In Italy, another country somewhat isolated filmically by the war, the same kind of realization of the fin-de-siecle decadent symbolist aesthetic can be found, mostly in films associated with the “diva” phenomenon. The most complete example, which also has decor to match, is Charles Kraus' Il gatto nero (The Black Cat). This last is one of the few films of this kind to use atmospheric insert shots to heighten the mood. The first film explicitly intended by its maker to be a visual analogue of poetry, Marcel L'Herbier'sRose-France (1919), continues further along these same paths.
