The Oxford History of World Cinema (14 page)

was fairly simple; the out-of-order shots were assembled according to the pre-existing

script, and intertitles added. Numerous positive prints were then run off by the laboratory

and the film was ready for sale to the exchanges.

THE BEGINNING OF NARRATIVE

There was a 'crisis' in transitional cinema around 1907, signalled by complaints in the

trade press about lack of narrative clarity, as well as by exhibitors' increased use of

lectures in an attempt to make films understandable to their audiences. Films were poised

between an emphasis upon visual pleasure, 'the cinema of attractions', and story-telling,

'the cinema of narrative integration', but conventions for constructing internally coherent

narratives had not yet been established. In the transitional years, between 1907-8 and

1917, the formal elements of film-making all became subsidiary to the narrative, as

lighting, composition, editing were all increasingly designed to help the audience follow a

story. Integral to these stories were psychologically credible characters, created through

performance style, editing, and dialogue intertitles, whose motivations and actions

seemed realistic and helped to link together a film's disparate shots and scenes. These

'well-rounded', believable characters, resembling those of the then fashionable realist

literature and drama, contrast sharply with the earlier period's one-dimensional stock

characters drawn from the melodrama and vaudeville comedy skits.

The increased use of editing and the decreased distance between camera and actors most

obviously distinguish the films of the transitional period from their predecessors. The

tableau or proscenium arch shot, showing the actors' entire bodies as well as the space

above and below them, characterized the early cinema. However, towards the beginning

of the transitional period the Vitagraph Company began using the so-called '9-foot line',

staging the action about 9 feet from the camera, a scale that showed the actors from the

ankles up. At around the same time in France, Pathé and companies under its influence,

Film d'Art and SCAGL, also adopted the 9-foot line. By 1911 the camera had moved yet

closer, producing the three-quarter shot that became the predominant scale of the

transitional cinema and indeed of the entire silent period. In addition to moving the

camera closer to the actors, film-makers also moved the actors closer to the camera. In

chase films the actors had exited the shots in close proximity to the camera, but during the

transitional period the practice became standardized, deliberately employed to enhance

dramatic effects, as in a shot from The Musketeers of Pig Alley ( Griffith, 1912) in which

a gangster slinks along a wall until he is seen in medium close-up.

The decreased distance between action and camera not only enabled identification of the

actors and the development of the star system, but also contributed to the increased

emphasis upon individualized characters and facial expression. Editing was also

developed for this end; both to emphasize moments of psychological intensity and to

externalize characters' thoughts and emotions. The three-quarter scale already permitted

audiences to see the actors' faces more clearly than before, but filmmakers often cut even

closer at climactic points. This was designed to encourage fuller viewer involvement in

the characters' emotions, and not, as in early films like The Great Train Robbery, simply

for shock value. For example, in The Lonedale Operator ( Griffith, Biograph, 1911)

burglars menace a telegraph operator ( Blanche Sweet) and attempt to break into her

office. As Sweet desperately telegraphs for help, the film cuts from a three-quarter to a

medium shot, allowing a closer view of her fearful expression.

Editing was also used more directly to convey characters' subjectivities. In the earlier

period, film-makers had adopted the theatrical 'vision scene', using double exposure to put

the character and a literal embodiment of externalized thoughts in the same frame. Life of

an American Fireman ( Edison, 1902), for example, uses this device to show a fireman

thinking of an imperilled family, who appear in a balloon slightly above him and to his

right. This convention continued in the transitional period, as in The Life Drama of

Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine of France (Vitagraph, 1909), in which

the divorced and distraught Empress reaches out to a superimposed vision of her erstwhile

husband. But the film's companion reel, Napoleon, the Man of Destiny, approaches the

conventional flashback structure of the Hollywood cinema, in which a 'present-day' shot

of the character authorizes the film's presentation of the 'past'. Napoleon returns to

Malmaison shortly before his exile to Elba and, as he 'thinks' of his past, the film cuts

from him to reenactments of battles and other events in his life.

The transitional period also saw the emergence of the editing pattern that is most closely

associated with character subjectivity: the point-of-view shot, in which a film cuts from a

character to what the character sees and then back to the character. This pattern did not

become fully conventionalized until the Hollywood period, but filmmakers during the

transitional period experimented with various means of 'showing' what characters saw. In

an early example, Francesca da Rimini (Vitagraph, 1907), there is a cut from a tableau-

scale shot of a character looking at a locket to an insert close-up of the locket. In The

Lonedale Operator, Enoch Arden ( 1911), and other films, Griffith cuts between

characters looking through a window to what they see, although the eyeline match seems

'imperfect' by today's standards.

This last kind of editing, of course, not only externalized characters' thoughts but helped

establish the spatial and temporal relations crucial to narrative coherence, both in the

same scene (roughly, actions occurring at the same place and time) and between scenes

taking place at the same time in different locations. In the earlier period film-makers

occasionally broke down the space of a shot, selecting details for closer examination, as

in Grandma's Reading Glasses. While not as prevalent as it was later to become, this

analytical editing was sometimes used in the transitional period to highlight narratively

important details rather than, as in the earlier period, simply to provide visual pleasure. In

The Lonedale Operator, for example, when the burglars eventually break into the

telegraph operator's office, she holds them at bay with what appears to be a revolver but a

cut-in reveals to be a wrench. While analytical editing was comparatively rare,

conventions for linking the different spaces of one scene together, to orientate the viewer

spatially, became established practice. In fact, part of the suspense in The Lonedale

Operator depends upon the viewer having a clear idea of the film's spatial relations. When

the telegraph operator first arrives at work, she walks from the railway office's porch into

an outer room and then into an inner room. Following the principle of directional

continuity, the actress exits each shot at screen right and re-enters at screen left. When the

burglars break through the outermost door, the viewer knows exactly how much further

they must go to reach the terrified woman. Here, character movement links the shots, but

various other conventions, many relating to the relative position of the camera in

successive set-ups, also arose for establishing spatial relations.

The Lonedale Operator also provides an example of an editing pattern primarily

associated with the name of its director, D. W. Griffith. He became famous for the

crosscutting, parallel action, or parallel editing through which he constructed his spine-

tingling last-minute rescues. Several pre-Griffith films, however, show that, while the

Biograph director may have conventionalized parallel editing, he did not invent it. Two

1907 Vitagraph films, The Mill Girl and The Hundred-to-One-Shot, cross-cut between

different locations, the latter even featuring a somewhat attenuated last-minute rescue.

Several Pathé films from 1907-8 also contain fairly brief parallel editing sequences, the

plot and editing of one, A Narrow Escape ( 1908), prefiguring Griffith's The Lonely Villa

( 1909). But from his earliest films, Griffith experimented with cutting between pursued,

pursuer, and potential rescuer, and he and other American directors soon developed

parallel editing beyond the fairly elementary form seen in French films. The climax of

The Lonedale Operator, for example, cuts from the menaced heroine, to the menacing

burglars breaking down doors, to the hero in the cab of a speeding locomotive, to an

exterior tracking shot of the onrushing train.

When Griffith first began directing at Biograph in 1908 his films averaged about

seventeen shots, increasing fivefold to an average of eighty-eight by 1913. The later

Griffith Biographs probably feature more shots per film than those produced by other

American studios, such as Vitagraph, during the same years, but American film-makers as

a general rule tended to rely more heavily on editing than did their European counterparts,

who were concerned more with the
mise-en-scène
and the possibilities of staging in

depth. American films tended to stage the action on a shallow plane, with actors entering

and exiting from the sides. Particularly toward the beginning of the transitional period,

they even used painted flats, making no attempt to disguise their theatricality. By contrast,

European films, particularly the French and Italian, began to create a sense of deep space

not possible in the theatre. Lowering the camera to waist level from its previous eye level

facilitated shooting in depth; the reduction of the empty space above the actors' heads

produced both a larger, closer view of the characters and much more contrast between

characters closer to and further from the camera, permitting the staging of action in the

foreground, midground, and background. Convincing threedimensional sets for interior

scenes, often with doors that gave glimpses of an even deeper space behind the set, added

to the illusion of depth. The use of doorways and contrasting light and shadows often

enhanced the feeling of deep space in exterior shots, as seen in Romeo and Juliet (Film

d'Arte Italiana, 1909). In one shot, Romeo returns to Verona and walks through the dark

shadow under an arch into the well-lit deep space behind. The next shot, Juliet's funeral

procession, is a graphic match cut to the shadowy arched doorway of a vast church out of

which pours a huge cast. The film holds the shot long enough for the many gorgeously

costumed extras to wind past the camera, the lengthy procession drawing the eye back to

the church door.

The American cinema's emphasis on editing rather than
mise-en-scène
was coupled with

the development of a new 'cinematic' performance style that contributed to the creation of

credible, individualized characters. Film acting began increasingly to resemble that of the

'realist' drama and to reject the codified conventions of an older performance style,

associated primarily with the melodrama. The earlier or 'histrionic' style was predicated

upon the assumption that acting bore no relation to 'real' or everyday life. Actors

expressed themselves through a pre-established lexicon of gestures and poses, all

corresponding to pre-specified emotions or states of mind. Movements were broad,

distinct, and forcefully performed. By contrast, the newer or 'verisimilar' style assumed

that actors should mimic everyday behaviour. Actors abandoned the standard and

conventionalized poses of the 'histrionic' style and externalized characters' thoughts and

emotions through facial expression, small individuated movements, and the use of props.

Two Griffith Biographs made three years apart, A Drunkard's Reformation ( 1909) and

Brutality ( 1912), illustrate the differences between the histrionic and verisimilar styles. In

both films a wife despairs over her husband's affection for the bottle. In the earlier film,

the wife ( Florence Lawrence) collapses into her chair and rests her head on her arms,

extended straight out in front of her on the table. Then she sinks to her knees and prays,

her arms fully extended upward at about 45 degrees. In the later film the wife (Mae

Marsh) sits down at the dining-room table, bows her head, and begins to collect the dirty

dishes. She looks up, compresses her lips, pauses, then begins to gather the dishes again.

Once more she pauses, raises her hand to her mouth, glances down to her side, and

slumps a little in her chair. Slumping a little more, she begins to cry.

The changing use of intertitles during the transitional period also related directly to the

construction of credible, individualized characters. Initially, intertitles had been

expository, often preceding a scene and providing fairly lengthy descriptions of the

upcoming action. Gradually, shorter expository titles dispersed throughout the scene

replaced these lengthy titles. More importantly, dialogue titles began to appear from 1910.

Film-makers experimented with the placement of these titles, first inserting them before