The Oxford History of World Cinema (53 page)

The companies behind this strange phenomenon were in some cases organized on a

family basis. The films were distributed mainly in southern Italy and in the larger

northern cities, although on occasion they were exported to wherever emigrant

communities had settled. The Dora Film Company, owned by Elvira and Nicola Notari,

which had been founded shortly after 1910, succeeded in infusing its films with a

simplicity and authenticity which was far removed from the anodyne 'modernity' of the

commercial films being made for nation-wide audiences. 'A santanotte ('Holy Night') and

E'piccerella ('The little girl', Film Dora, 1922), both directed by Elvira Notari, are two of

the most important films in a genre which has its roots in the Neapolitan popular theatre

form, the sceneggiata (a simple, powerful drama interspersed with popular songs), which

was directed and acted by non-professionals, with no artistic or technical training, and yet

which managed to strike a chord with the audiences' feelings.

Still in Naples, Gustavo Lombardo had set up his own production company in 1918 which

emerged unscathed from the collapse of UCI. Hence, in the second half of the 1920s,

when directors, actors, and technicians were leaving in droves for France and Germany,

Lombardo Film continued to produce a steady stream of relatively goodquality films,

including a number starring the talented actress Leda Gys. Gys had performed with

outstanding results alongside Francesca Bertini in the pantomime Histoire d'un pierrot ('A

pierrot's story', Italica Ars/Celio Film, 1914) by Baldassarre Negroni. For Lombardo, she

made a trilogy entitled Ifigli di nessuno ('Children of nobody', 1921), directed by Ubaldo

Maria Del Colle, which combined populist drama with a significant degree of polemical

social critique. Lombardo Film changed its name to Titanus, and some years later moved

to Rome to join forces with a new organization founded by the Genoese producer Stefano

Pittaluga in a move which radically transformed the distribution system throughout Italy.

In the desolate panorama of the national film industry at the end of the 1920s, there are

some signs of renewal. The influence of the Fascist regime was still only marginal: it had

set up the Istituto Nazionale LUCE (acronym of L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa --

the Union of Cinema and Education) in 1924 with the aim of exploiting cinema for

propagandist and didactic ends, but it generally refrained from direct intervention in the

affairs of the industry. Aldo De Benedetti demonstrated in La grazia ('Grace', Attori e

Direttori Italiani Associati, 1929) how even a traditional story-line could give rise to a

style of filming of extraordinary purity.

The first Italian sound film to be released was a sentimental comedy by Gennaro Righelli,

La canzone dell'amore ('The love song', Cines, 1930), which came out also in French and

German versions. It was shortly followed by Sole ('Sun', Società Anonima Augustus,

1929) by Alessandro Blasetti, a film about the draining of the Pontine marshes which

showed the influence of German and Soviet cinema. Another young director, Mario

Camerini, who had already shown himself capable of injecting new energy into the worn

formulas of adventure films and bourgeois comedies through a more smooth and

technically sophisticated style -- as in Voglio tradire mio marito! ('I want to betray my

husband!', Fert Film, 1925) and Kif tebby (Attori e Direttori Italiani Associati, 1928) --

now took a further step forwards with Rotaie ('Rails', SACIA, 1929), which was shot as a

silent film, but came out two years later in a sound version. The Sole and Rotaie are

marked by clearly differing intentions, but both are inclined towards experimentation with

new forms which refashion with vision and authority the Italian vocation for realism.

Bibliography

Bernardini, Aldo ( 1980-82), Cinema muto italiano, 1896-1914.

--- (ed.) ( 1991), Archivo del cinema italiano, Vol. i: Il cinema muto, 19051931.

--- and Gili, Jean A. (eds.) ( 1986), Le Cinéma italien.

--- and Martinelli, Vittorio ( 1979), Il cinema italiano degli anni Venti.

Brunetta, Gian Piero ( 1980), Stotia del cinema italiano, Vol. i: 19051945.

Dall'Asta, Monica ( 1992), Un Cinéma musclé: le surhomme dans le cinéma muet italien

(1913-1926).

Leprohon, Pierre ( 1972), The Italian Cinema.

Martinelli, Vittorio ( 1980-91), "Il cinema muto italiano, 19151931".

Masi, Stefano, and Franco, Mario ( 1988), Il mare, la luna, i coltelli: per una storia del

cinema muto napoletano.

Redi, Riccardo ( 1986), Ti parlerb . . . d'amor: cinema italiano fra muto e sonoro.

British Cinema from Hepworth to Hitchcock

JOHN HAWKRIDGE

The tendency among film historians has always been to represent the British cinema as

having had influential and innovative beginnings-the so-called British pioneers-but then

to have fallen into decline and stagnation. From this perspective, as expressed for

example by Georges Sadoul ( 1951), Rescued by Rover (Cecil Hepworth, 1905) is the

high point. Films produced after that date, particularly in the period ( 1908-13) when one-

reel dramatic narrative was dominant, have been neglected. Even writers like Barry Salt

( 1992), who has done a careful formal analysis of films from the early years, have

focused perhaps unduly on fictional dramatic narrative, at the expense of the comic film

and -- even more important -- the various forms of actuality film.

As a result of these historiographical biases, a certain injustice has been done to British

films of the immediately post-'pioneer' period. Where there was innovation, it has been

overlooked, or interpreted in the light of later developments, notably those that came to be

part of the dominant Hollywood mode from 1913 onwards. In fact British films of the

period were often quite sophisticated, particularly in the comic and actuality fields.

Narrative editing, too, was often innovative -- but, unfortunately, the innovations tended

to be in directions which went against the grain of what was to prove the dominant

approach.

EARLY FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS

Before 1907-8, it was the actuality (in its broadest generic sense) and the comic film that

dominated British production output. Producers were geographically widespread,

although in the period after 1906 most of the production companies were located in or

around London. Thousands of titles were produced; before 1902 most consisted of only

one shot, but by 1905 lengthier films had led to the development of some reasonably

complex editing strategies. For example, the point-of-view shot pair came into relatively

early usage in British film. A particularly early example of this narrational strategy can be

found in the Gaumont (British) film The Blacksmith's Daughter ( 1904). Here the second

shot of the point-of-view shot pair is cued by having an old man lift a child up to look

over a fence, into a garden which a couple (the daughter of the title and her lover) have

just entered. The second shot shows the field of vision; it lacks the presence in shot of the

looker(s), but is taken from the space occupied by the man and the child in the previous

shot. That this is intended as a point-of-view perspective is shown by the fact that the

camera has been placed so as to shoot the scene through the fence, with the railings

clearly visible in the second shot.

The Blacksmith's Daughter is not the only early British film that displays innovative

shooting and editing strategies. The 1906 actuality A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.'s Biscuit

Works (Cricks and Sharp, 1906) is remarkable not only for its relative length -- in excess

of 2,000 feet when most fictional subjects were less than 500 feet -- but also because of

its use of high-angle camera shots, panning, and tilt movement, and its use of scene

dissection to give a more complete view of specific factory processes.

Despite the attention that has been paid by film historians to the development of early

editing practices, one particular technique, which has relevance to comic, actuality, and

fictional film narratives, has been largely overlooked; the jump cut in the context of shots

which maintain a continuity of framing. For example, in The Missing Legacy; or, The

Story of a Brown Hat (Gaumont Film Company, 1906), when a fight develops between

the protagonist and three men, there is a cut at the point where the protagonist is wrestled

to the ground. This is not 'lost footage' but a jump cut which allows the man's clothing to

be reduced to tatters during the 'absent time' of the cut. The film-maker disguised this lack

of clothing continuity by having the action staged largely out of frame, and by having the

protagonist partially obscured by his attackers. Similarly, the jump cut is important in the

narrative construction of some of the actuality films of the period. Thus in Building a

British Railway -- Constructing the Locomotive (Urban, 1905) the jump cut (keeping

continuity of framing) is used to create the temporal ellipsis that allows various stages in

the process to be shown, including both initial and final stages of construction.

Film-makers of this period in fact showed considerable ingenuity in developing editing

and shooting practices which ensured the effect they desired, whether in comic and

actuality films or dramatic narrative films. For example, the device of the 'ingenious

cheat' (Salt, 1992), whereby actor movement is used to simulate camera movement, has

been noted in the case of Ladies Skirts Nailed to a Fence (Bamforth, 1900). However, this

practice was not restricted to such comic sketches, but clearly also had a function in

fictional dramatic narratives.

Cecil Hepworth's Rescued by Rover ( 1905) was a major commercial success, and in

order to produce enough prints to meet demand, Hepworth's company remade the film

twice. From a narrative perspective all three films are the same, but at the level of film

form there are some small yet significant differences. In the first version of the film the

scene in which the remorse-stricken nurse bursts into the room and confesses to the loss

of the child is handled differently from the two later versions. The first version breaks this

scene down into two shots, the second being filmed from a closer camera position and at a

slightly different angle to the action. The other two versions, however, simply use one

shot -- the second camera set-up. Thus, on the face of it, the earliest version makes use of

scene dissection, whilst the later versions do not. If we view scene dissection as a

development in film form, then here we have a seeming regression. What has happened,

however, is rather that the film-maker has learnt from the 'mistake' in the staging of the

scene in the first version, in which the two shots of this scene register perceptually as a

change of camera position when it is actually the actors who have moved. Thus by 1905

Hepworth had a clear idea of how close the camera should be to the staged action, and

was prepared to move the actors forward to accommodate. When confronted by a similar

problem in a scene in Falsely Accused, produced the same year, Hepworth moved the

camera forward, since the staging of the action (with an attempted exit through a window

being dramatically important) precluded the possibility of moving the actors.

THE MAIN FILM GENRES

The fact that British films in the period up to 1906-7 were successful and influential,

nationally and internationally, has been well documented. Even contemporary critical

writing confirms the view of the superiority of British films vis-à-vis their American

counterparts. An editorial in the Projection Lantern and Cinematograph of July 1906

states, 'The cinematograph trade seems to be booming in the States. The demand for films

is exceptionally heavy, with the result that very inferior subjects are being produced,

many of which would not be tolerated at British halls'. The British success was derived

from both innovative filmmaking ( Fire!, Daring Daylight Burglary, Desperate Poaching

Affray) and the fact that international markets were open. However, by 1912 the situation

had reversed. The Moving Picture World of 20 January 1912 commented, 'English films

in this country are a hopeless drug on the market and cannot even please the Canadians.'

So why the fall? Hepworth himself, in his autobiography, refers to being 'not sufficiently

alive to the many changes which were occurring in the industry', and such Hepworth films

as Dumb Sagacity ( 1907) and The Dog Outwits the Kidnappers ( 1908) do show a

remarkable similarity (in story and film form) to the earlier Rescued by Rover. Added to

the perceived lack of quality of British films, and not unrelated, was the effective closure

of the American market to British producers with the formation of the Motion Picture

Patents Company in 1908.

It was around this time that the series film first appeared on British screens. The British

and Colonial Kinematograph Company (hereafter B. & C.) moved into the production of

series films at an early date. The Exploits of Three-Fingered Kate (First Series) was

reviewed in the Bioscope in October 1909, and a number of series were to follow in the

years leading up to the First World War. In terms of popular success none was more