The Oxford History of World Cinema (54 page)

important than the Lieutenant Daring series, which first appeared in 1911; the Bioscope of

28 March 1912 published an interview (and photograph) of Lieutenant Daring, 'the

famous English film actor'. However, since the interview was conducted with references

solely to Daring the fictional character, and not to Percy Moran, the actor who played the

role, then it would be more correct to refer to the notion of a picture personality rather

than a star. From the perspective of film form these B. & C. series films are also

interesting because of their use of emblematic shots (of the eponymous hero/heroine) at

the end (or, less often, at the beginning) of the films. Their inclusion might be seen in

terms of a generic code, since shots of this type are relatively rare in other film genres,

with the exception of the comic film, where again emblematic shots can be found at the

beginning or end of the film in productions from various British companies.

The importance of the Daring series can also be gauged by the fact that, when B. & C.

undertook a production trip to the West Indies in 1913 (something of a first for a British

company to take its artists such a distance), Percy Moran was in the party, and at least one

series entry was shot in Jamaica; Lt. Daring and the Dancing Girl. Although the West

Indies was its most far flung and exotic shooting location, this company often made use

of scenic location shooting, a fact that its publicity emphasized. For example, the first in

the Don Qseries of films ( 1912) was advertised as having been filmed 'amidst

Derbyshire's rugged and picturesque' hills, and this strategy of foregrounding scenic

pleasure is structured into the film itself in The Mountaineer's Romance ( 1912), when an

introductory title card announces, 'This Photo-Play Was Enacted Around The Beautiful

Peak District, Derbyshire'.

The parodic film appeared relatively early in British film production. In the same year as

Charles Urban first produced his Unseen World series of films, the Hepworth Company

made a parody of it. The format of the Urban series was based on combining the

technologies of the microscope and the movie camera, to produce magnified views of the

'natural world'. Hepworth's The Unclean World ( 1903) has a man place a piece of the

food he has been eating under a microscope. A circular mask shot then reveals two

beetles, but the joke is realized when two hands enter the frame and turn the beetles over,

revealing their clockwork mechanisms.

It was with the series film, however, that the parody almost developed into a genre in its

own right. B. & C.'s 'Three-Fingered Kate', who is continually eluding the hapless

Detective Sheerluck, may well be a direct parody of Éclair's 'Nick Carter -- le roi des

détectives'. The sending up of current events, and particularly current film releases, was

the stock-in-trade of Fred Evans, the most successful screen comic in Britain around

1913-14, who in the latter year produced a number of spoof 'Lieutenant Pimple' films,

including Lieutenant Pimple and the Stolen Invention. The Hepworth Company was also

producing spoofs of B. & C.'s and Clarendon's naval heroes. The prevalence of these

cheap-to-produce parodies is an indicator both of the lack of any comic star in the British

cinema in the pre-war period and of the still largely artisanal nature of British film

production, with the concomitant lack of finance, since much of the comic pleasure of

these film parodies resides in cheapness of production. The only requirement was that the

audience could make the necessary link back to the parodied film(s), and most often this

was clearly signalled in the titles themselves.

Although good at producing popular and cheap series and parodies for the home market,

British companies were slow at exploiting their own cultural heritage, unlike the

American competitors such as Vitagraph, who produced A Tale of Two Cities ( 1911) to

celebrate the centenary of Dickens. British producers concentrated heavily on comedy

production in this period, when the dramatic narrative had become the staple of the

industry. For example, of the films released in Britain in January 1910, the only British

company with a significant number of fictional drama releases is Hepworth, and these

were considerably shorter than comparable films from European and American producers

(three of the four dramas released by Hepworth in that month were less than 500 feet,

whereas European and American dramas were closer to 1,000).

None the less by 1912 there was a degree of optimism in the British trade press, and the

view expressed by both Cecil Hepworth ( 1931) and George Pearson ( 1957) was that by

1911-12 British companies had largely caught up lost ground. This was particularly true

for companies like Hepworth and B. & C., who began to produce a more attractive

product through, for example, the good dramatic use of scenic locations and a more

restrained and naturalistic acting style, notably in films like A Fisherman's Love Story

(Hepworth, 1912) and The Mountaineer's Romance (B. & C., 1912). Some of these films

also display a remarkable degree of filmic sophistication. For example, in Lt. Daring and

the Plans for the Minefields (B. & C., 1912), a scene in which Daring prepares to pilot a

plane is broken down into a series of four shots, involving axial cut-ins and a reverseangle

shot.

Clive Brook and Betty Compson in the successful British melodrama Woman to Woman (

1923), directed by Graham Cutts from a script by Alfred Hitchcock

COMPETITION FROM AMERICA

However, if British film-makers had 'caught up' in 191112, the rise to dominance of the

multi-reel film shortly afterwards, and the distribution practices of American film

companies, would again leave the British trailing behind. The home industry suffered

from the way a number of American companies 'tied in' British exhibitors. For example,

the Gaumont Weekly of 28 August 1913 complained, 'Many theatres have exclusive

contracts with the American manufacturers -- a cheap way of supplying the theatre'.

Almost coincident with the shift to multireel films as the industrial norm was the

emergence of a star system in America. This was not the case in Britain, where even in the

1920s the only actresses who could be called British film stars were Chrissie White and

Alma Taylor (particularly through their work with Hepworth) and Betty Balfour. Stars in

general and male film stars in particular were significantly lacking, in a period when they

were so central to the rise to dominance of the American film. Indeed, writing as late as

1925, Joseph Schenck commented brutally on British film productions: 'You have no

personalities to put on the screen. The stage actors and actresses are no good on the

screen. Your effects are no good, and you do not spend nearly so much money'

( Bioscope, 8 January 1925). Related to the lack of male stars in the British film industry

was an accompanying lack of any action genre equivalent to the Western, and the lack of

light comedy, genres which established so many American male stars in the 1910s and

1920s.

Despite the low esteem in which most British film productions were held, particularly in

the international market-place, optimism remained high in the immediate post-war years

in the British trade press, though the idea of a protection system, for example by the

imposition of import quotas, was beginning to gain ground. The London Film Company

had made use of American personnel (producers and actors) as a means of differentiating

its products from other British producers as early as 1913, and continued with this

strategy through the war years. A similar strategy was adopted by B. & C. after the war,

although with the quite specific aim of breaking into international markets, particularly

the American. Despite some initial success, the American market remained as elusive for

this company as it proved for other British producers, and by the mid-1920s the company

went out of business. In terms of production and exhibition, 1926 can be seen as the nadir

of the British film industry; according to the Moyne Report not more than 5 per cent of

films exhibited that year in Britain originated from British studios.

But it was not only American distribution practices and lack of capitalization or a star

system which hampered the potential success of the British film. At a time when

American films were clearly beginning to exhibit the dynamic traits associated with

continuity editing, British films were often marked by narrational uncertainty and the

inability to construct a unified spatio-temporal narrative logic (the hallmarks of what we

now call the classical Hollywood style). For example, the distinction between fade and

cut shot transitions, which had become clearly established in the American cinema in the

1910s, was often lacking in British films. Thus in The Passions of Men ( Clarendon,

1914) the temporal logic of the narrative is at times disrupted when shot transitions are

made by fades rather than cuts, and vice versa. Hepworth, idiosyncratic even in the

context of British film-making, used the fade as the general mode of shot transition, even

into the 1920s. The fact that Hepworth used the fade transition not for temporal ellipsis,

but simply to link shots together, posed a number of narrational problems. Most

obviously, compared to Hollywood films, with their slick continuity editing, the films

appeared slow and ponderous. More specifically, the constant use of the fade transition

tended to emphasize the discontinuous nature of narrative space, and the films, albeit

often of beautiful pictorial quality, become a series of 'views'. Regarded by Hepworth as

his best and most important film, Comin' thro' the Rye ( 1916) did not find a distributor in

America. As Hepworth somewhat poignantly states in his autobiography, regarding his

attempts to find an American distributor, 'I was told that it might not be so bad if it was

jazzed up a bit, and I came home.'

Although Hepworth's films of the 1910s and 1920s were admittedly idiosyncratic, other

British films from this period exhibited varying degrees of narrational uncertainty. A

lengthy part of the narrative in Barker's melodrama The Road to Ruin ( 1913) is devoted

to a dream sequence. However, clearly uncertain as to the audience's ability to follow the

narrative logic of the story, the filmmakers twice remind the spectator of the dream status

of the events unfolding; once through a return to a shot of the protagonist dreaming, and

once through the interpolation of an intertitle, which simply states, '-- and dreaming still .

. .' . Similarly, the use of the point-of-view shot pair, although increasingly common in

films of the 1910s, was sometimes used with a degree of equivocation. Many of the films

of the early 1910s did not use a true optical point of view, but moved the camera 180

degrees in relation to the character looking off screen, so that the second shot reveals not

only the object of the look, but also the 'looker' as well. At a key point in The Ring and

the Rajah ( Londan Films Co., 1914), the film makes use of pointof-view shots. One of

these has the rajah looking intently off screen, through some open French windows. This

is followed by a shot of the rajah's rival in love, from a camera placement that

approximates to the rajah's optical viewpoint. The relationship between these shots was

clearly not regarded as self-explanatory, and an intertitle is introduced, with the words

'What the Rajah saw'. The next shot, which has both the looker (the rajah's servant) and

the object of the look in shot is then in turn preceded by an intertitle which states, 'What

the servant saw', suggesting a distinct lack of confidence in the audience's ability to read

point-of-view articulations, in spite of the act that they had been in use in both the

American and British cinema for nearly a decade.

Thus it was not only under-capitalization, or the lack of a star system, but also aspects of

film form that made British films so uncompetitive with those of the United States.

Reference to British films in the American trade press as 'soporific' can in large part be

linked to issues of film form -- lack of scene dissection and degrees of narrational

uncertainty. Indeed, a film such as Nelson ( 1918), produced by Maurice Elvey for