Film editing - history, theory and practice: Looking at the invisible 9781526141385

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
A note on abbreviations
Introduction
Foundations
Developing forms
Time and place
Identification
A world of difference
Patterns of visibility
Points of view
Consolidating invisibility
The eye of the beholder
Variations on a theme
Revolutionary cinema
The last silent
Sounds promising
Talking pictures
Dialogue
The final rewrite
Cinema and psychology
Beyond invisibility
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Film editing: Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

history, theory and practice Looking at the invisible

DON FAIRSERVICE

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Don Fairservice 2001 The right of Don Fairservice to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester Ml 7JA, UK

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978 0 7190 5777 9

All editing is invisible.

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Ralph Rosenblum, film editor Film Comment, March/April 1977

The best compliment one can pay an editor is to tell him his editing is invisible: an editing job is considered successful when it goes unnoticed on the screen. Ironically, an editor invests weeks or months of intensive work to achieve the impression that he has done nothing at all. Ephraim Katz The International Film Encyclopaedia Of course, you can’t teach anyone how to edit. You can only pass on advice and tips they should follow. The tips are not rules; if you had rules for editing, why, you could put it in a book and anyone could become an editor. But you can pass on advice; after that you’ve got to use your judgement. From an interview with film editor William Hornbeck Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By

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To the memory of Mabel Clark Cecil Hepworth’s ‘cutting expert’, one of the first.

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Contents List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements A note on abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Introduction Foundations Developing forms Time and place Identification A world of difference Patterns of visibility Points of view Consolidating invisibility The eye of the beholder Variations on a theme Revolutionary cinema The last silents Sounds promising Talking pictures Dialogue The final rewrite Cinema and psychology Beyond invisibility

Appendix Bibliography Index

page viii xi xiii xv 1 5 38 49 58 70 81 105 119 134 157 178 203 223 249 263 284 299 314

330 338 341

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Illustrations

1 Five illustrations from L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie by Gustave Doré

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2 A Shocking Affair, from Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, August 1884

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3 The Strong Man Fraud, from Comic Cuts, May 1890

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4 Innocents on the River, from Illustrated Chips, May 1896

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5 The Kiss in the Tunnel. Shot 1: Train entering the tunnel

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6 The Kiss in the Tunnel. Shot 2: The kiss

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7 The Kiss in the Tunnel. Shot 3: Train passes

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8 The 180° line convention and setting up a new 180° line with a move in vision 9 Moulin Rouge. Shot 5: CS father looking directly at camera

84 94

10 Moulin Rouge. Shot 6: CS Parysia looking CAM left. She begins to speak.

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11 Moulin Rouge. Shot 9: CS father (new set-up). Looks directly at the camera 12 Moulin Rouge. Shot 10: CU Parysia (new set-up), slightly low angle

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13 Moulin Rouge. Shot 11: CS father (new set-up) looking CAM left: the principal cross-line edit

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14 Moulin Rouge. Shot 13: CS father (new set-up) facing camera eye-line towards right again

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15 Moulin Rouge. Shot 14: BCU Parysia (new set-up), wiping her nose and eyes

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16 Moulin Rouge. Shot 22: MS 2-shot. They shake hands and she leaves frame right

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17 Greed. Shot 4: WS bald man steps forward facing Trina

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18 Greed. Shot 5: CU bald man facing CAM left. He bows

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19 Greed. Shot 9: CU Trina, astonished

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20 Greed. Shot 11: CU Trina now looking CAM right, starts to speak

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21 Greed. Shot 15: CU bald man (as before), starts to speak

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22 Intolerance. Shot 1: Inter-title introducing The Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge)

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23 Intolerance. Shot 2: WS of open area with The Mountain Girl seated right foreground

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24 Intolerance. Shot 3: CS The Mountain Girl, slight angle change

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with position match 25 Intolerance. Shot 4: CU The Mountain Girl. A vignetted CU as she looks directly into the camera, deliberately mismatched with the previous shot

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Preface

When I was about 14 years old and having my first love affair with the cinema, there seemed to be very few books about filmmaking on the local library shelves. I don’t think there were many in bookshops either. There were books about films and film stars, reviews of the year, and there were sometimes books about the making of a particular film with descriptions of various craft skills; who did what and why, with photographs taken on the studio floor showing the camera crew and actors; pictures of film being processed; editing rooms; sound mixing. I liked these books best and learnt a lot from them. In fact it was one of these that made me decide that I wanted to be a film editor – one day. But there seemed to be hardly any books explaining why films were put together in the way they were, why they affect us in the way they do; how films work. Then, in the library, I came across a book written by a film director I’d never heard of before, V. Pudovkin. It was called Film Technique and Film Acting, and I read it avidly from cover to cover more than once. It was the best book that I’d ever read about filmmaking. I remember particularly one section in which the author vividly described being caught in a brief shower of rain one summer. When the rain stopped, he passed on his way and saw a man, stripped to the waist, cutting grass with a scythe. He described in great detail the movements of the muscles on the man’s back as he worked; the swing of the scythe blade and the way that it flashed and glistened as it caught the sunlight. He’d become fascinated by the way that the blade buried itself under the long, wet grass-blades and, in slicing through, caused them to leap together and fall, the raindrops tumbling down the narrow blades. It was, he confessed, as if he were seeing something for the first time. Being a film director, he began to wonder whether it might be possible to capture those same impressions on film, building them spatially and temporally, framing details and slowing the action to recreate the heightened awareness he’d felt at the time. He scripted and filmed his idea, including every detail in a mixture of framings and filming speeds, then edited it in a way which artificially transcended the reality and produced a deepened, remarkably enriched sense of the process on the screen. Those that saw Pudovkin’s experiment, unaware of his

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Preface

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methods, confessed to having experienced an almost physical sense of moisture, weight and force. Pudovkin’s book, and this incident in particular, made a profound impression on me. These were the things I wanted to know, and I wanted to know more, discover everything about how films can be structured, how they convey their meanings and how they work their magic on us sitting there entranced in the darkness. There were no other books then, and there have been very few since, that looked at films and tried to explain the ‘how’ and especially the ‘why’ of film editing. I would like to feel that this comes somewhere near to being the book which I couldn’t find on that library shelf all those years ago. London, 2000

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Acknowledgements

Screenplay excerpt from Mississipi Burning © 1988 Orion Picture Corporation All Rights Reserved. Screenplay excerpt from Scent of a Woman © 2000 by Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of Universal Studios Publishing Rights. All Rights Reserved. Dialogue from Stagecoach through Castle Hill Productions Inc. and with permission from Jackson E. Dube. Permission to include transcript from Der Blaue Engel from Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung/Transit Film GmbH. Excerpt from the television script of Bombay Blue by Steve Trafford, with permission of the author and Fabulous Fruits Limited. Extract from The Story of Modern Art by Norbert Lynton © 1980, 1989 Phaidon Press Limited. Extracts from Adventures with D. W. Griffith by Karl Brown, reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd. Extract from The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz Copyright © 1979 by Ephraim Katz & See Hear Productions, Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Illustrations from The Penguin Book of Comics by George Perry and Alan Aldridge © 1971. Extracts from ‘From Sennett to Stevens: An Interview with William Hornbeck’ by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell © Summer 1983 The Velvet Light Trap. This book could not have been written without the remarkable resources of the British Film Institute National Library and its ever helpful and obliging staff. Rare, early film material came mostly from numerous American video-cassette libraries, notably Foothill Video, Video Yesteryear, and Movies Unlimited, whose lists were a revelation and an inspiration. I want to thank Kevin Brownlow for some helpful and informative conversations, and particularly for letting me view a rare copy of Vitagraph’s The 100 to 1 Shot on a Steenbeck at Photoplay Productions, Venetia Barton for engaging debates on Homicide: Life on the Street, and for the loan of her videotapes. Kristina Hetherington and Tim Marchant must be thanked for reading the manuscript and giving me their helpful advice, also Ulrike Muench for her pertinent and invaluable criticisms. Finally, I must acknowledge the debt of gratitude I owe to my wife, Amanda, for her understanding and tolerance during the times when I completely disappeared into my head, and most particularly for reading, correcting and advising on the manuscript during its lengthy gestation.

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A note on abbreviations

In most chapters I have used abbreviations to suggest camera positioning and framings so as to clarify the structure and content of the scenes, or parts of scenes, used as examples. The frame sizes are described in relation to the parts of the body or a familiar scene. I am aware that some of these expressions are more specific than those commonly used in the film and television industries but feel that a more detailed approximation is more useful in giving a clearer impression of the image size being described in the text: ExBCU BCU CU CS MCS MS MWS WS VWS ELS

extreme big close-up: eye or mouth big close-up: eyes to mouth close-up: face and neck close shot: head and shoulders medium close shot: head to hip or thigh level medium shot: two to four people, full height medium wide shot: a street crossing wide shot: a bowling green very wide shot: a football pitch extreme long shot: a desert

In the main I have tended to avoid the expression long shot (LS), which can mean WS or VWS, and can also be confused with the amount of time it’s held on the screen. I’ve made an exception to my own rule with ELS, perhaps because a shot revealing this much would have to stay in vision for quite some time as well. There are a number of other abbreviations and expressions which appear throughout the book and these are explained below: CAM CAM left (or L) or right (R) dissolve

The camera. The space immediately to the left of the camera; this might refer to a character’s exit as being oblique and close to the camera. Cf. frame left. The gradual appearance of a new scene as the old scene fades into it. xv

The left side of the film frame irrespective of the camera or right (R) position and at right angles to it. An elevated camera position at least 10 ft above the ground and often considerably more, low angle A camera position that can be anything from just beneath head height to just above floor level with the camera looking up. OOV or OOS Out of vision, or out of shot. This usually refers to sections of dialogue that are heard, but not seen to be spoken, because the image on the screen is of someone or something else. POV Point of view. A shot of a place, person or object, presented in such a way as to suggest that it is being seen by a character in the film. It is usually interposed between looks or glances in the preceding and following shots. raised angle A camera position above head height but less than a high angle. Cf. high angle. SRS Shot, reverse-shot. Cutting between two people facing each other, usually in CU or CS with the camera remaining on one side of both characters to cover the angle changes. 2-shot (or 3– This refers to the number of characters framed in the shot. It shot) could be any number but it’s seldom used for more than five.

Abbreviations

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frame left (or L) high angle

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Introduction

Recent years have seen a phenomenal growth in the number of books written about films and filmmaking, and this reflects a wide general interest in the subject and also confirms its significance as an important area for academic study. There seems to be no limit to the ways we can try to understand cinema, and any writer contemplating an examination of some special aspect of this huge subject must first decide which section to look at. I decided at the beginning that I should limit my exploration – in this book anyway – to filmed fiction as it has evolved in America and Europe. In Looking at the Invisible I have set out to do a number of different, interrelated things. First of all, to explore the history of filmmaking in a way that it is not usually done, looking in detail at films specifically to discover the way that they construct meaning rather than evaluating them in the context of the cultural circumstances of their production and reception. This is something which, as far as I know, has not been attempted before, at least not from such a broad historical perspective. The main difficulty in putting together any kind of historical survey of filmmaking, particularly one that attempts to chart the way that films have been constructed from the very beginning, is that a point is quickly reached where decisions have to be made concerning what to put in and what to leave out. I have given the most detailed attention to the first thirty-five years of cinema history, the so-called silent period, largely because, in terms of structural analysis, it does seem to be the most neglected. But it also demands attention because it was the period when films were least formalised, when filmmakers were struggling to discover the most effective ways to construct meaningful narratives; it was a time of experiment and discovery; in fact, probably more experiment took place between 1895 and 1929 than in the following seventy years. Nonetheless, anyone familiar with the key movements and turning-points in cinema history, and the films and filmmakers associated with them, will identify some major omissions; but then this was never intended to be a comprehensive history, merely one that sought to provide some insight.

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Film editing

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The form of film language with which we are most familiar has been around for such a very long time that the idea that it might once have been different seldom occurs, and, if it does, it’s easily dismissed as being wholly irrelevant to anything being made for the screen today. The idea that cinema before sound was somehow inferior; that it was just undercranked movies with melodramatic plots and intertitles that one had to read, still persists despite the work done in recent years, particularly by Kevin Brownlow and Michael Gill, to dispel this rather antiquated view. My motive for examining the often primitive and unsophisticated early structuring methods of silent films was to discover what steps brought film language to its most recognisable form; to explore any other avenues of experiment that might have suggested themselves on the way; to discover why most films continue to be shot and structured in the ways that they are; and finally to evaluate new approaches that challenge convention. In the process of examining this early material, and following its development into the European experimental forms of the 1920s, it became evident that filmmakers who were compelled to clarify their narratives without the use of dialogue, evolved methods of framing and editing that were effective and more liberating than many of those standardised forms which became commonplace after 1915. Silent film remained free to communicate its meanings liberally because it was unshackled from the ‘real-time’ demands of synchronous sound. Even those filmmakers working at the very end of the silent period, when continuity conventions had been adopted as a valuable but not obligatory part of structuring practice, tended to adopt shooting and editing methods determined by creative needs rather than subscribe to any rigid orthodoxy. Most of the films that we see today, and the dramatised fiction that appears daily on television, use structuring and editing methods which, originating in America, became universally adopted after 1917 and formed the basis of a realist mode of presentation which has been called The Classical Hollywood Cinema’.1 With the commercial implementation of synchronised sound recording in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these conventions became institutionalised, and although there have been stylistic variations at different times over the years, most films use this securely entrenched, very familiar set of realist, structural forms. Something which is not generally understood is that even though these structures lend themselves to considerable stylistic versatility, the conventions limit the possibilities of enriching the content because of the contraints of their form. In his extensively researched and persuasively argued book on Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer, Noël Burch, comparing approaches to artistic and cultural production in the West to those of Japan, identifies significant differences in the relationships between content and form. His analysis of the history of Japanese cultural traditions and the circumstances of their production makes it quite clear that they are founded on a very different set of priorities. Indeed, he argues that the precedence that is given to content over form in the West, or more specifically the way that the essence of meaning is expected to dominate any awareness of the codes of its presentation, is something inimical to Japanese

Introduction

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understanding. As Burch explains, artistic traditions incline the Japanese to read any given text, including film texts, in relation to a body of texts; that ‘originality’ and Individualism’, values highly esteemed in the West, are quite foreign to Japan where borrowing and collective sharing are regarded as central to the development of creativity; and that linearity in presentation has no natural precedent over other structural forms. These differences contributed to the production of a cinema that explored alternative levels of access to meaning and understanding during a Japanese cinematic Golden Age.2 Film is adaptable to a broad range of presentational methods, and the truth of this can be found in both the fumbling uncertainties and the important formal experiments made at various stages during the whole silent period, notably in the Soviet Union but also in France and Germany after 1920. It can also be found in just about any pop promo or creatively original cinema or TV commercial appearing after 1980 where experiments in the alternative possibilities of film form have been encouraged and allowed a singular degree of creative freedom.3 Editing that challenges established continuity conventions is only very slowly entering current film and television drama, largely because the commercial forces that secured its original dominance are still in place. Until the bodies that control its production recognise the creative advantages of alternative structuring methods, they will continue to cling to a largely fixed and predictable form that is acceptable, safe and which is regrettably too often devoid of any stylistic originality.4 As well a tracing the stages that brought film structure to what Noël Burch has described as ‘the zero point of cinematic style’5 some later chapters of Looking at the Invisible examine the strengths of these dominant forms, explaining how and why they work, and how they reinforce social attitudes and values. An important part of any detailed examination of film editing, particularly one placed in the context of a film-editing history, is that it should explore those departures from convention that seek to extend film form into denser areas of cinematic representation and free themselves from the linear narratives that mainstream cinema allows. Theories of film editing cannot be considered outside the historical development of filmmaking because they are totally integrated within the practice. It is therefore only by making a detailed examination of the practice at different points in its development that some understanding of the logistics of the filmediting process might be clarified. This is the approach that I have undertaken. The way that a fiction film conveys its narrative is of course directly linked to the way that it is structured and theories which explore these complex matters have received detailed consideration elsewhere.6 However, because all fiction films are narrated through editing some of the strategies which have evolved to control the way that the content of a film is accessed are essential subjects for consideration here. In certain instances these turn on methods of presentation which can be considered either objective – the perception of sounds and images intended to be experienced independently of characters and presented by the film’s author; or

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subjective – where the spectator is positioned to share, with the characters, an experience of events as they unfold. Because the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ convey different meanings outside considerations of narrative theory I have thought it helpful to clarify these distinctions within this introduction. A work that sets out to explore the history, theory and practice of film editing must also be prepared to explain how current practice accommodates to those conventional editing forms that have been historically determined. These are concerns that are directly relevant to how the majority of films are edited now and how they could be edited in the future; matters of real concern to those who work in, or are ambitious to find a career in, the film and television industries. Consequently, within the arc of a broad historical survey, later chapters set out to provide some insight into the working practices that currently exist. Of all the various craft skills that come together for the purpose of making a film, the work of the film editor is generally the least-well understood. In clarifying the specifics of the craft, and the significance of the editor’s contribution to the production process, I hope these chapters will provide useful insights into the workings of a professional craft which has for many years remained unnecessarily obscure. Finally, I should mention that I have omitted from the main body of the text most references to the technical and mechanical means of handling and manipulating film materials other than when the content has made this appropriate. A detailed historical survey of these matters will be found in the appendix.

Notes

Film editing

1 Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema; an important contribution to the study of film history. 2 Burch’s book traces the independent development of form and meaning in Japanese cinema, placing it in the context of historical cultural traditions and finally explaining the circumstances that led that cinema to adopt western representational forms. 3 A relatively modern example of a feature film exploring alternative formal possibilities is Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1995). Greenaway’s highly original and unconventional film explores these contradictions by linking narrative and presentational methods to Japanese artistic traditions which then become an essential part of its content and meaning. 4 These constraints dominate not only fiction but also documentary forms where, apart from a range of equally inflexible presentational variants, the conventions are similar. 5 Burch, Theory of Film Practice, p. 11. 6 In particular, David Bordwell’s Narration and the Fiction Film and Edward Branigan’s Narrative Comprehension and Film.

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Foundations

1

Scrutiny What follows is about looking at films in a way which is unusual. It’s about examining the methods that have evolved to shape and structure moving images recorded on film so as to invest them with additional power and meaning. When we watch a film, we are aware of it only as a developing story built up from a series of impressions; an awareness of the detail is usually unnecessary for our enjoyment of the whole. Anyone wanting to understand how films are structured has already recognised that this is only possible by studying the detail, because much of the pleasure derived from the apparently seamless and easy flow of film narrative depends on the precision with which the various parts that constitute the content are assembled. So, the purpose of this study is to discover not just how, but why films are shaped and structured in the way they are; how those structures have developed and changed over the years and still continue to change. It is important to start by looking at the very first films that were made, because that’s where the story of film editing begins. There are two basic problems with trying to draw conclusions by looking at very early films: the first is that most of them no longer exist, which means that quite a lot of detective work has to be done to discern the patterns of development from those that we have; the second is that when approaching the subject it is important to set aside the idea that early films are rather naïve, irrelevant and probably boring. In actual fact these early, flickering images contain a wealth of information about the way that people perceived their world more than a hundred years ago. How filmmakers struggled to make moving pictures meaningful remains indelibly written in the shape and content of their work. Searching among these old shadows fixed on celluloid is a bit like exploring the remains of a past civilisation and discovering clues that lead us to understand why we still delight in going to the movies and why millions of us feel rewarded by watching television every night. How sounds and pictures are presented is central to the way that films and television convey their meanings and affect the way that their messages are perceived and understood. It’s important to discover why it developed in the way that it did. 5

Origination My invention can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial future whatsoever.

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Auguste Lumière (1895) There are lots of possible starting points from which to begin an examination of moving pictures, but by common consent the first significant programme of projected films presented before an audience occurred in Paris towards the end of 1895. Eight weeks later, on 20 February 1896, the Lumière brothers arranged a showing of a programme of their films at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. Some of the films that appeared in that programme, and others from the Lumière archive, have been recorded on videotape and are consequently available for detailed study. La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895) consists of a single wide shot showing the factory gates being opened and the workers coming through and moving off, either to the right or the left. This was not the first time that Lumière workers had been filmed leaving the factory and, although on the first occasion they supposedly knew nothing about it, there is quite a lot of evidence that this time the filming has been announced to the participants in advance; we get the impression that they have been asked not to react to the process of being filmed but to leave much as they would normally. Inevitably, we are aware of their awareness of the filming as it takes place; and because it is shared by the participants as well as the audience, there is a strong sense of display. The other thing to note is that the scene has a very clear shape: it has a specific start – the opening of the gates – and ends with the last person leaving. It might be noted, however, that a young man wearing a cap runs unexpectedly back through the gates just before the shot ends, not part of the filmmaker’s plan I suspect, but interesting in that it might be seen as the moment when the display was thought to be over. There is a commonly held view that early filmmakers loaded 50 ft of film into a camera and only stopped turning when the film ran out. The point that needs to be made here is that in this, one of the very first films to be made, there is a form of editing. We have come to call it editing in the camera, a decision made to film only part of an event and to stop when that piece of action is resolved. What is significant, if not surprising, about the films shown in the original London programme is that they all have a clearly defined shape and they all contain an extremely apparent sense of display. Le Repas de bébé (Baby’s Breakfast) and La Partie d’écarte (The Card Players), both 1895, are notable for another reason, in that they are both framed to include the main action by placing the camera near to the subjects, what I will describe as a medium-close shot (MCS). In the first, the breakfast table forms the base of the shot

Foundations

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and the composition is balanced with Auguste Lumière and his wife on each side of the baby, being fed by Auguste, in the centre. Again, what is inescapable about this scene is our awareness that the little family scene has been set up for us. Auguste and his wife ignore the presence of the camera operator but they reveal through their demeanour their awareness of its presence; they are part of a display. One of the remarkable things about this programme is that each of the films is packed with content and action, the breakfast scene shows Madame Lumière actively pouring and stirring coffee while Auguste feeds the baby, then gives it a biscuit, encourages it to eat, then puts some of the baby food into the saucer in front of it. The baby, unaware that it is participating in an arranged event, at one point proffers the biscuit to someone out of vision on the right of the camera. I am dwelling on the content of these scenes because too often they are dismissed as rather naive examples of early moving snapshots: primitive home movies. I think that it is important to look at them again in detail because these films are remarkable in that they contain elements of filmmaking practice and raise questions about film-editing theory which are, and have always been, directly applicable to everything that followed. La Partie d’écarte has also been carefully set up. The card players include two members of Louis Lumière’s family, his father Antoine, who sits on the left, and his father-in-law who sits opposite him. The man in the centre is a friend of Antoine’s, Félicien Trewey, a conjuror and illusionist. The shot has been framed so as to include the prearranged appearance of the waiter bringing the bottle and three glasses once the scene is under way. Winkler, on the right, deals the cards, Antoine lights a cigar and, once the tray is brought on, Trewey pours the drinks and the game continues. The scene has a carefully considered shape and is filled with action. The cards are cut: as the dealer deals, the waiter enters, takes the order and goes; the cigar is lit, the cards are played, the waiter returns, the drinks are poured, the game is won, the glasses are raised and they all drink. The glasses put down, the winner deals as the loser reaches for his change. All this is shown in 48 seconds but we have no sense of anything being hurried, we see the density of the action as being relevant to a filmed reality and yet at one level we know that it is an artificial construct to be accepted on its own terms of reference. The fact that Louis Lumière consciously conceived the shape and content of these films to maximise the interest level by collapsing real time into 48 seconds of screen time, argues an understanding of the fundamentals of film making which is exceptional for its day. But Lumière also recognised that dramatic suspense and comedy were an important part of an entertaining presentation. Démolition d’un mur (Demolition of a Wall, 1895) is a film that contains dramatic shape in concept and it is easy to see why Lumière elected to film an event which was due to occur for practical reasons within the grounds of the factory. Again, the event was staged for the camera. What is particularly interesting about this film is that it is the only one in the programme that contains elements of unpredictability and in this sense is more closely related to what we

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have come to regard as documentary. Like the other films, Démolition d’un mur is intended to display an actual event but staging was plainly essential. In fact when the camera starts to turn, the wall has already been prepared for demolition by placing a screw jack at an angle behind it. Lumière composes the frame with some skill; the wall that is intended to fall is framed in medium shot (MS) obliquely to the camera so that the angled arm of the jack that is to push the wall down can be seen to the left of the frame together with its waiting operator. Given that the event was required to be completed inside 50 seconds of screen time (the maximum length of film available at that time) the wall had been prepared for immediate collapse. Two workmen with pick-axes chip away at the base of the wall, but the token blows being delivered are plainly for show. Auguste Lumière, who is seen supervising the activity, waves the pick-axe wielders aside and signals to the jack operator to commence winding his handle. It quickly becomes evident that the jack will take some time to accomplish its task and Auguste becomes rather agitated calling the workmen to put on additional leverage by manually pushing on the wall which, eventually, collapses. The workers then set about breaking up the masonry with fervour. By its very nature the event is suspenseful, and Lumière seeks to build the suspense by shaping the action dramatically. The scene commences with the final blows that will weaken the wall being delivered. The men are waved aside and the second stage begins. The tension should then have risen as the jack did its work, but something wasn’t quite going to plan. A different tension now enters the scene, a different level of drama. Will the wall collapse before the film runs out? The wall is manually helped towards its collapse. The third stage can now commence and the workmen move in. It is important to explore the spectator’s role in the reading of this scene because it is a good example of the way that we categorise our responses and construct responses to what we are shown on film. It’s almost as if some kind of automatic sifting process is constantly at work comparing what we see on film to a kind of eternal model of reality. It starts with a recognition that we are in a cinema or watching a TV screen and that the real world is completely divorced from the picture on the screen and the sounds coming from the speakers. We know that we are looking at and listening to a construct, something made; a product. We also know that the product is intended to inform, instruct or entertain. What seems to happen, is that we immediately seek to determine the nature of the product so that we can condition our relationship to it. We have learnt the codes and conventions which are appropriate and can switch easily between them. There is complicity in the making and showing of films to an audience who has been present from the very beginning. A contract is made and agreed between spectator and filmmaker; both will contribute to the production of a process which is intended to guarantee satisfaction. The films in Lumière’s programme were considered to be, what were referred to as, actualitiés but as I have indicated in most instances there was a degree of

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control which was consciously seeking to shape the medium and so maximise its appeal. Three of the eight films might be regarded as containing minimum contrivance. Arrivé d’un train en gare à La Ciotat (Arrival of a train at Ciotat Station, 1895) invites a few comments. Perhaps rather obviously, Lumière frames his shot so as to include as much of the action as possible. The empty track runs obliquely away from the camera at an angle in to the distance at the right of the frame. It is interesting to note how, when the train arrives and passes the camera, a long line of carriages fills the frame as it comes to a stop; the composition is exemplary. It is hard to believe that this just happened by accident. The shot has been set up with some care and it comes as no surprise to learn that Lumière has filmed this scene on several occasions. As previously, members of the Lumière family are present on the platform together with other travellers but the amount of attention paid to the camera is negligible. The deep focus and the complex activity that is covered in depth should also be noted. The scene is, of course, shaped by the event and limited by the length of film available. What makes Barque sortant du port (A Boat leaving Harbour, 1985) different from the other films in this programme is the extent to which it goes out of control. This is the one film in the group where the film does run out before the event is complete and as Dai Vaughan has pointed out1 there is a great sense of potential in the unpredictability of the filmed event. In many ways it is the only truly documentary film in the group; the only real actualité. In all probability it was Lumière’s intention to film a planned and shaped event. The composition is careful, the figures on the end of the jetty almost certainly arranged. The rowing boat enters frame right and makes for the harbour entrance. The expectation of both the filmmaker and the occupants of the boat, and no doubt the audience, is that the film will end as the boat disappears behind the jetty and the onlookers, two women and children, wave. The strong waves beyond the harbour wall dramatically intervene, catching the boat and turning it dangerously broadside-on. The men are in difficulties; and one woman turns her attention from the children to look at them but the other seems more intent on securing the hat of one of the children that has blown off in the wind. There it ends. Because of the absence of resolution, because natural, powerful forces intervened and obliterated the sense of control that is fundamental to most filmmaking, other possibilities for the use of the medium became apparent. It is important also, to recognise that the unexpected turn of events separates this film from all the others in that at a certain point it ceases to be a conscious display. I have already raised this matter of display being a dominant aspect of most early films. I believe that the disappearance of display marks the point when mode of presentation, the nature of the dramatic address, altered significantly, and it’s important to define it with some accuracy. Modes of presentation start with an intention and this determines the codes and conventions that will be used to signal to the spectator how the presentation should be read.

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I want, finally, to come to Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle (aka L’Arroseur arrosé the Sprinkler Sprinkled, 1895) which was the first fully staged fictional film presented in public. It lasts just 39 seconds. The film has a classic structure: a gardener is using a hose to water the garden, the situation is balanced and there is stability. A young lad enters the shot behind the gardener and steps onto the hose preventing the water from flowing. The equilibrium is now disturbed. The gardener, assuming that there is something amiss with the hose, examines the nozzle. At this point the boy takes his foot from the hose and the water shoots out of the nozzle into the gardener’s face, knocking off his hat. The climax of the story has now been reached and there must follow a resolution. The boy attempts to run away but is pursued and caught just as he reaches the edge of the frame. The gardener drags him back and gives him token chastisement on his derrière as he tries to get away. Eventually the gardener releases him, he runs off, and the gardener continues with his watering: equilibrium now restored. This ridiculously simple, one-shot film has the same classic dramatic structure of just about every fiction film ever made. It has also been edited: the point where it starts and the point where it ends has been determined by the requirements of the action; a film lasting 39 seconds has been edited from material lasting 50 seconds. The point that I am making by analysing these early films is that they contain many of the elements that were repeated, and have been repeated, by filmmakers ever since. They are the seeds of what flowered subsequently and they also contain some of the basic formal editing principles that have guided and dictated the way that films are structured from that point on. Where the Lumière brothers led, many followed and quickly; by the end of 1896 the cinema had spread throughout all of Europe and the United States, through the agency of music hall proprietors and enterprising fairground showmen. At this time, films were seen as little more than a fairground novelty. A programme would be constructed of a series of single-shot films each scene being complete in itself and strung together into a programme lasting some 15 or 20 minutes. It’s important to realise that the invention of cinematography was conceived as nothing more than the making of an animated photograph. Photographs had been around for a long time but now the photograph could move. They were pictures that moved inside a frame and because they moved, there had to be a point when they began to move and a point when they stopped. This dimension of time inevitably affected the content of the photograph, and this had profound implications for its future. Originally, the period of time that a picture could move was restricted by the length of film in the camera and the amount of time that it took to run through. Filmmakers like the Lumières, recognising this, organised the content of the filmed event or selected a start point which would contain its principal content. Given these limitations, both practical and conceptual, it is small wonder that moving pictures were seen as little more than a novelty with no significant potential. They suggested themselves as little more

than a fairground attraction, and this is what they became; certainly not something to take seriously.

Prior to the invention of moving pictures, only live performance arts were, of the visual arts, structured inside a timescale. Theatre, ballet, opera, music, song were contained within a single time frame. They had a start point and continued unbroken until they ended. Music sometimes contained separate movements; a division equivalent to the division of acts in a play, opera or ballet, but no precedent existed in art, or life, for a visual, or oral, continuity to be constructed from separate pieces. A recording of a song or a speech was, almost by definition, an unbroken unit and so was a picture that moved. Lantern slides had of course preceded the cinematograph as a means of presenting separate views of a location or an event, but the fact that these were static images, often presented with dissolves between, emphasised the separate and dislocated nature of each view. In fact, there was considerable anxiety about the possibility of confusion or disorientation occurring if images were to follow each other without interruption. When it came to presenting a programme of moving pictures, it was equally important to avoid any confusion, so a reel would be made up by joining several 'Views’, as they were called, together with a short length of blank film in between. It must be stressed that the presentation of early films, certainly during the first decade, was dependent upon a vocal accompaniment much like that used during a lantern show. Because audiences would not be expected to understand the significance of a view, or a piece of filmed action in terms of its self evident content, projectionists or showmen would comment on the images projected on the screen, providing information about the origins of the images shown, or filling in links between shots to clarify their association or explain the circumstances surrounding their filming. This changed when filmmakers found ways of constructing films that clarified their own narratives. Dispensing with an external voice was plainly desirable provided a narrative presence could be sustained within the film itself.2 Filmed shots of real events were sold by the makers as separate units. This, after all, is what they were; single moving pictures of individual moments in a continuing event, but it became quickly evident that it was possible to join these different 'Views’ together. In 1897 a procession passed through London as part of the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and competing companies covered the event by placing camera operators at various points along the route. These films were offered for sale with recommendations that they should be joined together and shown according to the chronological order that was supplied. When filming actual events from a fixed camera position it soon became apparent that it was a waste of film to keep turning if nothing of particular

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Action in time

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significance was happening. News cameramen were encouraged to use their judgement and make decisions – editing decisions – as to what might be valuable to film and what would not. The result of this practice, what is called a jump cut, can be seen in many early actualities. The earliest film in the National Film Archive was taken by Birt Acres at the 1895 Derby. It shows the horses racing obliquely towards the left of the camera and passing the winning post. A jump cut is followed by spectators starting to cross the racetrack towards the stands and another jump cut is followed by the last groups moving in the same direction. When the camera was stopped, the shutter invariably stayed open which caused a frame of film, now stationary in the camera gate, to become fogged. This is a regular occurrence, even today, and is known as a ‘flash frame’. Flash frames were removed by cutting them out and splicing the film back together. This did not remove the jump cut but avoided the disconcerting flash of light between shots. This is an example of an early editing process, involving cutting and joining film to make the projected result more acceptable to an audience. Practically, it was nothing more than the obvious thing to do, removing a blemish, but symbolically it might be considered quite important. What this simple practice acknowledged was that it was necessary to intervene to make the filmed material more acceptable. And the moment that it was recognised that intervention by cutting and joining was not only practical but desirable, film editing began. None the less, a jump cut clearly signals that visual continuity had been disrupted. Operators commonly found it necessary to film scenes from different camera positions in order to cover an event as it progressed from place to place, and it was quickly discovered that, when these different views were spliced together, the avoidance of the jump cut produced an illusion of continuity even though they contained material obtained at different places and at different points in time.

Film editing

Méliès

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Georges Méliès was a stage illusionist, who, in 1888, became proprietor of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris and began to present performances of conjuring and magic. In 1895 he attended the famous Lumière première at the Grande Café, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. The Lumière programme was similar to the one shown in London some weeks later; a series of actualités, but Méliès was fascinated by the possibilities of the discovery. He tried to buy a Lumière Cinématographe but Auguste Lumière refused to sell him his brother’s device and Méliès was forced to purchase an Animatograph from the English inventor Robert W. Paul. Méliès soon adapted the principle of the projector to make his own camera and during 1896 produced seventy-eight films only two of which still exist. At first he set about shooting everything, moving around Paris filming people and places, trains and traffic and delighting in the results.

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There is a story that Méliès’s early trick films developed from an accidental discovery. Testing his recently developed camera by filming traffic in the Place de l’Opéra, the apparatus suddenly jammed. He freed the mechanism and carried on filming. On projecting the result, it appeared that a horse-bus had turned miraculously into a hearse. It is easy to see why early filmmakers took such delight in exploiting jump cuts for magic, or comic, effect and joining together discontinuous views of an actual event to construct an apparent continuity; no other visual medium could display this phenomenon. Time was no longer unchangeable, it could be broken up into sections, speeded up, slowed down and omitted altogether. Portions of the same event could be presented alternately and spatial continuity manipulated. Both tendencies traded in misinformation, a lie could be believably presented as truth. As never before, space and time could be controlled and put to creative use. Although the potential for constructing complex presentations of reality on the cinema screen existed from that moment there were also a considerable number of constraints. The projection of moving pictures was first of all thought of in terms of being a display. Its progenitors were the theatre, the music hall and the circus, all of which happened ‘out there’. They were also inescapably ‘moving pictures’, and pictures were always contained within a frame. Inevitably, therefore, films made during this early period used the camera principally as a recording device for a range of extremely inventive activities that could take place ‘out there’ within the prescribed area in front of the stationary camera. Georges Méliès pioneered the development of trick films. One of the first was Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady, 1896) and, like so many that would follow, exploited the jump cut for its effect. A woman sits in a chair and is covered by a cloth. The cloth is pulled away to reveal the empty chair, and with a gesture from the magician she is instantly replaced by a skeleton. In a later film, Le magicien; Illusions fantasmagoriques (The Famous Box Trick, 1898), a boy stands on a platform before a raised box. The conjuror (Méliès himself) brings down an axe and magically the boy ‘splits’ into two boys who start to wrestle. The conjuror pulls them apart and lifts one of them up, causing him to ‘vanish’ and turn into sheets of paper which the conjuror then tears up. The remaining boy is put into the raised box which the conjuror closes and immediately opens again, collapsing the sides of the box to show that the boy has ‘disappeared’. He stamps his foot onto one of the fallen box sides and the boy ‘re-appears’. He picks him up, sits on the table with the boy across his lap and instantly the boy ‘turns’ into two flags. He stands, waves the flags; sits cross-legged on the table; folds his body forward and ‘disappears’ in a puff of smoke. He re-appears through a door in the set before the smoke has cleared. This remarkable series of well-planned tricks is carried out by Méliès with remarkable flourish and style. The success of this kind of presentation depends on a high degree of accuracy in ensuring that the conjuror holds his position while the substitutions are made, but what is perhaps more important is that, provided

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the unexpected substitution immediately breaks into movement, the illusion of continuity is maintained. To achieve this, Méliès edited his films with considerable precision, producing not only persuasive magical effects but a pace and rhythm of presentation which contemporary filmmakers struggled to emulate. By the end of 1900, Méliès had made 227 films, each a minute or two long and they had tremendous international appeal. Méliès realised that to achieve the magical quality that gave his filmic illusions such a wide appeal depended on an ability to master transitions and optical effects, pioneering what were to become crucial editing devices; fast and slow motion, multiple exposures, reverse filming and printing, frame freezing, masking, fades and dissolves. The influence of Méliès’s pioneering and experimental work was immense, particularly in the United States where his films were enthusiastically received and widely shown.

Film editing

Constructions

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In many ways it is surprising, given that filmmakers were constructing films of actualities from a variety of viewpoints from quite early on, that ‘constructed’ films remained as one-shot entities for as long as they did. Robert W. Paul, an instrument maker and inventor, had been tempted into designing a camera and projector based on the Edison Kinetoscope3 by professional photographer Birt Acres, but the collaboration was short-lived. They parted following a disagreement over patent rights, and this prompted Paul to develop a projector and camera independently. In 1896 he set up in production himself. His film of the 1896 Derby, a single shot showing Persimmon racing past the post was set up very like Birt Acres’s film of the previous year, but Paul ensured that the camera kept turning, acknowledging the increased acceptability of a film without jumps in the action. An incomplete copy of a ‘constructed’ film made by Paul in 1898, Come Along Do!, uses two shots to tell its story. In the first, an elderly couple sit on a bench finishing their lunch before entering the next gallery of an art exhibition. The husband suggests that they move on, and they enter the gallery doorway. In the second shot, the man shows considerable interest in a nude statue before being hurriedly moved on by his wife. It seems that this film may well have been the first film made up of more than one scene and sold as such and therefore the transition between the two shots would have been made using a cut; after all, this had proved acceptable in joining actuality scenes. A film made by Birt Acres in 1895, A Rough Sea at Dover, contains a cut showing two different views and, interestingly, the cutting point seems to have been selected relative to the rhythm of the breakers hitting the beach. Later, Charles Goodwin Norton, a well-known touring lanternist, started to make films which he introduced into his lantern slide programmes towards the end of 1896. His filmed actualities of children’s sports days, c. 1898, are multishot films, as is Ox Wagon (1898) shot in South Africa by an Irish amateur pioneer, Robert Mitchell.

Different viewpoints

1 Five illustrations from L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie by Gustave Doré

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Long before photography, there had been precedents for presenting events pictorially from more than one perspective. One of the most impressive is a work produced by the artist Gustave Doré, L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie, published in Paris in 1854 (Figure 1). It was an epic series of 477 violent drawings in

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2 A Shocking Affair, from Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, August 1884

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continuity form, outlining a cartoon version of Russian history. Doré not only anticipated the techniques of the modern comic strip but presented what might be regarded as a series of illustrated storyboards. One sequence from an edition published in Germany during the First World War shows scenes of a barbarian invasion vividly drawn with the equivalent of camera angle changes, and close shots alternating with wide shots. In many ways it seems that Doré’s work was indicating filmic possibilities that would not be realised for another sixty years. Comics are interesting indicators of the way that continuity has been perceived. A

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Shocking Affair (see Figure 2), is a cartoon strip published in 1884, which illustrates the point well, the story is told in six pictures all from one position like frames from a continuous shot. The front page from an issue of Comic Cuts published in 1890 presents a series of cartoons all presented in the same way. These drawings illustrate separate moments from a continuous event that tells a story either visually, as in the The Strong Man Fraud (see Figure 3), or with dialogue printed underneath and accompanying the action. These early comics provide a useful insight into the way that illustrators felt constrained in the pictorial representation of temporal continuity, but in some cases the strip cartoonists were more adventurous than the early filmmakers. Innocents on the River (Illustrated Chips, 1896) uses the first three frames to establish the action from one position (see Figure 4). As the horse pulls the boat, the illustrations track with the action that leads dynamically into the climax. Although filmmakers had been filming actualities from moving vehicles from the earliest days – Lumière’s Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896) is one example – it seems that the presentation of an event taking place in one location was bound by the limits of the unchanging frame. This was the frame around a painting or a photograph, the limits of the artist’s view. It was the frame around a play in a theatre; the proscenium arch and the three-walled set, the limits of the spectator’s view. This was the way that reproductions of reality were separated from the three-dimensional world that, everybody lived in. It was a way of defining 3 The Strong Man Fraud, from the boundaries. The constructed scene or Comic Cuts, May 1890

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4 Innocents on the River, from Illustrated Chips, May 1896

the constructed story was required to be bound within an unchanging frame for a whole range of cultural and conventional, not to mention practical, reasons. Most of the conclusions that can be drawn about the way film structure developed during this very early period is limited by the films that are available to be seen and which form the only evidence that we have from which to make these judgements. Thousands of films were made during the early years and quite a few still exist, but these can only be used to indicate trends in the development of filmmaking. The early years saw a rapid expansion in the film market and this was an international market. European filmmakers saw, and were influenced by, the films that were being made by American pioneers who in turn were influenced by French and British experimental work. Whereas, in theory, producers owned what they made, the primitive state of copyright law at that time meant that the majority of films where in the public domain and prints were often stolen, pirated and illicitly duplicated.

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George Albert Smith

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By 1899 multishot films were becoming widely established. Smith was one of a number of Brighton-based British pioneers whose background in photography enabled him to build his own camera in 1896, and to begin selling films the

5 The Kiss in the Tunnel.

6 The Kiss in the Tunnel. Shot 2: The kiss

7 The Kiss in the Tunnel. Shot 2: Train passes

following year. At that time, ‘phantom rides’ – tracking shots taken by a camera mounted on the front of a moving train – had become very popular with audiences, but when the train went into a tunnel everything went black. So G. A. Smith came up with an idea; he made a film called The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) which, although sold separately, was intended to be cut into a phantom ride at the point where the train entered a tunnel. The result produced an early example of action

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Shot 1: Train entering the tunnel

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continuity. Smith’s shot shows the interior of a railway compartment with a gentleman in a top hat (played by Smith himself) smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper. Sitting opposite is an attractive woman (played by Smith’s wife) also reading. Apparently, on impulse, the gentleman puts down his paper; removes his hat; moves towards the lady who looks up. After making an affectionate gesture towards her face, he gives her an apparently welcome kiss. Then, as he returns to his seat, he manages to sit on his hat which he then, rather deflatedly, has to put back into shape. Any misgivings that the audience might have felt at being suddenly confronted with an, albeit contrived, moment of intimacy is thereby relieved by seeing the instigator disconcerted. Being inserted into a tracking shot, Smith’s version of The Kiss in the Tunnel takes the spectator on the journey with the couple, but another version was made shortly after its release. The Bamforth Company copied the film almost exactly, but constructed it as a three-shot film. In this version the first shot it a wide angle of the train entering the tunnel seen from the embankment (see Figures 5–7). The compartment scene that follows, features a younger couple where the young man places his cigarette on the door ledge before embracing his lady. This then becomes a rather more prolonged business with a good deal of canoodling as well. The final shot, taken from a railway platform looking down the track, is plainly intended to represent a third shot of the same train. As it thunders past, the film ends. The similarities and differences that mark these two films offer an opportunity to examine them to advantage. Smith’s film is undoubtedly more satisfying and the impression that it gives is that it was carefully conceived and produced with its function clearly in mind. Phantom rides provided spectators with a privileged view of, often, exotic landscapes as the train on which the camera was mounted made its way through attractive foreign locations. Whenever the train passed into a tunnel the camera operator would stop turning or alternatively the showman would cut the unexposed tunnel section out. Smith’s plan was that the showman could introduce an entertaining diversion that would maintain the continuity of the journey, obviate the need for a jump cut, and thereby enhance the spectator’s pleasure. Smith’s couple are evidently well dressed and would normally take care to be seen observing behaviour that was appropriate to their class. There is also some deliberate ambiguity concerning their relationship, they seem to be unacquainted which, given the fact that the lady appears to welcome the advances of the gentleman, seems rather shocking. Having him sit on his hat, so that his suaveness is deflated is an important moment that rounds off the scene. This makes the film in its context all of a piece. Although at one level the James Bamforth film seems to be little more than an attempt to cash in on a successful idea, Bamforth is attempting to make a complete film. This somehow changes our reading of it, for its principle purpose is to show us a kissing couple. When we reach the compartment scene, the youthfulness of the couple, the ordinariness of their appearance, the unquestioned acceptance of the man’s advances by the young woman, makes the scene rather voyeuristic. But

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for all its crudeness, James Bamforth’s film is about the couple in the carriage: the story is narrated through its editing. Smith’s film is simply a diversion – a jokey interlude inside a travelogue. An understanding of the difference between reality and its presentation is manifest in an other film made by Bamforth about this time: Ladies’ Skirts Nailed to a Fence (c. 1900) sometimes called Women’s Rights. In a medium-wide shot (MWS), two women (played by men) are conversing conspiratorially, while standing next to a fence. The short section of fence consists of wide, horizontal, wooden planks nailed at each end to two vertical posts. A cut is made, ostensibly to the far side of the fence, because the two women are now seen standing behind it. But in fact the camera has remained in the same place and the women have merely moved to the far side of the fence. What might, conceivably, have been a persuasive means of avoiding the need to move the camera (one side of a fence can look very much like the other) is largely ruined by the fact that the fence posts can be clearly seen to remain on the same side as previously. But much more to the point, the positions of the two women remain unchanged, i.e their positions are not reversed as they would be if the camera were filming them from the opposite direction. This second shot, in which two young men pull the women’s skirts through gaps and nail them to the fence, consequently appears totally unconvincing. The final shot is a continuation of the first with the women now showing the appropriate degree of consternation. Judging from the films that are available from this period, G. A. Smith does seem to have pioneered some remarkable shooting and editing conventions which were far ahead of those being used elsewhere. Let me Dream Again (1900) is a twoshot film which uses a pull in and out of focus each side of the cut between the man embracing an attractive young woman at a party and his waking up in bed with his wife. This film was remade by Pathé two years later but using the more conventional dissolve. It is generally acknowledged that Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) is a film of considerable significance in that it is the first multishot film that divides a continuous scene into a series of shots. A medium shot of a boy standing by a table at which his grandmother is seated, uses her magnifying glass to look at various objects in the vicinity. Each time he does so, a vignetted close-up of the object is inserted. Here Smith was acknowledging that it was possible to construct a continuity from separate parts of the same scene; furthermore, these parts could be linked by a look what preceded them. He also demonstrated that close-up details of objects in a scene could be cut in to explain the action or to achieve clarity. Another Smith film, As Seen Through a Telescope (1900), extends the same idea. A wide shot shows a man seated outside a house using a telescope to obtain closeup views of the vicinity. In the background of the scene a man is helping a young woman get on to her bicycle. A cut to a vignetted close-up of his hand, as he takes the opportunity to fondle her ankle, is intercut with the wide shot. As the couple

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approach and move to pass behind the voyeur he is firmly pushed off his seat by the young man, losing his hat as he falls. The use of the close-up in this scene is remarkably effective in that it is an early example, perhaps the earliest, of a pointof-view shot. A point-of-view shot, or POV as it is usually known, might be loosely defined as a shot which shows the view seen by a character which has been prompted by a look or glance. The use of the POV shot plays a very significant part in the development of film narrative and this will be explored in depth at a later stage. In simple terms, it enables the spectator to share the same view as the character, and the effect of this is to involve the spectator with the character’s perception inside the scene. On the evidence that exists, it seems that most of the pioneering development in the structure and editing of early films took place in Britain. Studies of films made by two of the leading American production companies, Edison and Biograph, before 1902 seem to indicate that most of their productions were filmed in a studio; that the films contained one shot, photographed in full-length view, and that the action consists largely of mischief-making or of disappearing characters and trick shots. Even when films were made out of doors the form and content tended to be much the same. There was also a considerable degree of copying and sometimes the credit for some films would be wrongly attributed. The Edison Catalogue of 1901 describes Weary Willie in the Park (1900): a seat almost full of ladies and gentlemen. Dirty tramp approaches; squeezes in; lady next to him leaves immediately; tramp moves up, and each lady and gentleman leaves in turn until the tramp has the seat to himself.

Film editing

This description bears a remarkable similarity to James Bamforth’s Weary Willie (1898) which was based on a postcard set produced by the Bamforth Company some time previously. Whether this film is a duplicate or a remake is open to question. There was a conservatism that existed in the United States which seems to have been based on a principle that if a product was selling well and customers were satisfied, why alter it? Even some years later the Americans seemed reluctant to introduce camera movement in dramatic films. In 1905, Cecil Hepworth, yet another significant figure in the growth of early filmmaking in Britain, developed a sophisticated tracking and panning device which he installed in his new studio at Walton-on-Thames. This is from his autobiography of 1951:

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When the studio was built and ready for work I put down a sort of railway for the wheeled camera-stand to run on, to make what are now called ‘tracking shots’, which had not by then been heard of. Also we used a panoramic head so as to follow the actors as they moved about the scene, until we were informed by America – then our biggest customer – that Americans would not stand those movements and we must keep the camera stationary.4

It is interesting to note in this context that Biograph’s Hooligan in Jail (1903) starts with a wide shot of a prisoner eating a meal in a prison cell and then dollies in to get a close view of his facial expressions.

Williamson was another important English pioneer filmmaker. He had a chemist’s shop and photographic business in Hove near Brighton and undertook the processing of films that were being made by local amateurs. In 1897 he began to make films himself, concentrating mostly on actualities, but from 1900 he was making dramatised reconstructions of real events, and short-story films that developed multishot possibilities and continuities in ways that had not been explored before. The most remarkable of these films, Attack on a China Mission – Bluejackets to the Rescue (1900), is constructed from three separate shots which are intercut to present full coverage of the incident. At this time it was common to ‘re-create’ dramatic episodes of newsworthy events, and this incident which had recently taken place during the Boxer rebellion was a popular subject. Nordern Film Works of Blackburn, who specialised in making ‘ fake’ newsreels of the Boer War and the Boxer rebellion, made a far inferior one-shot film of the mission attack the same year. The first shot is a wide shot (WS) taken from the drive in the front of ‘the mission’ (the film was made locally in Sussex). The missionary and a woman, whom we take to be his wife, come out of the house in conversation. Suddenly, a weapon-carrying Chinese rebel makes an appearance on the left of screen. Alarmed, the missionary sends his wife back to the house while he runs towards the right of frame and hurriedly ushers a child and nursemaid back into the house. The attacker again appears briefly to the left of frame. The missionary re-appears carrying a handgun and a rifle, which he puts on the ground; his wife follows him and stands anxiously in the porch. The missionary fires the handgun towards far frame right as three attackers, all carrying weapons, enter from left of camera and move towards him. The first attacker grapples with the missionary and a struggle ensues. Meanwhile, more rebels enter from far frame right. The woman is fired on and the attackers enter the house, but at the same moment the missionary’s wife appears on a balcony above one of the windows and waves a handkerchief. In this version of the film a cut is then made to a MWS of the gate which leads into the drive as a group of rebels move away through the gate, apparently to join the attack. A cut then shows a reverse angle of the area in front of the gate, a group of bluejackets (armed naval personnel) run through the adjacent field; climb the low fence and take up firing positions in the foreground of the shot just inside the gate. A cut back to the reverse angle, a continuation of the first shot, is made showing the bluejackets now in the foreground of this shot facing the house. Firing as they move forward in groups, the rescuers move to surround the house. The above description is based on a version of the film discovered in the archives of the

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James Williamson

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Imperial War Museum, London, and comparing it with the description of the film in Williamson’s catalogue suggests that this version has been wrongly assembled and that the film should commence with the MWS of the front gate through which the rebels pass and that the cut to the bluejackets approaching across the field should immediately follow the handkerchief waving. The catalogue description says:

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Missionary’s wife now appears waving handkerchief on the balcony; the scene changes and shows party of bluejackets advancing from the distance, leaping over a fence, coming through the gate, kneeling and firing on all fours, and running forward to the rescue, under command of mounted officer.

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Attack on a China Mission, together with two other films that Williamson made shortly afterwards, mark a crucially important moment in the development of film editing and dramatic structure. What had become obvious to many filmmakers was that action which moved obliquely in relation to the camera had certain advantages. First, by moving into or out of the background of the scene, the action could be sustained for a much longer period than if it were moving directly across the field of view. Second, the movement of the action through the perspective of the shot would produce a change in size and therefore increased dramatic emphasis, and third, action which moved into or out of the space adjacent to the camera would emphasise the space beyond the camera’s view. Action filmed in this way would generate a sense of three-dimensional space for the spectator and consequently a greater feeling of realism. The moment when the missionary’s wife waves a handkerchief to signal to the bluejackets is remarkable in that it acknowledges a spatial and temporal link between two adjacent shots, and this is further confirmed by the following action cut between bluejackets as they leave their arrival shot and then move away from the camera towards the house. I believe that Williamson also became acutely aware that there were also certain disadvantages to this manner of structuring a scene. Action filmed moving away from the camera cannot show facial expressions and ideally requires a meaningful destination towards which the action is progressing. Attack on a China Mission provides interesting confirmation of this. The wide shot of the house is the meaningful destination for the attackers and, as they move towards it, Williamson directs one of them to turn round and look past the camera towards his followers, waving them on. The group of Chinese rebels moving towards the house through the gate (actually intended to be the first shot of the film), are not filmed approaching, which we might expect, and this might be because ‘actors’ of Oriental appearance were few and far between in the Brighton area. The following year Williamson made Stop Thief! (1901). This was one of the first multishot chase films and contains some remarkable insights into the filmmaker’s concerns at that time. The first shot, a wide shot, shows a tramp walking obliquely towards camera right. Coming up behind him, and overtaking

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him, comes a butcher’s delivery boy carrying on his shoulder a joint of meat on a tray. As he walks past him, the tramp runs up, grabs the joint of meat and runs away back in the direction from which they have both come. The second shot is a MWS and shows a row of white-fronted terraced cottages; a woman stands at the door of one of them. The tramp enters frame left and runs obliquely towards camera right, carrying the meat. A second woman comes out of her cottage towards the rear of the shot and watches as the tramp exits frame pursued by two dogs. The butcher’s boy then enters, runs through the shot and exits camera right as before. The final shot shows the tramp entering frame right laterally and hiding in a barrel; the dogs jump in after him; the boy enters, removes the dogs and the tramp with difficulty, and eventually carries out the appropriate chastisement. The first shot demonstrates Williamson’s recognition of the advantages of staging the action obliquely and with the action proceeding towards the camera. By having the tramp and the boy move towards the camera he increases the dramatic emphasis and achieves the best view of the theft. The tramp then runs away into the background of the shot thus prolonging the action. It seems clear that Williamson would ideally have liked to have been able to shoot the second shot just as I have described it but, as is so often the case in filmmaking, things do not always go to plan. We have become rather used to seeing jump cuts in old films, perhaps especially films as old as these. Commonly, the jumps result from repairs to damaged sections of film and are of little significance, but at this time, because the cost of film stock and processing was very likely to be one of the largest expenses to be met by the filmmaker, retakes would be avoided if at all possible and audiences at that time did not find jumps in the action disconcerting. The second shot contains two jump cuts, both of them deliberate edits. The first is used to speed the action. As the second woman comes out of her cottage to watch what’s going on and the tramp runs out of frame, there is a jump cut, and the two dogs immediately run into frame and pursue the tramp. What at first sight appears to be a second jump cut then occurs just before the boy enters, but this is not just a means of closing up a gap as previously; this is a completely different shot. We will never know why the original shot of the boy running across was considered unsuitable, what is certain is that Williamson re-staged the end section and directed the second woman to repeat her entry as she had done previously. The fact that this time she enters much later in the shot, just before the butcher’s boy makes his exit, confirms it as being a retake. The final shot is staged by Williamson with entrances made laterally. This is because the action is to be played out between the barrel, in the centre of the shot, and the camera. The business of the tramp, the meat and the dogs, going in and out of the barrel is lengthy and complex and Williamson uses a series of carefully positioned jump cuts to speed the entrances and the action as much as possible. What we have here is an example of creative editing used to improve the pace of a film and a successful experiment in organising action and scene structure.

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The same year, 1901, James Williamson made a much longer film, one that was to have a very particular influence on the development of film editing internationally: Fire! The cinematic potential inherent in the activities of firefighters had been recognised from the earliest days. It was a staple component of most lantern slide shows and an early Lumière film, Pompiers à Lyon (c. 1896), showing the local fire brigade turning out, was one of the first to realise it filmically. Williamson had previously made single-shot actualities of the local Hove Fire Brigade, now he wanted to develop the idea considerably further. Attack on a China Mission had explored the presentation of an event by constructing a continuity from different angles to show the complete scene. Stop Thief! had experimented with making editing transitions of continuous action moving between adjacent spaces. In Fire! he would present a complete story containing separate events, in different locations, linked only by the dramatic narrative. The first shot shows part of a house, smoke billowing out of one of the upper rooms. A policeman runs into the shot, obliquely from camera left, and turns to looks back towards the direction from which he came. He blows his whistle and make a ‘come on’ gesture with his arm towards others not yet in view (an action almost identical to that of the first attacker in Attack on a China Mission, who turns his face to the camera when he waves his comrades forward). The policeman attempts to gain entry to the house but, unable to do so, runs out of frame laterally frame right. A cut then takes us to a MWS of the front of Hove Fire Station and the policeman enters frame left and gives the alarm by banging on the, readily opened, doors. This ‘exit screen right before the cut, enter screen left after the cut’ figuration raises an important question of character movement between shots which will be explored in detail in a later chapter. It is interesting, because in Stop Thief! the action does not flow across the cut as it does both here and in conventional modern practice, but follows a left-exit, left-entry – right-exit, right-entry figuration. Because the movement of the action throughout Fire! appears to follow the modern conventional pattern, it is possible that Williamson deliberately set out to use it. This second shot then develops to show the lengthy process of harnessing the horses to the various fire appliances. Williamson again uses jump cuts to speed the action along – regarded as an acceptable practice in that excisions are quite apparent. It should also be stressed that modern film audiences are conditioned to accept that the content of individual pieces of action are invariably much less important than the dramatic thrust of the continuing narrative. Audiences at the turn of the twentieth century responded to filmed action as moving pictures or animated photographs and engaged with the overall content quite differently. The third shot is a lengthy WS showing the main fire appliance vehicles as they gallop towards the camera at an oblique angle before exiting camera left. A cut is then made to MWS of a bedroom inside the burning house. Williamson realised that the story of the discovery of the fire should also be told from the inside, and

Influences In France, Georges Méliès was also experimenting with multishot films. His first was L’Affaire Dreyfus made in 1899. Like Attack on a China Mission it was an imagined reconstruction of an actual event, but unlike Williamson’s film it consisted of a series of twelve separate one-shot films detailing separate events of the Dreyfus affair which, when showed together, lasted an unprecedented fifteen minutes. Méliès preferred his films to be staged laterally, as if the action were being played within a frame or proscenium arch with characters making entrances from the side. But in one film of the series, The Battle of the Journalists, newspaper reporters are shown hurriedly leaving a courtroom by rushing towards the camera and leaving the frame in the near foreground, an unusual acknowledgement of the feeling of ‘realism’ that action developing into adjacent off-screen space can evoke. Méliès’s most successful multishot film was Le Voyage dans la Lune (A trip to the Moon) which he made in 1902. Conceived and filmed as a developing theatrical narrative, it was staged as a series of thirty separate scenes, which he appropriately described as ‘tableaux’. Performed very like a photographed stage

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that the audience will want to see the plight of the man waking to find his house ablaze. The story actually might be said to back-track at this point to show what happens, an extremely common structuring method at this time. Each scene is played through to its natural dramatic conclusion before presenting the net stage from the most relevant point of view and point in time. The ability of film to move back and forth between events happening in parallel during one continuous time scale was not fully articulated until some years later and owed its development principally to the work of D. W. Griffith. The room is full of smoke and a man gets up from his bed and tries, unsuccessfully, to extinguish the flaming curtains with a pitcher of water. He tries to escape through the door but is driven back by the fire raging outside. In despair at his plight, he is eventually overcome by the smoke and collapses on the bed. A fireman appears at the window; smashes it and climbs in bringing his hose. He extinguishes the flames; picks up the man in a fireman’s lift and makes for the window. A cut is then made to a WS of the exterior of the house where firemen are hosing the house. The rescuing fireman descends the ladder, carrying the man to safety. The shot continues for some time during which a young child is brought safely through the French windows, much to the delight of the rescued man who accompanies the child as she is carried obliquely away past camera left. Finally, another man leaps from the upstairs window into a prepared safety sheet held by a group of firemen standing below. James Williamson’s Fire! is significant in that it successfully constructs a complete film from separate scenes and links action from different locations. It also develops a continuity by connecting action through a series of cuts.

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play but incorporating many of the trick effects which he had developed through his one-shot film illusions, the scenes were connected by a series of dissolves and it had a running time of just under fourteen minutes. The film was immensely successful, particularly in America, where, because at that time films were sold to distributors rather than being leased, it made Méliès a fortune. Méliès was an individualist, and first and foremost a showman, but he was not the only Frenchman to recognise the remarkable potential of moving pictures.

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Charles Pathé Charles Pathé was the son of a Vincennes butcher who began his career in show business by exhibiting the Edison Phonograph in fairgrounds and soon after was offering his clients counterfeit Kinetoscopes imported from England. A ruthless businessman, he built an organisation during the early years of the twentieth century which assured France a dominant position in world cinema for decades. Ferdinand Zecca, a young Corsican, joined Pathé in 1901. A prolific director of considerable talent, he had started his career by directing films for Gaumont, one of Pathé’s rivals. From the start, his films had a direct sensational appeal ideally suited to the fairground exhibitors who were Pathé’s earliest customers. Histoire d’un crime, was based on a series of wax tableaux in the Musée Grévin, Paris, and tells the episodic story in a series of one-shot scenes each linked with a dissolve. Starting with the crime itself – theft and murder of an official during a burglary – the culprit is quickly discovered, arrested, imprisoned and, several scenes later, executed by guillotine. The need to tell the background of the crime – in a flashback sequence – had few filmic precedents at the time, but early comic strips had established the convention of balloons, suspended above the heads of sleeping characters, containing illustrations of dreams or memories.5 Whereas this had been done previously using photographic techniques, Zecca constructed a small insert stage above the sleeper, inside which the background story is told in a series of scenes joined by cuts. This need to re-call dreams or past events using inserts had been recognised very early on, and the balloon solution became established as the acceptable convention. This could persist only as long as the sleeper or dreamer occupied a small part of a much wider shot, but the bold step necessary to remove the source of the recollection completely came much later when other conventions were devised to signal the fact that the film was now looking into the past. Like Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune made the following year, Zecca’s Histoire d’un crime was very influential.

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Edwin S. Porter

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Porter was a young American mechanic who initially worked for the Edison Manufacturing Company as early as 1896 when he was involved with the setting up of Edison’s first venture into film projection, the Vitascope. Recognising the

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enormous commercial potential of projected moving pictures he then successfully set up and operated his own equipment in various mainline theatres, rejoining the Edison Company in 1900. Early in 1901 he became production head of the new skylight studio on East Twenty-first Street and worked as director-cameraman producing one-shot comedies and actualities and brief multishot reconstructions. In 1901 Edison obtained an exclusive contract to film events at the PanAmerican Exposition at Buffalo, New York and made a series of routine records of President McKinley’s visit. While waiting for the President to emerge from the Temple of Music, the word spread that the President has been shot by an assassin. The cameraman took a panorama of the crowd waiting outside the Temple as the news spread, producing a poignant record of the tragedy. The President died several days later. The Edison Company produced eleven films covering the entire episode; starting with the Exposition and ending with the funeral, but the film that would have been the climax of the series was missing. The assassin was an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz and he was to be executed by electric chair in November the same year. Porter sought permission to film the execution but was refused, so he decided to stage it. The Execution of Czolgosz and Panorama of Auburn State Prison (1901) starts with a WS pan of the outside of the prison walls; then a series of dissolves follows: to the prison courtyard, to Czolgosz outside his cell and, finally, to his execution. It seems likely that Porter would almost certainly have seen Zecca’s Histoire d’un crime and been influenced by it, for the similarities are very evident. But Porter’s film is a bold piece of work founded on a real case; the dissolves seem appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion and integrate the grimness of the location with the inexorability of the event. However, in the reconstructed scenes, Porter, perhaps following Zecca, elected to stage the action laterally rather than obliquely which emphasised the theatricality of the presentation. By 1901 Porter had encountered the work of Méliès, G. A. Smith and James Williamson and almost certainly the work of other British pioneers. The concept of the longer, multishot film was now becoming established and it seems likely that the originality of Williamson’s Fire! may well have prompted him to produce a version for Edison. Arthur S. White, a cameraman and location manager at the studio, had been a member of a volunteer fire brigade in his youth; he therefore arranged for his old fire-fighting colleagues at Chelsea, Massachusetts, to turn out for Porter’s film. The combination of actuality footage with reconstruction had worked well with the Czolgosz execution and Porter included scenes of horsedrawn fire engines rushing through the streets which he gleaned from the Edison archive of stockshots. Porter called the film The Life of an American Fireman and, apart from some dramatic embellishments at the beginning, it copies the form and content of Williamson’s film almost exactly. Porter starts his film with a rather theatrically framed shot of the fire chief’s office which shows him asleep in a chair. The fact that he is dreaming is suggested by the superimposition inside a circular vignette of a mother and child. The Edison

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Catalogue writer does not seem quite certain as to the relationship of the mother and child and the sleeper, nor of his reasons for becoming agitated: The fire chief is dreaming, and the vision of his dream appears in a circular portrait on the wall. It is a mother putting her baby to bed, and the impression is that he is dreaming of his own wife and child. He suddenly awakens and paces the floor in a nervous state of mind, doubtless thinking of the various people who may be in danger of fire at the moment.6 [My emphasis]

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It has always been the accepted that this is the intended reading of the scene, yet dramatically it makes very little sense as the fire chief’s family are not relevant to the story. But a dream about a mother putting her baby to bed which develops into the reality of a mother and child escaping from a fire suggests premonition, and the agitation on wakening seems to confirm this. The Edison Catalogue indicates that each single-shot scene dissolves into the next, but a print of the film recovered in 1977 seems to indicate a fade in and out between most scenes. Shot 2 is a close-up of a fire alarm box: an unidentified figure enters the frame and pulls down a lever to start the alarm. This figure is never seen again. Shot 3 is a WS of the fire station dormitory and shows the firemen waking on hearing the alarm and descending a pole through a hole in the floor. Shot 4 is a WS of the ground floor of the firehouse; workers harness the horses to the engines and eventually the firemen (again) slide down the pole in the centre of the scene. Shot 5 is a WS the doors of the fire station flung open and the engines charge out. Shot 6 is a snowy WS (obviously a stockshot) as eight fire engines rush past from right to left.

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Shot 7 is another WS of a street as four fire engines rush past and the camera pans to follow the fourth as it comes to a stop outside a burning house.

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Shot 8 is a WS interior of the smoke-filled room which shows the woman and child on the bed. She rushes around attempting to escape; throws open the window and calls for help and eventually collapses on the bed. The door is smashed open by a fireman who, entering, tears the burning curtains from the window and smashes the window frame out. A ladder appears at the window; the fireman picks the woman up in a fireman’s lift and carries her through the window to the outside. After a pause he re-enters; picks up the child and carries her out. Two other firemen enter the window with a hose and extinguish the flames. Shot 9 is a WS of the exterior of the house. But this shot repeats the action in

The similarities with Williamson’s Fire! are instantly apparent, but so are the differences. Williamson starts his film with the discovery of the precipitating dramatic event by an identifiable person, who then carries the alarm to the fire station. The film then maintains a credible developing continuity to the end. Porter starts with a dream, or premonition, and an unidentifiable alarm giver (how the brigade learn the whereabouts of the fire is not explained). The firemen’s preparation and departure contains temporal overlaps; the fire engine shots are unmatched stockshots and the rescue scenes are repeated. It is important to explain why audiences at the time would have little trouble understanding the overlaps in the action which the film contained. Conditioned by lantern slides and comic strips, moving pictures were still little more than just that; a series of self-contained animated photographs each within its own frame. Multishot films did not automatically imply, as they do for a modern audience, that time moved forward as one scene, or one shot followed another. Filmmakers, like James Williamson and G. A. Smith were, through their experiments, discovering that it was possible to establish linear continuity from one shot to the next and that two or more shots could be made to express a single unit of meaning. Until 1977, The Life of an American Fireman held a truly significant place in cinema history as it was held to be the film which first established the principle of cross-cut editing, a relatively sophisticated cutting method which would have a profound influence on the development of film structure, and this had done much to establish Porter’s reputation as a creative innovator. Cross-cut editing put simply is action that is happening in one place, which has an effect on, or is related to, action happening in another place within a common continuing time frame, and can be intercut. For example a cut can be made from a dialogue scene inside a car to a shot taken outside the car as it passes and then back inside again. Or perhaps more dramatically, a cut from the heroine tied to the railway track to the train engine approaching in the distance and then back to the heroine again. It acknowledges that shots that follow in sequence maintain an unbroken temporal continuity. Until 1944, The Life of an American Fireman was a lost film, descriptions of it depended on the memories of those that had seen it, the paper print copyright version in the Library of Congress, and the 1903 Edison Catalogue description which, if it were read by someone familiar with modern film-structuring methods, might seem to imply a certain amount of cross-cutting between the woman and child in the smoke-filled interior and the firemen coming to the rescue from outside. Film historians were persuaded that this was the case. Lewis Jacobs in his influential The Rise of the American Film, first published in 1939, was reinforced in this view by a set of frame enlargements, made for copyright purposes by the

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its entirety from the moment when the woman calls for help from the window, and includes a moment when the woman pleads for the fireman to return and save her child. He reappears almost immediately, descends, and the mother receives and hugs her child.

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Edison Company and known as the ‘Jamison continuity’. This arrangement of stills seemed to indicate cross-cutting at the film’s climax, and was included as an illustration in Jacobs’s book. Then, in 1944 a copy of The Life of an American Fireman was discovered in the Pathé archive and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Amazingly, it confirmed the accepted view of the film. The two final shots, shots 8 and 9 referred to above, had been intercut to produce thirteen separate shots illustrating the developing action as an unbroken continuity and cutting dramatically between the interior and exterior scenes. This was taken as conclusive proof that Edwin S. Porter had made a major contribution to the development of film editing, and that The Life of an American Fireman was the film that showed the way. Not everyone shared that view, and in 1958 an attempt to resolve the question was made. The paper print copyright version was used to make a projectable print, and this clearly demonstrated that Porter’s original version conformed in most respects to the 9–shot Edison Catalogue description. Controversy raged; defenders of the Museum of Modern Art version argued that the 1903 paper print was simply a record of uncut material. It was not until another print, probably an original release print, came to light in 1977, that the matter was finally resolved. On examination, the rediscovered print, although slightly different in some minor respects, confirmed that the copyright version, and not the Pathé archive, cross-cut version discovered in 1944, was indeed the original. It is impossible to know why or when the film was re-edited. Suggestions have been put forward that it was re-cut about 1910, or even later, to accord with the view of the film that was current at the time and using the implications inherent in the Edison Catalogue description as a guide.7

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Dissection

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British filmmakers were continuing to experiment. George Albert Smith continued to explore the use of close-ups as a means of clarifying detail and increasing audience involvement in the action. Films featuring close-ups of faces had been common in Smith’s work; Comic Faces – an Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer (1898); Grandma Threading her Needle (1900); Scandal over the Teacups (1900) which showed two middle-aged women swopping confidences; and Two Old Sports (1900) which featured two middle-aged men leeringly discussing a girlie magazine (copied by Edison in 1903 as Art Studies). These short films used close-ups to parody character types and were intended to be little more than entertaining vignettes. Grandma's Reading Glass and As Seen through a Telescope had been successful at integrating close-ups with wider shots, but in both instances the use of the close-up had been ‘justified’ by using an optical enlarging device to explain the inclusion of the closer detail. In 1901 Smith had made The Little Doctor in which a small boy dressed as ‘the doctor’ brings a bottle of medicine to a young girl who feeds it from a spoon to a kitten. The film showed the entire action in MS but inserted a close-up of the kitten being fed from the spoon.

Cut to the chase – William Haggar Haggar was a showman with a travelling tent cinematograph show, touring the fairgrounds in Wales and the west of England at the beginning of the twentieth

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In 1903 Smith made Mary Jane’s Mishap, or Don’t Fool with Paraffin. Mary Jane, the housemaid, is shown in the kitchen polishing shoes; getting polish on her face; wiping it off; checking her appearance in a mirror; failing to light the stove and finally using paraffin to do so and blowing herself up. What is exceptional for a film made at this time is that at the points when Mary Jane’s actions are pertinent to the comedy – getting polish on her face; checking her appearance in the mirror; pouring paraffin into the stove – there is a cut from the wide shot to a close shot (CS), followed by another cut to the wide shot in order to show her movement from place to place – and the points where the cuts are made are carefully chosen to match the action as closely as possible. Smith’s use of the close shot to direct the spectator’s attention to the comic or dramatic detail sprang from a need to solve a problem, the problem of emphasis.8 The majority of films that had been made up to that time had tended to be wide views that contained a quantity of action; the only thing which made them different from a photograph was the fact that they could capture movement, and so the initial appeal was towards those films which showed the most action. The obvious problem with this was that a wide view will often contain a considerable quantity of detail, much of it of interest, and much of it unseen on one viewing. Consequently, it was quite usual for these programmes of short films to be projected several times. A good example of this is to be found in the Lumières’ Barque sortant du port (A Boat leaving Harbour), mentioned earlier, which shows the rowing boat caught by a large wave as it leaves the shelter of the harbour wall. The dramatic action, which commands one’s attention, prevents awareness of the rather touching detail of the woman on the harbour wall trying to adjust the hat of the young boy which has blown off in the wind. I only became aware of this after several viewings of the film. The need to maximise an audience’s awareness of the content, or prolong the pleasure of a particular moment, has always been of concern to filmmakers and a variety of means have been developed over the years to deal with it. The climax of The Juggernaut, a film made in 1915 by Ralph Ince, shows a train crashing into a river from a broken bridge. This powerfully dramatic moment is over much too quickly, and therefore before continuing with exciting scenes of the rescue which follow, the entire train crash is repeated so that it can be seen again. In fact most moments of dramatic action have invariably been slowed down to maximise their effect and allow the detail to be enjoyed. For example, the train crash in The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993), like so many action sequences, is filmed with several cameras and contains slow-motion, repeat action, optical effects; a whole range of devices which prolong the action.

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century. Seeking to get ahead of his competitors, he bought a camera and started making films himself, using his fairground helpers as the cast. His best-known film is probably The Life of Charles Peace, a reconstruction of the activities of the notorious criminal which he made in 1905. In 1903 he made Desperate Poaching Affray. James Williamson’s Stop Thief! is generally considered to be the original source for the subsequent development of the ‘chase’ films, and Desperate Poaching Affray is a later example of what was to become one of the cinema’s most enduring dramatic motifs. The chase film is important because it played a significant part in establishing the idea that a single continuity can be constructed by cutting and joining together two separate pieces of filmed action. Most chase films of the period start with a precipitating event and then progress from shot to shot; each starting with the entry of a pursued character who runs obliquely towards the camera, encounters and overcome some obstacle, and then leaves the shot followed by the pursuers. William Haggar’s film uses many of the editing principles that had already become established and develops them further by introducing significant variations. The first is the use of the pan shot to follow action. The two poachers have hidden in the undergrowth to elude the pursuing gamekeepers. Trusting that they won’t be seen, they emerge and run off towards frame right and the camera pans, following their progress towards a five-bar gate in the background of the shot. The gamekeepers and police, realising they have been outwitted, then enter the shot and continue the pursuit. Whereas usually action tends to start in the background of the shot and progress towards the camera, Haggar now films action entering close to the camera and moving away, but, in order to give the shot dramatic emphasis, has the poachers stop, raise their guns and fire dramatically towards the pursuers as they run into the shot. When choosing an editing point, it was usual to delay cutting out of a shot until the last moving character had left the frame, and in most instances this convention continued to be observed throughout the silent period (even in action comedies made by Mack Sennett and Hal Roach who are often credited with the introduction of sharply paced editing). The editing of Desperate Poaching Affray is unusual in that commonly a cut is made to an incoming shot before the action is completed in the outgoing one. The oblique staging, dramatic action and tight editing produce a result quite unlike anything else made at that time. But the greatest surprise comes towards the end. In the fifth shot of this seven-shot film, the camera is positioned on the edge of a shallow lake, framing a WS with the lake in the foreground and a slope leading away to a path in the background. One of the poachers runs from the background of the shot down the slope and into the water. He is pursued by a single policeman who runs in after him and a struggle ensues. The poacher eludes capture and runs back towards the slope. As he does so, a jacketed figure wearing a dark cap crosses the frame to the left, moving very close to the camera and goes out of shot. At that moment, one of the gamekeepers is pushed into the lake to the right of the camera, the second poacher jumps in after him, runs past him, and makes for the slope

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attempting to follow his colleague. A cut to the sixth shot is then made, a MS which shows this same action continuing but from a different angle. This shot now also shows clearly the man wearing the dark cap who then joins the chase by jumping into the water and they all exit frame right. The final shot shows the poachers being caught. The arrest made, they are brought close to the camera before being taken off camera right. It may seem strange, when looking at these very early British films, that what we recognise as evidence of a mature form, did not lead immediately to a rapid development of a sophisticated film language. The reason is that Smith, Williamson, Haggar and others had no clearer concept of how films should be made than anyone else; they were experimenters, explorers. In some ways, these filmmakers might be compared with any artist working in any medium who seeks to push out the boundaries of the materials that he works with whether it be music, paint or clay, and the results of these experiments were not necessarily accepted as definitive or even clearly understood by their audiences. Although they might be thought of as at the cutting edge of possibilities, their formal experiments were interesting but they did not have, nor were they necessarily intended to have, significant commercial potential. In short, they were too ahead of their time. Let me give one final example. Alf Collins was an illiterate music hall comic; he styled himself ‘The wellknown Comedian of His Majesty’s and Drury Lane Theatre’. In 1902, the British agent for films made by Léon Gaumont in France, Colonel A. C. Bromhead, engaged Collins as their first producer of London based one-reelers, and between 1903 and 1910 he made a whole series of chase films. Few of Collins’s films still exist but the Gaumont Catalogue entries of the period suggest that his approach to film structure and editing was exceptionally inventive. In 1903 he made The Runaway Match, or a Marriage by Motor Car; the catalogue describes the action as being presented in two parts. In the first, ‘Outside the Ancestral Manor’, Captain Dasher is shown eloping with his fiancée, Lady Constance. A photograph exists which shows the couple running down a deserted street to a waiting car, and from the composition it is plain that the action was covered using a panning shot that followed the action up to the car and showed them getting in. The catalogue tells us that at this point Lady Constance’s father appears, curses them, and begins to chase them in another car. The second part is described as ‘The Chase as seen by the Pursued and Pursuers’, and describes two shots, the first taken from the lovers’ car in motion which shows the father’s car in pursuit and gaining ground so as to show facial expressions. A sudden burst of smoke from his car betokens a breakdown and he is left standing and stamping his feet as the image recedes. The next shot, taken from the pursuing car, shows the lovers kissing in the back seat, then, reacting to the off-screen breakdown, they stand and wave their handkerchiefs, blowing kisses as their car draws away.

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The use of related travelling shots in a filmed drama at such an early date is certainly remarkable. Note, however, that there was no suggestion of intercutting between the shots, the intention being to show both actions separately and in full. The last three shots of the film are a model of economy in terms of their cinematic construction and would not disgrace a present-day television commercial. The first of these, Outside the Church, is very brief: ‘The fugitive lovers enter the church’. We are not told if this is another example of a panning shot following action but regardless of how it was filmed, we can be certain that the action and the location were clearly conveyed. The second must be quoted in its entirety: Inside tying the nuptual knot. The captain’s hand half fills the picture, holding the wedding ring, which is plainly seen; then the lady’s hand comes into view, it is seized with the captain’s left and with his right he places the wedding ring upon the correct finger. As only the hands are shown, every operation is plainly seen. The hands then advance to the camera, clasped across and fade away. The final shot, Outside the Church, shows the furious father meeting the couple after the ceremony. A Marriage by Motor Car contains structural elements for telling a story simply and economically in film terms that are being rediscovered a hundred years later; time ellipses, jump cuts, repeated action, exposition through suggestion and comprehension through inference. It is as if the experimenters of the time, because they were not cluttered up with decades of elaboration, rules and conventions, could keep it simple. I am reminded of a neat aphorism that I once saw attached to the loom of a craft weaver: ‘The simple can only be arrived at, once the complex has been exhausted.’

Film editing

Notes

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1 Vaughan, ‘Let there be Lumière’. 2 The commentator, as an essential part of film presentation, became totally institutionalised in Japan, where the benshi were considered every bit as important as the film itself, often achieving a status equal to, if not greater than, the actors in the film. Because of their popularity, they commanded considerable power and remained a necessary part of film viewing throughout the whole silent period despite attempts by studios to make them redundant. Even after the arrival of sound (which they recognised as the greatest threat to their existence) they persisted in retaining their role. Their dominance ended in 1932 only after substantial redundancy payments were negotiated. 3 The Kinetoscope was a coin-operated, animated-picture device which preceded the invention of the film projector. The short, single-shot films, were viewed individually by looking through a magnifying lens mounted on a box-like peep-show machine at a back-projected image. 4 Hepworth, Came The Dawn, pp. 75–6. 5 Barry Salt, in the commentary for the BFI Early Cinema vol. 1 videotape, refers to this device being used by G. A. Smith in his earlier The Corsican Brothers. 6 From the Edison Catalogue of 1904, reproduced in Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 39.

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7 Gaudreault, ‘Film Narrative – The Development of Cross-Cutting’, reprinted in Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema, p. 133. 8 Mary Jane’s Mishap is actually based on an Edison film made in 1901 called The Finish of Bridget McKeen, but the Edison version consists of only two shots with Bridget blowing herself up in the first is linked by a dissolve to an illustration of her grave in the second.

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2

Developing forms

I spy with my little eye Something that becomes quickly evident when studying films made during this early period is their tendency to contain within them an acknowledgement that they were being looked at; an awareness that the film was a display. Some of the reasons for this are not hard to find. A camera was an optical device that recorded a moment of reality fixed in time. The subject of a photograph would commonly be party to the recording process. They had a stake in the result, their image was the content. The consequence of this was that a kind of formality evolved whereby the subject would seek to present an aspect of themselves that was acceptable both to themselves and the eventual viewer of the photograph. This has always been true: people pose themselves or smile for the camera; it is a recognised aspect of the process. The resulting photograph carries with it a signal to the viewer; a kind of authentication which ensures that both the viewer and the subject understand the terms of the contract, which seems to say, ‘at the moment this photograph was taken – for that fraction of second – I agreed that a record of myself could be made’. Moving pictures changed all that. Pictures that recorded action in time were capable of seeing past the prepared moment: they were capable of capturing informality. This was considered acceptable provided that they were the moving pictures recording events and activities as they would be seen by people there at the same time, but the cinematograph was also capable of showing aspects of peoples lives secretly; it was capable of spying. There is abundant evidence of this concern demonstrated in scores of films made at the time. Many of these films used voyeurism as their subject. G. A. Smith’s As Seen Through a Telescope made in 1900 has already been mentioned; the following year Ferdinand Zecca made Scenes from my Balcony for Pathé. Directly influenced by Smith’s film, it shows a man standing on a flat roof watching through his telescope as a woman dresses for bed. A vignetted close-up of his view simulates the telescope lens. It was usual for the voyeur to be punished for his

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Keyhole spying was also an often repeated theme. Both Pathé’s Par le trou de serrure (aka Peeping Tom, 1901) and Hepworth’s The Inquisitive Boots (Fitzhamon, 1905) show hotel servants as voyeurs who, having shared their appropriately vignetted viewpoints with the spectator, receive their come-uppance in some way. The subject of these films was the pleasure to be taken in looking; it was as if the cinematic process was itself being scrutinised and questioned. Looking could be a questionable activity and capable of producing feelings of guilt. Importantly, in all these films the voyeurs share their illicit pleasure with the spectator by looks and gestures towards the camera, and this was fundamental to most films of the period. Sharing these activities with the spectator was a way of distancing the process, it was as if the character in the film was saying, 'It’s alright to look, to spy; I’m standing between you and the object of your gaze, it’s only a bit of fun.’ Some music hall comedians had traditionally used an identical method of producing a mix of intimacy and distance. British comedian Max Miller built his act on just this premise. He would constantly make glancing looks towards the wings as his act progressed, generating a sense of artificial tension, as if at any moment the stage manager would come on and drag him off for telling such risqué jokes; almost as if he should not be there at all, and that it was all the audience’s fault for laughing so loudly. By engaging directly with the spectator, the nature of the presentation as a performed display is emphasised and a specific tension is set up between the spectator and the content which undercuts the realism that the photographic image is capable of producing and makes the spectator aware of the process of presentation, emphasising the security of a narrative presence. In the performance arts at that time there was no precedent for the public presentation of intimacy; indeed, the notion of an Intimate performance’ would have been regarded as a contradiction in terms. Performance was synonymous with presentation and display; intimacy was unperformable because, before cinema, the means were inconceivable: intimacy – the private exchange of thoughts and feelings – was personal. The theatre was an acceptable platform for the exploration of drama and conflict but subject to a specific range of presentational techniques and projections, and always from a distance and invariably coupled to regulated exaggeration of voice and gesture. The possibilities inherent in the film image – proximity, subtlety of gesture and expression – hinted at a kind of voyeurist realism that implied a denial of narrative presence. Anything might happen. Films from the period which seem to confirm these anxieties are quite revealing. English filmmakers Frank Haydon and George Urry, who developed the Eragraph projector, made a small number of films at the turn of the twentieth century. A single-shot film featuring a couple kissing in close-up, ends with both parties

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audacity: Smith’s voyeur gets pushed off his seat; but Zecca’s voyeur is only frustrated when the object of his gaze blows out the candle.

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looking towards the lens as they break apart; grinning in a rather embarrassed way and suggesting that the presence of the camera is inappropriate. Edison had filmed a close-up of a kiss as early as 1896 for the Kinetoscope, featuring John C. Rice and May Irwin, two actors who were enjoying success in The Widow Jones, a current Broadway play. The kiss, the climax of the play, had been ignored as a peep-show novelty but caused a stir when projected on the cinema screen, with moralists and reformers showering the press and politicians with letters of outrage and members of the clergy denouncing it as ‘a lyric of the stockyards’. There was something else involved as well, but not fully understood at the time: proximity heightened identification and it was this that was capable of causing feelings of discomfort. It is perhaps pertinent to mention at this point the effect that scenes containing intimate conversation had on audiences when sound films started to become established more than thirty years later. Up to that point, intimate, or confessional scenes could be played out on the theatrical stage and be considered acceptable because of the theatrical artifices which evoked the need for a suspension of disbelief; the conventions of a proscenium arch framing the action, voices projected for audibility, painted scenery, etc. The arrival of the ‘talkies’, with close shots of actors in realist settings sharing spoken intimacies at a level that was also realistic, was often too much for audiences to handle, and their discomfort at seeming to eavesdrop on private conversations invariably resulted in giggles and embarrassed laughter.1 Edwin Porter’s famous The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) is also exceptional in its use of a close-up to reveal a moment of intimacy. Similar in some respects to the revelation of a man’s hand and a woman’s ankle together in the same frame in G. A. Smith’s As Seen Through a Telescope, Porter’s film shows a young woman seated in a shoe shop having a shoe lace tied by the young male assistant. On the left of the MWS, the woman’s mother, or chaperone, sits reading a paper. A cut in to a close-up of the man’s hand tying the lace reveals that the young woman is gradually raising the hem of her skirt to reveal more of her shapely leg. A cut back to the original framing is made as the young man, responding to the invitation, kisses the young woman on the lips. The chaperone then soundly chastises him with her umbrella for his impudence. Again, the resolution of the film involves the voyeur being punished and the moment of intimacy being denied. It is perhaps relevant to note that the close-up insert of the skirt being raised is shot against a plain white background, suggesting that it was filmed separately, probably later. If concerns about the difficulties inherent in presenting intimacy was one factor that prevented the inclusion of close-ups in films, other factors were at work which saw them as unnecessary. At this time, silent films were principally about action. Denied speech as a component in telling the story and still linked to circus, spectacle and showmanship as compelling entertainment, story films had to show things happening. Moving pictures were at their best when they showed a lot of

movement, and the ability to tell a story by linking separate scenes was, by 1903, well established.

The Sheffield Photographic Company was a family photographic business run by Frank Mottershaw. Some of the family toured with projection equipment, giving film shows in different parts of the country and, like William Haggar, Mottershaw made his own films. Two made early in 1903, Daring Daylight Burglary and Robbery of the Mail Coach were commercial successes, and Mottershaw, hoping to sell the films internationally, approached a dynamic British distributor, Charles Urban, an American with established connections in the US Urban bought the films and offered the American distribution rights to Edison. Daring Daylight Burglary entered the Edison Catalogue as Daylight Robbery but little is known about Robbery of the Mail Coach which apparently no longer exists.2 What is clear is that Edwin Porter was inspired by Mottershaw’s films to make his own version of a train robbery, for The Great Train Robbery was made later that year. The interest in accounts of criminal activity had long been established through the enormous popularity of Penny Dreadfuls, weekly publications featuring true stories of violent crime illustrated with lurid drawings of imagined dramatic moments. Haggar’s Desparate Poaching Affray, also made in 1903, with its use of shotguns fired at close range, was almost certainly the first film to put violent crime on the cinema screen. Although Daring Daylight Burglary does not contain any gun fights, it does progress through a series of related scenes that tell the story of a crime clearly and dramatically. Both films achieve a strong feeling of realism by being filmed in exterior locations; but whereas in Desparate Poaching Affray the action is continuous, Daring Daylight Burglary is told in stages. The film starts with a high-angle WS of part of a house as a burglar climbs over a wall, forces open a window and climbs in, not realising that his progress has been observed by a small boy who appears behind him, peering over the wall. A cut to a WS of the street where the police station is situated, shows the boy entering the station and emerging with a policeman and they both run back towards the scene of the crime. This cut to the second shot follows the linear narrative – boy sees break-in, boy fetches police – but also contains a movement forward in time; the cut to a different location automatically implying ‘a short while later’. The third shot, which is the same set-up as the first, shows the first policeman climbing the wall and entering the house through the window and a second policeman comes over the wall to assist. There is an interesting anomaly at the beginning of this shot; the burglar is seen completing his exit through the window, demonstrating clearly that it is a continuation of the original made only a few frames later. Mottershaw now moves the story swiftly along: a cut to the roof is followed quickly by the entrance of the burglar pursued by a policeman and a struggle

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Frank Mottershaw – Daylight robbery

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ensues. A jump cut is then made to obscure the substitution of a very realistic dummy policeman and the struggle ends with the ‘policeman’ being thrown over the ridge of the roof and the burglar climbing over after him. The story now divides; for the next shot – a WS of the lane alongside the house – has a policeman enter and tend the lifeless body of his colleague who has ‘fallen’ from the roof, and as the scene continues, it exemplifies a dilemma which filmmakers at this time seemed to understand but were conceptually unable to solve. Complex action takes a long time to show in its entirety and the scene sets out to show the arrival of a horsedrawn ambulance; the injured man placed on a stretcher, put inside and taken away. Of course the need for all this to occur in real time seriously slows the action down and there is a suspicion that some judiciously placed jump cuts have been introduced to speed things along. Audiences at that time would have little difficulty filling in the action between scenes; for instance it was not necessary to show the burglar leaving the window before seeing him pursued onto the roof, but it was not clear how to progress action during a scene other than by using a jump cut. G. A. Smith had demonstrated that it was possible to cut into a close-up during a scene in Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903), but that had been to reveal more detail, what was not realised was that a close-up also excluded part of the scene, and action proceeding out of vision could be artificially contracted during the time that it was unseen. For example, once the horse ambulance had begun its approach in the master shot, a cut to a close shot of the policeman as he looked back towards the injured man would have provided an opportunity to shorten the approach time by several seconds before cutting back to it. Having concluded the digression of the injured policeman, Daring Daylight Burglary turns its attention back to the story of the burglar, and uses a familiar chase structure, with entrances being made in the background of the shot, proceeding obliquely towards the camera and leaving the frame. But the introduction of action showing the burglar escaping onto a moving train as it leaves the station, and being captured as he attempts to leave at the next station, was the first time dramatic action involving steam trains had been used in a film. It is perhaps not coincidental that the dramatic possibilities suggested by this film were not lost on Edwin Porter as he started work on The Great Train Robbery (1903).

Film editing

Back to basics – The Great Train Robbery

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Porter had learned much from the experimental optical effects of Méliès’s films and the structural innovations of English filmmakers, and he now successfully combined elements from these discoveries and introduced much that was original to produce a milestone in filmmaking history. By electing to tell a story that drew on the myths and legends of the American frontier, showing the ruthless violence and relentless retribution that helped sustain its appeal, he was establishing a

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genre and laying out the ground for thousands of films that would subsequently be made. The Great Train Robbery is also much longer than others being made then; a film of about 1,000 ft. in length with a running time of anything up to about sixteen minutes was known as a one reeler. This was the maximum length that could be conveniently loaded onto a projector at that time. Porter had made a version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) just before embarking on The Great Train Robbery and that had been slightly longer, but films of this length were epics compared to the three- and four-minute films that were then commonplace. It is instructive to consider the structure and editing of The Great Train Robbery because, although it marks an important point in the development of cinema, in some ways it also defines a point from which filmmaking was restarted. Because the film was so influential and its form widely copied, many of the experimental editing practices that had been discovered previously were to be ignored and play no part in the development of editing practice until they were rediscovered some years later. Porter’s film is constructed from fourteen scenes and each scene consists of one shot, mostly a wide shot. In 1903 there were very few precedents for filming a scene from more than one angle, for a number of reasons it would have been considered unnecessary; the filmed action would invariably include broad, dramatic movements which meant that a wide shot could include a lot of action and was the simplest, quickest and most economic way of getting a result: a matter of crucial commercial importance. The interiors were filmed in a studio and for these Porter used the frontal, theatrical staging that was common at the time. The practical reason that interiors filmed before 1910 have this flat, static staging is because, unlike exteriors, studio shots tended to be illuminated from skylights through gauze which provided a much reduced level of light. The resulting loss of depth of field made it difficult to maintain sharp focus on action staged in depth, even if the studio was large enough to construct the appropriate sets. It was something that would have been considered both costly and unnecessary. But in spite of the practical and commercial reasons for maintaining a distance between the spectator and the dramatic content, there is a lingering sense that some filmmakers were instinctively aware of the need to establish a distance from the realism that moving pictures seemed capable of producing and the, as yet unexplored, powerful psychological effects related to proximity and intimacy. The basic structure of the film is linear. Scene 1 shows the robbers entering the railroad telegraph office, holding up the operator and forcing him to instruct the arriving train’s conductor, who arrives at the office window, to arrange an unscheduled stop for water a little further down the track. The telegraph operator is then tied and gagged and the robbers leave. In fact the nature of the exchange between the operator and the conductor is far from clear and it is probable that this information would have been given verbally to the audience by the showman or a commentator who, before the establishment of inter-titles, was often a necessary part of the presentation.

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The arrival and departure of the train which is shown through the window (using a sophisticated superimposition technique borrowed from Méliès) offers an opportunity to reflect on how the scene might have been constructed if crosscutting, the stucturing method developed some years later by D. W. Griffith, had been an editing strategy available at the time. Instead of showing the arrival of the train through the window – quite a technically complicated matter – it could have been shown from the platform outside the office. The conductor, getting off and approaching the office window, would be plainly unaware that the robbers, hiding inside the office, were compelling the operator to pass false instructions. As he came closer, the spectator would begin to identify with the conductor, but knowing that the operator was being threatened. Removing the interior scene from the spectator’s view and replacing it with a view of the unsuspecting conductor would heighten the suspense by emphasising the dramatic irony in the situation. Scene 2 shows the engine stopping at the water tower and taking on water which gives the robbers the opportunity to emerge from hiding and secretly climb aboard. The need to minimise the time taken to complete the action is evident from the very small amount of water taken; until the fireman has completed his task the robbers cannot sneak onto the train without being seen. The point made earlier, about screen time being made shorter than real time by cutting to closer shots to obscure unseen action, is equally relevant here. Porter does maintain a continuity of direction by having the train enter from the right following its exit frame left in the previous shot. It is difficult to determine whether this was intentional or not, common agreement on entry and exit conventions was not to become established for some considerable time, but although there does seem to be some continuity of movement being followed, in the exteriors this might have more to do with the position of the sun than the direction of the train. Later in the film there does seem to be some confusion, at least to spectators schooled in the rigorously applied rules that have governed the direction of movement between cuts since 1930. The passengers have disembarked at gun point and are systematically robbed of their possessions. The robbers then run towards frame right, the carriages on their left, but their entry into the next shot is made into the right of frame and the carriages are now on their right suggesting that somehow they managed to get on the other side of the train. However, I suspect that nobody viewing the film in 1903 would have been troubled by the inconsistency. Scene 3 is the express car interior; the messenger is alarmed by sounds of forced entry outside the communicating door and manages to secure the strong box before throwing the key from the train. The robbers break in, shoot the messenger and, failing to find the strong box key, use a small dynamite charge to break it open and exit with the contents. It is not difficult to understand the effect of this scene on an audience unused to seeing anything like it before. Smashing doors, a

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shoot-out, death, a violent explosion and all happening as the exterior scene rushes past the open car door (more Mélies-style superimposition). Scene 4 is set on the tender facing towards the engine. The robbers climb on to the tender and threaten the engineer and fireman. A fight ensues when the fireman attacks one of the robbers with a shovel. After a struggle, the fireman falls and is viciously beaten unconscious before being thrown from the engine. The robbers then compel the engineer to stop the train. This extremely powerful scene contains elements that might be recognised from Daring Daylight Burglary: the burglar’s fight with the policeman on the roof of the house that ends with the policeman being thrown off, has some exact parallels here, particularly the substitution of a dummy using a jump-cut to obscure the switch. Of particular interest is the description of this scene in the Edison catalogue of 1904. It starts: ‘While two of the bandits have been robbing the mail car, two others climb over the tender....’3 Now, at the water tower, four bandits climbed aboard but only two broke into the express car and stole the money. The catalogue tells us that ‘meanwhile’ the other two bandits have been holding up the engineer and fighting with the fireman but the film does not show this because Porter did not know how. I think that the catalogue writer has got it right: plainly, the logical development of the robbery would be for the two events to happen at the same time. But in 1903 the possibility of cutting between two pieces of action to suggest their simultaneity had not been realised.4 Porter therefore shows them linearly and there is little doubt that this method of structure is used throughout the film. Each scene has its own separate timescale unrelated to action occurring in another scene. For anyone familiar with modern film structure, which assumes a continuous forward flow of action through time as each scene follows another, Porter’s structural method is difficult to grasp and I believe that earlier assessments of this film have failed to realise this. Scene 5, shot from the trackside, shows the locomotive coming to a stop. The robbers compel the engineer to uncouple the engine and pull further down the track. Scene 6 shows the passengers disembarking and being made to hand over their possessions, which has been mentioned above. This is the longest scene in the film and also the dullest, lasting nearly two minutes. Porter introduces a dramatic moment about half-way through when one of the passengers attempts to run away and is viciously shot down, but the repetitive business of relieving each passenger of their rings, wallets and purses, all in WS, destroys much of the tension that has been built. Let me briefly sketch in what follows. The robbers run to the, now separated, locomotive and travel further up the track near to the spot where there horses have been left in a copse. They get off the train, run down the embankment and make their way to the horses. They then mount up and ride off.

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We now come to that part of the film which earlier film historians considered to be a structurally significant innovation. We cut back to the interior of the telegraph office where the operator is lying, still tied and gagged, he attempts to drag himself to the telegraph key but collapses to the floor unconscious. His daughter arrives and eventually revives him by throwing water in his face. Now on the face of it, this does seem to suggest a fresh approach to structure, and before I expound on it further I think that I should try to clarify what is meant by cross-cutting and what is meant by parallel action. Simple cross-cutting is showing parts of two scenes that are progressing simultaneously by cutting between them. This is what the re-worked cross-cut version of Life of an American Fireman does, it shows the action as an unbroken continuity by cutting between the interior and the exterior of the burning room as the action develops: as the woman goes towards the window to call for help on the interior shot, a cut is made to the exterior showing her reaching the window and leaning out, and so on. I have already indicated that a modern handling of the scenes showing the interior of the telegraph office and the conductor getting off the train and coming to the office window might have used cross-cutting: two pieces of linked action seen from different perspectives. The two pieces of action are, of course, also happening in parallel, that is to say the action in one is known to be continuing while we are seeing the other, so we would be quite correct in describing it as parallel action, but because the events are so closely interrelated it would be unnecessary. We tend therefore to reserve the expression ‘parallel action’ to describe two areas of activity that are happening at the same time when there is no action link between them but the outcome of one is related to, or will have an effect on the other. Of course it is possible to crosscut between the two events, in which case one might say that we are cutting between two pieces of parallel action. I think that it also helps to clarify what is frankly little more than semantic emphasis, if one reserves ‘parallel action’ for situations where there is a significant geographical space between the different events. Doctor Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964) is entirely structured on parallel action as it develops between three places; the war room, the airbase and the bomber. Each time a cut is made to a different location, we observe action elsewhere that will have an effect on the development of the story, it is as if the filmmaker were saying ‘meanwhile ...’. The cut back to the telegraph office seems to do just this: the scene continues a previously seen strand of the story that will effect the outcome, and the expression ‘meanwhile’ therefore appears to be appropriate. Consequently, it has become widely accepted that it is indeed the first example of parallel action used in a film, but I do not think this was Porter’s intention at all. I believe that the audience at that time would have understood that the recovery of the telegraph operator and the arrival of his daughter was a continuation of the same scene shown previously now following its own independent time frame. There is a well-established literary

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convention whereby a writer, at a point of division in the narrative, pursues one line of events to a certain stage, then returns to the point in time when the division occured and then describes another set of events that had occured simultaneously. This convention is commonly signalled by three asterisks placed centrally between two paragraphs. So: * * * Once the bandits have left the telegraph office, the operator manages to get to his feet and attempts to raise the alarm by operating his morse key with his mouth. Unable to do so he falls to the ground. His young daughter enters with his lunch box; discovering his plight, she cuts him loose and helps him to his feet. In the local dance hall a barn dance is in progress, a ‘tenderfoot’ is discovered and made to dance a jig. Suddenly, the telegraph operator enters the hall and gives the alarm, a posse of six men leaves immediately and, it seems, instantly discover the robbers whereabouts, for they are now in pursuit; the bandits galloping towards the camera with the posse close behind. Gunshots are exchanged and one of the robbers is shot and falls from his horse. Suddenly, there appears to be a jump forward in time, we see that the three remaining bandits have now eluded the posse and are gathering to share out the spoils, not realising that their pursuers have dismounted and are creeping towards them. A final shoot-out ends with the three bandits gunned down. To a modern audience, there does seem to be something of a problem with the transition from the dance hall to the next scene where the posse are immediately in pursuit of the bandits, and although the scene carries the narrative along in an exciting way, there is a sense that some element in the story is missing at this point. The problem is not so much the fact that the posse discovers the bandits so inexplicably quickly, but because we saw them apparently get away with their illgotten gains in scene 9 (the catalogue tells us that they ‘make for the wilderness.’) we find it hard to believe that they have not got miles away during the time that it takes for the telegraph operator to be discovered by his daughter; released and revived, and go to the dance hall to give the alarm. But this is only a problem if one attempts to read the film as a single unbroken continuity. The important thing to realise is that a contemporary audience perceived it not as a single continuity but as a series of separate events shown individually, rather like a lantern show but with pictures that moved. Indeed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Porter had completed only a short time before, is constructed very like a lantern lecture, with overlapping action and inter-titles between scenes. It should also be added that The Great Train Robbery is known to exist in more than one version and consequently the exact editing order is uncertain. Cecil Hepworth provides an interesting insight into the way that individual scenes shot for a film were not necessarily considered as being solely part of that film. In his autobiography, Hepworth recalls that by 1903 a film’s length was determined by the demands of its subject, but because longer films might have to

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be cut down to make them more saleable, they continued to catalogue each scene separately, so that Alice in Wonderland (1903), which was 800 ft. long and contained seventeen scenes, was numbered in the Hepworth catalogue from 430 to 446, and that The Duchess and her Pig Baby could be purchased separately as No. 438.5 For all its merits, and they are considerable, The Great Train Robbery did not introduce cross-cutting, nor did it establish the principle of parallel editing. Certainly, anyone looking back at the film once the parallel-editing principle had been established would tend to read it in that way, but nobody would have seen it like that in 1903. If the seed of an idea was planted at that time it was not to flourish for several years.

Notes

Film editing

1 Walker, The Shattered Silents, pp. 169–70. 2 The film, described in detail in a catalogue entry, features the hold-up of the horsedrawn mail coach and robbery of the passengers. 3 From the Edison Catalogue of 1904, reproduced in Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, p. 44. 4 If any were needed, this would appear to confirm the inauthenticity of the crosscut version of Life of an American Fireman. 5 Hepworth, Came the Dawn, p. 63.

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Time and place

3

Episodes, emblems and externality The evidence seems to suggest that 1903 marked a watershed in the development of editing principles and film structure. Many of the innovations that had resulted from the experiments of the preceding period had not entered the main thrust of filmmaking practice. What had become established above all else was the notion that by editing individual scenes together a story could be told, and implicit in that arrangement was the idea of narrative continuity between scenes. The other notable developments were in the area of the chase film and the trick film which were extended beyond two- or three-shot ideas into extended narratives that progressed action between scenes with much exploitation of fantastic and comic effects. Using stop frame animation and Méliès’s films and techniques as models, and devising inventive variations on the formula of magical substitutions and jump-cuts, every kind of possibility was explored. But these films were little more than variations on a theme and the results, popular, entertaining diversions, were successful and profitable but did little to advance the creative possibilities of dramatic cinema. More serious themes were explored, Edwin Porter made two notable social justice melodramas, The Ex-Convict (1904) which used the same form as his earlier Uncle Tom’s Cabin, consisting of eight separate single-shot episodes, each with its own title, and The Kleptomaniac (1905), which told the story of two women, one rich, the other poor who are both arrested for shoplifting. The first part shows the rich woman visiting a department store and stealing trinkets, and the second, the poor, hungry woman stealing a loaf of bread. The third scene shows the court where they are both arraigned, the judge showing courtesy to the wealthy woman by allowing her to sit apart from the group of accused. Ignoring the poor woman’s pleas, he sentences her to prison, but readily accepts the defence proffered by the rich woman’s lawyer. This kind of moral tale was familiar to audiences from lantern slide lectures, and films of the period borrowed liberally from this source. Robert Paul, the English scientific instrument maker and cinema pioneer who had made Come Along Do! back in 1898, adapted a lantern slide show on a temperance subject to 49

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make Buy Your Own Cherries which he made in 1904. A simple morality tale about a drunkard’s reformation, told in six one-shot scenes with an insert of the signed pledge half-way through, from an editing standpoint its interest is solely in the manner in which the scenes are connected. With one exception, each scene is staged using the familiar theatrical framing with entrances and exits being made laterally across the plane of action. A working man gets into a dispute over his unpaid bar bill in the local public house. Returning drunk to his poorly furnished home, he argues with his wife about the inadequate meal that she has provided, and then is overcome with remorse on finding his two children cowering beneath the table, fearful of his anger. Passing a temperance hall, he is persuaded to enter and sign the pledge. A close-up of the signed pledge is followed by a scene outside the bar in which he rejects an invitation from the owner to come in for a drink, electing to buy cherries from a stall instead. We next find him as he returns to an attractively furnished home and is warmly greeted by a well-dressed wife and children. Now, more smartly attired himself, he brings presents for his children and flowers for his wife and they all sit happily, having their tea and cherries. The editing and structure of the film shows considerable awareness of the need to sustain the linear flow by cutting to each shot ahead of the developing action and also ensuring that the cutting point is made only when each new scene is already being propelled by its own existing dynamic. The drunken father leaves the bar and the owner apologises to a customer for his violent behaviour. A cut to the drunkard’s home is made as the wife is preparing a meal and the cut is made during her movement across the room as the children, hearing their father’s approach, crawl beneath the table before he enters through a door at the back of the set. Later in the film, the pledge having been signed, a cut is made to the street outside the bar, the owner greets two gentlemen as they pass her, the cut being made as both men move dynamically across the frame in conversation. The greeting is acknowledged, the men exit, and the cherry stall is swung into frame from the opposite side. Only then does the now reformed father enter the scene, and, when he leaves it, having bought his cherries, he comes obliquely towards the camera and leaves the frame close to camera right. For all its lack of sophistication, Buy Your Own Cherries contains evidence of a carefully judged sense of pace and timing that was beginning to enter some films made from this time. What is noticeable, however is that, whereas we understand the order of the scenes to be chronological, the film makes no distinction between events that follow each other immediately (the cut from the exterior to the interior of the temperance hall), those that mark a short time interval (the cut between the father leaving the bar and arriving home), and unspecific time intervals (the cuts between the close-up (CU) of the pledge certificate and his refusing to enter the bar, or between that and the final scene when he returns home with presents and flowers). Certainly, we have to infer lengthy time intervals in the latter stages

Rescued by Rover A film of particular significance which constructs a narrative by carrying action across different scenes to produce an unbroken continuity, is Rescued by Rover (1905), directed by Lewis Fitzhamon who joined the Hepworth Manufacturing Company early in 1905. Cecil Hepworth had been making fewer films himself and needed someone to take over the task of directing which would leave him free to

Time and place

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because the improvements in the family’s appearance and the furnishings inside the home are so noticeable. This does seem to confirm that both audiences and filmmakers did not need to clarify distinctions between different time frames because specific time intervals were not yet relevant to the meaning of these films. The dominant form seemed to be stories told chronologically but more usually and more importantly, episodically. The episodic form was used by William Haggar for Life of Charles Peace which he made in 1905. The film is a reconstruction of the activities which led to the arrest and execution of the notorious criminal some fifty years earlier, and has the distinction of being the earliest extant British one-reel story film. Haggar breaks the story down into eleven scenes, each identified with a title card. Eight scenes are played through in a single shot much as in Buy Your Own Cherries, but three of the scenes contain more than one shot. The first multishot scene, which is the fourth scene of the film, is simply a cut between an interior bedroom set as Peace climbs a ladder to escape the police, and the rooftop where a struggle takes place and two of the policemen are shot. The episodic structure leads on to the fifth scene, titled ‘Burglary at Blackheath’, which contains three shots. In the first, Peace escapes from attempted arrest running obliquely past the camera. A cut to another exterior shows Peace climbing into shot over a wall, then, after a struggle with another policeman, running away from the camera. A reverse angle cut follows, showing Peace now running towards the camera; this is Haggar returning to the structural invention at the end of his Desperate Poaching Affray and introducing a cut within a scene from another angle. Peace is eventually captured and taken by rail to Sheffield for trial. The ninth scene, ‘Struggle in the Railway Carriage’ shows the side of the, supposedly, moving train as Peace leans out, struggling to escape through the window. A cut to another angle, apparently taken from a window adjacent to the first one, shows Peace struggling to climb out as the train rounds a curve. He gets pulled back in, then a figure (actually a dummy) springs out of the carriage window, and a cut is made to Peace as he is pursued towards the camera; he stumbles, is caught, and taken past camera right, a reminder of the ending of Poaching Affray. This film marks a kind of transition between the episodic form, with its roots in the lantern slide show, and the move towards a sophisticated film continuity. The excitement lay in those scenes which maintained a continuous time flow across adjacent aspects of a single event.

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supervise other aspects of the business. Rescued by Rover is an action film with similarities to the successfully established chase film formula. Unlike many films made at that time it has a classic dramatic structure. Classic structure, simply related, has three parts. The first presents a situation that is balanced and contained. Then, something occurs to destroy the equilibrium, to turn the situation around and cause concern. In his excellent book on screenwriting, Syd Field refers to this event as the first plot point.1 The second phase is concerned with confronting and overcoming the various difficulties and dangers that now exist in an attempt to restore the situation to balance. At some stage during the second phase, another key event occurs which turns the story around again and moves it in a different direction; this is the second plot point. The third and final phase is concerned with achieving a resolution and restoring equilibrium. A nursemaid wheels the baby carriage containing her charge along a country walk towards a rendezvous with her soldier boyfriend. She is accosted by a passing gypsy woman but ignores her and walks on. She meets up with her soldier friend and, distracted by his attentions, is unaware that the gypsy woman has followed them and is creeping towards the baby carriage. Swiftly, and unseen, the gypsy steals the baby and makes off. This is the first plot point. At home, the child’s mother is expecting the baby’s return and is alarmed by the nursemaid’s sudden entry and distressing tale. Rover, the intelligent family dog, who has understood the cause for all the concern, slips away. Leaping through a downstairs window, and following his sixth sense, Rover sets off in search of the stolen child. He dashes down streets and swims across a river, eventually coming to a row of terraced cottages. After looking into various doorways, he finds the one he seeks and disappears within. In an upstairs room the gypsy woman enters with the baby and sits to remove its outer clothes, then placing the babe onto a bundle of grubby looking sheets on the floor, she finds a bottle of intoxicating liquor and drinks from it before settling down onto the floor to sleep. At that moment Rover enters the room; he sniffs the baby but is rudely sent away by the gypsy. Now, having located the whereabouts of the child, Rover sets off back to the family home, covering the same ground as before but in reverse. The baby’s father, having heard the tragic news, sits disconsolately in a chair uncertain what to do. But at that moment Rover enters the room and indicates that his master should follow him. Realising that the dog might have picked up the scent, the father decides to go with the dog. This is the second plot point. Rover leads the baby’s father to the cottages and the child is rescued. Back at the house the mother is waiting anxiously and is overjoyed as her husband, carrying the baby, comes in with Rover. An emotional reconciliation concludes with Rover being warmly thanked. The strengths of Rescued by Rover have much to do with its classic structure which tells a dramatic tale with a good deal of suspense. Much credit has been given to Hepworth himself for the editing of this film and I think it is important to set the record straight. In his autobiography Hepworth says very little about the

Time and place

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editing of his films and concedes that he knew ‘nothing whatever about editing’. I think that there is quite a lot of evidence that this actually was the case. We must presume that Lewis Fitzhamon had a significant part to play in the way that the film is put together, but in his book Hepworth does make a very occasional reference to a Mabel Clark who, ‘joined the “staff” as what would now be called “cutting expert”' and he also tells us that she played the part of the nursemaid in Rescued by Rover. In those early days there was very little recognition of the existence of craft skills, largely because everyone was feeling his or her way and discovering how to make progress together. Hepworth plainly valued Mabel Clark’s contribution and she is perhaps the very first film editor to be identified by name. There are various interesting aspects to the way that the film is cut; the first shot shows the nursemaid pushing the baby carriage obliquely towards the right of frame with the gypsy woman in the left foreground, as the carriage exits the frame a cut is made to what at first appears to be a reverse angle, the nursemaid entering frame left. But we quickly realise that the nursemaid is now pulling the carriage and the gypsy is in the background of this frame, awaiting her opportunity to move in as soon as the nursemaid is distracted. It is of course an outrageous piece of directorial contrivance to place the nursemaid and her soldier beyond the camera and the baby and so provide a clear view of the action. Rover’s progress is confidently handled with the dog always approaching obliquely through the shots but each shot starts with an empty frame and ends with an empty frame, a cutting practice that persisted throughout the silent period, and Rover’s lingering in a doorway of one of the cottages is overcome with a judiciously placed jump cut to speed the action, much as James Williamson had done in Stop Thief! Once again the filmmaker’s inability to conceive of contiguous action being presented in parallel becomes evident once Rover has discovered the gypsy’s home. After Rover enters the house, a cut to the upstairs room (interestingly, we automatically infer that it is upstairs in the same house) has the gypsy woman entering the shot with the baby. There then follows some extended business with the removal of the baby’s clothes; putting the baby down; finding and drinking from the bottle and finally lying down to sleep before Rover makes his entrance into the room. It seems quite evident that all this action might be described as ‘what the gypsy did when she took the baby home before Rover got there’ because any other reading begs the question ‘what has Rover been doing all this time?’. In spite of the bold flow of continuity editing that covered Rover’s journey, when it came to dealing with two separate timescales, very little had changed since The Great Train Robbery or for that matter the ‘injured policeman’ digression in Daring Daylight Burglary. A couple of small points might be mentioned. Rover’s journey to find the baby contains a close shot of him rounding a bend alongside a fence, and although the return to the house to summon help covers the same ground (both directions would have been filmed from the same camera set-up), a decision to omit the close

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shot on the return journey moves the action more swiftly into the next phase of the story. Once the father arrives outside the cottage where the baby has been hidden, Rover goes into the house. At this point the father (played by Hepworth himself) looks towards the camera and makes a gesture as if looking for confirmation from the audience, ‘In here?’; it’s an interesting moment belonging to that category of character-spectator links that we have already referred to, and with much the same intention: it reminds the audience of the narrator’s presence. A much more overt example of a film playing to the audience was made by Lewis Fitzhamon for Hepworth in 1907. That Fatal Sneeze starts with a meal being shared by a father and his young ‘son’ (played by Gertie Potter, a Hepworth regular) in which the father’s over-use of the pepper pot on the boy’s dinner causes him to sneeze uncontrollably, much to his father’s glee. An interesting transition follows – a short cut to black – presumably to suggest a time jump to a bedroom early the following day, where father is still asleep. The boy enters, and with much pantomime, looks and gestures, shows his intentions clearly to the camera by coming towards the missing fourth wall. Having liberally peppered father’s room, clothes and handkerchief, he departs just before the man wakes. A jump cut boldly omits the time taken for father to dress and the story progresses into a classic chase scenario, with every scene showing a calamity caused by the father’s apocalyptic sneezing and an increasing number of inconvenienced victims joining the chase. This direct play to the audience in That Fatal Sneeze, and the seeking of approval implicit in Hepworth’s glance and gesture in Rescued by Rover, links directly with the asides that are associated with popular theatre and the confidences that the music hall comedian shares with his audience. Film historian Nöel Burch has pointed out that, whereas in the theatre this direct look over a sea of gazes confirms the recipients as part of a group rather than as individual spectators, the glance at the camera seems ‘to call out to each member of the audience by name since the camera stands for a single point in pro-filmic space, occupied by each spectator’ (Burch’s emphasis).2 But because cinema at this period was still very much a popular entertainment medium with no dialogue to hear and much action to watch, it was expected that the audience, watching flickering pictures projected onto a white sheet in a crowded, smoky room would respond to the cinema experience collectively and noisily, and the spectator’s own individual response would be subsumed into that of the group. As the means and methods of structuring films developed, their form changed and the nature of their engagement with the audience also changed. Nöel Burch has directed attention also to the significance of the emblematic shot which appeared regularly at the beginning or end of films between 1903 and 1906. A notable example is found at the end of Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, a MCS of George Barnes, who plays the outlaw’s leader, taking aim and firing his pistol directly at the camera: and the audience, and the Edison Catalogue suggests that the shot ‘can be used to begin or end the picture’. As Burch points out,3 the

Meanwhile With so few films actually remaining in archives from this early period it is impossible to know exactly when a solution was found to the problem of how to show two things happening in parallel. Of the many thousands of fiction films that were made between 1900 and 1906 only about a thousand remain. The 100 to 1

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function of the emblematic shot was partly an attempt to emphasise character by introducing a close shot (every other shot in The Great Train Robbery is a wide shot) and partly to establish eye contact between actors and spectators. In fact the emblematic shot served a number of closely related functions; at the end of The Kleptomaniac, for example, Porter adds a shot of a blindfolded figure of Justice holding a scale. On one side of the balance is a bag of gold, on the other a loaf of bread; as the balance shifts towards the bag, the bandage is removed to reveal Justice as having just one eye which looks only at the gold. Burch mentions a similar use of the emblematic shot at the end of How a British Bulldog Saved the Union Jack (1906), which shows a close-up of the bulldog with the flag between its teeth. Using a shot in this way – to point a moral or summarise the story, has the effect of making a clear division between the fictional tale and its telling. Rescued by Rover uses the device not only in the instance already mentioned – the father looking to the audience for confirmation – but at the beginning and the end of the film. The film opens with a close shot showing the baby lying on a cushion with Rover sitting behind, guarding. It ends with a medium shot of the family re-united, a kind of concluding summary. Barry Salt draws attention to the opening shot in Raid on a Coiner’s Den (Alf Collins, 1904), which shows a close-up with three hands coming into the frame from different directions, one holding a pistol, another with a clenched fist and the third having a policeman’s striped sleeve-band – the hand holding hand-cuffs.4 Buy Your Own Cherries contains something similar – the signed pledge – the pack-shot for a commercial selling temperance: which is what the film is. Emblematic shots at the beginning and end of films developed in two ways; the move or cut into a closer framing at the end, by placing the spectator in closer proximity with the characters in a concluding tableaux, assisted identification with a satisfactory resolution, a kind of narrator’s signature. Its other development was into a specific, always visually appropriate, opening title sequence. It tended to be separate from the film itself, like the title pages of a book (an image which became very popular), it gradually led into the start of the film which, not uncommonly, might begin with a superimposed printed text describing the historical context in which the story was set. This kind of opening, very common in films made during the 1930s and 1940s (and often wickedly parodied since), was another way of marking a narrator’s presence and interestingly, it was to disappear in later years as the presence of the filmmaker/narrator became more obscured.5

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Shot, made by The Vitagraph Company in 1906, seems to be the earliest known example of a film that establishes a single continuity, showing related events occurring in two different places, and cutting between them. The film tells the story of a young woman and her father who are facing eviction from their home. The young woman’s fiancé goes to a race-track and places a bet on an outsider: the 100–to-1-shot of the title. The horse wins, and the young man races home, arriving just in time to pay off the debt. The first shot shows the interior of the family home with the father and daughter being threatened with eviction. The daughter’s fiancé then leaves, and a series of shots show him pawning his pocket-watch, arriving at the race-track and literally picking up a hot tip. A bet is placed at 100:1, the race is run and the hero wins the money that will pay off the debt. Hurriedly boarding a taxi, he sets off home. A cut back to the house interior finds the father arriving home in despair, still unable to raise the money. The landlord and bailiffs then arrive to carry out the eviction. A cut to the outside then shows the taxi approaching, and the camera pans with it as it arrives at the house. A cut back to the interior is then made as the hero enters the room and saves the day. There can be little doubt that this method of construction does retain some elements of the episodic; the cut between the hero pawning his watch and coming out with the money, is a straight jump forward in time which would be scrupulously avoided some years later when this kind of transition had either to be signalled by a lap dissolve or obscured by a cut back to the home to sustain a sense of continuity. We should recognise that the way that The 100 to 1 Shot is structured is not the result of a sudden realisation that cross-cutting would enable two aspects of a story to be shown at the same time, or that arranging scenes in this order would produce a single continuity. I think it happened because the story could not be told any other way and the creative possibilities only became evident afterwards. If it began from a simple need to show two related events by alternating between them, perhaps the first unexpected realisation was that by omitting sections of dramatic action it was possible to maintain the sense of a single continuity. The second, was that by alternating between two unresolved events a tension would be generated in the spectator until the outcome was known, and an unresolved situation is suspenseful. All these speculative conclusions were most unlikely to have sprung directly from filmmakers viewing The 100 to 1 Shot, but the seeds were there. In charting the gradual changes that affected film structure, it is helpful to examine those films that seem to demonstrate the growing awareness of untried possibilities. These filmmakers could not have any idea of how films would look in the future, like any explorer, they were content to see where the next step led, and if they happened across something that was different, it was natural to respond by thinking, ‘That’s interesting, that’s new; perhaps I can use that.’ Examples of films made during this period are scarce, but a film that Ferdinand Zecca made for Pathé in 1907, Le Cheval emballé, seems to suggest that by that date

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Field, Screenplay, pp. 7–13. Burch, ‘How We Got into Pictures’. Burch, Life to those Shadows, pp. 193–6. Salt, Film Style and Technology, History and Analysis, p. 55. By the end of the 1990s, many American films were presented with the title and the opening credits removed from the front of the film entirely and placed at the beginning of the end credits.

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films were telling stories as single progressing continuities as a matter of course, both film time and real time moved steadily forward in one direction (unless some obvious, vignetted superimposition made reference to another timescale), and cross-cutting between two simultaneous events was the usual way of relating them. Le Cheval emballé is a standard chase film of the period and its chase structure, which occupies the long central section, follows a predictable form. The beginning is of particular interest in that it cross-cuts between a delivery man occupied with customers in a block of flats, and his horse, who steadily consumes a vast quantity of oats from a grain merchant’s stock in the street below. This example of suspenseful cross-cutting – the delivery man unaware of a potentially calamitous situation and the horse getting further and further down the sack – trades successfully on the dramatic irony of the situation. Tension rises every time the delivery man is delayed in his progress back to the street. Because the spectators accept that the two events are occurring within one continuous time frame they can identify with the anticipated outcome: they start to care about what will happen. To return briefly to the classic dramatic structure discussed earlier, the horse starting to eat the oats is the first plot point; the equilibrium is upset and the outcome uncertain. Zecca develops the chase with considerable invention as the run-away horse causes a succession of disasters before returning to the street outside the stable yard. The horse, still attached to his cart, then moves forward, through the stableyard gates, and a cut is made to a closer shot of the action. At the cutting point, the horse enters the closer framing and continues the right to left movement towards his stable door and starts to enter. At that point, a cut to the stable interior occurs on the movement and, as the straps that secured him to the shafts are ‘magically’ released, the horse enters the stable. By any accounts, this is fairly remarkable stuff, suggesting perhaps that this kind of continuity editing was now well established; that the innovative reverse angle cutting of James Williamson and William Haggar had become commonplace. But that was not the case at all. These continuity linkages between shots would not become widely adopted for several years. Le Cheval emballé was completed at the end of 1907 and was released in America at the beginning of 1908. It was the year that David Wark Griffith made his first film.

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4

Identification

Looking into the mirror Two notable tendencies thread their way in and out of the great variety of film subjects that filmmakers used during this pioneering period, one was concerned with the taking apart of a body and putting it back together, the other was a fascination with the idea of pictures that could take on a life of their own. Given that the vast majority of films made at the time have disappeared completely, we might conclude from the prevalence of these subjects in the films that are available for study, that these concerns occupied the minds of filmmakers well beyond simple camera tricks and illusions. A film made in Britain in 1903, An Animated Picture Studio, shows a dancer (thought to be Isadora Duncan) being shown an animated image of herself dancing. Standing next to her are the proprietor of the studio and his technician. All is well until they see an image of the proprietor enter the picture frame and begin to seduce her, at which point she angrily knocks the animated picture to the ground. They all stand astonished as the fallen picture continues to portray the embarrassing scene. Here is a clear reference to a moving picture taking on a life of its own; revealing hidden fantasies and resisting attempts to control it. Méliès made at least one very similar film in 1909, called The Mysterious Portrait, it shows Méliès himself sitting to one side of a large picture frame which is empty apart from a black background. His gestures produce a life-size portrait of himself which gradually comes into focus. It then animates, allowing the two Méliès to engage in delighted confrontation: a moving picture in which identification could not be more explicit. Somehow there seemed to exist anxieties about the potency of moving pictures and their capacity to affect people’s lives; that perhaps films could invade our unconscious selves. Certainly there was much evidence that audiences wanted to engage with these magical representations of reality, the more real it seemed, the more the spectator could identify with the characters that inhabited this cinematic world. As actor Michael Caine once put it, ‘As an actor you don’t hold up a picture and say, “this is me”, you hold up a mirror and say, “this is you”.’1

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The strange power of attraction possessed by the motion picture lies in the semblance of reality which the pictures convey; that by means of this impression of reality the motion picture exerts on the minds of the spectators an influence akin to hypnotism or magnetism by visual suggestion; that this sort of limited hypnotic influence is capable of more powerful exertion through the medium of motion pictures than is possible in any sort of stage production or in printed fact or fiction, and

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It has been pursuasively argued that the other common theme, the taking apart and reconstitution of bodies, may have its roots in infantile psychological fantasies,2 but it must also refer to a fascination with the ability to achieve the seemingly impossible, the fragmentation of the body and its complete reconstitution invisibly; the joins are not seen. For the audience at that time, this was an extension of a stage illusionism that provided amazement and wonder, they knew that it had to be a trick but did not know how it was done (and probably did not care). For the filmmaker it opened up possibilities of cutting up and rejoining, which manipulated a different kind of invisibility, one that conveyed an illusion of a whole that was actually made from individual parts. If the parts appeared to be inseparable from the whole body, then they were what they seemed: it was not just a clever trick, it was a way of constructing a believable reality. Somehow, I respond more to the idea that the process was not so much about fragmentation but reconstitution: the power to make a whole from parts. Examples occur in dozens of early trick films like The Haunted Curiosity Shop (Blackton, USA 1901) in which the proprietor witnesses a floating head become a woman’s torso, which is then joined to a skirted lower trunk which enters the scene: the complete woman then spins around to demonstrate her solidity. In A Mystic Re-incarnation (Biograph, USA 1902) the head, limbs and torso of a woman’s body are conjured up and placed together with some clothes on the ground: they ‘magically’ turn into a bemused young woman who rises as if waking from a dream. (Méliès’s version of this film, Illusions funambulesques (1903), has the re-constituted woman kiss him to demonstrate her solidarity. ) A final, rather different example is The Good Veteran and the Children (Gaumont, France 1908). This has an elderly war veteran seated on a park bench surrounded by children. He good-naturedly allows them to remove his head and limbs for a ball game. The game over, his parts are restored and he cheerily waves them goodbye. The fantasy is made real again. Something important needs to be said here. Trick films are more than just an entertaining means of playing with an illusion of time and space, they are also a desperate need to demonstrate that what you see is not reality; to keep saying again and again, ‘You know this is impossible, a trick; in the real world these things can’t happen: films are films, not reality.’ Yet, at the same time, filmmaking was being urged towards constructing an even more believable reality. Frank Woods, an influential critic who wrote for the New York Dramatic Mirror under the pseudonym ‘Spectator’, wrote the following in May 1910:

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that it is therefore the part of wisdom to cultivate absolute realism in every department of the motion picture art.

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What seemed to be important, at least to certain practitioners, was that, provided the means of producing this impression of reality were transparent, a distance remained between the reproduction and the process; the filmmaker/narrator’s presence was evident and the audience stayed in control. The nature of filmic presentation during these early years was acknowledged as being a show, and a show that told a story implied a narrator, in this instance the filmmaker. It would be several years before the narrator’s presence became subsumed beneath a structuring system that seemed to give motion pictures a self-sustaining, dynamic existence of their own.

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Sustaining the narrator system

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Making a detailed assessment of the structural and editing developments in filmmaking during what was perhaps one of the industry’s most creative periods is fraught with difficulty. In 1908 there were ten major film-producing companies in America and numerous independents each producing several one-reelers a week. Barry Salt has estimated that of films made in America between 1907 and 1913 only about a thousand still exist, and 457 of these were made by D. W. Griffith for The Biograph Company. Given that the Vitagraph company had a larger output than Biograph throughout that period and that only a handful of their films remain, it quickly becomes evident that the scope for comparison is rather limited, to say the least. The fact that all the films made by Griffith during his five years with Biograph are available for study, not only enables a close analysis of the development of Griffith himself but might also be seen as referring to the work of his contemporaries, as undoubtedly the developments in content, form and structure made by one group of filmmakers would certainly have influenced others. David Wark Griffith was an actor and writer of questionable ability who worked for Biograph during the early part of 1908 selling story outlines and appearing in one-reelers. Biograph were having financial difficulties and their vice-president and general manager, Henry Norton Marvin, felt the need to try to improve the studio’s position. Marvin realised that the quality of the films that they we making could be better. The previous head of production at Biograph, 'Old Man’ Wallace McCutcheon, had recently retired and his son, Wallace jnr, had a preference for theatre work and was only prepared to make one film a week. Henry Marvin needed another director. In those early days the division between the performances of the actors and the technical process of filming of the scenes was largely separate. The cameramen saw their role as the principally creative one, the director’s role being to rehearse the actors in the scene until it was felt that they were ready to be filmed when the cameraman would take over, lighting the scene and determining how the action

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should be composed and framed. The two Biograph cameramen were G. W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer and Arthur Marvin, brother of Henry. Griffith’s energetic involvement with the films that he had worked on had impressed Arthur Marvin and he recommended him to his brother as a possible director. Griffith, who had never even directed a play before, approached the task with caution, requesting guarantees that he could continue to work for the company if his trial film turned out to be a flop. The Adventures of Dollie (1908) was fairly typical of the stories that were being made as one-reelers and has some similarities with the beginning of Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover. Children being stolen by gypsies was a common theme at the time, only varied by the methods used to prolong the central section before the family is re-united. Little Dollie is hidden by the gypsies in a barrel which falls from the back of their cart as it fords a river. The barrel is carried away by the current over waterfalls and rapids and finally comes to rest in a quiet backwater. Brought ashore by two boys who are fishing, the father is called and Dollie is released into the arms of her family, none the worse for her experience. Structurally, the film follows the now well-established pattern of following events scene by scene as the story unfolds. Each scene consists of one shot which links action to the next, there is no intercutting and each scene is held until the action it contains is completed. Given that Griffith had not made a film before, there is a suggestion that Arthur Marvin, who shot the film, was able to provide some valuable guidance. The subject of the film, one in which a vulnerable person is put in jeopardy by bad individuals and who is saved by circumstances outside their control, was used with variations time and again by Griffith. Threats to family life were a common and significant theme in 1908, no less than in Fatal Attraction eighty years later. Griffith’s first film was well received by Biograph, and Henry Marvin immediately set him to work on other projects so that by the time it opened to the public on 14 July 1908 he had completed five films. The speed with which these one-reelers had to be turned out was exceptional by any standards and consequently the quality varied enormously. The average was two ten-minute films a week, and between June and December Griffith shot sixty-one. The following year he shot a phenomenal 141 one-reelers, the modern equivalent of twenty-three full-length feature films, before slowing down to a steady rate of about half that number in subsequent years. Griffith has been described as, ‘an overworked employee of a company engaged in illegal restraint of trade, for whom he produced an average of nearly two films a week over a five year period.’3 Griffith himself was only too conscious of the pressures of trying to make films with too little money and too little time and likened the process to churning out sausages in a sausage factory. Working at such a pace, only a small proportion of the films contain evidence of a developing style; but what seems to be clear is that he constantly looked for opportunities to try out new ideas and develop further those experiments that had proved successful.

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In 1944, Seymour Stern, Griffith’s authorised biographer, was commissioned by the BFI to compile an index of Griffith’s work. In the introduction he says:

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Most of the Biograph shorts were the stock-in-trade market-junk of the period and have no significance, technically or ideologically, but the important ones are very important.

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The task is to identify the important ones and draw some conclusions from them. Although Griffith was quick to learn and ready to experiment he was only prepared to do so on his own terms. His Biograph films are notably conservative in respect of the advances that had been made prior to 1908. All the evidence seems to suggest that he was only interested in using a technical device if he could see how it would contribute to the dramatic needs of the story. On the day that The Adventures of Dollie opened in Union Square, New York, Griffith started work on his sixth film The Greaser’s Gauntlet. A young Mexican, Jose, leaves his home to find work in the United States. He visits a crowded bar and is framed as a thief by a villainous Chinese waiter. Caught, and nearly lynched, he is saved by Mildred, a young American girl to whom he vows eternal gratitude. Inevitably, Mildred falls into the clutches of the villains and is finally rescued by Jose: now she can express her gratitude in return. Griffith’s instinctive sense of structure is manifested in the decision to start and end the film with a scenic shot which shows the hero first setting forth into the dramatic structure of the film, and finally returning to the point that he started, his adventure over. This device, like so many that Griffith evolved, evokes the presence of himself as narrator. The shot identifies itself as a beginning, preparing the audience for the narrative that will be carefully shaped from this point. Used again as the final shot, it provides a symmetry that suggests a conclusion without finality; an elegant and satisfying end to the film. The Greaser’s Gauntlet also exemplifies the difficulty of attempting to portray subtleties of action relevant to the story without the use of inserts. The scene in which Jose enters the bar is a busy wide shot showing the whole setting populated with characters and extras. It is during this scene – a one-shot scene – that the Chinese waiter picks the pocket of a cowboy, takes the money from the neckerchief containing it, and then plants the incriminating scarf on Jose. Because the details of this action are not isolated by the use of closer shots, there is no way that the gaze of the spectator can be directed towards what is relevant in the scene. To some extent this points up the difficulties of attempting to tell a story which relies on details to advance the plot without having access to conventions which make it possible.4 But it is not as if Griffith was unaware of the advantages of cutting in closer to the action, because later in The Greaser’s Gauntlet he actually does cut in from a wide shot for the first time. This kind of cut in to a closer framing, which is sometimes referred to as a ‘cut in on the axis’ (the axis between the subject and the camera) was not new, having been first used in Mary Jane’s Mishap some years earlier. Here, Griffith uses it following Jose’s rescue from the lynch mob. Jose and

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Mildred face each other in profile and he gives her the embroidered gauntlet as a token of his gratitude. At one level the use of the closer shot can be read as a desire to clarify the action, but there is an emotional reason as well, by placing the characters closer to the spectator their facial expressions can be read more clearly and a greater degree of identification results. It is likely that the basic form of cross-cutting between parallel events which occur in Vitagraph’s The 100 to 1 Shot (1906) and Pathé’s Le Cheval emballé (1907) which was released in America at the beginning of 1908, were seen by Griffith. In fact, as Barry Salt has pointed out, The Curtain Pole, a comedy which Griffith made in October 1908, contains action quite closely based on the Pathé film. Salt also refers to the use of cross-cutting in a Biograph film, Her First Adventure, which Wallace McCutcheon jnr made in May 1908 when Griffith was working for Biograph as an actor. This film cross-cuts action between a kidnapped child, her captors, and those pursuing them further back down the various streets.5 Griffith introduced the principle of cutting between two parallel events for the first time in The Greaser’s Gauntlet. Once the mob has dragged Jose from the barroom, instead of continuing to follow this action, Griffith cuts to a corridor where the Chinese waiter has retired to count the money he has stolen. Then, having returned briefly to show the progress of the lynching party, he returns to the corridor to show Mildred (whom we saw first in the bar-room) observing the real culprit and realising what has occurred, dashing to the rescue. Griffith then cuts to the mob arriving at the lynching tree and then, as Jose has the noose placed round his neck, to Mildred running down the street. A final cut is made to the tree to see Jose briefly strung up before Mildred dashes in with the truth of his innocence. Griffith took the dramatic possibilities inherent in this form further than anyone else. His next experiments with cross-cutting appear in The Fatal Hour, his ninth film made in July 1908. A young woman reporter investigating a whiteslave racket has been caught by the villains. They tie her to a bed with a gun pointing at her, and this is rigged to a large clock which ticks steadily towards 12 o’clock when the gun is set to fire. Her whereabouts having been discovered, her rescuers race to the location, saving her in the nick of time. By cutting between the heroine’s desperate attempts to get free, close-up inserts of the clock face and the rescuers racing towards her, Griffith created suspense by cross-cutting as it had never been achieved before. He also discovered that the alternation between events enabled successive shots to be of lengths which could be determined in the editing and which were not necessarily dictated by the amount of action contained within the shot. Griffith seems also to have evolved a feeling for relative space between shots which is exemplified by placing the heroine, bound to the bed, on the right side of the frame facing left, and organised the flow of the rescuers obliquely from far left to near right so that they move – literally – towards her. The Fatal Hour was the first example of what became known as ‘the Griffith last-minute rescue’ used by him and others, hundreds of times in the ensuing years.

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What Griffith had confirmed was that the audience could imagine missing action. When cutting from one situation to another, the out-of-vision event was considered to have continued. This provided the filmmaker with the opportunity to elect which parts of the action to show. Key actions would be included and those sections of activity which necessarily linked them but were dramatically uninteresting would be excluded. Consider how Griffith might have edited sections of The Great Train Robbery.

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Int: the express car Two bandits force their way in and shoot the Messenger who falls to the ground. Ext: the locomotive and tender The fireman climbs on to the tender to confront the other two bandits with a shovel. A hand-to-hand fight begins. Int: the express car One of the bandits is searching for the strong-box key. Failing to find it he prepares to dynamite the strong-box. Ext: the locomotive and tender The fight climaxes and the fireman is struck on the head with a lump of coal and falls down senseless. Int: the express car The strong-box blows open and the bandits start to collect the money. Ext: the locomotive and tender The unconscious fireman is picked up and thrown from the tender as the engineer is forced to stop the train. And while we are being fanciful, how about this: Ext: train: row of stationary carriages Passengers are forced to leave the carriages at gun point. The bandits start to rob them. Int: telegraph office. The operator drags himself to the telegraph key and, failing to operate it, falls to the ground. The door opens and his daughter enters and runs to him.

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Ext Train: row of stationary carriages The bandits continue to rob the passengers. One of them runs towards the camera and is shot, falling to the ground.

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Int: telegraph office. The Operator removes the last of his bonds and leaves with his daughter.

Ext. Train: row of stationary carriages. The bandits finish their task and run towards the engine. Int: a dance hall. A barn dance is in progress and a tenderfoot is made to dance.

Int: a dance hall. The door of the hall suddenly opens and the operator stumbles in to give the alarm. A posse of six men leaves immediately. Ext: another section of the track. The locomotive stops and the bandits run down the embankment. Ext: A Copse at the bottom of the embankment. The bandits make for their horses and ride off. Ext: a track through the woods. The bandits are being pursued by the posse, one of them is shot and falls from his horse, etc. It is worth speculating as to why audiences readily accepted the abstract presentation of two parallel events as being related in time and space. The psychology of perception has been explored through numerous experiments which demonstrate that we have an innate need to organise shapes in space so that they accord with an understanding of reality which is familiar and meaningful. We assume a logical relationship so that we can make sense of what we see. Once we presume an intention to convey meaning, we seek to discover what that is by applying a set of possible codes. A simple example might be found in the way that Grandma's Reading Glass was constructed. The boy looks through the magnifying glass at the bird-cage in the MS and the vignetted close-up of the bird which immediately follows is taken to be an image of what he sees. Parenthetically, the difficulty that one might have with appreciating a piece of abstract art – failing to understand the artist’s motives and methods, might well render it meaningless. Comprehension would depend on an understanding of the communication codes forming part of the artist’s creative intention. Most of Griffith’s experiments during the Biograph period explore this essentially filmic method of communication. In The Medicine Bottle (Feb. 1909), he cuts between three locations. A mother is visiting friends when she discovers that instead of the medicine which she believes she has left behind for her daughter to give her sick grandmother, she has mistakenly left a bottle of poison. She attempts to make an urgent telephone call to her daughter to warn her, but the inattentive operators at the exchange are indifferent to her haste. Meanwhile the daughter is dutifully preparing the fatal dose. Here the drama is constructed between three

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Ext: the locomotive. The bandits climb aboard the uncoupled locomotive which moves up the track.

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static scenes which are associated only in terms of our understanding, there is no desperate race to the rescue, Griffith, as narrator, controls the tension and suspense by determining the order, length and content of each shot. Whereas The Fatal Hour was constructed as a straightforward intercutting of two events proceeding without interruption to a conclusion, Griffith soon realised the dramatic potential of including frustrations and delays to increase the suspense. In The Medicine Bottle for example, the daughter, about to feed the poison to her grandmother, spills the contents of the spoon and has to start again. This need to sustain extended action, occasionally produced an imbalance which stretches credibility. The climax of The Drive for Life (Jan. 1909) concerns a race to prevent a young woman eating from a box of poisoned chocolates. From the point when the hero, having learned about the poisoned chocolates, sets off with his chauffeur to drive to his fianceé’s house, there are eighteen shots. The first three show the car moving off and making progress. The fourth shows the chocolates being delivered at the house, then, after a further shot of the car racing past, we come to shot six as Mignon, watched by her mother and sisters, starts to open the package. The next two shots show the car passing and then stopping for both men to get out and adjust the engine, then getting back in and driving on. Credibility is rather stretched on finding that by the next shot, number nine, the young woman has yet to open the box. During the next eight shots the car travels relentlessly on, smashing through a toll gate, crashing into a carriage, racing through shot after shot until it reaches Mignon’s drive. Meanwhile Griffith intercuts just about everything that it is possible to do with a chocolate apart from eat it. Chocolates are held teasingly to the lips, kissed and replaced, are taken out by a sister and held to Mignon’s mouth; chocolates thus poised are then dropped to the floor and picked up, then finally handed round to the entire family just as the hero makes his life-saving entrance. This imbalance was not lost on the audience nor on perceptive critics such as Frank Woods of the New York Dramatic Mirror who correctly identified the source of the problem in his Mirror review, ‘either the chase is too long or the act of eating the candy is commenced too early in the picture’. Frank Woods also identified the same problem in The Lonely Villa which Griffith shot in April and May 1909. Perhaps one of the most celebrated of Griffith’s race-to-the-rescue pictures, The Lonely Villa bears a remarkable similarity to a Pathé film, The Physician of the Castle released in the United States in March 1909 under the title A Narrow Escape. It does seem likely that Griffith used the Pathé film as a model for The Lonely Villa, as the similarities are remarkable, but the evidence is that in doing so he learned from the process as well, improving substantially on the Pathé original and applying these innovations in his subsequent work. The Physician of the Castle starts with two villains planning to lure a doctor away from his home with a false message. Once he has set off with his chauffeur they plan to break in; secure the wife and her son and then rob the house. The young son, having observed the villains

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overpower the maid from a window, warns his mother and they move between rooms, locking and barricading them with furniture. The doctor’s wife finds the message and telephones the castle shortly after the doctor has arrived and learned that the message was false. Immediately, he races home and, picking up two policemen on the journey, arrives just as the villains break into the study where the wife and son are hiding. The Physician of the Castle is principally structured from scenes built from a linear series of shots, in fact there is only one point where there is intercutting between different locations – during the close-up telephone conversation between the doctor and his wife. (The framing of these two shots as close-ups is exceptional, and interestingly not used by Griffith in The Lonely Villa. ) The first twelve shots advance the plot sequentially up to the point when the boy and his mother barricade the first door, then an inter-title – ‘Arriving at the Castle’ precedes two shots in which the doctor’s car enters the gates and he is taken in to join his patient’s family. Then after the telephone conversation, there is a sequence of five linked shots showing the departure, the collection of the policemen and the journey home before the shot in which the villains are caught and restrained. The Pathé film runs about seven minutes and contains thirty shots, The Lonely Villa is much longer at about twelve minutes and contains fifty-two shots, but Griffith intercuts much more and introduces delays and other frustrations to strengthen the suspense. Unlike the Pathé film, which starts outside a café with the two villains plotting, The Lonely Villa establishes the family house in the first shot, with three villains crouched in the left foreground. The fake note is delivered; the servants are given the day off, thus isolating the wife and daughters after the doctor’s departure and obviating any need to deal with their presence, and whereas the Pathé villains pay to have their message sent officially, here the bearer of the message is in league with the robbers, and is thus able secretly to remove the bullets from a revolver that the doctor leaves with his wife prior to his departure. By introducing the plot device of having the car break down near to an inn, Griffith contrives that the doctor never reaches his destination. From the inn, the doctor telephones his wife, but on learning of their plight, he is suddenly cut off when one of the robbers cuts the phone line outside the villa. The car being unusable, he borrows a horsedrawn waggon and assistance from a group of gypsies in which to make his dash to the rescue. The changes and improvements in content are substantial but the main difference is in the intercutting. From the point where the telephone rings in the Villa, Griffith intercuts shots alternately between the doctor and the family – and twice to the villains breaking in and cutting the telephone line – a total of seventeen shots. The climax of the film uses the same alternation, intercutting between the robbers and the family with brief cuts to the doctor’s horsedrawn progress.

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Facing the front

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Fundamental to his structural style was a rigid retention of the staging that had existed since the beginning, what has been described as the bounded shot, designed to show the full length of a standing figure inside an unmoving frame. (In fact Griffith tightened his framing throughout the Biograph period, and framing that in 1909 was cutting the figure below the knee had, by 1913, moved in to cut at the hip and waist. There is strong evidence that films being made by Vitagraph at this time led the way towards closer framing. ) Interior staging required that the camera was positioned so that walls, usually containing doors, coincided with the edges of the frame. It would be fixed in terms of camera movement; entrances would be made from the sides and occasionally from a door in the back of the set. Partly this was a matter of devising a quick and simple practical working method in studio spaces which offered little opportunity for anything else. These interiors would sometimes be shot with the space divided into two halves with actors moving between adjacent spaces and cuts made between each shot. This developed into a structuring method which involved connecting doors and hallways with movement between. The Lonely Villa well demonstrates the dramatic power that Griffth developed from this kind of staging: as the robbers succeed in breaking down a door the family takes refuge in an adjoining room and shots are intercut between the two spaces so that the tension builds at the edges of the frame. This structuring preference was central to Griffith’s frontal method and he retained it well beyond his Biograph period which ended in 1913. Exterior staging tended to be very similar, although towards the end of the Biograph period the opportunities offered by working in three-dimensional space led to some more flexible structures. Action would take place in depth, with movement towards and away from the foreground and changes of angle began to be used from 1911. But Griffith came to these devices only slowly and retained a preference for frontal staging throughout. Varying camera angles on interiors were rare and Griffith’s main method of scene dissection was the cut in on the axis to a closer framing. During the early Biograph years, this would usually be restricted to cutting in from a wide shot to a closer shot but from 1912, closer framing generally, and in particular cutting from a wider to a medium close shot, became more common. What Griffith demonstrated above all else was that continuity and impact of action are created in the cinema and that meaningful relationships between successive shots are automatically inferred. Once this became established as part of the cinematic code, a whole range of possibilities followed. Editing could imply associations and contrasts which the content and context clarified. In A Corner of Wheat (Sept. 1909), a farmer fails to sell his wheat at market because the price has been controlled by a wheat tycoon who corners the market. At one point, the film cuts between the poor being turned away from a bread line because they cannot afford the increased price, and a shot of the wheat baron giving a sumptuous,

Notes 1 During an interview for the ITV television series Lights, Camera, Action!, transmitted in 1995. 2 Burch, ‘How we got into Pictures’. 3 Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 49. 4 It might seem to be a measure of Griffith’s inexperience that he was unaware of the need to show details of action in order to clarify the narrative in what was only his sixth film, but he also fails to isolate a key piece of business, a drug being put into drink, in The Musketeers of Pig Alley made in 1912. 5 Salt, Film Style and Technology, History and Analysis, p. 111.

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celebratory dinner to his wealthy friends, who toast his success. In this film Griffith also creates a deliberate symmetry by showing two farmers preceding their horses as they sow wheat in a picturesque opening shot, based on Millet’s painting The Sowers, and ending the film with the younger farmer sowing alone. A more daring juxtaposition occurs in After Many Years (Sept. - Oct. 1908), where Griffith cuts from a shot of a shipwrecked husband on a deserted island, looking up from a locket held in his hand, to a close shot of his wife standing on their porch, her arm reaching out to him – a reference to a wider shot from the beginning of the film – which offers an immediate associative link, its meaning made evident from the context. Once the notion of codified linkage was established, Griffith was able to build film structures to almost unlimited lengths, eventually stretching the creative possibilities to the limit with Intolerance in 1916. What seems to be clear from an analysis of Griffith’s structural devices is that, seen from a point in history many decades later, one is struck by the way that in spite of all the cinematic innovations which he developed and established, he still chose to limit many of the possibilities available to him. There are puzzling aspects to Griffith’s character; basically a man of conservative restraint with clear-cut ideas about the need to produce an essentially popular and commercially successful body of work, he proceeded by instinct rather than by planning, building the content of scenes in rehearsals until he felt they were ready to film and apparently never working from a script but carrying his ideas only in his head. He would always trust his intuitive feeling in exploring possibilities and was wary of adopting too quickly the innovations that were appearing in the films of others, possibly because he mistrusted anything that challenged his instinctive response. It seems that he wanted his films to carry his own particular mark and structured them so that they retained the visibility of his own method. Looking at the films which he made during the Biograph period and the years that followed, certain patterns emerge which suggest that Griffith had a very clear idea of the need to preserve what he saw as the narrator’s presence, in the process he pioneered a range of possibilities which other filmmakers took much further and similarly marked them with their own originality.

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5

A world of difference

Industrial growth Looking so intently at the work of D. W. Griffith during the crucial years of 1908 to 1913 runs the risk of losing sight of the wood for the trees. During this period, in Europe as well as America, enormous developments took place in the production, distribution and exhibition of films. In December 1908, Biograph had finally joined with eight major production companies, Edison, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig, Lubin, Pathé Frères and Méliès who, together with the Kleine Optical Company, a major importer of films, formed The Motion Picture Patents Company. The Patents combine controlled most of the important film patents covering film, cameras and projectors, and was formed with the intention of protecting their monopoly from independent operators and so dominate the market. The independents fought back, and continued to establish themselves as a major force in the industry in spite of a series of damaging lawsuits which benefited neither side. By 1912 the Patents Company’s share of film production and imports, had fallen to slightly more than half, the so-called independents, who were also importing and making all the feature films of three reels and more, accounted for the rest. Eventually, in 1915, after years of struggle the federal court declared the Motion Pictures Patents Company an illegal conspiracy in the restraint of trade, but by then it was little more than endorsing what had already been accepted: the business was now wide open. Before the outbreak of the First World War, filmmaking had become a huge growth industry in both America and Europe. In France, Pathé Frères was the largest motion picture producer and also exporter of films, to America and especially to Britain, where 40 per cent of the new films released there were made by the French company – imported American films accounting for 30 per cent of the rest.1 During these years, Pathé’s vast empire assured France an almost total domination of world cinema: in America some nickelodeons only showed Pathé films. By 1914 the organisation was employing five thousand people, and had pioneered the practice of an industrialised basis for filmmaking. If Pathé and Méliès dominated the market in the area of comedies and fantasy films, an attempt to appeal to a more selective audience was established in 1907 70

Epic scale Italian film production grew phenomenally during these years, with subjects that called for huge resources and which returned equally large profits to the businessmen and financiers who backed them. In 1913, two hundred Italian studios were turning out three films a day for an ever growing international market; Quo Vadis?, and two rival versions of The Last Days of Pompeii, featuring thousands of extras and vast three-dimensional sets, were all produced that same year. Nine reels in length, and a spectacle of epic proportions, Quo Vadis? returned its producers a profit twenty times their original investment.

A world of difference

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by a company calling itself the Société Film d’Art. The intention was to bring together the most important playwrights, directors, actors, composers and painters of the period and introduce the classical qualities of the theatre into film. Their first production, The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (L’Assassinat Duc de Guise), made in 1908, featured actors from the Comédie Française and incidental music by Saint-Saëns (the first written for a film). Although marking a move backwards towards theatricality in terms of staging and performance, the shooting and editing of the scenes adopted the usual method of cuts following the action between adjacent spaces. What was new, and unlike most American staging at the time, was that cuts were made from action going away through a doorway at the back of the set, to the same action now seen approaching – entering the setting previously glimpsed through the doorway at the back of the outgoing shot, a change of camera angle through 180°. 2 This produced a sense of depth and three-dimensional space much more related to reality than anything possible in the theatre, and its use may well have evolved directly from the unique ability of film to make seemingly real links between spaces that are actually unrelated. But Film d’Art productions for all their grandeur of scale continued to adopt the episodic, single-scene structure not so different from Zecca’s Histoire d’un crime made in 1901. Admittedly, the epic subject-matter often necessitated an episodic form, but Film d’Art’s Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la Reine Elizabeth) made in 1912 was a far cry from the dramatic suspense and emotional involvement achieved by the editing structure commonly found in Griffith’s one-reelers. Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt as the Queen, was the first Film d’Art to be shown in America, and the first feature film. With a running time of fiftythree minutes, it contained only twenty-three one-shot scenes. Griffith’s The Sands of Dee, a rural tragedy of mistaken love, made in May 1912, used sixty-eight shots in its ten-minute length. Queen Elizabeth was enormously successful and demonstrated in America, what had already been established in Europe, that films of five and more reels, based on classic and epic historical themes, and which appealed to a middle-class rather than a popular audience, could be enormously successful and profitable.

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But all this was exceeded by Cabiria, an epic saga of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, which was directed by Giovanni Pastrone in 1914. Even longer, at twelve reels, and taking six months to film, with exteriors shot on location in Tunisia, Sicily and the Alps, it featured a dramatically sophisticated narrative against a background of elaborate historical reconstruction. Its influence was enormous, particularly in its use of extended, slow tracking shots which, when copied and used in American productions, became known as ‘cabiria’ movements. Most of these epic sagas played out their dramatic narratives in single-shot episodic scenes which proceeded sequentially following the dictates of their historically determined plots. But what has not been sufficiently acknowledged is that Cabiria also contains some remarkable examples of advanced scene construction and editing methods. Between 1913 and 1916 the foundations of modern film-editing practice were being put into place and Cabiria played an important role in that process. The scope and scale of this epic production provided Pastrone with the opportunity to experiment and develop shooting and structuring methods that were quickly absorbed and reworked by others. In the main he continued to rely on the traditional single-shot scene, his slowly tracking camera heightened the visual interest and the scale and depth of the elaborate settings was given greater emphasis by the constantly changing perspective. The resulting altered framings could be used to isolate some parts of a scene and exclude others. Pastrone also regularly dissected action within scenes in a variety of ways. These ranged from simply cutting in to a closer framing of part of the action, with position matching used to sustain continuity, to elaborate angle changes and fragmentation of action, presenting an entire scene as the sum of its parts. A particularly potent example of this occurs during the Moloch sacrifice scene, during which children are fed into the furnace that opens into the body of the god. The repetitive activities that constitute the ceremony are shown as a montage: wide shots show the crowds as they enter the temple door, a gaping mouth; the vast interior is filled with people and the activities within are revealed as a series of MWS and MS that show different aspects of the ceremony. The entire sequence is remarkable for the clarity of its narrative logic and the originality of its execution. But it was not merely at this level that Pastrone’s confident handling of multishot scene construction is demonstrated; for example, later in the film the joint heroes, Flavius and his black servant Maciste, are imprisoned in a cellar that looks out on a courtyard. Maciste, the strong man, bends apart the bars of their cell – action shown from both inside and outside the window. When Elissa (in fact, Cabiria raised as a servant) is arrested and dragged across the courtyard to confront Karthalo the priest, Maciste escapes, and in a remarkable series of connecting action shots, follows and ensures her release. It was the directors whose films dealt with dramatic events at a private and personal level, who recognised that editing was the means that enabled them not

The coming of the Danes Before 1906, filmmaking in Denmark was very similar to that found in Britain, small independent companies and showmen making actualities, filming stage acts, and eventually experimenting with the dramatic possibilities of film. The first fiction film made in Denmark was The Execution (Henrettelsen) made by Peter Elfelt in 1903. The story of a mother who is condemned to death for killing her two children, the film relies on static, single-shot framing, but unlike other films of the time, Elfelt constructs a sense of space that goes beyond that captured by the lens. Gestures are made to people outside the limits of the shot, and entrances and exits relate to action taking place both on and off the screen. These practices are rare, even in Griffith’s early films, but in some way presage those qualities that seem specific to the significant body of films that were made during the Danish silent ‘golden age’, from 1910 until the end of the European war. Nordisk Films Kompagni was established in November 1906 by Ole Olsen, an enterprising showman who had begun his working life as a shepherd; had become a fairground operator and subsequently a successful cinema owner. He had a good instinct for accurately judging the tastes of his audience and between 1907 and 1910 Nordisk was turning out one-reelers at an average of nearly three a week. In 1908, Olsen established The Great Northern Film Company, in America, which handled the release of Nordisk’s considerable output there. Press reaction to Nordisk films which opened there that year praised the excellence of the photography, the originality of the staging and the realism of the performances. Moving Picture World in December 1908 commented: ‘There is a marked difference between the acting in the Danish productions and those of other foreign filmmakers. The Danes seem to do everything so seriously.’ Even so, towards the end of 1909, and perhaps as a result of competition that was coming from America, particularly from Biograph, there was some evidence of sales slipping. It was time for renewal. Olsen decided that his company should place even greater emphasis on the quality of the films they were making and matters improved

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only to shape the overall content of their films but was the key to exploring subtleties of mood and character. Because silent films could cross language barriers by simply replacing intertitles with translations, vast quantities of films were imported and exported to feed the ever hungry international market. The influences that this interchange had on film making in terms of style, form, content and technique were significant and largely impossible to trace. Certainly, the invention and originality of the best of Griffith’s work at Biograph between 1908 and 1910, and other leading American companies who were seeking ways to improve the quality of their work in a very competitive marketplace, appeared to have an effect on the standard of work emanating from one particular corner of Europe, and there can be little doubt that the stimulus had effects which were both reciprocal and far-reaching.

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markedly. By the end of 1912, Nordisk was employing a staff of 1,700 people and was, after Pathé, one of the largest film producers in Europe. There were other companies, Fotorama, Kosmorama and Kinografen to name just three, who quickly established themselves by the quality of their output. The film which most clearly marks the beginning of Nordisk’s international reputation is The Abyss (Afgrunden). Made in 1910, it was a first film for its leading actress, Asta Nielsen, and its director, Urban Gad. The film acquired considerable notoriety because of its subject-matter, the sexual awakening of a young woman, leading to jealousy, violence, death and finally her imprisonment. Its most famous scene is the performance of a stage act in which Magda (Nielsen), having captured and immobilised her lover by tying him up with rope, performs a sensuous dance during which she rubs her black, satin-dressed body against him until, on reaching a climax, they both collapse in a passionate embrace. In terms of its editing, however, it demonstrates few notable developments. Many scenes are composed in the standard full shot and contain no intercutting, though occasionally Urban Gad elects to cover some action from more than one angle, and for some shots moves the camera forward framing actors from the waist up. Following the success of The Abyss, Gad and Nielsen made The Black Dream (Den sorte Drøm) for Fotorama in 1911 which was much more adventurous in terms of its editing. Lasting more than an hour, this four-reel melodrama tells the story of Stella (Nielsen) and her lover, Count Waldberg, who falls foul of a wealthy jeweller, Hirsch, a man obsessed by his desire for Stella. The scene in which Waldberg declares his love for Stella is played with them seated on a divan. Gad starts with a shot showing the action obliquely in MS, but as the sexual tension increases the scene progresses to its climax, and a cut to frontal angle is made as Stella accepts the count’s passionate pleading and lets him take her into his arms. By 1911 the Danish filmmakers were not only making longer films with complex plots but had introduced the principle of showing continuing action from more than one position almost certainly ahead of anyone else. Another Danish company, Kinografen, made a three-reeler, The Four Devils (De fire djævle, 1911); a circus story about the loves and betrayals that precede the jealous murder and suicide of two members of an acrobatic trapeze act, the ‘Flying Devils’. Fritz and Aimée, are engaged to be married but Fritz begins an affair with a wealthy young countess. Aimeé discovers his betrayal and confronts him, but is pushed aside. The trapeze act is performed without a net and during their act, Aimeé, unhinged by Fritz’s betrayal and rejection, deliberately allows him to fall, before plunging to certain death herself. Directed by Robert Dinesen and Alfred Lind, the film also uses structuring and editing devices that indicate an advanced degree of invention with scenes that cover action from more than one angle and varying frame sizes. Camera panning is used to follow action in several scenes and care is taken to match the action from one shot to another. In one sequence, scenes are cross-cut between Fritz as he tries to decide whether to keep his appointment with the countess, and Aimée as she

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worries about Fritz’s strange behaviour. The film became an international success, and was considered, with Gad’s Afgrunden, to have been particularly important as an influence on pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. Danish film historian Ebbe Neergaard also rated The Four Devils highly, considering it to be the first film told in a reasonably modern film language. In his book on early Danish cinema Ron Mottram compares the film favourably with work produced at Nordisk, finding in The Four Devils a total world with the interaction of events existing beyond the limits of the frame.3 Robert Dinesen, who also played Fritz, had extensive experience in the theatre but had not directed a film before and the naturalness of the performances he obtains from his cast is clearly influenced by his own. Alfred Lind was more experienced, both as a director and cameraman (he had been Urban Gad’s cameraman on The Abyss) and photographed The Four Devils as well as directing. He also made an equally impressive film the following year. It seems that melodramas set in the world of the circus were popular themes (Nordisk built a permanent circus-set), and The Flying Circus (Den flyvende Cirkus, 1912) was one of many made at the time. Again, there are camera angles and distances selected to provide the best presentation of the content, and action cuts with the cut anticipating the action, certainly an advanced technique for 1912. This is clearly demonstrated in a sequence where a rope is thrown by Laurenzo the tight-rope walker across a street to an upstairs room, where it is caught by Erna, the mayor’s daughter seeking to escape from a fire. The rope secured, he rescues her by walking across with the young woman on his back. At the point where the rope is thrown, there is a cut ahead to the window across the street just before the rope appears: the cut anticipating the continuance of the action. Looking at the analysis that I have just made concerning the above editing strategies, has prompted me to re-examine the perspective from which I am charting this particular history of filmmaking. It seems so easy to fall into the trap set by hindsight; to seek out and emphasise those elements in the development of film editing that seem to be markers on the route that I know film structure took and to ignore the others. Whoever made the cut that I have described in the last paragraph, must have had a reason for doing it that way. Perhaps the editor – who may very well have been Lind himself – had explored the various points that might be chosen when cutting between two shots to suggest continuing action. Initially, the most commonly selected point was to cut from the out-going shot as soon as the frame became empty and to the in-coming shot just before the action commenced (e.g. Rescued by Rover). Later, it was usual to tighten the cut by cutting ‘out’ when the exiting object or person was partially out of the frame and ‘in’ just after they had started to appear; a tendency which persisted as late as 1929. The reasons for both these approaches are simply logical: as soon as Rover has left the shot, it is over; cut to the next and show Rover as he enters. Then, because the cut might feel rather slack, it was tightened to remove unnecessary frames, both in and out. How then must Lind’s preference for a cut

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that anticipates the action be explained? Originally, it might have come by accident – leaving too many frames on the in-coming shot by mistake; or through experiment – what felt right; but the essential realisation was that it mimicked the reaction of an onlooker or spectator, and consequently made it seem more real. Because it mimicked reality it better obscured the evidence of its own existence – it was less visible. When Ebbe Neergaard describes The Four Devils as being ‘the first film told in a reasonably modern film language’ the danger is to assume that instead of making a simple statement of fact, Neergaard is handing out a metaphorical diploma, ‘To Alfred Lind, for being the first director to ...’, and so on. What I am stressing is that at this stage the move towards realism was little more than a need to extend the fundamentals of the medium; cinematography was capable of producing images that were very like reality itself; an illusory, cinematic world could be constructed by joining separate shots together. It was a small step to accept that editing which mimicked the way we perceive reality merely sustained the illusion. It was not simply that Danish filmmakers were responding to techniques that lent themselves to increasing realism, stories were carefully prepared; photographic standards were high and leading stage actors headed the cast lists. The directors who were joining Nordisk had invariably started their careers in the theatre and were versed in the classics and literary adaptations. One of the most important, August Blom, had been a theatre actor for fifteen years when he joined Nordisk in 1908. After playing small parts and learning the craft he directed his first film in 1910 and later the same year directed a version of Hamlet filmed on location at Elsinore, but it was his version of The White Slave Trade (Den Hvide Slavehandel 1 (1911) which firmly established his reputation as a director. A young woman, Anna, having seen an advertisement for a job, travels to London leaving her boyfriend, Georg, behind. The advertisement is a front for a white-slave racket and Anna is imprisoned in a brothel. She manages to get a message to her father but the Danish police can do little. Georg learns of her plight and his attempts to defeat the white slavers and save Anna, form the central section of the plot. Compared to the films made by Lind, The White Slave Trade does not contain much in the way of structural innovation, indeed the story is told episodically with no cross-cutting, but the film uses an interesting device in an early sequence to set up the story, a split screen – a triptych. A man stands in the left third speaking on the telephone and a young woman sits at a table speaking into a telephone in the right third, both face inwards and it can be inferred that they are conversing. The centre panel shows a MCS of Anna and her father in conversation while standing on a high balcony overlooking central Copenhagen with cars below and buildings in the distance. This triptych device is repeated later in the film but slightly differently with two men conversing on the telephone and the centre panel

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showing the young woman who is the subject of their discussion. By any standards this was technically and structurally well ahead of its time, and as well as extending the boundaries of cinematic form, it was a device which gave the film a definite style – it carried the mark of its maker. In 1911 Blom became head of production and supervised scripts and casting. The films which emerged from the Nordisk studios tended towards sensational subjects and although Blom tried to introduce contemporary themes he had mostly to work with rather weak and often banal stories of seduction and betrayal; prostitution and adultery. He compensated by the way that he told these stories, laying great emphasis on natural performances, using sets and mirrors to expand the dramatic content of a scene, and narrative techniques that involved close-ups, cross-cutting and scene dissection. Of the seventy-eight films which he made between 1910 and 1914, his most prestigious was Atlantis, based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s novel, which he shot in 1913: it was two hours long, one of the longest made anywhere in the world. Nordisk had started making longer films in 1911, of the seventy-seven films made that year, half were two or three-reelers running anything up to an hour in length and there is little doubt that these longer films were having considerable audience appeal, particularly in America where members of the Patents combine were restricted by collective agreement to making one-reelers aimed at the nickelodeon market. Not so restricted was Carl Laemmle’s independent Universal Film Company and its first feature was Traffic in Souls made in 1913, a powerful film about prostitution ‘with a tough, uncompromising look of urban rather than studio reality’.4 There is no doubt that Universal’s six-reeler was inspired by August Blom’s The White Slave Trade, released in America as The White Slave Traffic. Atlantis tells the story of Dr Kammacher, an intense and somewhat libidinous biologist who travels round the world in an attempt to escape the horror of his wife’s mental breakdown. While in Berlin he is attracted to a beautiful dancer, Ingegard, but discovers that he is but one of her many admirers. A research paper that he has written is rejected by the Berlin Biological Institute and, feeling disheartened, he travels to Paris. While there, he learns that Ingegard is planning to travel to New York and he books a passage on the same ocean liner, the Roland, hoping to establish a relationship with her during the voyage. Kammacher’s sea voyage and his New York visit become both a factual and spiritual journey in which the relationships that he makes, his handling of love and loss – including a dramatic episode during which he rescues Ingegard from the sinking ship – are woven into a personal narrative of a man seeking some focus for his life and coming to recognise the role that fate plays in shaping one’s destiny. Blom draws on a wide range of editing and technical effects to create a film which skilfully follows the main character by dissolving through different levels of reality, exploring his dreams and recollections and then suddenly breaking into jolts of violence as when his deranged wife attacks him with a pair of scissors while he lies asleep.

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Directed with imagination and mature confidence, in many ways, Atlantis is way ahead of its time. Sold very much as an ‘art film’, with much emphasis placed on its literary origins, it was first released in December 1913 to wide international acclaim. When the film opened in New York in 1914, it was in a much shortened version: American exhibitors, taking the view that a film longer than 90 minutes was unsuitable for their market, cut several episodes. In 1955, American film historian James Card addressed an audience attending the Danish Film Gala at the Museum of Modern Art. In a speech which charted the early development and subsequent achievements of the Danish contribution to silent film history he gave his view of Blom’s Atlantis: a film in every technical respect superior to any other motion picture in the world that has been preserved for study from the year 1913 ... The maker of Atlantis knew how to cut his films with all the skill of Ince. He used parallel action with the same brilliance as Griffith. He used double exposure with the poetry that supposedly was discovered years later by the Germans ... by 1913 no more impressive film had ever been projected in the film theatres of the United States.5

Film editing

Swedish beginnings

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The success of the Swedish film industry might be said to date from 1912, when Charles Magnusson, a pioneer cameraman who had joined Svenska Biografteatern as a production manager in 1909, moved the company from Kristianstad to Stockholm. Svenska Bio had prospered under Magnusson’s artistic direction and perhaps not unaware of the quality shift apparent in the films emerging from his Danish neighbour, Nordisk, Magnusson sought to compete. Both companies made a circus drama based on an identical story and remarkably, both Nordisk’s The Great Circus Catastrophe (Dodsspring til Rest fra Cirkus Kuplen) and Svenska Bio’s The Great Circus Disaster, were premièred on the same day in August 1912. Magnusson hired as actors two successful actor-managers, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller and both, almost immediately, became directors. Victor Sjöström, at 32, with sixteen years’ experience in the theatre, approached the new medium with enthusiasm and was quick to learn. His first film, The Gardener (Trädgárdmästeren, 1912), written by Stiller, is extremely accomplished. A wealthy middle-class man (played by Sjöström) who spends much of his time in his elaborate garden and conservatory, becomes jealous when his son falls in love with a beautiful young woman. Openly disapproving of the relationship, the dominant and calculating father sends his son away to college and soon after, forcibly seduces the young woman in the sun-filled silence of the large conservatory. The girl’s life is ruined, and rejected by society, she falls into prostitution. The film ends with her returning to the scene of her downfall, where she commits suicide, her lifeless body being discovered by the man who destroyed her.

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The rape scene caused the film to be banned in Sweden. Successfully distributed abroad, the film then disappeared from view and for almost seventy years was considered lost until a print of the censored version was discovered in America. Sjöström found many of the constraints that limited the creative use of the camera, especially during the filming of interiors, very frustrating and much of The Gardener is set outdoors with beautifully back-lit exterior lighting. The natural light illuminating the conservatory interior serves much the same purpose while contrasting dramatically with the violent rape, and ultimate suicide. Given that this was Sjöström’s first film, it is not surprising that its strengths lie mostly in the excellent natural performances and the impressive photography by the experienced cinematographer Julius Jaenzon. But the film is also confidently staged, with many scenes constructed from different shots filmed from varying angles, and using framings which carefully reflect their dramatic content. Interestingly, the feeling conveyed is that, in spite of his inexperience, or in fact because of it, Sjöström did not want to be limited to working in ways that others had determined. There is a bold freshness about his approach which suggests that an original and uncompromising talent was at work. And so it was to prove. Of the many films directed by Sjöström before 1916, only two survive. The Gardener and Ingeborg Holm which he directed in 1913. Ingeborg Holm is a deeply moving chronicle of enforced poverty, deprivation and insanity. The film tells the story of a woman compelled to enter a workhouse following the death of her husband; her two children are fostered, but she learns that one of them is mortally ill. She escapes from the institution and eventually traces the dying child but is captured and returned to the workhouse. In anguish over the death of her daughter and deprived of her son she descends into madness. Fifteen years later she is traced by her son who has been away to sea. He finds her deeply deluded and rocking a piece of wood as if it were a baby. Only when he shows her a photograph does she seem to recognise him and take him in her arms. The criticism of the poor-law system in Sweden, which was the subject of the film and the play on which it was based, cause considerable controversy and brought about a change in the law. Made with great passion and commitment, the film is remarkable for the simplicity of its construction which consists of about forty, one-shot scenes each preceded by an inter-title that brusquely summarises the narrative: ‘Want’; ‘Bankrupt’ and so on. In each brief scene the action is designed and photographed in depth. There are no edits within the scenes and Sjöström and his photographer Henrik Jaenzon establish mood by lighting and careful camera placement. This might not have been an editor’s film, but deciding where each scene must start and finish and finding the correct rhythm for the title inserts would still have called for careful control of the structure and delicate judgement of the pace. Mauritz Stiller was four years younger than Sjöström and they were friends, Stiller scripted for Sjöström who acted in several of Stiller’s films but there was no

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close artistic collaboration. Apparently influenced by many of Griffith’s one-reel narratives, Stiller’s early films demonstrate a polished sense of timing and rhythm. In his book, Scandinavian Film, film historian Forsyth Hardy, impressed by Stiller’s fifth film, The Black Masks (1912), records that it contains over a hundred scenes, switching between interiors and exteriors, include close-ups and panoramic shots. It is indicative of the extent to which the single-shot scene had become firmly fixed in the mind as the main structuring component in films that commentators retained the word at this period even though the word ‘shot’ had superseded it. Stiller’s subjects ranged from comedies to literary works, and he made film versions of three novels written by Nobel prize-winning writer Selma Lagerlöf, all of which he adapted for the silent screen. Above all, Stiller recognised the central importance of editing in his films, ‘I make my films twice, once on the set and again in the cutting room.’6 Although few of the films have survived, between 1912 and 1917 Stiller wrote, directed or acted in more than 30 thrillers and comedies for Svenska Bio and during the same period Sjöström was directing, and often acting in, as many as eight films a year. It was an important period of growth and change, both Sjöström and Stiller continued to make films in Sweden, producing prestigious and influentially significant work, mostly before they were tempted to leave and work in the Hollywood of the 1920s. The effect that Danish and Swedish films had at this time on the developments that were taking place elsewhere, particularly in America, cannot be defined with any precision but it was undoubtedly profound. The next few years would see a consolidation of many of the filmmaking techniques which became established during this important silent period, the foundations for what followed were now in place and, together with the wave of influence that had gathered in other parts of Europe the scene was set for the final act before the coming of sound.

Notes

Film editing

1 Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 29. 2 This was movement from a conventional, wide staging as the actors departed from the scene. The cut then showed them entering the new scene, similarly staged. 3 Mottram, The Danish Cinema 1895–1917, p. 104. 4 Mast, A Short History of the Movies, p. 60. Traffic in Souls is discussed in more detail in a Chapter 7. 5 Card, ‘Influences of the Danish Film’, pp. 53–6. 6 Quoted from the commentary for Cinema Europe – The Other Hollywood, ‘Art’s Promised Land’, TV documentary series, BBC 1995.

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Patterns of visibility

6

A fixed position In 1907, shortly after setting up Nordisk, Ole Olsen decided that he wanted to make a film about lion hunting but could not afford to go to Africa to see it in reality. He had previously made a very successful film about polar-bear hunting by acquiring an animal from a zoo in Hamburg and, after letting it loose on the ice, getting hunters to shoot it in front of the camera. Importing lions from the same source, he set about making Lion Hunting (Løvejagten 1907). The sequence that leads up to finding and shooting the lion was constructed from an intricate montage of twenty-five shots which cross-cuts between hunters and lions filmed from a variety of angles and framings to produce a kind of structured continuity. By modern standards the result is awkward and clumsy, but what is important is that the idea of using editing to produce an artificial geography and establish a subjective point of view was arrived at quite instinctively.1 It is important not to make the mistake of seeing any of these strategies as some kind of sophisticated pre-knowledge of the way that films would eventually be cut together. These devices appear to be significant only because we know the direction that scene construction would eventually take and understand the theory that informs it; at the time they were simply expedient. Smith’s action cuts to close-up in Mary Jane’s Mishap, and the montage in Lion Hunting are not based on any theory, they happened because they seemed to answer a particular need. From some points of view these methods would have been seen as commercially disadvantageous; wasteful of both time and resources. Apart from the precocious examples mentioned above, no instances of action within a scene being divided into separate, related shots and filmed from more than one position, have been discovered in films made before 1911, and it is reasonable to speculate why this was. At the time it would have seemed only logical that a spectator can only be expected to see something happen from one position, i. e wherever he happened to be at the time. It was therefore possible to divide the space in front of a fixed camera into two halves, the left and the right and cut between them, or to cut in on the axis, because that just divided the scene, 81

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or showed a closer view of it, from the same viewing position. It was also acceptable to cut between geographically separate places because each location permitted the establishment of a new, fixed point from which to view the scene. What would have seemed questionable, if it was ever considered at all, was the idea of showing continuous activity from a different angle within the same space. Indeed it would probably have been regarded as not only undesirable but unnecessary; why would a spectator need to be shown different aspects of the same action from more than one position? We know that ubiquitous camera positioning eventually became accepted practice, and this raises important questions concerning why this came about, and where the spectator is, which will be considered in later chapters.

Dividing the scene

Film editing

At the beginning of 1910, D. W. Griffith had persuaded a reluctant Biograph to let him move his production base to California for four months to take advantage of filmmaking in a climate very different from the Arctic blasts that were sweeping down the east coast and freezing New York city. The outcome was successful, and Biograph had few reservations about his plans to repeat the trip the following year. Griffith arrived with his cast and crew early in January 1911 and they immediately started work, filming interiors at the outdoor studio in Los Angeles and making good use of the Californian sunlight and scenery. By the beginning of April they had completed twenty-one of the seventy one-reelers that Griffith would make that year. Several of the films had used coastal settings and Griffith chose to film the climax of The Primal Call, the next film, on Redondo Beach. The story concerns a young woman from a middle-class family who falls in love with a young sailor but agrees to marry a wealthy, older man of whom her family approve rather than risk their disapproval and follow the dictates of her heart. At the concluding climax of the film, the young woman, accompanied by her fiancé, family and friends, is confronted by her young lover as they walk on the beach. He desperately attempts to carry her off and, responding to the honesty of his feelings, she makes a sudden decision to abandon her fiancé and, running into her lover’s arms, finally commits herself to him. Filmmakers had been gradually moving the camera nearer to the action for some years, by 1911 the lower frame line cut the figure somewhere between the knee and waist. For the final six shots of the film, Griffith moved the camera even closer to the characters which meant that cutting between them involved a sharp change in the viewing angle. The hero carries her away from the group then leaves her and runs out frame right, towards his rowing boat waiting at the water’s edge.

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CS she pauses, uncertain what she should do. CS the sailor, standing by his boat looking frame left towards her.

3

Now, this marks something of a development in terms of scene dissection and seems almost to be an example of a ‘shot/reverse-shot’ (SRS) structure in which each character occupies his/her own shot and looks off-screen towards the other. In this instance Griffith effects a powerful dramatic moment by building tension towards the edge of the frame and releasing it with the cut to the heroine entering and joining the hero’s shot. But in common with so many of Griffith’s structuring devices, the nominal position of the earner a/spectator actually remains constant in both shots, because the camera is close to the action, cutting between the characters necessarily shows them looking obliquely towards each other in each shot. Barry Salt has identified a particularly ‘modern’ example of SRS use in The Loafer, an Essanay film made in 1911.2 Because of a neighbour’s generosity, a former drunken loafer has become a successful farmer. In one particular scene he climbs down from his buggy outside his farm and is approached by a stranger who begs some money from him but is refused. The stranger moves away, turns and berates the farmer who reacts angrily and pursues the man as he runs off. After a struggle the farmer runs back to his farm. The sequence is constructed using five setups. 1 2 3 4 5

MWS camera slightly elevated. The farmer adjusting horse’s harness and stranger enters frame R. Request refused and stranger exits cam R. CS as the stranger enters cam L and turns, looks back towards cam L, and berates farmer and eventually runs off frame R. CS farmer for his angry response looking at cam R, and exit cam R pursuing stranger. LS the field into which they run from frame L, then struggle and from which farmer finally exits frame L. MWS farmhouse door, farmer enters cam R.

Apart from the inclusion of an inter-title into set-up 2 and some inter-cutting between 2 and 3 before the stranger runs off, the sequence is played out in the above order and it is immediately evident from the flow of the action between the cuts, and the directions in which the characters look, that the scene is constructed following a pattern which eventually became standard practice universally, and which might be said to posit the notion of the camera presenting the logical viewpoint of an observer present at the scene. To some extent this is true; certainly its use has become a fundamental component of modern film narration in that the alternating close viewpoints encourage identification. It is interesting to consider why, as an obviously useful figure of structure, SRS practice did not quickly and

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4 5 6

CS as 1. She hesitates, then raising her arms, she finally decides to go to him. CS as 2. He opens his arms to receive her. CS as 1. She runs towards him. CS as 2. She enters his shot and they embrace.

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universally become established; in fact there is considerable evidence that it was actively resisted by filmmakers, certainly in Europe, until the late 1920s.

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To put these matters properly into perspective it will be useful to examine the conventions which have, almost universally and with rare exceptions, come to govern the flow of action on the cinema screen since around 1930. The SRS figure which is examined above and the entrance/exit movements between shots that proceed from it, gradually became fixed into a cinematic convention usually referred to as the ‘180° rule’. It was developed in an attempt to resolve the problem of showing action in different parts of a scene when the logical assumption was that a spectator can only observe action occurring in any given scene from one fixed position. These sequences in The Primal Call and The Loafer, did just this; they split the action into different parts but retained the notion of the fixed spectator. Given the need to vary the distances between the camera and the action, and also allow action to move between adjacent spaces, it became established that, provided the camera always remained on the same side of the action, the spectator would accept the construction as logical and realistic.

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8 The 180° line convention and setting up a new 180° line with a move in vision

Various directions The third film that Griffith made during the Californian winter of 1911 is generally regarded as being one of the best that he made during his Biograph period. The Lonedale Operator of the title is a young woman, the daughter of the Lonedale rail station telegraph operator, who is engaged to be married to a locomotive engineer. He walks with her as she carries her father’s lunch to the station office. Discovering that her father feels unwell, she encourages him to return home, offering to take over his job. Her father gratefully departs, and entering the office she waves through the window to her fiancé as he boards his locomotive and sets off. A cash delivery is due, and she meets the delivering train and takes the bags inside, unaware that two robbers have climbed from the track as the train departed. Spotting them through the window, she hurriedly locks the outer doors and telegraphs a warning message to the station up the line where her fiancé’s locomotive has halted. The message received, the engineer and his fireman set off to the rescue. Meanwhile, the robbers are forcing their way through the locked doors. They reach the inner office but are surprised when the young woman

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The 180° line is the eye-line between two characters looking or glancing at each other, or moving towards each other, and it is also the direction of flow as movement travels from one shot into another. Provided the camera always stays on one side of this line, the 180° convention is considered to have been respected. In most modern filmmaking practice this convention has become something of a rigid and inflexible rule and ‘crossing the line’ is regarded as a heinous sin. But sometimes the director will need to restructure the content and action in a scene so as to deliberately show it from the other side of this line, where matters of emphasis are to be considered for example. This is now done by actually showing the line being crossed so that the spectator is not disorientated. For example, let us suppose that we are watching a WS of a scene in which two people are conversing in a room; he sits to the left and she stands on the right (see Figure 8). A cut to a CS of the man shows him seated and looking towards frame right. A cut to the woman shows her standing and looking to frame left, but as she talks she moves towards camera right and it pans to follow her movement. She is now looking towards frame right, she has crossed the line between them and the camera is now on the other side. To maintain the convention, a cut to a CS of the seated man looking towards her must now show him looking frame left. This is the way that the 180° rule has been applied, with some notable exceptions, certainly since the coming of sound although in fact the convention started to become established in America around 1915. Yet throughout the whole of the silent period some filmmakers felt free to position the camera without feeling bound to any rigid set of conventions, and that freedom provided opportunities for a creative use of movement and positioning which eventually had to give way to the pressures of a subjectively driven realist logic.

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points what appears to be a small pistol in their direction. At that moment the engineer and his colleague arrive and save the day. The young woman reveals that the ‘pistol’ is in fact a small adjustable spanner and the robbers bow as they acknowledge that they have been outwitted. Justly commended for its carefully constructed and edited story and its exciting cross-cut climax, The Lonedale Operator marks a significant point in Griffith’s development. Two particular editing advances are notable, the first concerns an action cut. Inside the Lonedale office, a close shot shows the heroine receiving a telegraph message signalling the imminent arrival of the pay-roll. As she stands to watch the train arrive, there is a cut to a wider shot from the CS motivated by the need to anticipate the action which follows, and she quickly turns to leave the office. Later in the story, this action will be used in reverse – cutting in to a CS from the WS – to emphasise her anxiety as the robbers start to break in. The second is concerned with scene dissection: having reached the platform, as she signs for the pay-roll, the two robbers emerge from beneath the train, unseen. They then cross the platform and the next shot shows them slipping down the embankment out of sight. A return to the previous shot shows her carrying the pay-roll across the platform and another cut is made as she pauses outside the office door before going inside. This is confident handling of related action within a scene and it is this kind of structure which makes The Lonedale Operator exceptional, but what is of particular interest in this film is the entrance-exit structure that Griffith adopts. With certain exceptions, most of the characters’ entrances and exits into and out of each shot are made completely at variance with what we know as the 180° convention and this is quite deliberate. The first shot establishes the engineer and his companions taking a break and sitting in the sunshine, and the second the young woman arriving to stand outside her garden gate. In the third shot the engineer rises, leaves the group, and exits frame right. He then enters the next shot frame right to join his fianceé in a continuation of the second shot. They then leave together exiting frame right but enter in long shot (LS) again from frame right – exit left then enter left in the next shot, and so on. In fact, the alternation is so pronounced that a cut that occurs later between the woman waving to her fiancé through the office window and his returning wave from the engine’s cab is particularly noticeable because it conforms to the 180° convention. In one way the deliberate alternation might be interpreted as a stylistic construction that conveyed balance and symmetry and which might be said to accord with the relationship established in the opening shots which brings the lovers together and follows their progress towards the station. There are also other deliberate alternations. Once the robbers start to force their way into the outer office, the woman is seen in CU at the operator’s desk sending her urgent message facing frame left. The telegraphist to whom she is signalling is dozing in his chair facing frame right (Griffith intercuts between them to build some suspense) and his

I used to complain that he would shoot everything from one angle, and suddenly he’d go to the other side and shoot a close-up, and I always objected to that. He didn’t mind; he said, ‘The audience has to know that the camera went to the other side’ ... he didn’t consider it a mistake.3 What has to be realised is that because Korda started his career as a director in Hungary and worked in Austria and Germany between 1920 and 1926, he was perfectly at ease with the structuring practices that persisted there until the end of the silent era. Because filmmakers working in Germany and elsewhere in Europe took a very free approach to the way action was structured between shots, there has arisen a presumption that this was simply the way that they did it and that is all there is to it. The problem is that, although to some extent that may well be true, there is undeniably some dramatic value in deliberately using what I will term ‘cross-line

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pictorial opposition, although readable as back to back or facing, at least emphasises the dramatic space that separates them. The sequence of shots which begins with the robbers first approaching the window of the office and being seen by the woman, contains no oppositional cutting – both parties are looking frame left, yet the inner and outer office settings with locked doors between, divide the screen space so that action can flow between these spaces and be seen both actually and metaphorically in opposition. Certainly, it is clear that Griffith and other filmmakers of the period where aware that action and composition within a shot was bound to relate to the content of the following shot and made use of these oppositions and congruences. But perhaps because no rigid code of practice existed, audiences were not conditioned to expect action to be arranged in any fixed way and were prepared to infer relationships between shots much more readily. In fact there is much evidence that now the wheel has turned full circle and modern audiences, who are exposed to an enormous quantity of alternative structuring practices – particularly the influential, impact-with-brevity, TV advertisements – are perhaps as open to alternative constructions as their great-grandparents were. What does seem to have occurred is that opinions concerning the adoption of the 180° convention were divided, and during the years that followed it began to be applied more rigorously in some places and hardly at all in others. There is much evidence that in the period immediately after the First World War most American production had largely adopted the 180° convention, although departures from the practice are commonly found in films made as late as 1931. In most instances these are unintentional and arise partly from simple error, with directors used to a less constricting code finding it difficult to grasp the 180° rationale, and partly from a refusal to consider it necessary. American film editor William Hornbeck (1901–83) came to Britain and worked for Alexander Korda between 1935 and 1940. He recalled in an interview that he regularly had to complain about Korda crossing the line:

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edits’ in certain circumstances. For example, in an episode of ER, the American television drama series, a character suddenly makes up his mind to embark on a course of action and confront a demanding situation. He sets off, and the camera tracks with him in WS as he approaches some swing doors. He pushes them open and a cut is made across the line as he enters the room in MS. In the first shot he travels right to left and after the cut – left to right. There seem to be several things happening in this structure. First of all, there can be little doubt that the sudden unexpected cut across the line delivers considerable impact to the action, also the cut to a closer framing increases the effect and the change from a moving shot to a static shot is powerfully jarring. Finally, there is dramatic value in making the first shot a right-to-left movement and the second left to right. This will be considered in detail in chapter 17 but basically there are reasons why left-to-right flow is suggestive of ease and right to left of difficulty. I am suggesting that in the situation described the character moving towards the doors in the ‘difficult’ direction builds up a tension which is dissipated when he goes through the doors and goes with the flow. The principle problem in making an assessment of these strategies is that years of conditioning to a strict observance of the 180° convention tends to promote a disturbed response to anything which clearly transgresses it – it is seen as quite obviously ‘wrong’. It unsettles the sense of reality which is sustained by always placing the spectator in a seemingly logical position vis-à-vis the action – the camera acting as the observer’s eye. I think that there are several issues to be considered here. First, to what extent were audiences actually disturbed by action being presented with cuts made across the line given that there had been very little conditioning to any fixed schema of construction? Second, accepting that cuts made across the line could be used creatively, in what circumstances and to what extent was this strategy used? And finally, what were the reasons and effects of this practice being abandoned? In approaching these questions, it might be pertinent to recall my own responses to exposure to films made before 1929 when I started to research this project. Initially, I was confused and alienated every time I was presented with a construction that ‘crossed the line’. Once it became evident that these constructions were a natural part of a historical process, I was surprised and to some extent shocked to realise how much I had become conditioned to accept the modern 180° convention. This was powerfully emphasised for me during a viewing of G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927). At one point in the film the morally depraved Khalibiev confesses to a prostitute in a café that he plans to murder the blind Gabriele to whom he is betrothed so as to get his hands on her father’s money. The scene is played in a series of alternating close-ups, but Pabst shoots both shots from opposite sides so that the characters look the same way. At first this seems strangely unsettling, but after a while there is a tendency to go with the flow and the structure begins not only to feel right, but there is a sense that the form is contributing something more to the scene, it

Taking a different line Among the hundreds of films in which examples of intentional cross-line edits can be found, there are some which help to build a case better than others. In 1922, F. W. Murnau directed Nosferatu, the first ever screen version of Bram Stoker’s

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becomes a necessary part of the content. In a later scene, the prostitute calls on Gabriele to warn her about Khalibiev, and this is constructed (as is most of the film) using conventional SRS structure. Then, suddenly, Pabst again inserts a reverse which, by deliberately crossing the line, introduces Verfremdung –the moment made strange – requiring the spectator to stand outside it. It was then that I began to understand that there were considerable creative possibilities in cross-line editing strategies and that these were extremely common, not only in the films that Pabst made before 1929, but in the work of most German filmmakers and many other European directors as well. These were shooting and editing structures that conflicted with what might be regarded as the realistically logical way of observing a scene and made certain demands on the spectator. They discouraged an audience from simply identifying with the characters and their situation and required the audience to objectify the experience; to be both inside and outside the story at the behest of a narrator who could choose to foreground the process of narration at will. It is reasonable to assume that film makers and audiences during this period had very few problems understanding action shown as moving freely inside threedimensional space no matter where the camera was placed. One of Fritz Lang’s first films, The Spiders (Die Spinnen, 1919), a sort of German western made in the form of a serial, contains a sequence in which the hero is attempting to escape from a bunch of desperadoes pursuing him. In WS, he backs in through a door from screen left into a lobby area with a staircase leading off. Slamming the door shut, he struggles to secure the latch. A cut is then made to a CS of the pursuers as they attempt to force open the door, but they are also shown looking frame left. This figure is then repeated, showing the hero running upstairs followed by a cut to the men still trying to get into the lobby. The fifth shot of the sequence returns to the original WS as the door bursts open and the chase continues. There is little point in making much of this fragment, other than it usefully demonstrates a lack of concern for the 180° convention, it seems unlikely that Lang was seeking to achieve any meaningful juxtaposition by adopting this structure, and herein lies the difficulty. Because there was no common conventional formula to follow, the question arises as to whether it is possible to identify meaningful intentions in the way scenes were filmed. If a director is imprecise with regard to camera/action relationships, when is a cross-cut edit intentional and when is it not? While recognising that there is a need for a great deal of exploration to be made in this area, I suggest that there is considerable evidence that intentional cross-line edits can be identified in a significant number of films made in the late silent period.

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horror-fantasy novel, Dracula. The Dracula story is generally well known, but Henrik Galeen’s adaptation moves it from Victorian England to Bremen in 1838 and makes some changes to the plot. A recently married estate agent’s clerk, Jonathan Hutter, is sent to visit a strange client, Graf Orlok, at his castle in the Carpathian woods. During a meal with his sinister, cadaverous-looking host, Jonathan accidently cuts his thumb and Orlok is plainly transfixed by the event, advancing on him threateningly. Orlok is Nosferatu, a vampire, and visits Jonathan each night while he is asleep to suck his blood. During the day the vampire sleeps in his coffin and Jonathan, though weakened, discovers this and manages to escape and return to his wife. Nosferatu follows him to Bremen aboard a ship, but the crew gradually succumb to the pestilence that the vampire brings with him, which, carried by rats, then infects the whole city. Nosferatu schemes to get to Jonathan’s wife, Nina, and succeeds, but only through Nina’s contrivance; by keeping the vampire with her until daybreak she ensures his destruction and saves the city. Nosferatu is extremely modern in the way that its narrative is constructed. Scenes are built from numerous shots using changes of image size and significant angle changes which sustain interest by constantly redirecting the spectator’s gaze to different perspectives on the scene. The editing between shots is well paced and taut, with cuts made well ahead of the action so that the spectator is drawn along with the flow, finding satisfaction in a cutting style which responds quickly to movement towards the boundary of the frame. In the main, Murnau follows the 180° convention, and therefore departures from it become particularly noticeable: when a cross-line edit is used it is invariably to re-inforce a moment of shock or surprise. In the scene where Jonathan cuts his thumb and Orlok advances towards him, there is a WS showing the two men with the table in the foreground. Jonathan is backing through an arch into an adjacent room with the vampire on frame right moving towards him. A cut is made – a cross-line edit – to an MS of Jonathan who now looks towards Orlok at the edge of frame left. The next cut is a reverse angle – again a cross-line edit – showing the vampire moving towards Jonathan who is backing towards frame left. The first thing to note is that it would have been possible to shoot these three set-ups from any camera position, but Murnau decides on these three only. Second, because the action would most likely have been covered on each shot in its entirety, the shots could have been cut together in any order, indeed there is much to be said for using the third shot second; Jonathan backs away in WS – the vampire’s threatening approach – Jonathan’s frightened response; and this order would have sustained 180° convention for the first cut before crossing the line with next. But Murnau chooses a configuration which deliberately emphasises the cut across the line by cutting from WS Jonathan to MS Jonathan, then crossing it again to show the vampire’s advance. Because Murnau tended to work within the 180° convention to a greater extent than many other important German directors, the occasions when he

1

2 3

WS from the quayside favouring the wife who sits in the stern of the boat on the port side holding the tiller with her right arm and hand. The husband sets off rowing so as to turn the boat. MS favouring the man rowing, with his wife in the foreground left of the frame. The boat continues its turn. MS the woman at the tiller as the boat continues to turn. She looks back towards the village then looks back towards her husband looking CAM right as the turn is completed.

This sustains the 180° setup established in the first three shots, the camera being on the right, starboard, side of the boat. 4

CS the man determinedly rowing. CAM placed centre of the boat looking directly at him, he doesn’t look up.

The husband does not look up at all during the first part of the sequence but stares towards the bottom of the boat as he rows. The central placing sets up the possibility of establishing a camera position on the other side, which is what happens.

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makes a deliberate departure from it tend to be more noticeable. Of particular interest in this context is Sunrise, the first film that he made after being invited to Hollywood in 1926. With certain exceptions, films made in America from the midto late-1920s tended to work within 180° structuring practices as a matter of course, and this was basically true of Sunrise, but at one point in the film Murnau quite deliberately chooses to use a cross-line editing schema with powerful effect. The story of Sunrise is simply told. A poor farmer, who is married with a young child, falls in love with an attractive and sensuous city woman who is visiting his village. Determined to lure him to the city, she encourages him to drown his wife from a rowing boat, making it look like an accident. Completely under the woman’s spell, the husband sets off with his wife, ostensibly on a shopping trip, to row across the lake to where a trolley-car will take them into the city. They reach the centre of the lake but the husband cannot bring himself to harm her. He rows to shore and accompanies his now distraught wife to the city. After a tender reconciliation, the couple enjoy together the delights of the city and re-establish their loving relationship. But during the journey back across the lake that night, a storm blows up, the boat overturns and they are separated. Believing his wife has drowned, the husband turns on the city woman who mistakenly thinks that he has drowned her deliberately. As he attempts to strangle her, he learns that his wife has been found and is safe. The film ends with the family happily re-united. In the crucial scene on the lake, where the husband finds himself unable to go through with her murder, Murnau introduces a cross-line editing sequence which is an excellent example of the creative use of this device. The significance of the moment derives very largely from the way that the scene is built up and edited and I think that it is useful to explore this in some detail.

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5 6 7 8

MCS the wife. The CAM now on the port side of the boat the wife now looks CAM left. CS the man rowing (as in 4). CU the wife almost in profile, gives her husband a loving smile looking CAM left. CU the husband as he continues to row, not looking at her.

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This is the only close-up of the husband used in the rowing section and is used to balance and contrast the warmth of feeling that she expresses in her CU with the conflict of feelings evident in his inability to look at her. It also more than a simple point of view of the husband, this could have been achieved by another repeat of shot 4, but the CU emphasises the coldness of his attitude. 9 CU the wife looking CAM left (as in 7). Her smile fades. 10 CS the man rowing (as in 4). 11 CS the wife from a slightly higher angle. She turns her head from looking at her husband CAM left and looks away frame left. 12 WS her POV as a flock of birds takes off from the lake. It is during the next five shots that Murnau effects the wife’s change of eye-line from looking CAM left towards her husband to looking at him CAM right. 13 CS the wife (as in 11). She looks back from frame left to look at her husband as before CAM left. 14 CS the man rowing (as in 4). 15 CS the wife (as in 11) looks from CAM left out to frame right. 16 LS birds settled on the water. 17 CS the wife (as in 11) looks back towards her husband and is now looking towards him CAM right. During the next five shots both characters look frame right.

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18 CS the husband. The CAM now on the port side of the boat and he is angled (for the first time) looking towards CAM right. He gradually stops rowing. 19 CS the wife (as in 11) looks intently CAM right. 20 MCU the husband. Same angle as before in 18 looking CAM right but closer. He ships the oars. 21 CS the wife (as in 11), now looking questioningly to CAM right, leans across towards cam left but still looking CAM right. 22 CU the husband. He slowly lifts his eyes to look at his wife. 23 WS the whole scene from a slightly high angle, looking towards the stern as the husband rises and moves towards his wife.

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This re-establishes a 180° pattern which is sustained for the rest of the sequence. There seems to be little doubt that this scene has been filmed and constructed with enormous care. There is nothing arbitrary about it and it is extremely

effective. Part of that effect derives from the cross-line editing structure which Murnau adopts and which I believe intensifies the moment by introducing incongruities into the scene that register almost unconsciously, but have the effect of placing the spectator both in the drama and outside it; distilling that extra factor of ‘understanding’ which balances on the edge between feeling and knowing.

There does seem to be quite a lot of evidence that German directors in particular accepted the cross-line edit schema as a necessary and relevant structuring device and occasionally it is possible to discover it being used in a quite complex way. Ewald André Dupont, who, in spite of his French-sounding name was born and educated in Germany, began his filmmaking career in 1917. He is perhaps best remembered for a film that he made in 1924, Variety, or Vaudeville as it is sometimes known, was considered to be significantly ahead of its time; technically impressive, with bold camera movement and finely crafted editing that found the best in the performances. The international success of Variety led to an invitation to go to Hollywood, and in 1926 he directed Love Me and the World is Mine for Universal. It was not considered a great success, and Dupont came to England and made two British/German co-productions, Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929), both filmed at Elstree Studios. Moulin Rouge, which is ostensibly set in France and uses the famous Paris theatre and other French locations as background, tells the story of a glamorous and successful revue performer, Parysia, who has reached the peak of her career. On being introduced to her daughter Margaret’s fiancé, André, she is flattered to realise that the young man has fallen in love with her, and shocked to find herself attracted to him. Margaret tells her mother that André’s aristocratic father is totally opposed to their marriage because of her mother’s profession. She decides to visit André’s father, believing that by persuading him to agree to the marriage she will ensure her daughter’s happiness and end André’s infatuation with herself. Although successful in her quest, André, still obsessed with Parysia and feeling compelled into a marriage which he does not want, determines to take his own life. By weakening the brakes on his car he intends to make it appear to be an accident. Unaware of André’s intention, Margaret drives the car and it crashes, but although seriously injured, she makes a full recovery. Faced with the near tragic outcome of his infatuation, André realises how important Margaret is to his life; the marriage takes place and all ends well. Identifying instances of deliberate cross-line editing schema is not difficult in the work of a director who uses it in isolation, as the example drawn from Sunrise indicates. Like many German directors, E. A. Dupont tended towards a rather liberal use of camera positioning, sharing with Alexander Korda the belief that ‘the audience has to know that the camera went to the other side’ and consequently there can be difficulties in separating accident from intention. But in spite of this,

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Moulin Rouge

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Moulin Rouge contains numerous examples of intricate construction which seem to go well beyond mere laissez-faire camera set-ups (see Figures 9–16). The scene in which Parysia goes to visit André’s father is a useful example. Arriving at his country house, Parysia sends in a message written on the back of her visiting card, and the father agrees to see her. After they meet and make the opening exchanges Parysia asks why he is against the marriage and the father replies by holding up her card which says ‘Parysia – des Moulin Rouge’ and a dissolve is made to a closeup of Parysia as she sits facing him with a circle of light coming from a window behind her – a setup used for this shot only. 1 2 3 4

CU Parysia. She looks down rather embarrassed, then back to him facing CAM left. Inter-title ‘And your decision is final?’ WS the father rises from the chair behind his desk, his right hand holding his spectacles shaking slightly. He looks CAM right. MCS Parysia. She rises also but does not look at him. She is angled to CAM left.

Up to this point, the conversation that continued into the above exchange has followed the 180° convention with Parysia looking towards camera left and the father towards camera right.

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CS the father (a new set-up) he looks directly at the camera [Figure 9].

9 Moulin Rouge. Shot 5: CS father looking directly at camera

6

CS Parysia (a new set-up). She begins to speak looking CAM left [Figure 10].

Moulin Rouge. Shot 6: CS Parysia looking CAM left. She begins to speak.

7 8 9

Inter-title ‘Greater calamities could befall your son than marriage to my daughter. Monsieur.’ CS Parysia (as in 6), She finishes speaking. CS the father (a new set-up). He looks directly to the camera, a very hard look [Figure 11].

11 Moulin Rouge. Shot 9: CS father (new set-up). Looks directly at the camera

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This is a slightly wider angle than before which separates him more clearly from the background while keeping his image the same size. 10 CU Parysia a slightly low angle (a new set-up) [Figure 12]. She is angled away towards frame right but looks towards him off CAM left as previously. She then turns away facing frame right and, clearly upset, puts her hand to her face.

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12 Moulin Rouge. Shot 10: CU Parysia (new set-up), slightly low angle

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13 Moulin Rouge. Shot 11: CS father (new set-up) looking CAM left: the principal cross-line edit

11 CS the father, a slightly low angle (a new set-up). He is now also looking CAM left and is showing some compassion [Figure 13].

This is the principal cross-line edit. It indicates a change in the father’s response. The new set-up makes it clear from the change of angle that this is not a look away, but a cut across the line while he is still looking at her. This set-up is never repeated.

14 Moulin Rouge. Shot 13: CS father (new set-up) facing camera eye-line towards right again

This last cut re-establishes the original left-to-right configuration which is sustained until the end of the scene. 14 BCU Parysia (a new set-up). She wipes her nose and dabs at her eyes [Figure 15]. This is followed by a cut out on the axis and is made as an action cut. 15 CU Parysia (as in 10). She finishes using the handkerchief. 16 CS the father (as in 13). He clasps his hands together uneasily, looking to CAM right. 17 CU Parysia (as in 10). She turns to look at him CAM left as before. 18 CS the father (as in 13). He looks rather disconcerted. 19 CU Parysia (as in 10). She starts to speak. 20 Inter-title ‘Forgive me Monsieur – but my daughter’s happiness means as much to me as your son’s to you.’

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12 CU Parysia (new framing, tighter). She continues to cover her eyes. 13 CS the father (a new set-up). He is facing towards the camera more and his eye-line is now towards CAM right again [Figure 14].

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15 Moulin Rouge. Shot 14: BCU Parysia (new set-up), wiping her nose and eyes

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21 CU Parysia (as in 10). She looks down. 22 MS a two shot. A cut wide to show them facing each other, she looks up to him CAM left, he looks right, as before. They shake hands and she leaves frame right [Figure 16]. 23 WS the whole room. She walks away from him towards the door.

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16 Moulin Rouge. Shot 22: MS 2-shot. They shake hands and she leaves frame right

Greed Erich Oswald Stroheim was born in Vienna in 1885 and emigrated to America in his early twenties. By the time he was given a bit part in his first film, Captain McLean in 1914, he had been employed in a variety of odd jobs and adopted his Von’ – the mark of nobility. Working both as an actor and assistant director, notably with D. W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), he established himself in the early days of Hollywood and directed his first film, Blind Husbands, in 1918. Stroheim not only directed the films that he made during the early 1920s; he also wrote, designed the sets and starred in them. The films that he made had a sophisticated, decadent and essentially European feel enhanced by an extravagant attention to detail in costuming and settings. Stroheim’s battles with producers over his extravagant and self-indulgent working methods, and his insistence on total control over his films, culminated in the making of Greed in 1923, considered to be his masterpiece. Based on Frank Norris’s epic novel, McTeague, and very different from any of the films that he had made before, Stroheim’s completed film had a running time of nine and half hours and was ruthlessly cut by the studio.

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There are several important aspects of this scene to note. The first is the exceptional number of different set-ups and framings that Dupont uses for both characters. I have indicated only twenty-three shots in the above section of the scene, yet starting with the close-up of the visiting card and excluding inter-titles, there are fourteen different set-ups within those twenty-three shots and the opening and closing of the scene contains quite a few more. This suggests a considerable concern for meaningful, compositional detail and we find it in the subtlety of the framings and eye-line positions which Dupont uses for different parts of the scene. Because silent films could not use dialogue to indicate nuances of meaning, and to have required actors to exaggerate facial expressions as a substitute was clearly unacceptable, it was important to introduce alternative methods to suggest changes of mood as they developed through the scene. The father’s direct looks to camera are unusual but help to convey the unrelenting nature of his response; once his attitude starts to change, different set-ups are used to reflect this. There are quite a few scenes in Moulin Rouge that use complex shooting and editing constructions, some much more intricate than the one I have used as illustration. But evidence of deliberate cross-line editing can be found in the work of numerous German directors, notably in the films of Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst. In the main, most of the films made in America, certainly during the latter part of the 1920s, sought to follow the 180° convention and one might expect to find evidence of its appearance in the films of those European directors who were invited to work in Hollywood. What is certainly interesting is to find it in a film such as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed.

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Set in the early years of the twentieth century, Greed tells the story of McTeague, an illegal dentist. His friend Marcus introduces him to a new patient, Trina, whom he woos and wins. While waiting in McTeague’s surgery, Trina buys a lottery ticket and some time later, returning from a celebration of her engagement to McTeague, learns that she has won five thousand dollars. Following their marriage, their relationship gradually founders. Both essentially uneducated, and insensitive to each other’s needs, the fragile marriage is destroyed by McTeague’s

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17 Greed. Shot 4: WS bald man steps forward facing Trina

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18

Greed. Shot 5: CU bald man facing CAM left. He bows

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

WS the excited group at the top of the stairs as Trina and McTeague arrive. CU Trina looking CAM left turns quickly towards McTeague frame left. MCS Mother and McTeague, sharing Trina’s bewilderment. WS (as in 1) the bald man steps forward facing Trina [Figure 17]. CU the bald man facing CAM left He bows [Figure 18].

The next cut confirms that a cross-line editing schema is in place. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

CU Trina (as in 2) she faces CAM left, then quickly glances to frame left and back, and nods. CU the bald man (as before) looks CAM left and speaks. Inter-title ‘Your lottery ticket has won five thousand dollars.’ CU Trina (as in 2) astonished, turns towards frame left [Figure 19]. MCS Mother and McTeague’s surprised response.

The next cut very noticeably seeks to establish 180° conventional SRS structure. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

CU Trina, now looking CAM right, starts to speak [Figure 20]. Inter-title ‘Oh! ... there’s a mistake!’ CU Trina (shot 11 continued). Slight turn to frame left as before. WS (as in 1) Favouring the group. A woman points to the paper in her hand, persuading Trina that it’s true. Trina takes the paper. CU the bald man (as before). Looking CAM left. He starts to speak [Figure 21]. Inter-title ‘On presentation of your ticket ... you will receive a check for five thousand dollars!’

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drinking, his envy of others and Trina’s miserly obsession with the money that she’s won, secretly hoarded as gold coins. McTeague, rejected and abused, eventually murders Trina. Escaping into the desert with the gold, McTeague is pursued by the envious Marcus, convinced that the gold is his by right. Beneath the relentless sun, the two men destroy each other, dying through their stupidity and greed. Although born and raised in Austria, Erich von Stroheim is essentially an American director who retained strong links with European sensibilities and style. It is not surprising therefore to discover structuring and editing devices in his films that were common in Europe at the time. Greed contains numerous examples of cross-line editing schema, but the one that I have selected is important in that it occurs at a particularly significant moment in the story. McTeague, Trina, her mother and young brother have celebrated the couple’s engagement by going to see a show; they then visit McTeague’s dental parlour for something to eat. As they climb the stairs they are greeted by friends and neighbours, among them a cadaverous bald man with a plaster on his cheek, who has obviously asked after Trina (see Figures 17–21).

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19

Greed. Shot 9: CU Trina, astonished

20 Greed. Shot 11: CU Trina now looking CAM right, starts to speak

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17 CU the bald man (as before). 18 CU Trina (as in 2) looking CAM left again.

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There can be little doubt that Trina’s repeated look to camera left is the displaced angle, as the cuts made in on the axis to the bald man (shots 4–5 and 14–15) sustain his head position. Using cross-line edits in an attempt to re-establish the 180° convention (shots 11 and 13) as Trina attempts to suggest that there has

been a mistake–seeking to restore her feelings of imbalance–is an interesting application of the cross-line editing convention. It is sometimes argued that crossline editing is always simply arbitrary; merely the result of confusion about camera placement before the 180° convention was fully in place. The problem is that to some extent this is true but if, as in this instance, two versions of a shot are made and both of them are used, then this must surely indicate a deliberate intention. There is a commonly held view that silent films were somehow an inferior stage on the way towards the talking picture; that the goal was always greater realism and that because synchronised dialogue simulated reality in a way that the silent film never could, silent films were simply transitory and are largely irrelevant. This attitude also puts sound films made in black and white in the same category; merely a step on the way to colour and having no realisable creative potential. What these assumptions fail to appreciate is that films communicate not only through what is placed on the screen but just as powerfully by what is not, and that being free of the rigid necessities of realist form provides a filmmaker with the means to produce something likely to be more rewarding in the way that it is experienced. A pertinent analogy might be to compare this approach to that of a painter working with a restricted palette; by limiting the colours used to define the subject, the form can contribute significantly to the content of the work. As technology devised methods of representation that accorded more closely with the audience’s perceptions of reality itself, commercial interests quickly adopted those methods as having greater long-term economic value, and the development of synchronised sound, and eventually colour-film processes that

Patterns of visibility

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21 Greed. Shot 15: CU bald man (as before), starts to speak

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were only marginally more costly than monochrome, ensured that these technologies would become a permanent part of competitive film production. Inevitably, means and methods that had been adapted to further the creative possibilities of the medium at earlier points in its development now became redundant as new technologies procured the illusion of greater realism.

Notes

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1 In fact Olsen’s instinctive montage anticipates the experiments of Lev Kuleshov over a decade later. 2 Salt, Film Style and Technology, pp. 124–6. 3 Thompson and Bordwell, ‘From Sennett to Stevens’.

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Points of view

7

Outside, where the action is There can be no doubt that 1913 appears to mark the beginning of a significant change in the way that films began to be structured. Some of the tendencies which led to the establishment of SRS structure have already been explored in chapter 6, particularly with reference to The Primal Call The increased proximity of the camera to the action meant that if the playing area was to be divided, and this was the inevitable outcome of closer framing, the characters’ eye-lines relative to the camera would necessarily be oblique, and an angle of 30° was adopted as being most appropriate. What seems less clear are the reasons why it became acceptable to vary the position of the camera within the narrative space and abandon the single viewing point. I think this is probably quite a complex matter in that the reasons are several and somewhat disparate; certainly, releasing the camera from what was essentially a fixed frontal viewpoint was a very significant step. In some ways it was an evolutionary process. Once the basics of SRS figuration had become established, it was quickly realised that the camera could be positioned fairly freely within that figuration to obtain the best angle on performances or action. Using the 180° convention as a formal structuring principle allowed considerable latitude in terms of camera placement and many of the films made during and after 1913 adopted the convention. At the start, varying camera positioning within a scene was used simply to clarify the action, and examples can be found in many films made during a transition period that began in America about 1912. Louis Feuillade (1873–1925) was an incredibly prolific writer and director who started working in films in 1906, making comic shorts for Léon Gaumont. Many of these early films specialised in introducing startling trick effects into natural settings and there is an absurdist quality in the linking of conscious reality with unconscious fantasy which the surrealists would exploit some years later. In less than twenty years, Feuillade directed and scripted more than 800 films but he is probably best known for his fantasy serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex. The first of these, the Fantomas series, five separate films which he made between 105

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1913 and 1914, was based on stories published in a popular monthly magazine towards the end of 1911. Juve contre Fantômas (1913) was Feuillade’s second Fantomas film and centres upon the attempts by Inspector Juve of the Paris Sûreté to track down the master criminal Fantomas, a master of disguise with many aliases. Much of the popular appeal of the films is derived from the use of recognisable Parisian locations in which the protagonists are often pitched against each other in inventively constructed multishot action sequences. Most of the interiors however, consist of fixed-camera, single-shot scenes presenting the action played in depth. Occasionally, an interior scene is constructed using changes of viewpoint. Juve, assisted by journalist Fandor, has discovered that Fantomas is making a secret weekly rendezvous with a former accomplice, Lady Beltham, at a deserted villa. In disguise, they arrange to tour the villa as potential buyers. In the large cellar they are shown a large furnace with ducts that deliver warm air to the rooms above and a large water tank containing a floating empty bottle. The scene is covered using three camera angles. The first is a WS showing the entire space with a flight of steps leading down. A cut in on the axis to a closer MS is made as their guide opens the door of the furnace and they look inside; as they turn away, a cut is made back to the WS view. They then climb onto a raised platform next to the water tank, and a cut is made to an obliquely angled, closer view showing them looking down on the water surface and the floating bottle. A return to the WS covers their exit from the scene. Later, Fantomas, seeking to escape from the police, enters the cellar in the same WS set-up. He punches a hole in the base of an empty bottle and a close-up insert is used to show what he has done. He then climbs onto the platform, into the tank, and submerges himself beneath the water using the bottle as a snorkel tube. The two principal camera angles used in the earlier scene are then repeated, and show Inspector Juve and the pursuing police entering the cellar, climbing onto the platform and failing to find him. These formal symmetries, in which the basic action is repeated, emphasise the improbable, absurdist quality of the melodramatic plot. This degree of coverage contrasts significantly with scenes where, because there is very little action, it was not considered necessary to introduce closer views. For example, there is a scene in which Juve and Fandor enter a restaurant and recognise a woman diner as one of Fantomas’s accomplices which is played entirely in medium shot with inter-titles inserted to explain what is happening. At no point during the scene does Feuillade use close views to show facial expressions or looks and glances that would clarify the content of the exchanges between the characters, or introduce any psychological presentation of their motives. A later scene in a bedroom at the deserted villa shows Fantomas in conversation with Lady Bentham, but the whole scene is played in medium shot, the only inserts being a close-up of the air-duct grill through which we can see Juve and Fandor secretly listening to the conversation.

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Some similarities in structure, and in the realistic use of city locations, can be found in the first full-length feature to be made in America; the six-reeler Traffic in Souls, also made in 1913.1 At that time, members of the powerful Motion Picture Patents Company, known as the Trust, were still restricted by agreement to make only one- and two-reelers. Longer films had been made by Trust members: a fivereel Life of Moses had been made by Vitagraph in 1909, but exhibitors had been compelled to show it as a serial. Independents had imported multi-reel European films as early as 1911, but it was the enormous popular success of Queen Elizabeth (Amours de la Reine Elisabeth) starring Sarah Bernhardt, which Adolph Zukor imported in 1912, that convinced some sectors of the industry of the feature film’s viability and between 1912 and the first half of 1913, at least a dozen four- and five-reelers, made by independents, are known to have been released. However, enthusiasm for longer films did not always come from the top. Carl Laemmle’s Independant Motion Picture Company (IMP), the production division of Laemmle’s more famous Universal Film Manufacturing Company, employed a thirty-two year old actor-director, George Loane Tucker. Tucker had entered films in 1908 as an actor, started directing in 1910, and was now turning out a stream of one-reelers for IMP. Always on the look-out for possible subjects, he was aware of two successful plays, The Flight and The Lure, which dealt with the subject of white slavery. Danish filmmakers had made several films on the same subject during 1910 and 1911, and August Blom’s The White Slave Trade had been renamed The White Slave Traffic for its American release. Furthermore, the Rockefeller Report, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City, had been published in June, and Tucker felt that the climate of opinion was ready for a feature-length film on the subject. Unable to get official backing from Laemmle, Tucker persuaded four friends to back the project and went ahead. The film was shot secretly over four weeks but, before it could be edited, Tucker fell out with the IMP bosses, resigned and went to work in England. He never saw the completed film. Traffic in Souls explores the corrupt world of slave traffickers, men who ensnare young women, particularly immigrants, under the guise of friendship and force them into prostitution. The corrupt organisation is eventually destroyed by a mixture of resourcefulness and luck when the hero, police officer Burke, and his fiancée Mary Barton, obtain evidence that climaxes with an exciting raid on a brothel where Mary’s sister is being held captive. The structure of the film relies principally on the single-shot-scene format with action presented frontally and in depth that had dominated just about every film made up to this time. Tucker maintains a strong hold on the narrative using two principal strategies, cross-cutting between parallel lines of action and establishing a logical continuity of character movement between rooms, hallways and staircases in various locations; in fact the strength of the construction depends on his scrupulous use of the 180° convention throughout. What does impress is the multidimensional coverage of action which is used for some scenes, particularly

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the disembarkation of the immigrants at the dockside, but perhaps most notably in the climax of the film, the meticulously detailed raid on the brothel. This is a complex construction involving three police cars, dozens of policemen forcing entries into both sides of the building, co-ordinated by the hero from the roof-top, and all intercut with the heroine’s sister, previously captured by the traffickers, about to be whipped into submission inside the house. This climactic sequence reveals the extent to which it was now acceptable to place the camera wherever it best revealed continuing or related action. But the emphasis was still on action, and like Feuillade’s Fantomas series, thoughts and feelings were conveyed largely through the characters’ movements – the way they behaved. It was not considered necessary to use camera placement or framing to explore any subtleties of performance for dramatic emphasis. In most films made at this time a spectator was mostly invited to identify with a character because of the situation in which they were placed, and not as a result of being able to empathise with their inner feelings. Traffic in Souls presents its content graphically and objectively, but it remains essentially an action film based on a prurient subject, which perhaps explains why a film costing $5,700 was playing in twenty-eight New York theatres within a week of opening, took forty prints on a roadshow tour and eventually earned Universal $450,000.

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Keeping a distance

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Because it is necessary to examine all the important evidence of change that began around 1913, it will be helpful to return briefly to the films that D. W. Griffith made towards the end of his period at Biograph and those that he made subsequently, particularly The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, in that this enables us to confront certain aspects of his contribution to the development of filmmaking which hitherto have been avoided. Scene dissection and editing constructions that used shots taken from a variety of different camera positions seemed to raise some specific concerns for Griffith. His constructions suggest that he believed that an authorial presence could be retained only if the spectator remained objectively outside the filmic space, occupying a fixed position in front of which the action would be presented by the filmmaker. Freeing the camera from this single, objective position ran the risk of disrupting the integrity of what he regarded as the world of the film presented in depth. It was as if allowing access to aspects of the action within the scene somehow allowed the spectator a position of privilege, and a consequent degree of identification, which threatened his creative control of their response. Certainly, Griffith experimented with the possibilities of a multishot structure with interaction between the separate elements. In A Welcome Intruder, which he shot in January 1913, Griffith introduces a six-shot sequence which dissects the action using an SRS schema with looks between characters carried across the cuts.

The plot turns on the abduction of a child and the sequence begins with the boy’s father saying goodbye to him on the porch of the house.

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2

3 4 5 6

MS the porch. The father and the boy emerge from the house and, after saying goodbye, the father leaves frame right. MCS the front entrance of a bar further down the street. The father enters frame left, turns, looks back and smiles at the boy who is out of vision (OOV). He then exits frame right, but as he does so a man enters the shot from frame left, stops and continues to look off frame right, the direction that the father took. LS the street. The father enters CAM left into CS, turns and looks back, then waves and smiles. MCS (as in 2). The watching man turns and looks back towards the boy OOV. CS the boy standing on the porch. He returns his father’s wave looking CAM right. MCS (as in 2). The watching man turns and enters the bar.

What is particularly interesting about Griffith’s use of this variant of the usual SRS structure is the insertion of the watching man (who is in fact the abducting villain) into the second shot of the sequence, which not only places the villain between the father and the child visually but metaphorically as well. In fact Griffith underlines the point by returning to him in shot 4 instead of cutting to the boy, which might be expected. It should also be emphasised that the whole scene is objectively narrated, the arrangement of shots telling the story, and going well beyond the realism of a daddy waving goodbye to his son.2 Comparing Griffith’s films with the work of others made during similar periods seems to indicate that his emphasis on frontal presentation, with few exceptions, persisted right through his filmmaking career. The result of this preferred way of working and the distancing effect that it promotes does, at first sight, seem to be at odds with Griffith’s determination to generate excitement by cross-cutting between parallel activity, but in fact this is not as contradictory as it appears. Because the feelings of excitement are generated as a result of the spectator’s awareness of the relationship between different shots, the meaning is constructed at a distance by the form of the story, and the presence of the narrator is sustained. This notion of distancing can be clarified by reference to Griffith’s actual, and very specific, use of an LS in Through Darkened Vales which he began shooting at the end of September 1911. The story is typically melodramatic: the heroine, Grace, loses her sight as a result of an accident and Dave, who is in love with her, also goes blind from overwork while supporting her. He uses his savings for an operation which restores her sight and the lovers are united in the closing shot. The resolution of the film shows Dave using his stick and making his way through the urban streets that lead to Grace’s house. Grace sits at her window waiting for him and a series of

Points of view

1

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intercuts alternates Dave’s halting progress with Grace’s watchful concern. At one point Griffith introduces a LS of a wide, empty street and shows Dave making his way laterally through the background of the shot before cutting to a closer shot of Grace anxiously waiting at home. By physically placing Dave at a distance from the spectator, he objectifies the moment and clarifies Dave’s predicament, emphasising his vulnerability as a small figure in wide space. That Griffith was an admirer of the novels of Charles Dickens has been well documented, and the sometimes simplistic, puritanical attitudes and sentimental moralities that can be found in so many of his melodramas, suggests a clear link with the Victorian sensibilities of Dickens’s novels. His first wife, Linda Arvidson, in her reminiscences of their years at Biograph, recalls a discussion that took place concerning After Many Years which Griffith filmed in September 1908, three months after he began directing: When Mr. Griffth suggested a scene showing Annie Lee waiting for her husband’s return to be followed by a scene of Enoch cast away on a desert island, it was altogether too distracting.

Film editing

‘How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Griffith, ‘doesn’t Dickens write that way?’ ‘Yes, but that’s Dickens: that’s novel writing; that’s different.’ ‘Oh, not so much, these are picture stories; not so different.’3

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In an interview for The Times, given when Griffith was visiting London in 1922, he recalled either this or a similar incident and added: ‘I went home, re-read one of Dickens’s novels, and came back next day to tell them they could either make use of my idea or dismiss me.’4 In his 1944 essay, ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, Eisenstein affirms that Griffith derived the principle of sudden switching between scenes from Dickens and makes a persuasive case for the novel’s form leading Griffith towards equating the narrator with the film director, standing outside, observing and describing the events portrayed. There were of course other models. Henry James, born in 1843, a generation after Dickens, was a novelist who favoured the story told from a character’s viewpoint, an individual perspective. Although James was never able to remove entirely the intrusive presence of the narrator from his novels, his method was to put the reader in the position of an individual participant in the story who was then encouraged to follow the events as they unfolded by sharing that character’s point of view. It seems unlikely that filmmakers consciously determined to evolve a cinematic device that would emulate a literary form which James and others employed, but once free to construct the content of a scene from separate viewpoints, as in the basic SRS formula, it was but a small step to realise another set of related possibilities.

Towards invisibility

1 2 3 4 5 6

MS two men face each other, Lenny on the left, Richard on the right. CS Lenny looking towards CAM right. CS Richard looking towards CAM left, he then turns and walks away. CS Lenny (as in 2) he shouts after Richard. CS Richard (as in 3) he continues to walk away, ignoring him. CS Lenny (as in 2) looks frustrated.

The question arises as to whether shot 5 is part of the SRS structure or whether it is a POV. We can presume that when the face-to-face interaction ended, Richard’s walk away became Lenny’s POV, but really the only important thing is that the intention of the structure should be clear. The main point about a POV shot is that it is a view that the camera/spectator shares with a character and is shown from a position that matches it. The classic POV shot is most frequently preceded by a look or a glance. A cut is then made to the object of the glance from the viewer’s position or from a position immediately adjacent to it. Then another cut is made to the viewer having completed the glance. The object seen is required to be shown in a way which accords with the glance that prompted the cut to it. For example, a look up to someone on a roof would be followed by a camera angle from below, and so on, but considerable latitude exists with regard to proximity, and the size of the image would be determined as much by the dramatic purposes of the scene as a need to retain a sense of spatial logic. The term ‘point of view’ can theoretically refer to any point placed in a relationship to any viewer, the only necessary requirement being that the spectator comprehends the nature of the relationship between viewer and what is viewed. But the most important aspect of the POV shot concerns its use. Unlike any other kind of shot, it presents a view that the camera/spectator directly shares with a character in the film, and in that sense the spectator moves into a subjective awareness of the response that the character has to the events that he is observing. Although not so directly, the alternations of editing between two characters in an SRS figure encourage the spectator to become subjectively involved in the scene in a similar way and also, like the positioning of the camera/spectator in the POV structure, the closer the eye-line of the character is to the lens axis, the greater the sense of identification with the characters and degree of involvement in the scene. The steps that took cinematic form from the objectivity of its beginnings towards the subjectivity of point-of-view and shot/reverse-shot editing, seem to have begun

Points of view

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The POV almost certainly developed from an increasingly confident use of shot/reverse-shot constructions within scenes. The reason for this is fairly easy to understand. Imagine a situation where two characters are facing each other in a scene that starts as an MS with both characters looking towards each other laterally then cutting to close-ups with the camera angle set at 30° to their eyelines.

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about 1913 and one filmmaker in particular was quick to explore the possibilities offered by this kind of construction. Ralph Ince was the youngest of three brothers, sons of a pair of American travelling actors all of whom, raised in the theatre, started their careers as actors. In 1907, after a succession of failures touring in stock theatre, followed by a period as a commercial artist, Ralph Ince joined the Vitagraph company, then one of the major film producers in America. He was 20 years old and ready to start at the bottom. As was usual in the pioneering days, Ralph Ince had the opportunity to try his hand at a variety of off-screen jobs, becoming a prop-boy at one stage, then acting in small parts and, eventually playing leads.5 Records show that Ralph Ince directed The Godmother for Vitagraph in 1912 and Barry Salt has identified one extant film from the same year, Double Danger, in which Ince shows a firm grasp of original structuring techniques.6 In fact the success of this film led to Vitagraph giving him a three-reeler to direct, The Mills of the Gods, which drew considerable attention to his directing skills. Most of the films that he directed in 1913 are now lost but His Last Fight, a one-reeler which was released in November, still exists. This film demonstrates how quickly Ralph Ince had absorbed the latest technical developments in film construction, pushing the possibilities of reverse-angle cutting further than anyone else. The increased pace of editing, something in which Griffith’s films had led the way, is well in evidence here: Barry Salt has calculated that there are as many as seventy-five cuts in the film’s 731 ft. length and that twenty-five of these are used to cut between reverse-angles covering interchanges of looks and words that were filmed in a succession of framings carefully selected to reflect the emotional pulse of the scenes. Just as Griffith had realised that by cross-cutting between different locations it was possible to increase the pace of a film by making each shot shorter every time you cut to it, so Ralph Ince recognised that cutting between reverse angles provided opportunities to tighten the action in just the same way, but within a scene. That the pace at which the scene had originally been played, unchangeable so long as it was restricted to be seen in one shot, could be adjusted at the editing stage to be shorter or, and this was the power that editing provided, longer and slower by artificially extending pauses and reactions beyond those established at the time of shooting. SRS use can be found only in a minority of films made before 1914 but other directors who were starting their careers at that time recognised the dramatic possibilities of the eye-line match in developing tension between related sections of screen space. John G. Adolfi was a 26-year-old former actor who started directing for Reliance and made a two-reeler, Detective Burton’s Triumph (1914), also known as The Bank Burglar’s Fate. The climax of the film takes place in a bar, to which Burton and two other detectives have followed the three robbers. Adolfi stages the establishing wide shot in depth, with the three villains seated at a table by the back wall. Between them and the camera, two more tables reveal Burton seated alone

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facing frame right with the table in the foreground occupied by Burton’s two disguised accomplices, one of whom faces frame left with a clear eye-line to Burton. The scene is then developed using a series of close framings on each of the tables angled so that the exchanges which follow, interchanges of looks and covert signals, are clearly seen. The intercutting between the three groups, leading to the gradual realisation by the crooks that they are being watched, continues over a series of nineteen cuts before a return to the WS covers the shoot-out at the end of the scene. The controlled intercutting of six eye-line matches is certainly exceptional by any standards and confirms the extent to which this shooting and editing practice was to become central to scene construction in the period that followed. John Adolfi continued directing and reached his peak in the transitional period between silent and sound, and in the early 1930s formed an association with George Arliss, directing film versions of the actor’s stage successes. He died in 1933 at the early age of 45. Almost certainly, directors found influences in the work of others. Ralph Ince made about a dozen films in 1914 starting with a five-reeler, A Million Bid, which was used for the opening season of the company’s recently acquired Broadway theatre show-case, newly named The Vitagraph Theatre. Well received at the time, like most of his films from that year, it is now regrettably lost. Of the films directed in 1915, perhaps the most remarkable is His Phantom Sweetheart, a one-reeler which was released in April. The plot turns on a rather hoary old trick of narrative construction that can only really work in films. Young Jack Courtney postpones his plans to go to the opera when he receives a message from a business friend making an appointment at his club. While waiting he dozes in his chair. From his box at the opera he notices a beautiful young woman taking her seat in the stalls and is entranced, particularly when she responds to his attention. Later, he finds her in the foyer having apparently missed her escort and is delighted when she agrees that he should accompany her home. Invited in, he confesses that he has fallen in love with her and she admits to feeling the same. Startled by a noise, she goes to investigate. Courtney, hearing a struggle behind a curtain, pulls it aside and the woman’s murdered body falls to the floor. Her enraged husband, the assailant, then attacks Courtney, throttling him, at which point his friend shakes him awake from his uncomfortable dream. The banality of the story is more than compensated for by the treatment, which shapes the tale with a confident use of SRS structure, building scenes from a variety of shot sizes and camera angles. Barry Salt confesses that when he first saw this film he was troubled by the suspicion that it was wrongly dated and that it had in fact been made some years later, for no other film that he had seen from that period was so advanced in terms of its technique. What this clearly reveals is that from this point, one particular direction that film structure would take would be built on these subjective strategies. The question that must be raised is that, given

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various alternative structuring possibilities, why was this system to become so dominant? Two significant, interrelated discoveries came with the acceptance of multishot scene construction based on the SRS schema. The first was that SRS and POV compelled a subjectivity and degree of identification that could be controlled and manipulated by giving precedence to whichever view of the scene was most relevant to the drama at any given moment. Second, constructing a scene from individual shots gave the filmmaker greater control over the whole scene. I have already examined the way that editing can be used to manipulate pace, but by shooting several takes of a performance and using different sections of those versions in the final assembly, the filmmaker obtained greater control of the content, the pace and the rhythm of a scene. Furthermore, just as in the climax of a Griffith last-minute rescue, as subjective involvement with the dramatic discourse of the scene increased, so the spectator’s awareness of the structure diminished. Indeed, what became quickly evident was that, not only were cuts between different viewpoints not consciously noticeable, but if a cut was made to or from a closer shot during action that could be matched in both framings, there was no awareness that a cut had taken place at all. If the action flow was relevant to the continuity of the scene, the cuts became invisible. This might be said to have been the point of origination of what was to become continuity cinema. Command of the techniques of multishot scene construction are much in evidence in the serial that Ralph Ince directed next for Vitagraph, The Juggernaut, ‘a story of modern life in five thrilling parts’. Serials, with their ‘continued next week’ policy, had taken America by storm in 1914, and in 1915 were at the height of their popularity. Only one episode of The Juggernaut appears to have survived, a race-against-time melodrama, climaxing with a spectacular train crash into a river (shown twice) and a gallant rescue of the heroine from the sinking wreckage, which contains some sophisticated cuts on action. The film uses editing to develop action between scenes with exceptional economy; a telephone conversation between the heroine and her father concludes with the receiver being replaced, and it is immediately followed by a cut forward in time as the heroine enters the next shot, now dressed to go out. In spite of the confident cuts on action, cuts on exits are still not made in anticipation of a character leaving the frame; a cutting strategy not fully adopted until the late 1920s. The innovatory structuring found in these films by Ralph Ince and John Adolfi, and no doubt many others made at that time, seem to have been absorbed into shooting and editing practice largely unnoticed. Although it is possible, as I have done, to consider these developments as simply logical extensions of existing practices evolving naturally out of experiment, it is a view that fails to take into account the fact that filmmaking between 1913 and 1915 was not happening in a vacuum. The discovery and development of cinema was, from the beginning, merely one part of a world undergoing a transformation.

This survey of the evolution of film structure has hitherto neglected to consider these developments in any context outside cinema practices themselves. Yet it is certain that activities occurring in the worlds of science and art during this crucially formative period must have conditioned the thinking of those practitioners occupied with such a powerful means of communicating ideas and attitudes as filmmaking. In the same way, the various arts, and to some extent sciences, responded to the inventions and the socially determining activities concerned with the making and showing of films. What we know is that the period between 1895 and 1914 saw the founding of modern physics, physiology and sociology, the invention of radio and cinema, massive changes in industrial processes, publishing and the mass-circulation of newspapers, and a radical transformation in artists’ attitudes to painting, music, dance and literature. It was a period of convergence during which Tor the first time the world, as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable’,7 In 1900, Max Planck asserted that energy, like matter, has a discontinuous structure and established the principles of quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein, building on Planck’s equations, constructed a special theory of relativity in 1904 which asserted that there are no absolutes, all perceptions of the material world are relative. An age of science had arrived which demolished simultaneously the former sacrosanct invariability of time, space and matter. Out of this cauldron of uncertainty and change a transformation in painting emerged that was led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The work that they produced between 1907 and 1914 became known as Cubism. When photography was invented around 1840, it was thought that it would appropriate the role of painting. In fact, artists saw photography as an exciting new medium offering fresh possibilities of exploring light, space and composition. The changes it did make were to those uses of art which were primarily concerned with recording appearances. Portrait painting survived but with changed function and reduced vigour, and historical illustration was taken over by press photography and film to powerful effect. For the first time ever, photographs could testify to the personal tragedies of the American Civil War, and documentary film expose the mindless brutalities of the First World War. Yet the ability of film and photography to render reality in these ways, through readily replicated and easily disseminated images, partly devalued them. The newspaper photograph and images of movement flickering momentarily across a screen were somehow transitory and devoid of substance. A painting however, was a real object, something that could be both its subject and itself. Painters, confronting these matters during the early part of the twentieth century, sought to make their art a directly expressed experience, either by producing paintings that owed little to the visible world, or by representing a visible world in ways that were more forceful than those of the film or photograph;

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their paintings sought to distil the essence of what was both seen and known. Through Cubism, Picasso and Braque sought freedom from the requirement to imitate reality, and at the same time explored a visual language that could express a different view of the world. The Cubists were concerned with the interaction between objects, and saw the spaces between as part of the same structure as the objects themselves. These discontinuities were combined in their paintings into a single integrated structure. In his 1969 essay ‘The Moment of Cubism’ John Berger writes:

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The Cubists created the possibility of art revealing processes instead of static entities. The content of their art consists of various modes of interaction: the interaction of different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between structure and movement, between the seer and the thing seen.8 Berger might be describing a scene from a film made any time after 1913 rather than summarising Cubist art. Because the early development of cinema runs exactly parallel with these challenging explorations in painting, it is tempting to seek evidence of influences. In 1912 a different kind of Cubism appeared, a Synthetic Cubism which involved the introduction of actual materials into a painting, producing a discontinuous texture. This idea of constructing meaning from a collage of different elements would eventually influence poetry, literature and music, and also film. Norbert Lynton, in The Story of Modern Art, notes the following:

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The film, a new kind of entertainment, was ambitious to establish itself as an art form at least equal to the theatre (on which it had depended too closely) and was beginning to find its essential means as an assembled work, free to ignore limitations of space, time, and sight. People to whom Cubism seemed a dereliction of duty rapidly learnt the language of montage (French for putting together) and accepted as perfectly comprehensible an art that combined photographic realism of parts with firmly anti-naturalistic composition.9

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If it seems fanciful to suggest that the remote concerns of intellectuals and artists working in Paris could have had any direct influence on filmmakers far removed from these preoccupations and busily making films on the other side of the world, the repercussions of an event which began in New York on 17 February 1913 might possibly be considered to have some relevance. On that date the first International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the Armory of the Sixty-ninth New York Regiment on Lexington Avenue. It had been organised by the Association of American Sculptors and Painters (AAPS). This great media event was a sensational success, written about in every newspaper and attended by 90, 000 people in New York alone. After four weeks it went on to Chicago, where it was seen by 200, 000 visitors, and finally it went to Boston. It

Notes 1

2

I have used the term ‘full-length feature’ in its modern sense of a film running somewhere in the region of 90 minutes. At the time, films longer than one or two reels were called ‘multiple-reel’ films. I am indebted to Joyce Jesionowski’s valuable analysis of Griffith’s Biograph films for this and many other pertinent insights into Griffith’s work contained in her book Thinking in Pictures.

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was the first opportunity that Americans had to confront directly the art that had been produced in Europe during the previous fifteen years. There had been an exhibition of French impressionists in the mid-1880s, yet by 1913 most Americans still thought Impressionism was the latest thing. Included in the hundreds of works on display were paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Derain and Duchamp; there was sculpture by Brancusi and of course paintings by Picasso and Braque. Perhaps the painting on show that most obviously displayed a link between the moving image and Cubist abstraction was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, painted in 1912 and influenced by the photographic studies of figures in motion made by Marey and Muy bridge. The result was a subject clearly detached from the conventions of fixed space or time. Certainly, the impact of Duchamp’s painting ensured that it was singled out for particular attention and much vituperation, the famous description of it as ‘an explosion in a shingle factory’, being much repeated. American realism – paintings of scenes of ordinary city life, referred to as the Ashcan School of painting – was, in 1913, regarded as the radical modernist threat to a long-established artistic tradition of heroic classic idealism. Consequently, the Armory exhibition had a devastating effect on American art, causing impassioned debate and polarised attitudes. Many younger artists, who had been realists, turned to modernism, new galleries came into existence to provide for changed preferences, and as one chronicler of the event wrote: ‘In spite of ridicule and vituperation, the sweep of art history could not be impeded by either ignorance or eloquence; American art was never the same again.’10 In 1914, a book by Arthur J. Eddy appeared, Cubists and Post-Impressionists, saying that the art of the future would be more spiritual; the keynote of the modern movement was ‘the expression of the inner self, as distinguished from the representations of the outer world’. It is difficult to be aware of the impact of this highly publicised event on artistic and creative activity in America during 1913 and the years that followed without believing that its effects would be reflected in that most prolific area of creative endeavour – the burgeoning film industry. While accepting that new possibilities for a multidimensional approach to film structure were initially part of a natural evolution, any new thinking that began to appear during 1914 could not have been immune to the upheavals prompted by the Armory show.

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Mrs D. W. Griffith, When the Movies Were Young, p. 66. Quoted from The Times, 26 April 1922 in Eisensteines essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, published in his Film Form, p. 205. 5 It is important not to confuse the youngest Ince brother with his slightly older brother Thomas who, entering films as an actor in 1906, began directing for Carl Laemmle’s IMP in 1910 and for Kessel and Bauman’s NYMP in 1911. He established NYMP’s California studio complex, which became known as Inceville, and is recognised as the founder of the ‘studio system’ of production. 6 Salt, ‘The Unknown Ince’. This is a very full and well-researched article for which I am indebted for most of my comments on this important director. 7 Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’, p. 137. 8 Berger, ibid., p. 153. 9 Lynton, The Story of Modern Art, p. 65. 10 Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, p. 68.

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Inceville In 1912, Thomas H. Ince, the elder brother of Ralph Ince whose work was discussed earlier in the last chapter,1 was running the Hollywood studio of Kessel and Bauman’s New York Motion Pictures (NYMP). He had been NYMP’s principal film director since September 1911 and had gained a reputation for the high quality of his films, many of which were westerns. He had leased a huge tract of land in the Santa Ynez Canyon at Santa Monica – soon called ‘Inceville’ – and it was here that he filmed his productions. In many ways Ince was a better producer than director. A dynamic and ruthless individual, he had been the driving force behind the studio’s remarkable success and had closely involved himself with all aspects of every film that was made there. He acquired a growing stable of talented directors and stars, insisting on detailed scripts (many of which he wrote himself) and rigorous production planning. His dominance of the studio output meant that his name was better known than any other, and his close supervision of the films that were made convinced him that, if there were any commercial advantage to be had from a name on the opening credits, it had better be his. By the middle of 1912, the studio’s growing output was such that Ince decided to stand down as the company’s principal director and concentrate mainly on supervising production. Like most films of the period, the westerns made at Inceville between 1911 and 1912 were structured on the single-shot/scene principle. To clarify their content, scenes would often contain inserts of letters or documents and would sometimes be preceded by an inter-title, usually explaining what was about to be seen. But, towards the end of 1912, some interesting variants on this structure were appearing. The Invaders, a three-reeler released at the end of November, was directed by Francis Ford,2 who also acted in the film, although some sources name Thomas Ince as co-director. The matter is complicated because Ince’s close involvement with, and influence on, every film produced at Inceville was considerable. Francis Ford had begun his career in films in 1907 working as an actor for the Edison

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company and it was as an actor that he was initially hired by Ince. The Invaders is certainly one of the first, if not the first short film that he directed. A typical western story of the period, The Invaders is concerned with a dispute over an alleged invasion of Indian tribal lands. A year after agreement with the Sioux about territory boundaries, a group of surveyors arrive at a remote miliary outpost. The daughter of the Sioux chief, Sky Star, who has rejected a marriage proposal from a suitor, wanders alone not realising that he is following her. She welcomes a friendly approach from one of the surveyors but their meeting is interrupted by the slighted suitor who jealously decides to make trouble. Falsely accusing the surveying team of violating the land treaty and dissatisfied with the Colonel’s reassurances, the Sioux join forces with the neighbouring Cheyenne and the surveying party are massacred. Sky Star, attempting to warn the soldiers of the uprising, is injured. The Indians mount an attack on the fort and destroy the telegraph line linked to the next post. Lieutenant White, betrothed to the Colonel’s daughter, rides for aid, and the attack is successfully driven off. Sky Star dies of her injuries and the Colonel, his daughter and Lieutenant White pay their respects. The most innovative structuring device used in the film occurs during the scene when Sky Star is seen and approached by one of the young surveyors. Sky Star’s wandering is first seen through the lens of the surveying instrument, and the reaction of the two surveyors is cross-cut with a vignetted close-up view of her: their POV. One of the young men leaves with the evident intention of approaching her, and a cut to an MS of Sky Star shows him entering the scene. He speaks to her and she joins him as they sit against a rock. The scene continues using a shot construction quite advanced for its time. A VLS of the couple in the distance, taken from behind them, shows the rejected suitor entering the frame and watching them from a distance. A cut is then made to a complete reverse angle showing the couple in the mid-foreground. In the distance behind them, and unseen, is the approaching suitor. This reverse-shot structure is repeated, and, as the suitor gets closer, they see him and go their separate ways. He follows the departing surveyor from a distance. A structure covering continuous action from two intercut viewpoints is quite unusual in a film made in 1912. It does more than present the relationship between action occuring in two adjacent spaces or moving between them. Constructing a single, three-dimensional space and selecting viewing points within it seems to empower the spectator by confirming and heightening an awareness of what is both seen and known. This is more than action presented sequentially: in this construction, the spectator is more readily invited to occupy the filmic space and inevitably the emotional space as well.

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Inside, where the feelings are The name Reginald Barker appears in very few film histories. He was born in Canada of Scottish parents; his mother died when he was 2 years old and he was

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sent to live with relatives in Scotland. When he was 10 his father brought him to America and they settled in California. He determined on a stage career which he pursued with varying success until 1913: he was then 26. Now that Hollywood had become the centre of the rapidly growing American film industry, Barker decided that the time had come to ‘enter pictures’ and learn everything about films. He approached Thomas Ince and offered to work for nothing. Ince agreed, but after four weeks it was clear that Barker had much to offer and he was put on the payroll. During the following months, Barker proved his ability on one- and two-reelers, many of them featuring Japanese actors. Ince was impressed with the results and gave Barker his first feature, The Wrath of the Gods. Although by 1913 the popularity of the western – all the rage since 1910 – was beginning to decline, Ince’s studio had committed considerable resources to sustaining the genre and he was keen to explore possibilities of developing it. Early in 1914 he had taken on an experienced stage actor, William S. Hart, who wanted to make realistic, ‘adult’ westerns. These short films were immediately popular, and towards the end of 1914 Ince asked Barker to direct Hart in his first feature. It was called The Bargain. William S. Hart introduced to the screen the ‘good-bad man’ character who starts out with bad intentions but is redeemed through some good or noble deed. In The Bargain, Hart plays Jim Stokes, a two-gun outlaw known for daring stagecoach robbery. The local townsfolk, aware of the threat, double the guard; but Stokes outwits them, holds up the coach, steals the cash and gets away. During the pursuit, Stokes is ambushed and wounded and is later found and tended by a local farmer, Phil Brent, and his daughter Nell, who are unaware of his identity. Stokes and Nell fall in love. Nell accepts his proposal of marriage and Stokes, now determined to reform, plans to return the stolen money to the express company. Two neighbours act as witnesses to the ceremony but, having found evidence of the stolen cash nearby, become suspicious. When Stokes takes the money into town to return it, they convey their suspicions to the sheriff. Stokes is caught and held captive by the sheriff in a room above a saloon and gambling hall. Planning to send him and the money into custody on the next stage, the sheriff telegraphs his intentions ahead and, while waiting for the stage, visits the gambling hall. He loses all his own money then succumbs to temptation and tries to recover his losses by gambling the recovered express money. However, the roulette wheel is rigged and he loses the lot. On learning what has happened, Stokes strikes a bargain: he will recover the lost money in return for his freedom. Temporarily released, Stokes successfully robs the crooked casino, returns the money and, with the connivance of the sheriff, gets away. All, of course, ends happily. What is immediately noticeable about the shooting and editing structure of this film is its confident and adventurous handling of multidimensional camera positioning, shot-reverse-shot action coverage, use of POV and variation of framings for dramatic emphasis. The very first shot of the film is designed to bind

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the spectator with the leading character. It begins with an ELS of rugged, hilly terrrain seen from above; then the camera makes a true panorama shot, moving slowly across the barren emptiness, then suddenly revealing Stokes in close shot, striking flame from a match and lighting a cigarette. A little later, Barker achieves a similar result by cutting back and forth between Stokes preparing his hold-up and his POV of the approaching stagecoach in the very far distance. After Stokes has been wounded in the ambush and is discovered by Phil Brent, Barker builds tension by using SRS structure to cut between them, controlling the pace of the scene by editing. Cross-cutting is used extensively, to condense action, to create a sense of parallel contrast and to establish mood. Once Stokes has been captured and handcuffed to the bed to await the next stagecoach to Blue Rook, the sheriff is faced with a tedious three-hour wait. His frustration is conveyed by cross-cutting between the small cramped room and the spacious saloon and casino below where everyone seems to be having a good time. Even though the film is silent, these cross-cut images are able to evoke a very potent sense of place, with the actuality sounds not heard but imagined. Barker also realised that, through editing, it was possible to convey inner thoughts and feelings. During a conversation in the living room between Nell and the Parson, Barker cross-cuts between their conversation and Stokes listening in his bedroom, overhearing them through the door. The camera is here being used to privilege the spectator in a completely new way, by providing an opportunity to share Stokes’s personal response to a conversation taking place in another room, not to show action, but to construct Stokes’s inner thoughts. These are only a few instances of an approach to directing and editing which had started to break new ground. However, although The Bargain emphasises character internality, it is essentially an action-driven western, and it is in this respect that the advances in multi-directional camera positioning are most evident. The following example reveals how this opened new possibilities for linking shots into a linear construction. Stokes has struck his bargain with the sheriff and sets off to rob the casino. 1 MCS Stokes hotel bedroom. Watched by the sheriff, Stokes climbs out through the window. 2 MS Stokes – an action cut – as he emerges from the window and steps out onto the balcony. He looks cautiously around, sees the ladder used by his captors still against the wall, climbs over the railing and starts to descend. 3 MS ground level, an action cut as Stokes descends the ladder. He looks around, takes a neckerchief from his pocket and cuts eyeholes in it with a coin to make a mask. He puts it in his pocket and, checking that he has not been seen, casually enters the saloon.

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7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

WS the large saloon interior – sightly elevated angle. It is largely deserted, the casino has closed and all the activity is taking place in the back bar. Stokes crosses the saloon and walks towards the camera, looking past it. He exits CAM R. WS from inside the casino area. Stokes approaches the wide doorway; in the foreground a croupier is bagging his takings. MS a reverse angle. Stokes is in the right foreground and the croupier is finishing his bagging-up inside the room. WS from inside the casino area (as in 5); the croupier finishes and exits frame left. MS a group of croupiers standing by the cashier’s table. Our croupier enters frame left (!) and throws his money bag on the table. MCS Stokes standing to one side of the casino door. He puts on his mask, draws his revolvers and exits frame left. MS Croupiers (as in 8). Inter-title: ‘Throw up your hands.’ MWS – a new set-up – reverse angle of 10. The croupiers and cashier raise their hands and back away revealing Stokes, masked with two guns pointing at them. MWS – a new set-up – reverse of 12. Stokes in right foreground takes the bag of money and backs out of shot CAM right. WS the casino interior – similar to shot 5 but tighter. Stokes backs out through the doorway, pockets the money, turns and dashes towards the saloon exit.

Needless to say he is pursued, escapes, and is eventually able to make his way back to the room to be manacled to the bed by the sheriff, his side of the bargain now accomplished. The Bargain, one of the best films to be made by the studio during 1914, was released at the beginning of December; but for all its directorial skill, Reginald Barker was not named as the director; credit for directing the film was taken by producer and studio boss, Thomas H. Ince. Barker continued to develop his directorial skills with every film he made. Towards the end of 1914 he embarked upon a feature starring the noted stage actor George Beban, The Italian. An Italian immigrant, Beppo Donnetti (played by George Beban), arrives in New York and makes a living as a street boot-black. He sends for his bride to be, Annette Ancello; they marry and a baby is born. During a sweltering New York summer their baby becomes ill. Beppo sets off to buy pasteurised milk for the child; he is mugged, and while seeking violent retribution, is arrested. His pleas for help from Corrigan, the slum boss, are brutally rejected and he is imprisoned. A message for Annette, passed to his gaoler, is deliberately destroyed. The baby dies and is buried in his absence. Beppo, finally released, desolate and angry, learns that Corrigan’s young daughter is sick and determines to revenge himself on her

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father by harming the child. He manages to get into Corrigan’s house unseen, but on finding the sleeping child he confronts the enormity of his intention and leaves. In the final shot he sobs out his despair over his son’s grave. Throughout the film, Barker concentrates on revealing the inner qualities of the leading character as he struggles to construct and sustain family life in a deprived part of the city. There are no villainous plots or melodramatic contrivances, one of the most compelling and suspenseful sequences is concerned with Beppo and Annette missing each other at the dockside when she first arrives in New York. Beppo’s struggles are against the self-interest and indifference of others, and his naïveity leads him into misjudgements and missalliances, which have tragic consequences. The Italian is notable in that it apparently sets out to explore how multidirectional camera positioning and variable framing could be used primarily to emphasise character development and psychological motivation rather than plot. Thomas Ince credits himself and C. Gardner Sullivan, a screenwriter who was head of the scenario department, with the essentially character-driven screenplay, engages a highly regarded character actor to play the lead and gives the responsibility of directing the film to Barker. A particularly unusual device – a prologue and epilogue – is used to frame the story; introduce the supposed source of the film, and link the actor with the character that he plays. These scenes reveal exceptional control of the techniques of continuity editing; camera movement, placement, and framing. After the opening titles there is a fade to black and then stage curtains open on: 1

2

3

4

MWS of a furnished room. The actor, George Beban, sits on the sofa reading the final pages of a book. He shuts it, stands up puffing on his pipe and tosses the book onto the sofa. He moves away from the camera, passing the fireplace to where some books lie on a small desk. He sits at the desk, puts his pipe in his mouth, and reaches for one of the books. CU Beban, a front view of him as he looks down at the books OOV. He takes the pipe from his mouth puts it down and reaches OOV for a book and picks it up. BCU Beban’s POV of the book held in his hand. The book’s title, The Italian, is printed above a picture and below it are the names ‘Thomas H. Ince & C. Gardner Sullivan’. CU Beban (as in 2). He starts opening the pages, turning through them, then looks down at his pipe, picks it up and puts it in his mouth, then begins to stand up.

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The action cutting and continuity matching are meticulous throughout.

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MWS (as if a continuation of shot 1). He completes his rise and comes forward, still flicking through the pages and puffing his pipe. He then puts the pipe onto the mantlepiece and sits on the sofa with the book,

returning to the first pages. He sits back against the end of the sofa and puts his legs up to get comfortable. At the point when he puts the pipe onto the mantlepiece, a very slow track forward begins which, when it stops, frames him in an MS.

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BCU the first page of the book with an illustration of a church and short text held long enough to be read. CS Beban reading. He turns the first page. Slow fade to black. Fade in WS a small Italian church with a Byzantine dome silhouetted against the sky (very similar to the illustration on the first page of the book).

This is the first shot of the film proper. The epilogue begins after a fade-out on the shot of Beppo kneeling at his son’s graveside. Fade in on the CS of Beban turning to the last page of the book; BCU the final page; MWS as at the start of the prologue, Beban closes the book and looks thoughtful. The stage curtains close. This prologue/epilogue structure has a number of functions. It is emblematic, in that it introduces George Beban the stage actor (the opening and closing stage curtains) apparently engaged in the process of selecting a story worthy of his talents. It separates the actor from the role in a way which gives emphasis to his status.3 It stresses the importance of the character which he plays and with whom the individual spectator will be required to identify closely. It introduces a seamless structure of shooting and continuity editing, which will be used throughout the film, and which encourages identification with both George Beban’s, and the character, Beppo’s, inner feelings. The films that Reginald Barker directed for Thomas Ince during this important transitional period place considerable emphasis on revealing a character’s internal journey through the use of flexible camera placement and compositional framing, and there can be little doubt that these shooting and structuring methods were appearing to varying degrees in many of the hundreds of films being made at this time. In making these analyses, we are fortunate that many significant examples of the best work still exist. The Italian was released in January 1915 and Barker continued to make numerous shorts and several well-received features for Ince. Towards the end of 1915, he made The Coward, a civil war drama featuring noted actor Frank Keenan and Charles Ray. In a mixed atmosphere of anxiety and exhilaration, young men, accompanied by their women friends and families, are flocking to the Confederate Armyrecruiting post in the town hall. Young Frank Winslow, son of an authoritarian, retired colonel, presents himself at the desk with reluctance; he does not want to join. He makes an excuse and leaves. His father, outraged by his son’s cowardice, threatens to shoot him and accompanies him back to the recruiting desk. Now a soldier, Frank is unable to cope with his terror and, returning to the family home, deserts. His mother, and the family’s black servants, are unable to keep his desertion a secret for long and his father, disowning him, takes his son’s place in

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the ranks. The town falls to the invading Union troops and the Winslow house becomes the officer’s military base. Young Frank, hiding in the house, overhears the invaders’ tactics, overpowers a guard and steals his uniform. He then holds up the officers and escapes with the plans that reveal the Union positions. Riding to take the plans to the Confederate camp, he is mistaken for an enemy scout and shot by his own father. The plans get through, the battle rages and the Confederate troops win the day. Frank, recovering from his wounds and revealed as a hero, is reconciled with his father. Despite the melodramatic, scarcely credible, derring-do plot, a rather slow and ponderous performance from Frank Keenan as the colonel, and the out-of-scale battle sequences (combat footage left over from Ince’s earlier Battle of Gettysburg, 1913), Barker is able to convey the characters’ internal conflicts and establish spectator empathy through careful camera placement and shot construction, particularly during the early scenes. In order to establish Frank as a sympathetic character from the outset, we see him for the first time seated with his girlfriend watching a hummingbird on its nest. Barker starts by cutting between reverseangled CS of each character, the alternating close shots inviting indentification with the characters and establishing a romantic situation, then intercuts CUs of the hummingbird with their reactions and finally, cuts to a 2-shot as Frank diffidently takes her hand. Barker’s shooting and editing adds significantly to the carefully scripted symbolism and, having established aspects of Frank’s character, develops it further during the following scenes. 1 MS Frank and his girlfriend as they walk together into a clearing and react to what they see off-screen right. 2 MS (a reverse angle) of an excited group outside the town hall. 3 MS (as in 1). Frank and his companion; she leads him as they exit screen right. 4 MS (as in 2). The group look off left, and shortly after Frank and his girl enter and join their friends. This confirms the fully established use of SRS schemata and also the use of anticipatory editing between shots 3 and 4, leaving shot 3 once the exit is established and cutting to shot 4 for the group’s reaction, and in anticipation of their delayed entrance. Many directors were aware of the continuity difficulties that could occur when making a cut-in on the camera axis from a wide shot to a closer shot of an individual or group. Variations in body positioning between the two shots invariably made the action impossible to match, resulting in a noticeable jump. This could be obscured by changing the camera’s angle when shooting the closer framing. Barker regularly makes use of this device as an aid to smooth continuity, but the sudden change in angle also has the effect of offering the spectator a privileged view of the character and provides greater access to the feelings of uncertainty about enlisting, which he clearly feels. The same device is used a little

Cecil B. DeMille Cecil B. DeMille is remembered principally as a director of historical Hollywood costume epics from the 1930s and 1940s, in particular his spectacular 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston, which he first filmed in 1923. DeMille was one of the founders of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company which made its first film, The Squaw Man, directed by DeMille, at the beginning of 1914: he had not directed a film before. Trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he had made a living in the theatre as a producer and playwright and in 1910 had joined up with Jesse Lasky, writing several stage musicals which Lasky had produced. The Squaw Man was a considerable success and put the Lasky company firmly on the map. DeMille had an instinct for dramatic narrative and innovative presentation, particularly in terms of lighting, and was eager to develop his filmmaking skills. 4 His acknowledgement of the importance of editing is demonstrated by the presence of his name as both editor and director on most of the films that he made before 1919. Most assessments of DeMille’s films draw particular attention to The Cheat, referring to it as his ‘masterpiece’. Released on 12 December 1915, it certainly proved to be the most sensational of the twelve films that he directed during that year. Edith, wife of a stockbroker, Richard Hardy, enjoys a flirtatious relationship with Hishuru Tori, a wealthy Japanese collector of objets d’art, who is obsessed by her. Hardy has been losing on the market and upbraids his wife for her extravagance. Unrepentant, Edith gambles with funds ‘borrowed’ from her charity work, and loses. She goes to Tori for help, and he agrees to lend her the money in

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later when Frank stands by the recruiting table and is about to enlist; the cut to a close shot using an angle change isolates him from his immediate surroundings and presents his inner turmoil as something that is shared with the spectator but hidden from the recruiting party. As long as the spectator was locked into a fixed position from which to view a scene, the dramatised activity was largely perceived as display. Moving the camera inside the filmic space changed the spectator’s viewpoint literally and symbolically, and compelled an awareness of matters that was not obviously displayed; angle changes accompanied by closer framing provided a privileged position of proximity and encouraged sharing of a character’s psychological state. The films that Reginald Barker directed for Thomas Ince at this time have been singled out because they clarify how certain filming and editing techniques, which were being explored in these films for the first time, developed. What is clear is that these films are representative of a revolution in film structuring which took place between 1912 and 1915. Towards the end of that period one director in particular brought to the development of these techniques qualities which were to become exceptionally influential.

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return for her implicit promise of sexual favours. Hardy’s fortunes change when a risky investment pays off. Edith borrows from him, returns the money to Tori, and attempts to end the relationship. Tori, furious at the prospect of losing what he now regards as part of his collection, brands her on the shoulder with a red hot iron and taunts her. Edith, now mad with pain, shoots and wounds him. Hardy has followed Edith and, apprehended at the scene of the crime, admits to the shooting to shield his wife. When her husband is put on trial and found guilty, Edith is unable to let him take the blame and, publicly revealing the brand on her shoulder, denounces Tori in open court. The case is dismissed and Edith and her husband are reunited. This mixture of sex, sadism and sacrifice was in fact handled with considerable artistic integrity and, as Lewis Jacobs has pointed out, ‘was one of the first of the domestic dramas of the well-to-do in their own surroundings and with their own problems, presented without moralising and from their point of view’.5 The film was extremely successful and very influential, particularly in France where its popularity among the middle class led to an acceptance of the idea that films could be culturally relevant. There is considerable sophistication and style in the film’s presentation and certain sequences are conceived and edited with exceptional panache. An early scene reveals confident handling of POV structure and action continuity. Richard has returned to his house to learn from the maid that his wife is out with Tori (they have been to a social engagement where Edith, as treasurer of the Red Cross fund, has been given a final donation bringing the total to $10,000). Richard is furious to discover the delivery of yet another set of extravagant gowns and that Edith has neglected to pay her maid’s wages. At that moment, Edith returns with Tori in his open-topped car. The sequence is structured as set out below. 1

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MCS foreground, MS background. Richard angrily tosses the dress back in the box and turns away upstage towards the door at the back of the set. Suddenly he hears something and turns to the window. WS high angle. Richard’s POV of the car pulling up below. Tori switches off the engine. CS Richard in profile, pulling back the curtain and looking down. WS high angle (as in 2). Tori gets out. He walks around the front of the car. MCS (slightly elevated angle) Edith sitting in the car. Tori enters frame right and opens the door for her. As she gets out, she stumbles and Tori puts his arm round her to support her. CS Richard (as in 3), looking down. MCS (as in 5). Edith thanks Tori, he removes his cap and she shakes his hand. Edith exits below frame left. Tori watches her go, then replaces his cap and turns to close the car door.

MS Richard. He lets the curtain fall back into place, moves forward into MCS, picks up the dress bill and turns as Edith enters through the upstage door. The way that this sequence is shot and edited would not seem out of place in a film made twenty years later, but as the scene continues there is a return to the single unbroken frontalism which had dominated most film structure up to this period. In one continuous shot we witness Richard’s anger about her extravagance and her justification of it; a camera pan following her move to a wall-safe to put the fund money away, Richard’s insistence that the clothes be returned, his exit, the maid’s attempt to remove the packages foiled by Edith and finally her taking pleasure in the dresses as she takes them from the box; all this in one MCS lasting almost two minutes. However, the single-shot scene which follows shows much more evidence of confident mise-en-scène, with DeMille’s careful handling of the grouping and the movements of the actors clearly derived from his understanding of theatrical staging. After dinner, the Hardys and their guests enter the drawing room in WS from doors at the back of the shot, the women leading the way. Richard and Jones, a stockbroker friend, pass the women and move forward in active discussion, pausing in MS to the left of the frame. This enables a view of Edith breaking off her conversation with another woman and being joined by Tori. They walk away together towards a door at the back of the set which leads onto a garden balcony and, as they leave, Richard and his friend continue to come forward and Jones takes a cup of coffee from the maid as he sits; the action motivated by a desire to discuss their investment plans out of earshot of the guests in the depth of the room. This is an excellent example of subjective structuring: the action now staged to exclude the world beyond and place the spectator in a privileged position from which to share the intimacy of the moment. DeMille achieves all this without dissecting the scene or using a cut-in, and consequently the subjective is emphasised, the narrator’s presence hidden. In the main, The Cheat tells its entire tale without the need to cut between parallel events, essentially an objective procedure. Instead the linear pattern of the unfolding narrative encourages close identification with the individual characters and their predicament. There are a few instances of action-related cross-cutting – Richard approaching Tori’s house having followed Edith, for example – but there is no use of parallel action for ironic comment. There are two occasions, however, when DeMille cuts to an image in a very unexpected way. Near the start of the film, Richard telephones Edith and explains his predicament: ‘Can’t you economise ‘til my investments pay? It won’t be for long.’ Edith, waiting for Tori to collect her, is adamant: ‘If you want me to give up my friends and my social position – well – I won’t’, and she hangs up on him. 1 2

CS Richard, he tries to establish re-connection, then hangs up. MS Edith, seated by the telephone; she hears something.

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MS Tori arrives in his car. MS Edith; the maid at the window comes forward and announces his arrival. MS Tori, gets out of his car, takes off his coat and exits frame. CS Richard (apparently a continuation of 1). He makes a frustrated gesture and resignedly rests his head on his fist. MCS Edith, as the maid leads Tori into the room. They converse at length.

The reason for this cut to Richard is certainly unclear. It can be read in various ways: a visual reinforcement of the reason for Edith’s displeasure; Richard’s frustrated isolation shown as a parallel event; or simple expediency, eliminating unnecessary slack during the predictable entrance of Tori and the maid, and cutting to Richard instead. Either way it seems to earn its keep by briefly requiring the spectator to ‘read’ the moment outside the flow of the narrative. The second use of an unexpected cut occurs later in the film after Edith has been persuaded to provide sexual favours to Tori in return for the $10,000. Richard arrives home jubilant, his investments having paid off handsomely. Edith is equally delighted. Suddenly, a cut is made to an MCS of Tori picking up the telephone and starting to dial. A cut back to the Hardys shows them still in cheerful mood – then the telephone rings. Edith answers; it is Tori, and the telephone conversation is structured by cutting between them. Given the linear nature of the narrative, the sudden cut to Tori making the call, comes as a surprise. Partly this is because we are conditioned to sound-film convention where the sound of the telephone ringing would be used to interrupt the Hardys’ jubilant mood. In the absence of sound, a cut to Tori dialling her number provides a similar impact but, interestingly, it also contains other resonances. The image of the resolute Tori appearing unexpectedly in the midst of the Hardys’ joyful exchanges seems at first to be an image of Edith’s nemesis, her sudden recollection of her awful predicament. This reveals very powerfully the positive value of a disjunctive cut, snapping the spectator out of a subjective involvement with the moment. Although DeMille retains an unbroken frontal presentation for many of the expositionary scenes in the film, by framing them in MCS, he is able to achieve intimacy and close identification with the characters. By modern standards, this structure seems very static, but DeMille does it deliberately, scene dissection being used to increase tension only in those scenes containing moments of heightened drama. An example is the key scene where Edith learns that her investment of the ‘borrowed’ Red Cross funds has failed. During the Red Cross Ball, held at Tori’s house, Tori shows Edith round his inner sanctum where he keeps his collection of ivory and other Oriental antiquities: 1

MWS (slightly elevated angle) Tori and Edith. Tori demonstrates a lighting effect on a Buddha statue.

2

MS Tori and Edith (a cut-in to a slightly different angle) as they step up into a raised part of the room. They suddenly both look off frame right.

In fact the cut-in is not a good action match, but necessitated by the need to be closer for the intercuts which follow.

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4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14

CU as sliding doors open to reveal Richard’s stockbroker friend, Jones, who has invested the money. He looks grimly towards them obliquely off frame left. MCS Edith and Tori, she looks shocked on seeing his expression. Their eyes follow him as he enters frame right. Edith asks Tori to leave and he exits frame right. Jones is distraught. Inter-title. ‘We’ve lost – your Ten Thousand Dollars is gone.’ CU Tori (as in 3), watching from the doorway. MCS Edith and Jones; he is dismissed and exits right. Edith faints. Tori enters frame right, switches off the light and carries Edith off frame right. MCS Tori and Edith as he carries her in from frame left and seats her on a chair next to a wall screen. Tori kisses the unconscious woman and she recovers soon afterwards. Inter-title. ‘I’ve got to have Ten Thousand Dollars tomorrow.’ MCS (as in 8). Tori speaks earnestly to her. Suddenly a light goes on behind the wall screen and the silhouette of two men can be seen. The other side of the screen. CS Richard and Jones who is telling Richard of his personal loss. Inter-title. ‘I wish I could help you, but I couldn’t raise a dollar tonight to save my life.’ CS Tori and Edith (screen excluded from the frame). Tori underlines her plight. Insert at the top right of the frame – part of a newspaper billboard – ‘Society Woman Steals Red Cross Fund.’ Tori helps her up and they exit frame left. MCS Tori’s desk. They enter frame right and sit. He writes her a cheque.

The structure of this scene uses quite advanced editing strategies. The head turns in shot 2 indicating action off-screen which is then shown. The use of close-ups with 30° eye-lines to suggest dramatic intensity (shot 3 conveying the friend’s serious concern about the lost money and shot 6 conveying Tori’s realisation of Edith’s, exploitable, plight), cutting to follow action developing across the room between shots 7 and 8, and 13 and 14, and also the reverse action presentation across the wall screen to show the conversation in the next room. Yet there are remnants of some archaic practices too: the superimposed insert of the newspaper billboard to convey Edith’s thoughts as Tori seeks to make his deal with her; and a retention of what appears to be a rather contrived frontalism at the point when Jones enters the main shot.

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Noël Burch has pointed out that, whereas the initial Tori/Edith eye-line is matched with that of Jones’s CU at an angle less than 30° off the lens axis, when he enters their 2-shot it is directly from the side.6 In fact their change of eye-line is shown as they watch him approach, and it is almost as if they were watching him take a detour around the camera crew before entering the shot. The reason for this is certainly obscure but perhaps the framing of Tori and Edith is so close, that a more oblique entry would have largely obscured the actors within the frame. The final climax of the film is shot and edited with remarkable power and conviction and it is clear why the film had such tremendous impact. DeMille controls 180° convention exceptionally over the spacious setting of the courtroom and builds tension with audacious and compelling economy, using all the dramatic armoury of angle changes, variable framings, close-ups of main characters and reactions in the crowded public galleries. At the climax, as Edith bares her shoulder to reveal the brand, the sudden cut into CU has a shocking impact and the subsequent riot, as the crowd attempt to lynch Tori for his inhuman act, is splendidly handled using a variety of angle changes and close-shot detail. In attempting to chart a course through the editing and constructional developments that were taking place between 1910 and 1915, I have tried to identify some of the most significant and influential films that came out of that period. But picking out a relative handful of films from the many hundreds that were made, distorts what was almost certainly the reality. The development of these storytelling methods cannot have progressed in the linear way that a stepby-step analysis might suggest, with a film offering a set of alternative possibilities that were instantly taken up by the films that were made next. It has rather to be seen as an unbroken flow of films of every sort, overlapping each other in terms of their attractiveness and appeal; competing for audiences and using all the devices available to their producers to make any one film more successful than another. Films had to look good, and the establishment of mood through fine photography and lighting was essential to the visual pleasure that was part of movie-going. But audiences were much more interested in the stories, the characters, and the stars than in the subtleties of framing, editing and scene dissection, and the truth is that those aspects of filmmaking passed wholly unnoticed. They were invisible.

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The brothers always worked for different companies and their activities were unconnected. Older brother and mentor of the celebrated director, John Ford. It is important to remember that for a long time film acting was regarded very disparagingly by actors who worked in the legitimate theatre. Although it gradually became more acceptable to act in films, actors still felt that it was necessary to remind film audiences of their links to what was still considered to be a superior activity. (See also n. 21, chapter 9 in this volume. )

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5 6

Although DeMille is usually acknowleged as the director of The Squaw Man, the film was co-written, co-produced and co-directed by Oscar Apfel, a veteran stage and opera producer-director who began directing films in 1911 for Edison. Kevin Brownlow has suggested that Apfel actually directed the film and that DeMille was able to use the experience as a training exercise. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, pp. 336–7. Burch, Life to Those Shadows, p. 218.

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9

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Seen from the outside Throughout his work, D. W. Griffith almost never used the point-of-view shot. With very few exceptions he also avoided using shot/reverse-shot structure as well. Griffith’s camera was that of an observer. There can be no doubt that he was aware of the growing acceptance of these alternative shooting and editing methods, they had begun to appear in Danish films as early as 1912 and opened up possibilities for a kind of cinema which sought to engage the spectator subjectively, a tendency which had been enthusiastically taken up and improved upon by American directors between 1913 and 1915 as we have seen. It has been suggested that because of his extended commitment to his work, Griffith stayed out of touch with the evidence of these movements towards a more subjective way of working,1 but his conscious refusal to follow this path in all his subsequent work suggests that it had nothing to do with a lack of awareness. It also had nothing to do with an understanding of the difference between the two structuring methods. Griffith was no theorist, and unlikely to be aware of the loss of objectivity that came with a cinema that conveyed an illusion of the spectator participating in the drama, sharing the feelings and emotions with the characters inside the cinematic space. Griffith’s approach to filmmaking was essentially personal and intuitive. He never worked from a script, even when making a film as long and complex as The Birth of a Nation. He was an autocrat, and there is considerable evidence that he did not understand, and seemed almost to resent and avoid using, methods which he had not developed himself. He was also arrogant, and the enormous popular and critical success that he had enjoyed during his Biograph period confirmed for him that he was the most important director working in America, if not the world. Like many film directors that came after him, Griffith saw a direct link between the size and scale of the films that were made and the degree of recognition and acclaim that was accorded their maker. In keeping with common practice at the time, all the films that he made for Biograph had been made uncredited, and had mainly been limited, by agreement with other members of the Trust, to one-reelers. The success of longer films dealing with epic, historical subjects that were being 134

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made in Italy, particularly Enrico Guazzoni’s eight-reel Quo Vadis? which opened in New York in April 1913 to considerable acclaim,2 had made Griffith feel frustrated at not being able to persuade Biograph to allow him an opportunity to compete. So he went ahead anyway, and during the early part of 1913, the fourth consecutive year that he had taken his crew to California, he set about making a four-reeler without reference to the Biograph managers in New York. It would be the last film that he would make for Biograph: he called it Judith of Bethulia. A biblical epic based on one of the books from the Apocrypha, the film tells the story of Judith, a young widow living in the city of Bethulia which is besieged by the Assyrian army led by Holofernes. By feigning love for the conqueror, Judith is able to kill him and save the city. At Chatsworth Park in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, Griffith built a huge set which contained an impressive reconstruction of the city of Bethulia and populated it with hundreds of extras. Elaborately costumed as the city’s peaceful inhabitants, they are besieged and attacked as they attempt to defend their city from hundreds more extras making up the Assyrian army. The tremendous size of the undertaking provided rich visual possibilities for Griffith’s preference for presenting content in terms of parallel action, and during the siege sequences this device is used to powerful effect. But the film is less successful during the large-scale action sequences with Griffith’s camera adopting an observational role, filming from different camera positions and attempting to construct a commanding picture of the events portrayed through, what would eventually be termed, ‘montage’ – the construction of a complete impression of an event from the cutting together of its separate parts. But the overall effect is rather distancing; there is no close in-fighting, the combatants on both sides remain anonymous, and although there is much movement and sword waving there is little sense of meaningful conflict. Griffith’s seeking to emulate the epic size and length of Italian spectaculars seems necessarily to have deflected him from the more personal and intimate elements which had been at the heart of so many of his short subjects. He introduces a sub-plot near the beginning of the film which features Naomi, the water carrier, and her admirer Nathan, but makes little of the dramatic possibilities that would result from weaving these two main stories together, and, for much of the film, the Naomi and Nathan characters are set aside. The weighty biblical subject seems also to have encouraged Griffith to seek a rather artificial ‘operatic’ style of performance and this, linked with the single-shot frontalist presentation of all of the interiors, produces an ‘animated tableaux’ feel to many scenes, the main characters required to do little beyond behaving rather stagily within the limits of their historically determined roles. A film of these dimensions, in terms of the scale of the visuals and the extended screen time available to do them justice, was something that Griffith had not been able to attempt before. His insistence on accuracy in detail of costumes and production design, time spent on rehearsing the elaborate battle scenes, and the

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large amount of film stock exposed, meant that the completed film cost double its original budget. When Griffith returned to New York with enough film to make a six-reel feature, Biograph’s managers were furious. Henry Marvin expressly forbade him to make any more films for them, and offered him ‘promotion’ to studio production chief. These were terms that Griffith could not accept and he let it be known that he was open to offers elsewhere. The offer that he eventually took was from Mutual Reliance-Majestic who were prepared to allow him to make two independent features a year in addition to the contracted features that he would make for them. Griffith’s break with Biograph was announced at the end of September, and on 3 December 1913 he placed an advertisement in the New York Dramatic Mirror headed:

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D. W. GRIFFITH Producer of all great Biograph successes, revolutionizing Motion Picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art

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Beneath the heading he listed the titles of 151 films that he had made for the company and laid claim to a number of technical innovations, many of which had actually been invented and used by others before he joined Biograph. For the first time since 1908 he was taking due credit for the films that he had directed, or at least those films which he felt reflected his best work. It was a very clear statement of Griffith’s unquestioned sense of his own superiority. The company held back release of Judith of Bethulia, eventually completed by Griffith at four reels, for another six months.3 The major film event of 1915 was of course Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, originally called The Clansman. The history of the making of this cinematic landmark, and the controversy that followed its release, has been documented extensively elsewhere. These matters fall outside the scope of this study, but the form of this important film provides a useful insight into Griffith’s directorial methods and editing style. The film tells the story of the American Civil War through the lives of two families, the Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South. Their sons, friends in peace, are pitted against each other in a conflict that kills brothers in battle and threatens hopes of rebuilding relationships from the wreckage of the aftermath. Griffith shows the history of the conflict in remarkable detail, reconstructing the battles and the significant events of the period that led to the defeat of the South. After Lincoln’s assassination, the film depicts the reconstruction during which the carpetbaggers and political agitators sought to exploit the instability that followed the war. Griffith ridicules the desire of the negroes to attain political rights and presents the emancipation of the blacks in terms of cruel stereotypes. He blends history with melodrama by showing Flora,

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

MS Gus walks along in front of the picket fence looking frame right at the house. MS Flora stands on the porch looking out then turns and enters the house. MS Gus (as in 1) continues to look at the house. Ben Cameron comes up behind him and goes through the gate turning to face Gus who looks at him. Inter-title. The ‘little Colonel’ orders Gus to keep away. CS Ben speaks to Gus (OOV) and gestures with his right hand. CS Gus replies indignantly. CS Lynch, entering from frame right, mounts the steps to his house then turns and looks off frame right. MS Gus and Ben (as in 1). Gus finishes speaking, and in a surly manner puts his hands in his pockets. CS Lynch (as in 7) looks determined and exits frame right. MS Gus and Ben (as in 1) Lynch comes up behind them and asks what’s going on. Gus speaks. (This is now a 3–shot. ) CS Ben (as in 5) looking outraged. CS Gus and Lynch (as in 6). Lynch speaks and points angrily at Ben. CS Ben (as in 5) looks disdainful. MS Gus, Lynch and Ben (as in 1). Ben turns and enters his house. Lynch speaks to Gus then walks back towards his house. Gus stares at the Cameron house then walks off frame right.

Griffith constructs this section of the scene from five set-ups. The opening MS (Shot 1) is used as the master for the scene and this is dissected by closer shots, 5 showing Ben, and 6 showing Gus and later Lynch as well. The only other shots are Flora, for her exit, and shot 7, from which Lynch observes the altercation and

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the young Cameron daughter, pursued to her death by Gus, a former black servant intent on rape, and the attempt by the mulatto Lieutenant-General, Silas Lynch, to forcibly compel Elsie, the Stoneman’s daughter, into marriage. These outrages are avenged by the intervention of Flora’s brother, Ben Cameron, who forms the Ku Klux Klan to fight the excesses of black power and who, at the climax of the film, free the Stonemans and rescue the Camerons from the evil intentions of the negro militia. Anyone viewing The Birth of a Nation twenty years after it was hailed as a masterpiece would, apart from being shocked at the overt racism of the piece, be confused by Griffith’s studied avoidance of SRS and POV use. Certainly, by the time he made The Birth of a Nation, he had come to terms with the value of dissecting a scene into its components, and this is clearly illustrated by the scene in which Gus has shown an interest in Flora and has followed her to the front of the Cameron house:

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determines to intervene. In fact, this scene is exceptional in that it is the only scene in which Griffith comes at all close to using shot/reverse-shot structure in the entire film, but he avoids it by having Gus and Lynch in shot 6 almost play away from the camera rather than at an angle of 30° to it, which had become (and very largely still is) the usual camera angle for SRS alternation. This of course allows Ben the dominant position in the scene and reinforces our identification with him while at the same time occupying the position of an observer. A later scene demonstrates a more complex approach to scene dissection. Following Flora’s death, Gus has been captured and he is tried and executed by the Klan. Dr Cameron is arrested on suspicion of being implicated in the murder of Gus, and paraded in chains before his former black slaves. Two loyal servants of the Camerons, a manservant and Cindy, The Faithful Mammy, persuade a friendly carter to help them assist Dr Cameron to escape. Two black militiamen, led by a white officer, take Dr Cameron to a corner where the cart is standing and they are accosted by Cindy and the manservant who gleefully pretend to fraternise with his captors. The manservant pretends to mock Dr Cameron while Cindy distracts the two black soldiers. Cameron’s wife and daughter Margaret arrive and watch in dismay. Suddenly, the two servants attack the three militiamen and the moment seems intentionally comic with the substantial figure of Cindy pinning two soldiers to the ground. Phil Stoneman, who has joined Mrs Cameron and Margaret, runs in and shoots one of the captors, and the Cameron family escape on the cart. Starting with a WS, a slightly elevated angle showing the main action which is the master shot for the sequence, Griffith dissects this scene by cutting into either an MCS of the escorted Dr Cameron and his ‘mocking’ manservant, or an MCS of Cindy with the two soldiers as she engages them with her feigned delight over Dr Cameron’s arrest. In spite of the proximity of the action covered by these two shots, Griffith carefully frames them so as to exclude action from one intruding upon the other. Other shots are intercut; an MCS shows Cameron’s wife and daughter arriving and subsequently joined by Phil Stoneman, in which they enter the shot laterally from the right and look off laterally left and an MCS of Elsie Stoneman which shows her observing the events looking off-frame right. At the point when the tables are turned and the servants attack Cameron’s guards, Griffith intercuts an MS of the action for the first time, showing Cindy using her weight to flatten the black soldiers to the ground while her colleague swings a punch at the officer. Other angles are introduced showing Cindy pinning the soldiers down in MCS and Stoneman entering the fray and shooting one of the militia. In each instance, the framing chosen is that which gives the best view of the detail while still limiting the camera to a position that remains within 45° of the arc. Griffith never elects to show the action from either the viewpoint of Phil Stoneman and the Cameron women or that of Elsie Stoneman. We see them observing the out-of-vision action looking laterally off-screen, but the main action is always that of the camera as observer, never one that is shared.

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This is particularly noticeable during Gus’s pursuit of Flora, in which we are shown Gus looking intently off-screen towards the young woman he is following, but the camera never shows a view of her as the object of his gaze, the following shot always shows her approaching or moving laterally across the screen. This structural tendency is helpful in clarifying what is meant by a subjective viewpoint. Because we are never shown Gus’s view of Flora, she is never presented as wholly vulnerable; in a subjective construction, we would share Gus’s view of his prey, and acquire a sense of his threat which strengthens our feelings of anxiety for his intended victim. Furthermore, this speculative view of Flora, frightened and running away, would also make us complicit with his intention; it is a structure which allows us to experience vicariously, and take pleasure in, Gus’s sense of anticipation and power. We would share both feelings, Gus’s and Flora’s, and enter the emotional world of the scene. Griffith’s use of POV in The Birth of a Nation is so rare and oblique that evidence of its use is easily missed. After the Confederate army’s first success at the battle of Bull Run, a farewell ball is held in Piedmont on the eve of the departure of its quota of troops to the front. Bonfires are burning in the streets, and Griffith introduces a WS of the large entrance hall of the Cameron house showing couples resting from the celebrations. Ben Cameron walks towards the camera and acknowledges a seated couple, then something in the space behind the camera catches his eye and he approaches further, stops and looks beyond it. A cut is then made to the LS of a bonfire in the street, part of a shot seen earlier, looking down the street and not a viewpoint from the house. This is followed by a flare-lit, street exterior with couples strolling in the light beyond a picket fence which frames the foreground. This is plainly intended as Ben’s POV, since a cut back to a smiling Ben Cameron follows, and he turns and walks away back across the room. Finally, a cut is made back to the previous shot of strolling couples outside, and the scene fades out. Griffith’s cutting of this scene is most interesting. The deliberate POV structure is very clear, but Griffith seems almost to want to deny it, or at least alter it through augmentation. After Ben’s first look, the next shot shown is not his POV, which might be expected, but a general shot of the bonfire in the street. The POV shot, with the picket fence foreground, follows, and this in turn cuts to Ben’s smile and his turning away, which is conventional POV structure. But then Griffith returns to the POV shot now divorced from Ben’s look. It is almost as if Griffith were personally reclaiming the shot. Perhaps the most perverse avoidance of POV structure in the film concerns a scene which is actually designed around an event being witnessed in order for the narrative to progress in a certain way. Immediately after the scene discussed earlier, in which Ben Cameron is reprimanded by Lynch for ordering Gus to keep away from the Cameron house, there is a cut to an in ter-title: ‘In agony of soul over the degradation and ruin of his people.’ And in MS, Ben enters frame left and stands on a high riverbank looking out across the valley. He removes his hat and sits on a rock making a helpless gesture, then hangs his head facing laterally frame

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right, the river sweeping away below and behind him. A cut is then made to an MWS of a path with the river below and behind, the same configuration as the shot of Ben, but the river is nearer, indicating that the path is below Ben’s level and for a moment it is difficult to establish the relationship of this shot to the previous one. Then two white children, carrying a white sheet, run up the path towards the camera. This disorientation is reinforced with the next cut, a repeat of the first, in which Ben raises his head and looks off to camera right – upstream – as it were. The intention is quite clear – Ben is watching the children. A return to the shot of the children shows them crouching to the left of the path and covering their heads with the sheet; four black children follow up the path and stop on seeing the ghostly, sheeted mound, and a cut to Ben, as before, shows him leaning forward as he watches them. The shots that follow need not be described in detail. The four children, scared by the moving, white-sheeted bundle, run off back down the path pursued by their white tormentors and, after an inter-title – ‘The inspiration’ – Ben gets up, gestures appropriately and exits frame left. Inter-titles: The Result

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The Ku Klux Klan, the organisation that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule [... etc. ]

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When I first saw this scene I was convinced that somehow the shots of the children had been flopped over, because it seemed logical that if Ben was looking upstream his view would show the river on the left and the path and children on the right, and this was plainly not the case. But I also knew that I had to be mistaken. Because I have been thoroughly conditioned by commonly used POV conventions, I anticipated that I would be shown Ben’s POV. In fact I was seeing an objective view of the children’s game taking place on the path below and some distance in front of Ben; his view of the children’s activities, unlike ours, would be from behind them as he looks upstream towards our viewing point. If it were necessary to find an example of calculated, objective presentation, it would be hard to find a better one than this. It is difficult to know quite what one might make of Griffith’s apparently calculated denial of subjective structure, particularly exemplified by avoidance of SRS and POV use. There are other tendencies in his work which confirm his deliberate objectivity. For example, in The Birth of a Nation, Griffith recreates with remarkable accuracy historic scenes based on detailed accounts and paintings. These historical tableaux are always accompanied by an inter-title which identifies the moment in history, but there is always a small added reference explaining that the scene is an accurate, historic reconstruction and often giving the source. In other words the narrator steps outside the story to add a footnote to the image. Another noticeable tendency can be found in his apparent disregard for accuracy in continuity and action matching. In his book on silent cinema, The

Parade’s Gone By, Kevin Brownlow draws attention to this, concluding that Griffith’s ability to conceive how a scene should be cut was masterly, but when it came to the execution he seemed to lose interest.

A long shot would be taken in bright sunlight; the following shot would be dull and overcast. A warrior would sheathe his sword in the long shot; in the close shot he would sheathe it again.4 There are numerous other examples of action mismatches, particularly with regard to inserts. In The Lonedale Operator the close-up insert of the small monkeywrench which Blanche Sweet pretends is a pistol to hold the robbers at bay, is held with one hand in the MS but held by two hands in the CU. In The Mothering Heart (1913), Lillian Gish plays the part of a woman humiliated by a philandering husband. Although pregnant, she decides to leave him because he no longer loves her. She gives birth alone in a cottage and soon after the infant dies. In the final sequence, unable to express her anger and grief, she leaves her husband sitting by the body of the dead child, enters the garden and, with a stick, smashes the rose bushes until they are stripped bare. Returning to the room, she indicates that he should leave but then notices the baby’s comforter held in his fingers. As she places her hand over it, their hands touch around the symbol of their tragic loss and, in a swell of recognition and forgiveness they are reconciled. Unfortunately, the big close-up insert of the hands and comforter is totally mismatched with the MCS which preceds and follows it, and the splendidly performed emotional climax of the scene is markedly spoiled by the clumsiness of the error. In The Parade’s Gone By Kevin Brownlow also quotes from a conversation that he had with film director Andrew Stone in 1962. Stone had worked with Jimmy Smith, Griffith’s editor, and recalled that Smith always insisted that Griffith ‘didn’t give a damn’ about matching, and that Griffith made decisions concerning the need for close-up inserts only after seeing the rushes of the filmed scene the following day, when he would then go back on the set and film them. Trusting to memory can be unreliable with this method of working and it is common practice to have the editor present on the set to ensure accuracy. But I find Jimmy Smith’s emphasis curious; it is as if it were not just a matter of occasional misjudgement, but he ‘didn’t give a damn’; as if he wanted it that way. In his book, Brownlow also refers to a theory put forward by Ray Angus, editor of the Silents Please TV series in a conversation that they had in 1964. Angus was convinced that this was deliberate and that Griffith, in common with other directors, quite intentionally created these double actions.5 It seems that there are good reasons to believe that Griffith sought a kind of anti-realism and that discontinuities may well have been part of that intention. Karl Brown, in his fascinating reminiscence of working with Griffith, recalls some

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It is one of the incomprehensible features of this great man that he was capable of the most meticulous staging, ensuring the correctness of every detail, yet he could be blind to glaringly mismatched editing.

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interesting facts which might assist in understanding Griffith’s complex approach to his work.6 While filming The Birth of a Nation, Karl Brown recalls that during the scene when Gus is pursuing Flora, he insisted that Walter Long, who played Gus, should run bent at the waist, constantly calling for him to ‘run low’. Griffith also required that, to achieve a look of bestial passion, Gus should roll his eyes and, literally, foam at the mouth: achieved with the aid of small bottles of hydrogen peroxide. Mae Marsh, as Flora, was required to run with fluttering steps, followed by short pauses to look back in fear. Karl Brown later concludes that Griffith ‘was most emphatically not striving for natural realism but for a sort of cartoonist’s projection of the outstanding features of his various character types,’ and he adds ‘In literature, Charles Dickens had been a sort of literary cartoonist, projecting word-images of characters whose essential characteristics were stressed at the expense of everything else. Griffith admired Dickens very much indeed, and what we admire we emulate.’7 One aspect of Griffith’s purpose in all this might also be found among Karl Brown’s recollections. Griffith, it seems, depended absolutely, even slavishly, upon audience reactions, believing that their response to his films was the only true barometer of their worth. He would secretly arrange previews involving only himself, his driver and Jimmy and Rose Smith, his editors. Films would be previewed not once or twice but dozens of times and Griffith would seek out the most unsophisticated audiences that he could find, knowing from his experience as a barn-storming actor playing raw melodramas all over the country that the audiences for his films wanted everything spelled out in black and white, with deep-dyed villains and the purest possible heroes and heroines. Although this is not so surprising, it does reveal one of the many paradoxes at the centre of Griffith’s work. At one level he courted an audience for popular melodrama, often with stories of crashing banality that took a simplistic view of traditional values, and especially family values, under threat. At another level he aspired towards recognition as a major film artist by making grandiloquent statements about human injustice and noble sacrifice with films of breathtaking scale and stature.

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The Mother and the Law

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It would seem that Griffith planned and shot his next film, The Mother and the Law, while The Birth of a Nation was still being edited. Griffith was used to maintaining a constant flow of work; filming by day and attending to the progress of editing by viewing the work of Jimmy and Rose Smith in the projection room until late at night. The Mother and the Law was based loosely on the events surrounding the break up of a strike by the National Guard which had caused the death of twentythree workers at the Rockefeller Colorado Fuel and Iron Company8 and also reports of a murder case then dominating the headlines. In order to raise the funds for a moral crusade organised by his sister, a factory owner reduces the wages of his staff. The men go on strike, but the militia is called

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in and it is ruthlessly broken and workers are killed. A young labourer, the Boy, now forced out of work, turns reluctantly to crime. He is framed by the local gang leader, the Musketeer of the Slums, and goes to prison. While there, the moral crusaders forcibly take his baby away from his wife, the Dear One. Released from prison, the Boy returns home to find his wife at the point of being raped by the Musketeer of the Slums, and in the struggle the Musketeer is shot and killed, not by the Boy, but by the Musketeer’s mistress, the Lonely One, who has been jealously watching from the window. She throws the gun into the room, the Boy picks it up, and the police arrive just at that moment. The Boy is tried, found guilty and is about to be hanged, when the Lonely One confesses the truth. He is saved from the gallows following a dramatic last-minute rescue. The editing of the film was not completed when The Birth of a Nation was released on 8 February 1915. The repercussions of this event ensured that The Mother and the Law would not reach the screen as originally intended until late in 1918. The phenomenal popular and critical success of The Birth of a Nation has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, as has the controversy that surrounds it. It was considered not only an artistic and technical triumph for Griffith personally but its popularity ensured that it was immensely profitable. During the first year following its release it was seen by more people than any other film in history. It was a gamble that had paid off and Griffith’s own status, which was already high, reached its peak. He and the various investors who had risked much during its making were now very rich men. A new company was set up in order to finance Griffith’s next venture and investors fought for the privilege of owning part of what they were certain would be another blockbuster. In spite of his triumph, Griffith was also attacked from every quarter for what was seen as an overtly racist polemic. The problem was that Griffith believed that drama needed to be presented in simplistic good versus evil terms, as revealed in hundreds of his one- and tworeelers. Longer films, Judith of Bethulia, The Mother and the Law and The Birth of a Nation, were seen as opportunities to present stories reflecting the same values, with the same appeal, but on a bigger scale. Smarting under accusations of bigotry, he defended what he regarded as his right to free speech by publishing a counterblast to the film’s detractors in which he accused the ‘powers of intolerance’ of assaulting the new art of the motion picture and insisting that ‘Intolerance is at the root of all censorship. Intolerance martyred Joan of Arc. Intolerance smashed the first printing press. Intolerance invented Salem witchcraft.’9 It seems likely that it was at about this time that he decided that his next film would mount a massive attack on the ‘powers of intolerance’ using examples of injustice and treachery drawn from history to demonstrate his case, but as Kevin Brownlow has pointed out, the film Griffith made ‘carries not the barest hint of the fiercest intolerance of all: race hatred’.10 The latest Italian epic, Cabiria, had reached America in May 1914 and it seems that Griffith went with key members of his staff to San Francisco to see

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it.Brownlow is convinced that it was Griffith’s reaction to the film that persuaded him to try and outdo it.’ Probably no silent film, and precious few sound films, have contained imagery of such sustained power and confidence ... Griffith must have watched the film with an envy next to despair. How could anyone outdo such magnificence? Griffith did outdo it, but his recklessness proved financially disastrous.’11 If he decided on the title of the film at this time, it seems that it was not his intention to announce it openly. According to Karl Brown, each of the three films that Griffith made after The Mother and the Law was also called The Mother and the Law and Brown devised a means of identifying each film separately for his notes and the slate which carried each shot number. Even when the final film, the Babylonian story, was being shot during the early part of 1916 Brown recalls that it was still called The Mother and the Law as there was ‘a big long painted sign on the back of a huge wall on Sunset Boulevard that said so’.12

Beyond Babel

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‘We have gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We have found a universal language, a power that can make men brothers and end war forever. Remember that! Remember that when you stand in front of a camera!’13 D. W. Griffith

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Griffith’s concept for Intolerance was stupendous, experimental and daring. He would present four independent stories within the one film covering a broad sweep of human history. For the Modern Story he used The Mother and the Law version 1, but expanded it by building large settings for some additional scenes and added in the strike story which had not been part of the original concept. The French Story, which was filmed next, was concerned with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants in sixteenth-century France. The third, the Judean Story, was drawn from episodes in the New Testament and ended with the Crucifixion of Christ, and the final film, the Babylonian Story, was concerned with the betrayal of Belshazzar by his priests and the invasion of the city by Cyrus the Persian. Episodes from the four stories were to be intercut so as to bind together the gradual dramatic development of each and stress their association, and the stories would be linked by showing a symbolic image of the Eternal Mother rocking the cradle introduced by a line from a poem by the American poet, Walt Whitman: ‘Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking.’ The climax of the film would interweave the ravaging and destruction of Babylon, the massacre of the Huguenots, the Crucifixion, and the last-minute rescue of the Boy. Interestingly, Griffith declined to give the characters specific names, which is the way that we identify people and relate to them. As indicated in the above synopsis, the characters are given descriptive names – the Boy, the Dear One, the Lonely One – and so on, and this nomenclature is applied to other stories, the

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Rhapsode and The Mountain Girl in the Babylonian story and Brown Eyes in the French story. Some characters are named, but mainly this seems to be because they are based on specific historical personages, Belshazzar and Cyrus for example. Whatever Griffith’s reasons were, the result is to distance the spectator from the character as a person, and this seems certainly reconcilable with similar presentational tendencies which have been examined hitherto. Griffith seems to have seen this as a way of making the characters less specific, more in keeping with the universality of his theme. This vast undertaking was nearly eighteen months in production and cost $386,000.14 Astonishingly, it seems that it took only two months to edit from the 300,000 ft. that had been shot, and the first complete assembly ran eight hours. Griffith at one point considered releasing the film at this length in two separate parts, but practicality prevailed, and he produced a version lasting three and a quarter hours, removing many of the sub-plots and parallel stories which he had introduced during the filming. In keeping with every other film that he’d made up to that time, he worked without a written scenario or shooting script and without recourse to a single written note, and whereas this is not particularly surprising in respect of the oneand two-reelers that he was making for Biograph often at a rate of two films a week, what stretches credulity is that he adopted the same procedure for The Birth of a Nation and for Intolerance. Whatever else, working this way would have resulted in an undisciplined approach to filming and made it impossible to have an overview of how the content would be balanced as a whole. Julian Johnson, reviewing the film for Photoplay Magazine in 1916, commented that ‘thousands upon thousands of feet of this photoplay never will be seen by the public. In the taking, this story rambled in every direction, and DWG relentlessly and recklessly pursued each ramble to its end.’ Commercially, the film was a disaster. Opening in the same theatre where The Birth of a Nation had run for 44 weeks, Intolerance closed in 22 weeks after playing to dwindling audiences, and elsewhere the story was the same; initial enthusiasm followed by falling attendances. Intolerance is a film that has been written about and analysed endlessly, and critical judgement has been sharply divided. It has been described as Inspired but uneven’ and ‘a magnificent failure’ and also regarded as a masterwork; complex in form and experimentally daring. French film director René Clair wrote that ‘it combines extraordinary lyric passages, realism, and psychological detail with nonsense, vulgarity, and painful sentimentality’. If nothing else, it is certainly the most expensive experimental film ever made. The size of the film discourages any attempt to draw simple conclusions about the way that it has been edited. On viewing the film, one is easily overawed by the stupendous scale of the undertaking and the remarkable attention to detail in the costumes and the settings. Yet one is constantly aware of anomalies and apparent misjudgments in the way that it has been structured and, while accepting that all

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Griffith’s films are riddled with discontinuities, Intolerance seems to have more than the rest put together. All this presents something of a puzzle: why would someone who takes such pains to present on the screen imagery unrivalled in both richness and expansiveness, be so careless of the need for precision when balancing the structure and editing the shots? The answer to this is complex, because so many factors are involved. As we know, at one level Griffith ‘didn’t give a damn’, particularly about action matching, something that other directors were taking very seriously about this time. Karl Brown gives some insight into Griffith’s shooting methods which indicate how it would make cutting between shots either difficult or impossible. Of six takes of the same scene, no two would be played the same way. Griffith’s method of staging was similar to that of a composer writing a theme with variations. The theme was always the same, the variations as many as Griffith could think of at the time. There was no such thing as printing one selected take. Everything was printed. The final selection was made in the projection room, and the final assembly might very well be made up of bits and pieces of three or four out of six or eight takes.15 It seems plain that in determining the priority of factors for choosing one shot rather than another, the ability to cut them together smoothly was fairly well down the list. Brown recreates a typical conversation between Griffith and his editors during the editing of Home Sweet Home,16 which is also revealing: The projection room was really Griffith’s cutting room. Here he would sit, hour after hour, studying scenes he had run dozens of times before ... ‘Maybe if we took the last part of the third take and used the first part of the sixth, it would hold together better. ’Whispered consultation between Rose and Jimmy. ‘Get a bad jump –’ would be the verdict. ‘Then cut away and come back.’ ‘Where to?’ ‘We have a shot of Crisp approaching the house. Use that. Not much. Enough to cover the jump. Ten frames.’ ‘That’ll mean double-cutting.’17 A shrug. ‘Who cares, if it works. Try it and see.’18

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Anyone viewing Intolerance, and most other Griffith films, will be puzzled by the apparent arbitrary use of iris fades, both in and out, appearing at the start or end of a shot, and on occasions during a shot, for no apparent reason. Karl Brown again:

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Griffith never called ‘Camera’ or ‘Cut’ as was customary with other directors, but always ‘Fade in’ and ‘Fade out.’ Every shot began and ended with a fade. I didn’t know why until it finally dawned on me that Griffith himself never knew in advance whether he would need or not

At that time, producing an optical effect after the film was shot and processed was quite a complex matter, and committing to a fade during filming could have some advantages, particularly if the shape and order of shots had been planned in advance. Griffith’s unplanned approach might be considered to be somewhat constricting in this regard, but he was not seriously bothered by inconsistencies resulting from his arbitrary use of fades and either used them or ignored them, sometimes cutting halfway through a fade to another shot. Another factor to bear in mind with regard to Intolerance is that in attempting to reduce the length from eight hours to little more than three, apart from removing many sequences not absolutely essential to the plot, every strategy would have been used to lose frames, both to tighten the action, and to shorten the length of the remaining scenes, and in this Griffith and his editors have been ruthless, removing anything inessential. This is probably what Karl Brown means when he refers to Griffith’s ‘staccato cutting of nothing but “net” values’ an editing tendency which Brown believes had ‘put him far and beyond any and all competitors’. 20 And there is much truth in this, that the Griffith cinema, as revealed in Intolerance, should be considered as quite separate from those tendencies towards continuity cinema which have been explored in the previous chapter and which came to dominate the way films were to be edited and structured from that point on. At some level I believe that one might detect a relationship between Griffith’s approach to filmmaking and that of naïve or folk art. Many of the features are there: Griffith was an inventive and gifted craftsman with an instinct for storytelling at the most basic level, very like a craftsman-painter producing pictures of honest simplicity that reveal an experience of life unaffected by social prejudices and élitist attitudes. In naïve painting there is usually a preference for an objective presentation of the subject rather than one based on observed facts, primacy being given to the central figure which is often presented with exaggerated features. Commonly, there are contradictory elements in the composition, the artist deeming it more important to present a total view of the subject rather than be concerned with tonal recession or optical perspective, and when included, these are either rudimentary or not properly understood. The individual objects, or figures, included in the paintings are often shown separated from each other, unconnected, except in that they are part of the same scene. These are paintings, produced by vernacular artists, in which virtuosity is always subordinate to the subject, yet when looking at them we acknowledge that the anomalies and apparent misjudgements are an acceptable and necessary part of the whole. To what extent is it possible to identify instances of naïve artistry in

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need a fade to open or close any scene he ever shot, even in the closeups. So everything faded in and everything faded out and he was ready for anything. He might want to open a sequence by fading in on a closeup. He never knew. 19

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Griffith’s work, particularly Intolerance? Griffith’s objective approach to filmmaking is manifest; it is also the most immediately evident aspect of naïve art. Although there can be no direct parallel between the kinds of dissociation that exist in parts of a naïve painting with the various discontinuities that can occur in a film, there are some similarities. For example, at the beginning of the Babylonian story we are introduced to The Mountain Girl with an inter-title (see Figures 22–5):

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1

Inter-title: The Mountain Girl, down from the mountains of Suisana. [Figure 22]

22 Intolerance. Shot 1: Inter-title introducing The Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge)

2

Iris wipe-in from top left corner to a WS of an open area with a stone bench built against the wall at the back of the shot. Two men sit on the bench. In the middle foreground sits The Mountain Girl, her arms folded around the front of her knees. [Figure 23]

23 Intolerance. Shot 2: WS of open area with The Mountain Girl seated right fore-

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ground

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3

CS The Mountain Girl, slight angle change but position match as in 2. [Figure 24]

24 Intolerance.

4

CU The Mountain girl. A vignetted CU as she looks directly into the camera, the angle of her head a complete mismatch with the previous shot. [Figure 25] 25 Intolerance. Shot 4: CU The Mountain Girl. A vignetted CU as she looks directly into the camera, deliberately mismatched with the previous shot

Just possibly this discontinuous close-up is intended as an introduction shot of the actress, Constance Talmadge,21 but this is unlikely. If there is some ambivalence about Griffith’s intention, there can be no doubt that the discontinuity is not regarded by Griffith as unacceptable. It helps to support the view that disconnections are of little importance to Griffith’s overall concept. The Modern Story and the French Story contain most action continuity, possibly because they follow clear narrative lines. The Babylonian Story, which contains the greatest amount of display, also presents images with the greatest amount of disconnection. After Belshazzar has visited the marriage market and given The Mountain Girl leave to marry or not as she pleases, an inter-title announces the next sequence:

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Shot 3: CS The Mountain Girl, slight angle change with position match

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In the Love Temple, Virgins of the sacred fires of life.

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This is followed by a series of shots of scantily clad and diaphanously veiled young women in what might be termed ‘art’ poses. The setting is unspecific other than it is dimly lit by a torch flame, shown in the opening shot, and seems to contain a pool or fountain with a water spout. Few of the shots seem related other than in their subject-matter and by association. In one shot a woman poses while another, bare breasted, splashes her from the pool behind. In others young women lie back accessibly while others stand around holding mirrors and slightly rocking. The scene changes on a cut to a large high room seen in MWS and through the door at the back young women can be seen cavorting on a brightly lit flight of stairs. On one side of the room stands the Princess Beloved, posed, and Belshazzar crosses the room and, standing behind her, holds her in his arms. An inter-title: He promises to build her a city, beautiful as the memory of her own foreign land. Then a closer shot of Belshazzar and the Princess intercut with an intertitle: The fragrant mystery of your body is greater than the mysteries of life – And the 2-shot fades out to black. This is followed by a closer shot of the aforementioned doorway and the cavorting women, then by a close shot of a dark-skinned man, naked to the waist, sitting crossed-legged to one side of a door. (Is he the harem gate-keeper or a eunuch? It is interesting how he acquires some related role through the edited association. ) As he yawns, the image dissolves to a close-up of a harpist playing a harp and then a cut returns us to the dimly lit interior seen at the start, and a scantily-clad woman does a little rotating dance. Then a cut to the doorway, as before, followed by a repeat of the wide shot framing with Belshazzar and the princess, and then an inter-title:

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Belshazzar the King. The very young king of Babylon – And his Princess Beloved. Clearest and rarest of all his pearls. The very dearest one of his dancing girls.

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The next shot shows a window looking down over the city of Babylon. Belshazzar and the Princess enter and look out over the city. There are aspects to this sequence that suggest that at one time it was much longer and its purpose less oblique. Karl Brown recalls being barred from the shooting of a scene during which Belshazzar selects a bride for the night from

various scantily-robed young women.22 Lillian Gish recalls a scene in which young girls pay tribute to the love goddess Ishtar; each one giving herself to a man who came to the Temple of Sacred Fire to worship.23 This might refer to a much later sequence introduced with the inter-title:

What follows is an assemblage of individual shots which, rather like the sequence analysed above, conveys an emotional idea through inference while deliberately avoiding anything specific. A large group of people pay homage before a statue – presumably of Ishtar – and this is followed by part of a formal dance on the steps of the great court of the palace. The dance is intercut with interiors presented very like tableaux. Lightly-garbed men and women gaze at each other enraptured; a group of women, holding drinking vessels, shrug off their cloaks; one woman dances on a table while another reclining woman reaches languorously towards a seated man. Perhaps these scenes were less oblique in the eight-hour version. Yet for all its diffidence, even in its present form, the sequence contains a mix of disconnected but powerfully associated ideas; an illustration of naïve structuring, but also effective montage. It was this kind of assemblage which found favour with the Russian experimental filmmakers after 1917. It is also important to remember that Intolerance – which contains so many of these ‘primitive’ elements – was being shown alongside a much more sophisticated continuity cinema; most of Griffith’s contemporaries had already adopted shooting and editing methods devoted to achieving the apparently seamless structure which audiences favoured. What must be acknowledged is that the jumps and mismatches in Intolerance generate a tension within scenes which transcends continuity, the jaggedness of the cutting contributing to the content. One of the main difficulties facing a modern spectator who brings to the experience of seeing the film all the accumulated baggage and conditioned responses of continuity cinema is that Griffith’s work demands a different quality of understanding wherein the whole is infinitely more important than the parts, and in this Griffith’s concerns again parallel those of the naïve painter for whom the central subject of the painting is more important than accuracy in the details which shape it.

Creative discontinuity A particularly useful example of this occurs at the beginning of the famous strike sequence. After we see Jenkins instruct the factory manager by telephone to: ‘Order a ten per cent cut in all wages’, there is a cut to VWS, an elevated angle of a large group of workers at the factory gates, some are leaving, others arriving, and some, gathered about the noticeboard set to one side of the gate, are reacting agitatedly. The shot is very brief considering its content, about two seconds.

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In the Temple of Love The sacred dance in memory of the resurrection of Tammuz.

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The next shot starts with an iris-in and shows an MS of the factory gate area and noticeboard, and an employee is fixing a notice to the board. The area is completely empty of people. The factory manager enters holding a sheet of paper and gestures to another man to join them. There is then a cut to a continuation of the previous LS, the workers standing around the notice. At first it seems obvious that the MS of the empty area with the notice being put up was originally intended to start the sequence, particularly as it begins with an iris-in, but it has been positioned with total disregard for this continuity. How can this apparently deliberate misplacement be explained? It is tempting to seek a rational explanation – that the print had been damaged and incorrectly reassembled, for example – but later in the sequence there are other similar discontinuities that suggest a more accurate explanation After the initial confrontation when the militia fire on them, the workers retreat down the access road and congregate outside the closed factory gate, but facing the militia off-screen right. A group of armed security men, within the factory gate area, see the workers outside (at the back of this shot) and in a brief sequence the factory manager runs inside and telephones Jenkins. At this point there is an insert of an MS, from inside the factory gate, with workers shaking their fists through the bars at the guards – let us call this ‘shot X’. Jenkins answers the phone and tells the manager to ‘clear the property’. The manager hangs up the phone then runs out to give the order to fire on the strikers beyond the gate. It continues as follows: 1 2

3 4 5 6

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The armed guards move away from the camera towards the closed gates. MS workers from outside the gates. But they are largely looking off right towards the militia, shaking their fists, they start to move away to the left. The closed factory gates containing the guards are at the back of the shot. WS the guards (as in 1). They fire their rifles. MWS a group of women and children watch the events from a small hill. They all suddenly turn their heads to look off left. WS the guards (as in 1). They continue to fire. MS workers outside the gates (as in 2, but this is an earlier part of shot 2, before they move away. They continue to look off right, towards the militia, not towards the gates where the guards are firing as one might expect. WS the guards, a new set-up – a reverse of shot 1. They come forward, the front line kneel and fire off-screen left, the others fire over their heads. MS outside the gates (similar to shot 2). The workers have mostly moved away and the Boy is helping his wounded father in the foreground. Now, for the first time, there is reaction to the rifle-fire behind the gates.

9

What has to be emphasised is that on seeing the sequence run continuously there is no awareness of any discontinuity or misplacement. The sequence is cut quite fast and some of it is undercranked: the effect is largely impressionistic but very powerful. It is only when examining it in detail that anomalies appear. Specifically they relate to shot 6, which contains action which actually precedes shot 2, and the insert of shot X at a point when the action to which it relates is over. We must also consider the noticeboard anomaly mentioned earlier. Put simply, the reason for these action discontinuities is that dramatically and emotionally they make the scenes work better. And in this Griffith was instinctively applying a principle that underpins most creative film editing: that the dynamics of the exposition are much more important than any rigid adherence to realist continuity. Let us take the noticeboard section first. Jenkins is on the phone to the manager; inter-title: ‘Order a ten per cent cut in all wages’; the manager hangs up the phone and nervously wipes his forehead and mouth. A literal presentation of the next sequence might start with an iris-in to the MS as the notice is posted (and possibly an iris-out too), followed by the workers’ shot and the agitated response. Cause and effect. Griffith sought a more dramatic presentation by changing the syntax and ignoring the continuity. 1 2 3 4 5

Inter-title: ‘Order a ten per cent cut in all wages’. The manager hangs up the phone and nervously wipes his forehead and mouth. Bang. The screen is filled with agitated workers. The cause of their concern – the notice ordering a wage cut is posted. Bang. The workers are clearly not happy.

The result – a structure with much greater impact. Now let us consider the sequence where the workers are fired on. I think the main problem here is that the master shot (shot 2) of the workers backing away from the off-screen mititia had the guards fire on them from behind the gates rather late in the shot. Probably the original intention was to have the guards fire on the workers after they had retreated past the factory gates. ‘Clear the property’ meaning just that – fire on them as they go. But Griffith realised that this would be less dramatic than having the guards shoot at them earlier. Almost certainly, the MS of the workers threatening the guards through the gates – shot X – was an insert, filmed much later with just a handful of ‘workers’ filling the frame. As Jimmy Smith has confirmed, Griffith was not averse to going back and filming inserts after viewing an assembly of the material.

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10 11

MS from inside the gates (shot X), the workers shake their fists at the guards. MS outside the gates (as in 2). The area mostly cleared. Smoke. MWS group on the hill some start to move down.

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1 2

MWS as the manager delivers the order and the armed guards move away towards the barred gates at the back of the shot. MS workers from outside the gates. They are looking off right towards the militia, shaking their fists. They start to move away. The closed factory gates containing the guards at the back of the shot.

By having them partially clear the factory gate, the source of the next threat is displayed.

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3 4 5

WS the guards (as in 1). They fire their rifles. MWS a group of women and children watch the events from a small hill. They all suddenly turn their heads to look off left. WS the guards (as in 1). They continue to fire.

The image of the guards firing is artificially extended as much as possible by using several takes. 6

MS workers outside the gates (as in 2, an earlier part of shot 2, before the move away. ) They continue to look off right, towards the militia not towards the gates as one might expect.

By cutting to an earlier part of this shot, it can be read as a different set-up of the workers momentarily holding their ground. They are now the sitting targets for the guards who are shown next obliquely, from the side firing off left: the first time that we see the guards from the front. 7

WS the guards. They come forward, the front line kneel and fire offscreen left, the others fire over their heads.

Now Griffith can used the later part of the shot when the workers are caught in the cross-fire: 8

MS outside the gates (similar to shot 2). The workers have mostly moved away and the Boy is helping his wounded father in the foreground. They now react to the rifle-fire behind the gates.

It is important to establish some direct response to the guards firing, so shot X is brought into play. MS from inside the gates – shot X – the workers shake their fists at the guards through the bars. 10 MS outside the gates (as in 2). The area mostly cleared. Smoke. 11 MWS group of onlookers on the hill, some start to move down.

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Here, as in so many instances throughout the film, dissociation acts as an unsettling device requiring the spectator to experience the work at a level which goes beyond involvement with the characters and the plot. There can be no question that Intolerance was a colossal achievement both in conception and in the virtuosity of its execution. Such a daring attempt to push out the limits of what was possible in filmmaking could perhaps only have come about because of that strange mix of ingenuousness and overweening confidence

Notes Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 92, quotes Lillian Gish: ‘They say he [Griffith] saw other people’s pictures and took ideas from the Europeans. He never saw other pictures. He never had the time.’ 2 Although Griffith always denied seeing Quo VadisP, Kevin Brownlow, in The Parade’s Gone By (p. 92), quotes part of an interview in which Blanche Sweet recalls going to see it with Griffith in New York and suggests that he was encouraged to make Judith of Bethulia as a result. However, as Quo Vadis? opened in New York on 1 April 1913 and ran for twenty-two weeks, closing at the end of August, it is difficult to see how this could be: Griffith and his company were filming in California for most of the year and commenced Judith of Bethulia in July. It is possible that Griffith saw the film on returning to New York during the final weeks of its run. 3 Biograph’s fortunes took a marked down-turn after Griffith left. Kevin Brownlow in Hollywood – The Pioneers, p. 61, mentions that in 1917 they added two reels off out-takes to Judith of Bethulia and released it as a six-reeler under the title Her Condoned Sin. 4 Brownlow, ibid., p. 282. 5 Brownlow, ibid., p. 282. 6 Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith. Karl Brown began his career by assisting Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s cameraman. Starting shortly after Griffith left Biograph, he worked on The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and many others. 7 Brown, ibid., p. 78 8 There seems to be some difference of opinion concerning the event on which the strike sequence was based. Some sources indicate a strike broken by Pinkerton guards at a chemical works where nineteen workers were killed. 9 Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America’. 10 Brownlow, Hollywood, The Pioneers, p. 65. 1

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that had encouraged Griffith to take on the huge creative and financial risks involved. Critically well received, its influence was enormous; yet, commercially, it was a total failure. Griffith was financially ruined, and in an attempt to recover some of the losses for the investors he rashly decided to recut the negative to make two conventional feature length films, The Mother and the Law and The Fall of Babylon. Later, when he attempted to reconstruct the negative, nearly 2,000 ft. had been permanently lost. What might a history of film editing conclude from these considerations of Griffith’s work, and Intolerance in particular? Above all perhaps, evidence that there are valid ways of cutting and assembling film imagery that remain largely outside that mode of representation which began to dominate cinema after 1913.24 Griffith’s contribution to the development of filmmaking had been immeasurable throughout the Biograph years, he had taken a primitive form of cinema and refined it. Others were now building on his work and moving it in a different direction. Intolerance might be seen as a monument to alternative possibilities.

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Brownlow, ibid., p. 71. Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, p. 148. Gish, The Movies, Mr Griffith, and Me, p. 183. The actual cost is difficult to determine. An audit made in 1916 set the negative cost (the cost of the actual production excluding distribution, advertising, promotion and exhibition costs) at $485, 000, although the total cost, other costs included, is likely to have been as much as $2 million. MGM re-budgeted the film in 1936 and estimated the production costs to have been between ten and twelve million dollars. Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, p. 17. Between Judith of Bethulia and The Birth of a Nation, Griffith made three films for Mutual-Reliant which he called ‘pot-boilers’ – Home, Sweet Home was one of them. When another shot is inserted to overcome a jump cut some relevant action should realistically be lost during the inserted action. However, this is sometimes retained, double-cut, on the shot following the insert. Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, pp. 20–1. Brown, ibid., p. 59. Brown, ibid., p. 45. By this time, acting for the screen had become an acceptable activity and film stars were becoming an important commodity. It was common to introduce the leading actors, singly, at the very beginning of a film taking a bow, often in full evening dress and a lap dissolve would then be used to transform them into costume and character. However, Griffith took no interest in promoting actors, omitting cast credits from both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, pp. 171–2. Gish, The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me, pp. 170–1. Intolerance made a very strong impression in Japan when it was first shown in 1919, partly no doubt because its unique structure sat well within a cultural tradition that had no difficulty in engaging with a form that was not rigidly linear.

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Variations on a theme

10

Comedy and irony By the end of 1915 most of the structuring practices that are common to our current expectations of cinema had become established. Refinements would be introduced with every film made, but the industry which supported and encouraged filmmaking recognised that it was essentially a commercial medium, making products for consumption in a competitive market. The profits made were considerable. In America, the rise of the movie moguls, the establishment of the vast studio complexes and the growth of the star system were sustained by a set of values built on commercial success through popular audience appeal. With certain exceptions, what this mostly ensured was that the cinematic forms that would be adopted would be those that engaged audiences most successfully at the levels of subjective involvement with the narrative and personal identification with the characters. Certainly this kind of cinema held a powerful appeal for the growing middle-class audience and is particularly well exemplified by the success of DeMille’s The Cheat, discussed earlier (see Chapter 8). If we can conclude that Griffith’s authorial style, with its extensive dependence on cross-cutting and parallel action, drew substantially on dramatic irony for its effect, we will also find this in virtually all comedy, and certainly in the work of the comic geniuses whose work began to achieve popular acceptance during this critically formative period. This is particularly true of the comedy of Charlie Chaplin which uses both dramatic and structural irony as the basis of its humour. Chaplin’s famous screen character attracts sympathy but there is limited identification because he uses objective presentational forms to preserve the distance necessary to facilitate irony. Charlie Chaplin’s film career began when he joined Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in 1913. With his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, he began to develop the character of The Little Tramp which was to make him world famous. Chaplin appeared in thirty-four shorts for Sennett, and one six-reel feature, Tillie’s Punctured Romance. The guiding principles behind Keystone comedies at that time were speed and economy, speed referring not only to the pace of the action (invariably assisted by undercranking the camera)1 but the amount of time 157

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allocated to their production. Economy meant using every foot of film that was shot; and Sennett frowned on editors who rejected shot-ends. Most films made at that time used a minimum amount of cutting within scenes and as most of the comedy was built around action gags, it was sufficient to play them out in one shot, usually made with one take. Chaplin’s leisurely comedy, based on subtleties of timing, was very different from the breakneck speed of the standard Keystone product and there was considerable friction between Chaplin and his directors over differences in style and attention to detail. Chaplin’s ambition was to direct his own films and Caught in the Rain, his thirteenth film, made less than three months after joining Keystone, marks his first solo director credit. His instinct for the medium was quickly established as was his control over his films, Caught in the Rain was shot in a couple of hours whereas The New Janitor, released barely five months later, took a leisurely seventeen days to shoot. Chaplin’s rise as an immensely successful writer, performer and director of comedy was meteoric. When he started at Keystone, Sennett paid him $150 a week; when he left to make fourteen one- and tworeelers for Essanay in 1915, he was paid $1,250 a week and given a $10,000 bonus on signing his contract. He then made twelve two-reelers for Mutual for a star level weekly salary of $10,000 before signing with First National in July 1917 to make eight films in sixteen months for an unprecedented one million dollars. At Essanay, Chaplin established his working relationship with cameraman Roland Totheroh, who was to shoot all the films that Chaplin made in America. Totheroh understood that Chaplin’s comedy, based as it was on a mix of cleverly timed action and subtly observed detail, required little more than a simple, static, well-composed photographic style that was completely unobtrusive. It was during this period too, that Chaplin discovered Edna Purviance, who co-starred with him in more than thirty films. By common agreement, the last four films that Chaplin made for Mutual during 1917 rank among his greatest achievements and launched the period that marks his maturity, and it is on some aspects of these that I want to focus. In Easy Street, released in January 1917, Chaplin’s tramp character enters a mission where, having become enamoured of the harmonium player, Edna Purviance, he is ‘reformed’ by the minister and relinquishes the idea of stealing the offertory box. Charlie gets a job as a policeman and is given Easy Street, the toughiest area of the city, as his beat. Here, he overcomes the giant bully, played by Eric Campbell,2 and with Edna, dispenses charity to the poor. The Bully escapes, is overcome yet again by Charlie who is finally able to subdue all opposition and reform the district. By this time, directors had realised that action, particularly fast-paced, comedy action, sustained a greater sense of fluidity across a cut if entrances and exits followed the 180° convention, and consequently this was common among most of

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the comedies of the period, Chaplin’s films included. However, this was often not considered essential when cutting between groups or individuals looking towards each other and in the mission sequence, cuts are made between the congregation and the minister which consistently show the two facing the same way.3 This is also true of the close shots when Charlie and Edna first see each other. But Chaplin frames his own close-up tighter than Purviance’s, hers being a standard head and shoulders CS, indicating that the moment of intensity is felt principally by him. Although shot as a cross-line edit, the arrangement is unlike anything else in the film and it achieves its intensity by cutting across the line between the two looks angled at 30° to the camera.4 Once the story moves on to Easy Street itself, Chaplin undercranks the action to produce an increased sense of pace and these scenes are presented frontally with cuts in on the axis where appropriate. In many ways Chaplin’s films all retain frontalism as their basic presentational form, and this links to both the theatrical and the earlier observational mode of film presentation, which supported the structural ironies that were the basis of his comedy. Perhaps it is a measure of the extent to which, by this time, SRS and POV structure had been adopted extensively in the dramatic narratives being produced in Hollywood, that some critics charged Chaplin with being primitive, reactionary and unimaginative. What is evident, is the extent to which Chaplin recognised that it was possible to graft on to an observational presentation many of the editing methods that sought continuity by matching action across cuts and using movement to attract attention and obscure mismatches. These methods are well in evidence during the street fight scenes, in which the inhabitants, led by the bully, Eric Campbell, terrorise the police. Chaplin uses parallel action here to cross-cut between the violence on the street and the injured cops being wheeled into the police station, and also between the scenes which establish the bully’s control of the area and Charlie naively joining the force. Once Charlie, as the rookie cop, comes on the scene, a direct confrontation with Campbell’s bully is inevitable. Chaplin’s editing of this confrontation is quite revealing. Under the threatening gaze of Campbell, Charlie is attempting to use the police telephone that is mounted on a lamppost. Knowing the extent of the telephone business in advance, Chaplin frames this section of the scene just close enough to display all the details of the action, but as Campbell rolls up his sleeve to deal with Charlie, a cut is made to a wide shot encouraging the spectator to anticipate the nature of the action that will follow. This relates to the comedy routine common in circus clowning – ‘tell them what you’re going to do, then do it’ – a comedy of suspense rather than surprise – achieved by showing the banana skin in place before the comic slips on it. Cutting wide ahead of the action emphasises the structural irony in the situation, unlike a subjective presentation where the cut is triggered by the action. For example, when somebody seated in a close framing starts to get up, and there is invariably a cut out to a wider framing so that the action can continue to be seen. To intimidate Charlie and demonstrate

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his enormous strength, Campbell bends the gas lamppost over, at which point Charlie jumps on his back and as the lamp housing goes over the bully’s head there is a cut to an inter-title – ‘Gas!!!’ which, by being used between the WS of the action and the MCU that follows, obscures the cut and avoids any mismatch. Two contrasting attitudes to pace can be found in Easy Street. One is the common tendency in chase sequences of showing the pursued followed by the pursuer, but holding on to the shot until the latter has completely left the frame, and the other in the extremely bold time ellipses introduced to exclude unnecessary action. What seems strange is that when cutting a chase, although the action was invariably undercranked to achieve an artificial illusion of speed, it was not felt necessary to anticipate the ending of a shot by cutting out of it during the action. Yet elsewhere economy was invariably achieved by excluding sections of inessential transitional action with little comic potential; up and down the stairs between the Bully’s flat and the street, for example. Having established the staircase earlier, Chaplin felt able to cut straight from a character exiting from the street to their entering the door of the upstairs flat, ignoring the reality of the transitional space. In fact Chaplin’s use of the time ellipsis was very influential in changing attitudes to film structure. The Cure, made next and released in April 1917 makes bold use of the temporal ellipse. This was one of the few films that Chaplin made in which he abandoned the ‘little tramp’ character. Set in a health resort, Chaplin, dressed in a light jacket and wearing a straw boater, plays an alcoholic seeking a cure and every activity and situation possible in such circumstances is exploited for maximum comic effect. Much as the staircase was omitted in Easy Street, so the grand entrance hall and corridors, used to considerable advantage in some scenes, are included as transitional spaces only if relevant. Cutting between adjacent spaces, as when Charlie shoves the ‘helpful attendant’ out of his room and into the corridor using his foot, would mostly be cut when the action was half in, half out of the two spaces, and not cutting ahead of the activity to anticipate the displacement.5 Cutting to show objects being tossed or thrown between adjacent spaces had become established some time earlier, and was the obvious extension of looks being exchanged between shots. But once the object is seen to have been thrown, it quickly became apparent that the cut to the incoming shot, showing the object’s destination, had to be made sufficiently early for the eye to accommodate to the space before the object entered it. Action involving the throwing, or dropping, of objects is common to many comedy situations and The Cure contains plenty of examples. Chaplin’s understanding of the editing principles that are involved is illustrated in a scene where Charlie appears at the top of the wide, central staircase smoking a cigarette; below and to one side, Eric Campbell, playing ‘the Gout’, sits holding a cup of black coffee. Charlie drops his half smoked cigarette over the banister rail, and on the movement a cut is made to Campbell in MCU, the shot angled slightly down with

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the coffee cup in the foreground. After a pause of about eight frames we see the cigarette fall into the cup – cutting ahead of the action to sustain pace and also to achieve a sense of anticipation rewarded. The next cut however, betrays the fact that Chaplin has not recognised that the same principle can also be applied when cutting wide. In the MCU, Campbell lifts the offending cigarette from his cup, and, as he throws it down, a cut is made to an MWS of the action continued. Analysis of the cut reveals that it is a perfect action match but, because the action is obscured by the additional visual content contained within the much wider framing, by the time the eye has identified which part of the wide frame contains the action, it is over. By overlapping the action – i.e. showing part of it repeated on the wide shot – the action of throwing down the cigarette would have appeared to be continuous. As Chaplin’s success increased, so did his control over the films that he made. Whereas his Keystone shorts would be put together in days, the two-reelers that he made for Mutual could take six weeks or more. For The Immigrant, which was made immediately after The Cure, Chaplin shot 90,000 ft. of film, an incredibly high shooting ratio of 50:1, and he is said to have gone without sleep for four days and nights to complete the two-reel fine cut. There does seem to be evidence of editing difficulties in matching action during the early part of the film, which structures much of its humour around the rolling deck of the immigrant ship, and as Chaplin’s filming methods involved shooting numerous takes of every set-up, the time taken to make detailed assessments of their content would have been extensive. Later, when he began making films of feature length, his shooting ratio remained extraordinarily high and the time taken to complete a film was excessive by any standards. There were reports that a one-minute scene in The Kid, where the boy is making pancakes and Charlie gets out of bed and turns his blanket into a lounging robe, is said to have taken 50,000 ft. of film and two weeks to shoot.6 Chaplin’s last film for Mutual was The Adventurer, released at the end of October 1917. Chaplin plays an escaped convict who, having successfully evaded capture, rescues two wealthy women from drowning and is invited to their home. There he meets and courts the daughter (Purviance) but is recognised by his rival suitor (Campbell), who sends for the prison guards, forcing Charlie to take flight once more. The first part of the film, ‘The Man Hunt’, is carried out with remarkable sophistication. Charlie surreptitiously makes his first entrance from beneath the sand on a beach within feet of an armed prison guard, and the sequence is played mostly in close-ups, maintaining conventional screen direction through looks and glances. Cutting in to close-ups from wider framings invariably produced mismatches, but audiences at the time were either unaware of them or considered them unimportant. With the emphasis placed on character and performance, framing and cutting become simply pragmatic means to an end. Comedy is designed to work at a broad, more distant and less involving level of communication than most drama. Striving for accuracy in matching and editing

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material so as to remove or reduce these potential inconsistencies and achieve a certain degree of invisibility, is more appropriate to subjective narrative methods. One other specific moment from the early part of the film invites comment. In WS, Charlie is lying down on the top of a cliff looking down at the frustrated chief guard on the path below. He reaches for a large stone, kisses it, and throws it down the cliff. The cut to the MCU of Charlie is made just before he kisses the stone. The cut, made at this point rather than the slightly earlier point – as he picks it up – has two effects; it emphasises the kissing business and also makes the cut more obvious. An earlier cut would have been more obscure as it would have occurred at precisely the point when the spectator’s interest level was raised by the observed intention. By showing more detail with a closer framing at that precise moment, the cut would instantly reward the unconscious desire, and the join between the two separate pieces of film, would be ‘unseen’. This defines a difference between an objective and subjective editing method. Whether Chaplin calculatedly decided to cut these shots the way he did, we cannot know, but a clue might be found in the way that the scene continues. After he throws the stone, as if to clinch his successfully outwitting the chief guard, Charlie looks at the camera and smiles, unaware that a prison guard has crept up behind him and is standing next to his prone figure. The smile addressed to the spectator is an established distancing device, the use of which has been explored in an earlier chapter (see Chapter 2). Its use here seems to confirm the previous cut as being equally objective, but at the same time it explicitly emphasises the irony of the situation – our knowledge, and Charlie’s ignorance, of his imminent plight.

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The period of filmmaking that spans the ending of the First World War and the coming of sound was one of the most innovative in terms of developing style and form. Films made during that period, especially in Europe, contained degrees of exploration and experiment that might be said to have taken filmmaking from adolescence to maturity. It might be valuable to digress briefly to explore some of the fundamental aspects of the silent film in order to provide a context for an examination of the films that were made during this most important and innovative period of filmmaking. What is inescapable is that the silent film was, above all else, unrealistic. The images were recorded in monochrome; the speed of movement was alterable by under-or over-cranking the camera, and there existed no practical means of presenting synchronous speech or sounds that could be heard. The flow of images had therefore to be broken with explanatory or dialogue inter-titles (one of the reasons why films were wholly international is that a foreigner version could be visually identical, with only the inter-titles translated and replaced). With the absence of sound, the inclusion of an inter-title could be used to mask discontinuities and allow the editing pace to be varied at will.

Broken Blossoms D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), is based on a short story by English writer Thomas Burke, The Chink and the Child, taken from a bestselling collection entitled Limehouse Nights. It tells the story of a Chinese aristocrat, Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), who travels to England intending to promulgate his Buddhist beliefs of love, tolerance and harmony. He quickly finds himself to be just another immigrant, smoking opium and running a curio shop in Limehouse – a run-down Chinese district on London’s dockside. Lucy (Lillian Gish), the illegitimate daughter of prizefighter Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), is persecuted by her brutal father and one night collapses outside Huan’s shop and is given refuge. Later, his chaste but loving concern for the young girl is discovered when Burrows,

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The absence of any synchronous sound element in films also offered a significant creative advantage. Realistic sound might be defined as a series of unbroken overlapping sounds deriving from identifiable sources: it is perceived as continuous. It was because film structures evolved independently of realistic sound that they were free to develop a fragmented presentational form; a form significantly at odds with our visual perception of the real world which, like sound, is also inescapably continuous. Although in the past, attempts have been made to liken the human eye’s ability to select and focus upon a variety of views with the cinema’s ability to present changes of view through editing, the analogy breaks down quite quickly when one considers that filmed action is often presented from a multiplicity of camera positions totally beyond the viewpoint of a stationary observer. Indeed it is the actual ubiquity of viewpoint, quite unlike actual perception; together with film’s ability to reorder time and space, that makes film viewing so compelling. It provides a magical view of an apparently realistic world which is totally unlike reality itself. The point that I am seeking to make here is that it is the degree of departure from reality which can give the experience of watching a film that extra dimension. Exploring the ways in which soundless images could be edited to construct an artificial, dramatic reality from what was essentially photographed actuality became a central task during the following ten crucial years. One of the main difficulties in attempting an assessment of the most innovative films made internationally between 1918 and 1928 is the quite exceptional range of titles to choose from. The temptation is to attempt some consideration of the most significant films in terms of form and style, and I have to keep reminding myself that the task I have set myself is not to write a detailed and comprehensive history of film; that has already been exceptionally well done in various degrees of detail by numerous film historians already. I make this point because space requires that I must inevitably exclude large numbers of films all deserving some consideration for the originality of their form and structure and all able to offer valuable insights into the subject of this study. So, what follows will be a dip into a few important ones.

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returning from a boxing defeat, learns of her whereabouts. Lucy is dragged back to their hovel where, fearful for her life, she locks herself in a cupboard. Burrows takes an axe to the door and Lucy is eventually beaten to death. Huan returns to find his flat wrecked and the girl gone. Hastening to her home he arrives too late to save her, but in a confrontation with Burrows, shoots and kills him. He then carries the body of the young girl back to his flat, lays her body out in a silken robe, and commits suicide. Filmed over a period of eighteen days and nights without a break, because actor Donald Crisp was himself directing a film elsewhere during the day, the film was made relatively cheaply, for $88,000. In her biography, Lillian Gish states that the film was shot entirely without retakes and consequently, when finally edited, only 200 ft. of the exposed film remained unused. Although shooting ended in January 1919 the film was not premièred until 13 May; Griffith, it seems, was having regrets about making such a downbeat film; was dubious about its commercial prospects and devoted little time to supervising the editing. However, while working on the titles with the composer, Griffith recovered his faith in its poetic qualities only to find that Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, believing the film would be a box-office disaster, refused to release it. Griffith bought the film back from Paramount and released it through United Artists in October 1919. It was a monumental success. Justly praised for the performances of Gish and Barthelmess and for the superb atmospheric photography and design, the film was not only popular commercially but received critical accolades particularly in France where, released in 1921, it significantly influenced the films of French impressionist writer-directors Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and Marcel L’Herbier. Once again, Griffith chooses a story in which the three protagonists can be used to represent abstract qualities: Battling Burrows is unremittingly evil, his daughter Lucy is the helpless innocent and Cheng Huan embodies pure and selfless love. In many ways it is the absence of complexity within the characters, their unquestioning acceptance of their lot, that pushes the film towards dullness. The relationship between Lucy and Huan, based on simple kindness, contains no hint of honest sexuality to complicate the tale, and Burrows’s characterisation verges on caricature, his single-minded brutality and coarseness unexplained. Donald Crisp, an actor of considerable ability, was evidently encouraged to give a performance devoid of any subtlety. Nonetheless, the film has a compelling quality and seems strangely to succeed in spite of the ingenuous presentation of its theme. There are also some interesting, if strange, aspects to the way that it has been paced and structured. Even making allowances for conditioned responses to the faster pace of modern films, the pace of Broken Blossoms is unbelievably slow. Even a contemporary article, ‘Griffith’s Art’, in the New York Times of 25 May 1919, makes special reference to the fact that ‘it is not only that the action is slow – it is – it takes a man longer to walk across the street in Broken Blossoms than in other photoplays’, and likened this to classic

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Greek tragedies in which ‘tragedy comes from the steady march of inevitable events.’ Close examination of scene after scene reveals that every last frame of action and performance have been retained and used. After a while, the calculated slowness of pace develops a momentum that is almost hypnotic. Griffith seems to be casual with regards to cutting points and temporal logic. A scene in which Lucy stands outside Huan’s shop window looking at some dolls while he watches in CS is extended so deliberately that the suspicion that several different takes of Barthelmess have been included in order to extend the scene is inescapable. One is reminded of Lillian Gish’s recollection that only 200 ft. of film remained unused from a film running 95 minutes and therefore compelled to speculate whether it could have remained feature length if the editing pace had been increased. Griffith’s disregard for the niceties of action matching have been examined in previous chapters and we might also expect to find them here: we are not disappointed. But here action mismatches can be seen as quite calculated attempts to extend the action. For example, in a scene during which Lucy is compelled to stand and watch her father eat, his actions are deliberately repeated by using two shots to prolong the scene. After an inter-title, ‘She has to wait’, there follows a MS of Burrows, seated and eating oafishly at the table while Lucy, standing frame right, watches him eat from his knife. He then throws down the knife, picks up a spoon and starts to stir his tea. A cut is then made to a CS of Burrows as he picks up the knife; the knife business is repeated, then, as he picks up his spoon on this closer shot, there is a cut to a CU of Lucy watching, then an inter-title, ‘he can’t stand bad table manners’, then a cut back to the CS of Burrows a few frames after the previous cut-out, and he continues to stir his tea. Throughout this scene, indeed throughout the film, it is evident that every look, every gesture is included to its full extent. And this is also the case when parallel action is introduced. Scenes showing Huan’s discovery of his wrecked room, taking a gun, and making his way towards the Burrows’ home are intercut with Burrows’ attempts to get Lucy out of the cupboard, yet after each cut to show Huan’s progress, the cut back to Lucy and Burrows reveals no development of the scene. It is difficult to understand Griffith’s motivation in all this; one would like to feel that the reasons for the calculated longueurs are part of a creative intention, yet the suspicion remains that Griffith was responding to the material with a mixture of instinct and pragmatism rather than intellectual rigour. We might conclude three important things about editing from Broken Blossoms. The first is that action matching is of lesser importance than the need to establish the desired pace and rhythm of a scene or the work as a whole. The second is that, provided performances and photography are of a high standard, decisions concerning pace made during filming and subsequently altered by extending or shortening during editing, will pass largely unnoticed. And finally, that when audiences are following the dramatic thrust of a narrative they are very unlikely to be aware of, or concerned about, action mismatches.

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The Outlaw and His Wife

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The early work of Swedish actor-director Victor Sjöström has been discussed in a previous chapter with The Gardener (1912) and Ingeborg Holm (1913) being mentioned in particular (see Chapter 5). Between Ingeborg Holm and Terje Vigen (A Man There Was), which was released in 1916, Sjöström made more than twenty films, all of them now lost. His next film, The Outlaw and His Wife (Berg-Ejvind och hans Hustru, 1917) was acclaimed as a breakthrough film in Swedish cinema. Set in mid-eighteenth-century Iceland, and based on actual events, the film was adapted from a stage-play by Johann Sigurjonsson. For the first time, natural locations became more than merely authentic settings for dramatic narratives, as in the westerns made by Thomas Ince and others. In The Outlaw and His Wife the backgrounds became a character in the film, directly relevant to the human emotions played out against them. Berg-Ejvind, played by Sjöström himself, is an outlaw who has taken refuge in the mountains, having escaped from prison. His crime was to steal a sheep from a priest who had refused to help him to feed some starving peasants. At the start of the film he had witnessed an itinerant worker, Arnes, steal the fleece from a stray sheep and then dupe the shepherd who accuses him. Calling himself Kári, he is helped by Arnes to find work on a farm owned by Halla, a wealthy widow. She is attracted to him and makes him her steward, but Bjorn, the local bailiff, whose marriage proposal she has rejected, discovers Kári’s true identity and accuses him. Ejvind confesses to Halla and agrees to return to the mountains, but she decides to abandon her estate to live with him as his wife. Five years pass and they have a young child and an idyllic life. Arnes, the wanderer, joins them but he becomes jealous of their happiness and unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Halla. He decides to leave but, on seeing a search party led by the bailiff, returns to warn them. During the ensuing fight Halla kills their child rather than let him be captured, and Kári and Halla escape. Deprived of any means of surviving during a bleak winter, the couple facing starvation in blizzard conditions, eventually die together in the snow. French impressionist filmmaker and critic Louis Delluc wrote about the film in 1921 ‘Here without doubt is the most beautiful film in the world ... directed by Victor Sjöström with a dignity that goes beyond words ... it is the first love duet heard in the cinema.’ One of the most notable aspects of the structuring of the film is the exceptional simplicity of the staging and economy of the editing. In this respect it would be useful to examine the opening scene.

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Fade in. A MS of a herd of sheep moving towards the camera through a gate as the shepherd counts them. A boy in the background herding. Reverse angle MCS of the gate, the boy immediately enters shot following the last few sheep. The shepherd speaks to him.

A marked collapsing of time as the boy could not realistically have covered the distance so quickly. Inter-title – Bjorn Bersteinsson – bailiff. Placing the introductory inter-title before the shot of the character sustains the pace of the narrative.

Then a series of brief intercuts between the CS Bjorn and MCS of the shepherd and boy as the shepherd remonstrates with him. Finally they both set off to exit frame L. These short intercuts are used solely to reflect the agitation both men feel about an unstated problem. Because we are not party to their silent conversation, our interest level is raised. This also occurs in sound films in which we are deliberately kept from hearing what is said. MS Bjorn standing in his doorway, the shepherd and the boy are already in shot completing their entry from frame R and coming to a stop. This is typical of the tightening used in the film to speed up the action. It is quite unrealistic, but once established as a convention it becomes acceptable because it supports the spectator’s desire to move the story along. Inter-title – ‘The sheep are restless. The boy allowed two of them to stray in the mountains.’ MS as before. Bjorn remonstrates with the boy, takes a whip from the shepherd and starts to beat the boy. Inter-title – ‘Arnes, an itinerant labourer’. We are thus prepared for something new. CU hands with a knife shearing the fleece from a sheep. MS Arnes continuing his task. Sjöström introduces each of the main characters via an intertitle and a CU, followed by an MS. MS Bjorn, the shepherd and boy, as before. Bjorn stops his beating. Inter-title – ‘Punishment completed’ – he is sent to find the animals. MS as before. The shepherd and the boy leave shot. Introducing the two shots of Arnes shearing the sheep and then returning to the completion of the boy’s punishment narrates the story more dynamically. The spectator now knows what the characters do not, thus facilitating irony. The structure continues to develop in this way with the unexpected introduction of: Inter-title – ‘A stranger.’ CS The stranger (Berg-Ejvind) drinking from a waterfall. MS as he pulls back and looks up.

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CS Bjorn looks off frame R and speaks. MCS as before. The shepherd and boy.

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The story now continues with Ejvind seeing Arnes completing his shearing unaware that he is being watched, and putting the fleece in a sack, immediately, we see the arrival of the shepherd and the boy, and share their POV of the two sheep, one of them sheared. Arnes, seeing them, puts lichen into the top of his sack. The confrontation and successful duping of the shepherd then follow – all watched secretly by Ejvind – and all structured using 180° entry-exit conventions. Every cut is tight, making few concessions to any realistic representation of time and space. The scene in which Ejvind first meets Halla reveals a fascinating editing decision which is worth examining. Arnes has brought Ejvind to Halla’s farm so that he can find work, and he is immediately able to help by putting a heavy trunk into a loft. It is at this point that Ejvind and Halla see each other for the first time and she is then introduced to him by Arnes. Their first meeting is played out in a close profile two-shot, but suddenly Sjöström introduces a CU of Halla, a cross-line edit which, although its use signifies an important moment in the film by emphasising a key reaction, seems oddly out of place. During a following scene, Bjorn the bailiff arrives and, in a private exchange with Halla, asks her, rather peremptorily, to marry him. Her scornful rejection is shown in a CU, and on seeing it I realised that it was part of this shot which had been used as the insert in the earlier scene. Part of Halla’s intense look had been ‘borrowed’ by Sjöström and his editor and used earlier for quite a different purpose. Whether this cheat would be noticed by the average viewer is doubtful, and it certainly strengthens the moment, but what is also of interest is that although Sjöström understands and uses 180° convention meticulously throughout the film, he has no hesitation in introducing this shot even though it involves a very obvious cross-line edit. I suggest that it might be argued that the unsettling change of direction is quite intentional.

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Häxan

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The Danish actor-director of Häxan (The Witch or Witchcraft through the Ages, 1918–21), Benjamin Christensen, was considered to be the greatest individualist and experimenter in Danish cinema of his day. His first film was The Mysterious X (Det hemmelighedsflude X, 1913), a spy melodrama about a naval lieutenant accused of betraying his country. Technically, it was acknowledged to be a remarkable piece of work not least because of its lighting; as Kevin Brownlow has pointed out,7 the visual effects achieved by the director and his cameraman, Emil Dinesen, were far ahead of anyone else at the time. Furthermore, Christensen intuitively grasped the essentials of the film grammar which is the basis of continuity cinema, manifested here in his ability to develop scenes through editing rather than merely record them. Häxan, Christensen’s third film, was made for the Swedish company, Svenska Biografteatern but it was shot in Denmark at the Copenhagen Studios. At that

One of my actresses insisted on trying the thumbscrew when we were filming these pictures. Followed by a close shot of the actress smilingly undergoing the process. Then, at the first wince: I will draw a veil over the dreadful confessions that I forced the young woman to make in less than a minute.

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time it was the most expensive film ever to be produced in Scandinavia. Häxan was an extremely original concept, part-documentary and part-fiction: a historical and psychological account of witchcraft and superstition based on the contemporary accounts of the trials and persecutions that took place in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The film then draws parallels with modern examples of psychological illness and superstitious beliefs. The most successful sections of the film are those set in the Middle Ages in which fantasy is mixed with dramatic reconstruction to produce spectacular scenes of perversion and madness. Häxan was completed, after several years of research, in 1920. The film begins with an extended series of engravings. Effective use is made of a pointer to indicate those sections of the illustrations linked with inter-titles and, by the use of the first-person singular in the text, the sequence sets out to simulate a spoken lantern lecture, with the use of an iris-in and -out to prepare the spectator for changes. This opening precedes a remarkable series of reconstructed scenes filmed with effective low-key lighting, realistic settings and understated performances. The structure is built on changes in framing and shooting angle; confident use of close-ups and big close-ups; point-of-view shots; and action matches. The quality of the imagery is remarkably sophisticated. A sequence set in a witch’s kitchen shows members of a group bringing materials for use in magic potions and rituals. A woman visits the witch’s house for a love potion, and, as she is shown different mixtures, a dissolve codifies the transition into her putting the potion to use. Christensen cuts between a close shot of a fat cleric’s vulgar enjoyment of his food and a similar shot of the woman’s reactions as she prepares and serves the potion to him. The result, due largely to the editing and the performances, compels close identification with the characters and the situation. The episodic structure and first-person inter-titles then intervene to comment on the representation, breaking the flow. What is particularly satisfying about the form of the film is the extent to which Christensen weaves together sections of persuasive, and sometimes disturbing, realism with documentary objectivity; even on occasions alluding to the filmmaking process itself. A section on medieval instruments of torture suddenly introduces an inter-title:

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The jokey, ironic tone of this fragment is not out of place with the general tone of the commentary presented through the inter-titles. The alternation of graphic reconstructions of cruelty and anguish, with intertitles stating historical fact is extremely effective. At the conclusion of a series of particularly painful episodes, a young woman is tricked by priests into confessing knowledge of witchcraft. Christensen ends the sequence with the inter-title:

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In only two or three centuries more than eight million women, men and children were burnt for witchcraft. An objective condemnation of the part that organised religion played in encouraging these barbaric practices. Häxan was an attempt to use film to break down the barriers between art and social history, perhaps the earliest drama-documentary. It was certainly a major experimental landmark in the history of the cinema.

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Caligari

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In the period preceding the First World War, the German cinema had failed to achieve the standard of development to be found in America and elsewhere in Europe. Partly this was because filmmaking in Germany took longer to establish links with more culturally acceptable activities than in other parts of Europe. Its association with fairground entertainments and popular, escapist diversions lasted longer in Germany than elsewhere and the educated middle class failed to take it seriously. Certainly, its technical standards left much to be desired. In the period following the war, the predominant feeling that existed in Germany was one based on the need to replace the shattered world of the past with one founded on revolutionary change. Intellectual enthusiasm became focused on the progressive and the experimental, and in particular on an anti-naturalist trend in the arts called expressionism which had, as its basis, a feeling of disquiet; a dissatisfaction with the reality of world which appeared to deny the possibility of self-realisation. Young writers and painters returning from the war, and turning their attention towards the creative possibilities of film, sought to produce a cinema which exteriorised a subjective vision of the world. The screenplay of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1919), was written by Hans Janowitz, a Czech poet who had served as an infantry officer in the war, and Carl Mayer,8 son of a wealthy businessman. Their script was based upon a shared hatred of authority and a strange experience of Janowitz’s when he had become convinced that he could identify the perpetrator of a Hamburg sexkilling. In their version, Dr Caligari is a charlatan, a quack doctor who comes to the north German town of Holstenwall with a travelling fair. In his booth, he displays a somnambulist, Cesare, a young man seemingly in a permanent hypnotic state,

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who can be awoken to forecast the future. An arrogant town official, who has treated Caligari’s request for a licence with some disdain, is found murdered the following day. Two students, Alan and Francis, who are both in love with Jane, a doctor’s daughter, visit the fair and Alan asks Cesare how long he has to live. He is told, ‘until dawn’. The following day, Alan is found murdered. Francis, convinced that Cesare is the killer, persuades Jane’s father to help him to track the murderer. Caligari sends Cesare to kill Jane while the doctor and Francis are called away on a false lead. Francis returns to keep watch on Caligari’s caravan thinking Cesare is still there, meanwhile Cesare breaks into Jane’s bedroom with the intention of stabbing her, but kidnaps her instead. Forced to abandon her after a chase, he collapses and dies. Francis and the police investigate Caligari’s caravan only to find that the box contains a dummy. Caligari escapes and is pursued by Francis to a lunatic asylum. Francis insists on speaking to the director only to discover that the director is Caligari himself. The original script was intended as a satire on Prussian authoritarianism, in which men were turned into robots – killing machines – as Cesare was by Caligari. Erich Pommer, then chief executive of an independent company Decla-Bioscop, accepted what was both an unusual and subversive script. At this period there was a generally recognised view that foreign markets could best be entered with films of artistic achievement. Pommer became convinced that the Caligari screenplay offered considerable atmospheric and scenic possibilities and invited the painters Walter Riemann and Walter Röhrig, and designer Hermann Warm9 to work on the sets and costumes. At this time this group held the view that ‘films should be living drawings’ and this is strongly reflected in their designs for the film. The directing role was first offered to Fritz Lang who proved to be unavailable and Pommer then offered it to Robert Wiene.10 However, it was Lang who encouraged Pommer to add a dramatic framing to the Janowitz-Mayer script which completely inverted their intention, for the story now convicts its hero, Francis, of madness rather than exposing the madness in authority. Despite Janowitz and Mayer’s protests, this was the version directed by Wiene.11 The film begins with Francis sitting on a bench telling his tale to a companion. A young woman, Jane, drifts by as if in a trance, and the strangeness of the circumstances encourages the inference that the storyteller is deranged. The Janowitz-Mayer script is now played through as written, but at its conclusion a final framing sequence is added, in which Francis finds himself outside the asylum with other inmates and, seeing the benign director, takes him to be the nightmarish character that he has created. Put in a straitjacket and taken to a padded cell, the director explains that now that he knows that the deranged Francis believes him to be the mythological Caligari, he will be able to cure him. This imposed framing invalidates the subversive intention and intellectual integrity of the original in favour of a version that was likely to be more acceptable and in harmony with popular appeal.

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I have explained at some length the circumstances surrounding the production of this film because in many ways they parallel the conflicts and contradictions that have regularly been a part of filmmaking practice from the outset. It has long been recognised that films play an important part in conditioning the ethics, ideas and attitudes that audiences take from them, and that producers, writers and directors seek to put into them; add to this mix the demands of political expediency, social acceptability and economic viability and it clarifies the extent to which oppositional forces necessarily come into conflict when a film goes into production. The visual aspects of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, both in terms of its staging and design, were quite unlike anything seen before. The entire piece is played out in front of a series of highly stylised backdrops, false perspectives and starkly artificial constructions. The costumes and make-up are similarly exaggerated. The lighting is mainly flat with shadows obtained, not through lighting, but by painting the décor. Although made in 1919, Wiene stages most of the film using the frontal presentational form that had dominated the cinema’s early years, and this seems in keeping with the deliberate, very stagy artificiality of the design. Indeed, because each of the many strange sets is identifiably part of a unified whole, the film produces a response predicated on its own terms of reference: the artificiality delights the eye because it transcends reality. As in the theatre, there is a suspension of disbelief which heightens the pleasure in watching. This is memorably manifest in the scene where Cesare decides he cannot kill Jane but must take her away with him. He lifts her from the bed and, as he carries her to the doorway at the back of the set, her long white nightgown and the bedsheets trail behind them like bonds breaking in a train of mist. It is an intensely aesthetic image, a shocking mixture of horror and romance. The editing within scenes is minimal, consisting of occasional cuts to closer framings when appropriate. There is no attempt at action matching and no sense of discontinuity within scenes, inter-titles being sometimes used to mask changes of framing. When necessary, a complete reverse angle might be included, as when Alan faces Cesare in the show-booth and asks him how long he has left to live. The minimal editing contributes to the hypnotic, dream-like presentation; editing practices associated with a realist continuity cinema prevalent in 1919 would quite clearly be out of place in a film so calculatedly unrealistic and pictorially graphic. When it was first released, press reviews were unanimous in praising The Cabinet of Dr Caligari as the first work of art made for the screen. After opening in Paris in 1920, it ran continuously for seven years, setting a record. The film is regularly included in critics best film polls, in 1958 it was chosen by 117 critics from 26 countries as one of the top twelve most important films of all time.

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New objectivity Caligarism, as it became known, should be considered an extreme example of the expressionist artistic trends that developed during the post-war years in Germany,

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being based more on pictorial expressionism applied to the cinema rather than expressionist cinema itself. The successors of Caligari can be found in films such as Der Januskopf (Janus-Faced, 1920) an early work by F. W. Murnau, Paul Wegener’s remake of Der Golem (1920), and Robert Wiene’s Raskolnikov (1923). Certainly, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), discussed in an earlier chapter (see Chapter 6), should be included in this group as an example of cinematic expressionism, relying as it does on lighting, scene dissection and editing, rather than production design. Increased social stability in Germany encouraged a move away from morbid, psychological expressionist themes of the early 1920s towards a more realist presentational style, and this found an echo in an influential movement that grew out of an art exhibition held in the Mannheim municipal gallery in 1925 called ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (‘New Objectivity’). Painters who were inclined towards realism found support in the movement which insisted on the primacy of meaning over aesthetic interest. The political emphasis in the work was to denounce social inequality through satire; one painter associated with the trend, George Grosz, sought to produce what he called ‘modern history paintings’ in the tradition of Hogarth. The conviction was that the artist could convey his political message more effectively using realism as a formal device. The Austrian film director G. W. Pabst began his career as a young actor and worked in the theatre for twenty years before entering films in 1921. He directed his first film, Der Schatz, about the passions surrounding a search for buried treasure, in 1922. Pabst’s films reflect a creative energy that was always in touch with the social, psychological and artistic movements of his time and in his sixth film, The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927), he takes editing methods which had become central to continuity cinema (multiple framing, 30° reverse angles, action cuts and eye-line matches) much further than they had been used before. The story concerns the love affair between Jeanne, daughter of a French diplomat living in the Crimea, and Andreas, a young Communist. After her father is betrayed and killed during the civil war, Jeanne returns to Paris. Obtaining work in her uncle’s detective agency, she is shocked at the arrival of Khalibiev, an unscrupulous adventurer whom she suspects was party to her father’s death. Khalibiev quickly feigns an attachment to Gabriele, Jeanne’s blind niece, while trying to seduce Jeanne. Andreas comes to Paris on a political mission and the lovers are briefly united, but Khalibiev murders Jeanne’s uncle and steals a valuable diamond from the agency. Andreas is framed for the murder. Pabst always denied that he was a realist, insisting that he chose realist themes with the intention of being a stylist, and that he saw realism only as a means to an end. In The Love of Jeanne Ney he follows the tenets of the new objectivity directly, exaggerating the motives of his self-interested characters, and portraying them quite savagely within a totally convincing realist framework. In an interview given to Close Up magazine in December 1927, Pabst explained his method, ‘Every cut is

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made on some movement. At the end of one cut somebody is moving, at the beginning of the adjoining one the movement is continued. The eye is thus so occupied in following these movements that it misses the cuts.’ Interestingly, Pabst’s interviewer, Kenneth MacPherson, adds his own comments to Pabst’s description asking the reader to contrast his method with, ‘the crude and utterly unapologetic cutting of nearly all the films you see’, which certainly provides insight into some of the editing practices then current. In the main, however, most of the continuity editing methods used by Pabst and his editor Mark Sorkin had already become widely, if not universally, established. What was different about The Love of Jeanne Ney was the accelerated pace with which Pabst dissected his scenes, investing them with a taut energy. Film archivist Iris Barry has drawn attention to one particular scene in which Khalibiev sells a list of Bolshevist agents to Jeanne’s father. This scene lasts less than three minutes but contains nearly forty shots, all involving camera moves, angle or framing changes, action cuts and eye-line matches. Pabst went to Hollywood in 1933, and the difficulties surrounding his largely unsuccessful American venture, A Modern Hero (1934), made for Warner Bros, within the studio system, provide some useful insights into the American film structuring and editing methods which were now firmly in place. Pabst’s work was carefully monitored by Hal B. Wallis, Warners Bros.’ production chief, and memoranda in their archives make it clear that Wallis, insensitive to Pabst’s working methods, was quite unaware of his reputation as one of the creators of Invisible editing’. Pabst was regularly taken to task for not providing enough reverse angle, close-up reaction shots of his actors; Wallis making the point that it was only through close-ups that the characters’ feelings could be conveyed to the audience. This structuring method, used to increase audience identification, was now established Hollywood practice. Pabst was also used to shooting economically, knowing in advance where he planned to cut into any shot, and shooting accordingly; but this was not the American way, and he was told by Wallis that he must provide longer overlaps when shooting action. At that time, editing decisions tended to be within the prerogative of a studio editor working solely to the producer. Directors were not expected to make editing decisions in advance, or on the set; their role was considered to have ended when the last shot had been taken on the last day of filming. Much of the foregoing seems to suggest that examples of experimentation in terms of form and style are more readily to be found within the work of European directors than in the work being produced in America. Although this is certainly rather a sweeping generalisation, it does contain some element of truth. American film production had been largely unaffected by the European war and its output continued to grow and dominate world markets. It was because the American product quickly and successfully expanded along industrial lines that American filmmakers limited their structuring practices to those that proved most commercially successful. Opportunities for experiment were rare.

To conclude this rather eclectic group of films, I want to examine a brief moment in yet one more German film made towards the end of the period that contains elements of diversity. Two films made by the great German director F. W. Murnau have already been discussed in an earlier chapter – Nosferatu (1922) and Sunrise (1927), both concerning matters of emphasis (see Chapter 6). The last film that Murnau made in Germany before moving to America, Faust (1926), also deserves particular mention. The Faust legend is well known. An elderly professor sells his soul to the devil in exchange for his youth. At the start of the central section of the film, Faust has fallen in love with a young girl, Margarethe, and follows her home from church. While she is engaged with her brother, who has suddenly returned home with presents, Mephistopheles secretly places a trinket box, containing a gold heart and chain that has magical powers, in a drawer in her bedroom. The drawer is left open. Margarethe enters her room and, sensing a strange atmosphere, crosses to open the window and breath some fresh air. She sees Faust standing outside and he bows to her. She closes the window, smiling with pleasure at his attention. She then notices the gold chain in the partly opened drawer, rises and crosses to it. This particular moment deserves a close look. In CU, Margarethe has shut the window, smiling at Faust’s attentiveness. The next moment is concerned with her discovery of the trinket box and gold chain, which we know is there because we saw Mephistopheles place it. The scene might now continue with Margarethe completing her smile then, turning her head, reacting to something she’s not noticed before. Cut to her POV – the trinket box and chain. CU her puzzled reaction, then, as she moves, a cut to MS and she reaches in and picks up the chain. This construction would show the action unfolding subjectively, the spectator sharing Margarethe’s experience of the moment and identifying with her. Murnau and his editor deliberately subvert this presentation by cutting the scene as follows: CU Margarethe closing the window and smiling. CU the drawer and trinket box from Margarethe’s POV. CU Margarethe (as before). She turns her head and looks down to the drawer. MS she moves to the drawer and takes out the chain. By inserting the CU of the trinket box and chain before she sees it, this construction does several things. First of all, it exteriorises the moment, the trinket box becomes the subject of the scene, not Margarethe, consequently the spectator is placed outside the scene, observing the action. Showing the box without it first being seen gives it independent status; an object with magical powers, perhaps even the power to make someone look at it. This points up an important difference between two fundamental structuring methods and the degree to which they affect the spectator’s engagement with the

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Faust

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content of the scene. At any point the spectator is both inside and outside the film experience moving between illusion and acknowledgement of the story told. The editing process mirrors this distinction, producing either an inside perspective, shared with the character, or an exterior view, revealed by the storyteller. Although I have refrained from a more extensive analysis of Faust, it would be true to say that it was one of several quite exceptional films that Murnau directed, and equally original in terms of its form and execution. There can be little doubt that it was these qualities which encouraged the American production companies to invite the best of European directing talent to work in the United States. Why so few of them found it possible to integrate their individual creative abilities into the American studio system is another story.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6 7 8

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9

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The normal filming speed at that time was approximately 16 frames per second. Undercranking the camera (filming at a slower speed) caused the action to appear speeded up when projected. Eric Campbell played the ‘heavy’ in all but one of Chaplin’s Mutual comedies. He was killed in a car accident towards the end of 1917 after completing The Adventurer, Chaplin’s last film for Mutual. Instances of this configuration persist until the end of the silent period. A sequence in René Clair’s The Italian Straw Hat (1928) during which a man’s tie becomes unfastened, has cuts between the preacher and the congregation which fail throughout to observe the convention. It is quite possible that the use of cross-line structure at this point is deliberate – intended to emphasise Charlie’s emotional response to seeing Edna for the first time. One of the problems associated with the viewing of silent films that have been duplicated on to modern 35 mm formats, or run on projection apparatus with modern 3 5 mm picture gates, is that part of the original image is often excluded. Silent 3 5 mm film, which did not have to provide space for optical sound tracks on one side of the image, was exposed and printed with the picture occupying the entire width and height of the space available. Although it is possible to reduce this full-frame picture to fit the smaller dimensions of the modern 3 5 mm frame, it is not commonly done, so obscuring the width and height of the original frame by about a fifth, but unbalanced, so that action occuring on the far left of the screen is largely excluded. This makes it difficult to judge the timing of entrances made from that side when the film is projected. Huff, Charlie Chaplin, p. 120. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, pp. 510–11. After Caligari, Carl Mayer became one of the most important screenwriters during German cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ of the 1920s. Riemann, Röhrig and Warm were members of the expressionist group Der Sturm (The Storm), linked to a Berlin publishing house dedicated to the pursuit of modern creative work in the arts and founded in 1910 by writer-composer Herwarth Waiden.

Variations on a theme

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10 Actor-director Robert Wiene began his career in the theatre and directed his first film in 1915. Well-known principally because of his association with Caligari (and regarded by French film historian Georges Sadoul as ‘second-rate’), he never succeeded in developing a personal style. None the less he was quite prolific, with writing, directing and supervising credits on more than sixty films made prior to his death in 1938. 11 The fullest account of the making of Caligari is to be found in Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 61–76.

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11

Revolutionary cinema

Film as an agent of change Battleship Potemkin, Strike, October, Mother, End of St Petersburg, Earth, Arsenal: the titles of these films that were made in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and early 1930s are generally better known than most others produced elsewhere in Europe, or even in America during the same period. It is also true that although these titles are familiar, most people will have seen few, if any, of the films. The names of at least two of their directors are also familiar: Eisenstein’s name is legendary, Pudovkin’s less-well known; Dovzhenko’s unfamiliar to most. It seems that the titles of these films, their directors and the circumstances in which they were made have, if nothing else, now become part of folklore. The reasons for this are several. Most importantly, the films and their makers are linked with one of the most significant social and political upheavals of the century. In March 1917, after years of servitude and impoverishment, the mass of the Russian people overthrew the Tsar and established a liberal provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky and supported by Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary factions. However, dissatisfaction with the new government’s policies, particularly their decision to continue Russia’s involvement in the First World War, led to months of confusion and instability, and, on 25 October 1917, the Bolshevik Party seized power by storming the Winter Palace in Petrograd. The importance of cinema as a revolutionary tool was officially recognised during a conference of workers’ educational organisations in September 1917. There, a resolution on the cinema was passed, acknowledging that film was a real and potent weapon for the enlightenment of the broad mass of the people and that the cinema must be used to promote the development of class-consciousness in the cause of furthering the revolution. The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was only the first stage in the transition to Communism; the country that they now controlled was threatened by foreign intervention as well as by famine and civil unrest, and agriculture and industry had suffered from years of under-investment and neglect. The leadership recognised that cinema would be essential to the process of spreading information and ensuring understanding and acceptance of

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Documentary Dziga Vertov – taken from both the Ukrainian and Russian words for ‘spinning top’ – was born Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman, the eldest of three brothers,1 sons of a Polish librarian from Byalistok, then part of the Tsarist empire. Vertov continued to edit newsreels, Kino Nedelia (Film Weekly), until the end of the interventionist war in 1920; he then constructed a series of multi-reel documentaries from the footage. His plans to make another series, about building the new society, were frustrated by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by Lenin in 1922. This involved a brief return to a controlled form of capitalism in order to try to rebuild the shattered economy, and one of the results was that cinemas could once again fill their programmes with cheap and popular American and European imports. Vertov saw this trend as dangerous, believing that these films, indeed fiction films in general, contained elements that ran counter to what he saw as the documentary film’s more truthful representations of the world. Lenin also responded to these concerns and conveyed to Anatoli Lunacharsky, the Peoples Commissar for Education, his desire to increase the proportion of newsreels to fiction, adding that ‘you must well remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important’. In May 1922 the first of a series of monthly film journals, Kino-Pravda (Film Truth), appeared. The production of this series of twenty-three newsreel

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the new order, and that a new group of young, educated filmmakers should be encouraged in that endeavour. During the months of confusion following the Bolshevik seizure of power, the film studios, laboratories and cinemas, many situated in the area around Moscow, were nationalised. The effect of this was that the dispossessed producers and studio heads, many of whom were out of sympathy with the revolutionary change, stripped the studios of film stock, materials and equipment and moved south. Some eventually left for France with like-minded colleagues, technicians and actors. This prompted The Presidium of the Moscow Soviet to produce the first legislative decree to affect the film industry in an attempt to prevent the exodus. Soon after, Cinema Committees were set up in Moscow and Petrograd to reorganise all filmmaking activities and produce dramatised fiction with revolutionary themes. But the more far-reaching decisions concerned the establishment of the first ‘agittrains’: self-contained units with carriages containing equipment for the printing and production of newspapers and leaflets; actors and playwrights to produce travelling theatre; and a film crew. Eventually, ‘agit-trains’ with crews dedicated to the production and presentation of newsreels took to the rails equipped with travelling laboratories and cutting rooms. The first agit-train film crews shot newsreel covering the Red Army’s struggle against foreign interventionist forces, and returned with their footage to Moscow where it was edited by a 20-year-old Film Committee volunteer, an experimental poet who called himself Dziga Vertov.

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documentaries was undertaken by Vertov, but indirectly: his method was to brief his cameramen and, remaining in Moscow, undertake the structuring and supervision of the editing himself. His wife, Elizoveta Svilova, was his editor. They worked in an unheated, damp, rat-infested basement where the scissors and splicer would quickly rust, and splices fall apart because of the cold, wet atmosphere. Wholly dedicated to the documentary form, yet limited by film stock shortages, Vertov experimented by making connections between prerevolutionary news film and contemporary footage, making new meanings through careful juxtapositions. In this regard he was never a purist; he recognised the fundamental contradiction within the filmmaking process, that cinematic truth is essentially a constructed truth, and that by making the filming and editing methods transparent, the content of the message could be more honestly conveyed. This approach is particularly well illustrated in The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) in which the processes of shooting and editing are included as an important part of the content. Interestingly, the deliberate inclusion of camera tricks, speed changes, superimpositions and other devices were criticised by Eisenstein as ‘unmotivated camera mischief’. The arrival of sound was seen by Vertov as an opportunity to make use of it in ways that went beyond synchronism. By now he was working with his brother in the Ukraine studios and here he produced Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Don Basin (1931). The film was intended to show how the miners in the Don Basin were contributing to the Five Year Plan, and Vertov cut and used his soundtracks with the same freedom that he assembled his images, an experimental use of nonsynchronous sound that was as daring as it was original. The audiences however stayed away – yet again an example of an experimenter being ahead of his time.

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Montage

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Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov was a precocious young artist who, having graduated from the Fine Arts School in Moscow in 1916, became set designer for film director Yevgeni Bauer at the age of 17 and actually completed Bauer’s last film After Happiness (Za schast’n, 1917) when the famous director died having suffered a fall while on location in the Crimea. After working as a cameraman on the ‘agittrains’, Kuleshov became involved in setting up the State Film School in Moscow – the first of its kind in the world. He had already established himself as a film theorist, as well as a practitioner, having published articles in the trade journal Vestnik kinomatagrafi in 1917, but his film school superiors, believing that many of his theories appeared to run counter to the current orthodoxies being taught at the school, encouraged him to set up an independent study group. This became know as the ‘Kuleshov Workshop’. The importance of theory in the development of Soviet cinema can partly be traced to the virtual absence of film stock during this early period. A film shot by the Kuleshov group, On the Red Front, covering Polish attacks in the war still

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continuing on the Western Front, was shot on positive film stock, there being no negative stock available. This film was inspired by D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance which had, in terms of its form and content, a tremendous impact on young Soviet filmmakers. As Jay Leyda points out in his monumental history of the Russian and Soviet film, Kino, ‘no Soviet film of importance made within the following ten years was to be completely outside Intolerance’s sphere of influence’. Yet at the same time Leyda takes the view that it was the ‘modern story’ in Intolerance which had the greatest effect on Russian audiences, evoking an honest sympathetic response to this tragedy of American working-class life as portrayed by Griffith, even though the film’s philosophy would appear rather suspect seen from a Marxist perspective. The absence of raw film stock compelled the film students towards experiment with the restructuring of existing films, and it was within the context of this kind of experimentation that emphasis was given to the idea that became the basis of montage theory: that when any two pieces of film imagery are presented joined together, an audience will attempt to establish a meaningful relationship in the conjunction. These experiments led to what became accepted as a fundamental editing principle known as the ‘Kuleshov effect’. According to director Vsevolod Pudovkin, who was then a student in Kuleshov’s workshop and carried out the experiment with him, the procedure was as follows.2 Some shots were taken from an existing film of the famous actor Ivan Mosjukhin. These were static close-ups in which Mosjukhin supposedly did not express any feeling at all – quiet close-ups. These close-ups, which were all similar, were joined with other bits of film in three combinations. Pudovkin then proceeds to describe that each of the close-ups was followed by firstly a plate of soup standing on a table, secondly by shots showing a coffin in which lay a dead woman, and thirdly a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear. He then says that when the three combinations were shown to an audience that had not been let into the secret the result was terrific, and that the public allegedly raved at the acting of the artist remarking on the changes of mood that his performance was able to convey. I am not the first commentator to have some difficulties with this account. I do not doubt for one minute that this experiment was indeed carried out, but descriptions differ as to what was actually filmed. While most accounts quote Pudovkin, several substitute ‘a woman’, a ‘a nude woman’, ‘a half-naked woman’, or ‘a lascivious woman on a couch’ for the little girl playing with a funny bear. For the dead woman in a coffin, one account substitutes ‘a revolver’, and another ‘a man being murdered’. All seem to agree about the bowl of soup although in one account it is recorded as ‘a festive table’.3 It is difficult to know what to make of this. The revolver and the murdered man could be traced to a faulty recollection of another part of Pudovkin’s published Film Society address where he suggests that changing the order of three shots showing a smiling face, a frightened face, and a revolver alters the meaning of the scene, but these independent references to a nude woman seem to indicate a possible adjustment of the facts.

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There are also some other oddities. The film featuring the actor Mosjukhin is unspecified; Pudovkin says that the close-ups were taken ‘from some film or other’. We must assume that each of the close-ups was taken from different parts of it, with the actor against a different background, otherwise the audience would be being asked to assume that the soup, coffin and child were all in the same place at the same time. If this is the case, Mosjukhin must have been conveying some feeling depending on the circumstances pertaining in the original film, most probably different in each scene. So in what sense were they similar? Now, I do not know whether this experiment has ever been repeated, but if it has I think it is most unlikely to have received the enthusiastic response reported by Pudovkin. What might an audience have made of this strange little film consisting of little more than six or seven shots and apparently showing the same character in three unlinked locations just looking and reacting? If it was an average audience the most immediate response is likely to be confusion. But given the alleged success of the experiment, the next response would most likely to have been silent acceptance, for here was a character in a believable situation reacting truthfully towards what he saw. Mosjukhin is a fine actor; they would surely have been persuaded by his performance. What I cannot accept is that ‘the public raved about the acting of the artist’, nor do I believe that they ‘pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked at the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play.’ While applauding the motivation behind the experiment, I suspect that the audience was most likely to have been other members of the group eager to accept the fundamental principles being tested. I think that perhaps a certain amount of preaching to the converted was happening; something very in tune with earnest idealism of the time. Does this then devalue the conclusions? Well, I do not think it does, but nor do I believe that anything really new was being discovered. The entire basis of film construction has, from the very beginning, been built on the idea that two consecutive shots will be accepted as having a relationship, actual or implied. In fact the so-called Kuleshov effect was first used quite intuitively by English film pioneer George Albert Smith in Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900). The reader may recall the description of this film in Chapter 1. A boy, standing at a table at which his grandmother is seated, looks at various objects using her reading glass. Into this shot Smith cuts close-ups of each of the objects, vignetted to simulate the boys view. The final close-up is inserted after the boy looks through the glass at his grandmother’s eye. However, when Smith came to film the inserts sometime later, the grandmother was not available, so he substituted the eye of his friend Tom Green. Another Kuleshov experiment attempted to create an ‘artificial landscape’ by juxtaposing shots taken in widely different locations. In the first shot a man crosses right to left in front of a well-known Moscow landmark. In the second a

Theory into practice Vsevolod Pudovkin spent two years at the Moscow Film School, much of that time in the Kuleshov Workshop. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was there for only three months during the winter of 1922–23. Eisenstein was a 19-year old engineering student in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. He joined the Red Army as a volunteer and served as an engineer helping to construct the Petrograd defences before being sent to the Northern and Western Fronts. His instinctive skills as a painter and designer led him to work as a poster artist on the agit-trains; abilities which he also applied in the presentation of theatrical performances that he designed and directed. Demobilised in the autumn of 1920, he found work painting scenery for the Moscow Proletkult Theatre, dedicated to the promotion of new, avant-garde and experimental ideas – culture for the proletariat. There he came under the influence of director Vsevolod Meyerhold and was exposed to a wide range of original design and production possibilities. Eisenstein rejected the traditional character-based theatre and sought a proletarian theatre that focused on social inequalities, with the workers and their

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woman crosses the other way in front of another quite separate one. In the third shot they enter from each side and meet front of a third completely different location where they shake hands, the close-up of which was filmed later using two other people. The man points off-screen, and, as they look, a cut is made to the White House in Washington. Leaving frame, they are next seen climbing a flight of cathedral steps – a fifth location. Kuleshov called this technique ‘creative geography’. Again, although done here with humorous intent in order to make a point, Kuleshov was merely confirming what had been known for a long time. As I pointed out in Chapter 6, constructing an artificial geography through editing enabled Ole Olsen to make Lion Hunting in 1907 (see no. 1, p. 104 and text that precedes it). The climate of ready acceptance of the theoretical ideas being promulgated at this time can be understood if placed in the context of the attitudes that prevailed during the early 1920s. While the Bolshevik overthrow of the Russian state was officially seen as a serious threat by the capitalist democracies elsewhere in Europe, the political idealism that was the driving force behind the revolution had considerable support among writers, artists, intellectuals and others of a leftist persuasion within those neighbouring countries. Furthermore, it was evident that the leadership of the new regime recognised that the creative energies of young Russian artists, writers and filmmakers were necessary and essential in the pursuit of the revolutionary cause. The theoretical impetus behind the films made in the Soviet Union was constructed on the same Marxist principles that propelled the revolution; that a dialectic of oppositions was essential in order to bring about change. The consequent aim was to construct a cinema that was opposed to, and wholly different from, the existing dominant forms.

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families given heroic status, rather than individuals. He explored the possibilities of an episodic, epic drama that emphasised understanding over emotional involvement; a style of theatrical presentation intended to instruct and persuade. This incorporated a mix of acrobatic circus acts, sketches, noise bands and projected film. This he called the ‘montage of attractions’.4 It was because Eisenstein had ambitions to explore a range of formal and dramatic possibilities that went beyond the limits imposed by theatre, that he eagerly took the opportunity to direct his first film, part of a projected series of eight, sponsored by the Proletkult Theatre and tracing the rise of the Communist Party from the late-nineteenth century to 1917. The series was to be called Toward the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Eisenstein’s film was planned as the fifth in the series; in fact it was the only one actually made. It was called Strike (Stachka, 1924).

Film editing

The film begins with a quote from Lenin: The strength of the working class lies in organisation. Without the organisation of the masses the proletariat is nothing, organised it is everything. Organisation means unity of action, unity of practical operation.

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The first section of the film ‘Chapter 1. All Quiet at the Factory’ gives some indication of the kind of shorthand, cartoonist presentation that Eisenstein favoured. The opening shot is an undercranked low angle of factory chimneys belching smoke against the sky. Cut to a CU of a top-hatted factory manager stroking his chin and looking directly at the camera. Then a dissolve to a busy office corridor, again with the camera undercranked to speed up the action, followed by a dissolve back to the CU of the manager’s happy face. Next a long, tracking, high-angle wide-shot of the factory floor showing drive belts and machinery. Next an inter-title ‘All Quiet at the Fact – or – y’ out of which the ‘or’ animates into a cartoon like the silhouette of two characters, one (whom we later recognise as the foreman) has some information whispered into his ear; inter-title, ‘unrest is simmering’. The next shot, of factory chimneys reflected in a puddle, shows the action upside down and backwards. A man’s feet step backwards out of the water and, in the reflection, a group of workers walk backwards into the shot and begin a discussion. Cut to a MWS; the foreman runs away towards the group as they cross the tracks in front of a passing factory locomotive. The factory foreman (beard, cap, jacket and tie), stops in puzzled CU then moves on, and a cut to an extension of the previous shot shows him moving away in pursuit. A series of similar scenes follow, showing the foreman attempting to overhear group conversations and receiving whispered confidences from informers. An inter-title tells us that ‘discontent is spreading’; a report is made by middle management and eventually to the factory manager himself. After a CU showing him top-hatted and seated, a cut wide reveals him at his desk in an enormous office. He removes his hat and receives his informants face-on to the camera, his

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obesity emphasised by a wide-angle lens and his vulgarity displayed by his blowing cigar smoke at the camera and, by implication, at his informants. Because this film, and indeed the others made during this period and explored in this chapter, are essentially propaganda, the use of comic satire simplified the message for its intended audience. But what is of interest is how Eisenstein in his first film is confidently able to use cinematic devices and camera tricks to comment on the action and achieve a kind of entertaining objectivity. As it progresses, the mood and content of the film darkens and the comic moments become more spare. Later in the ‘Chapter 1’ of Strike, there is a short sequence in which a group of dissident workers discuss their plans as they ride on a rail crane. A large steel wheel hangs from the crane arm. The factory foreman sees them, and runs towards them making gestures of disapproval. The crane operator then pulls the lever that causes the arm to swing and the large wheel (a deliberate revolutionary reference) knocks the bosses’ lackey to the ground. The way that Eisenstein edits this moment is indicative of his deliberate expressionist style. The action of the wheel striking the foreman is presented as a series of quick cuts from different angles. The result is calculatedly artificial, intended to emphasise the violence of the symbolic moment by presenting it in a way that is disconcerting. But it does something else: it compels an awareness of its own construction, which detracts from its purpose. Chapter 2, ‘In which the strike takes place’,5 is brilliantly conceived and executed as a series of shots containing movement and action flowing in every direction. Each sequence is self-contained and usually introduced via an inter-title. The action sequences are filmed with the camera slightly undercranked, artificially speeding up the action. This increases the sense of pace and agitation as does the rapid cutting between various viewpoints. Tools are thrown down, closeup faces register reactions and responses. Sometimes the movement across the frame is in conflict with the action presented in the previous shot, sometimes it follows the established flow. The narrative logic is built through successive images that fragment the flow of action in terms of opposites: a wide shot might be followed by a big close-up; movement is set against stasis. These sequences in Strike really defy any attempt to describe them in words. The assemblage, built by careful selection of fragments of framed and photographed action, offers an experience in which the spectator is unaware of the individual parts and is carried along with the feelings generated by the construction. Continuity links between images are disregarded in the interests of pace or the need to present action in conflict. In one scene a group of agitators leaps from a factory locomotive as it comes to a halt and moves up to the camera and fills the frame. A reverse WS shows a stationary train engine with workers aboard. The agitators enter, and their leader’s close-up shows him gesturing and calling to his comrades to join the strike. Responding to his call, the workers descend from the engine and this is covered from a series of angles and framings edited to imply continuity but without showing it.

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At the end of this ‘chapter’ in the film, Eisenstein reintroduces a moment of deliberate symbolism. Having established a total stoppage, and unceremoniously dumped the foreman and managers into the lake, a high-angle wide-shot shows the vast mass of workers moving away. A dissolve to a close-up of a machinewheel spinning is superimposed over a three-shot: three men, representing three generations of workers, face the camera and fold their arms in unison as the superimposed machine-wheel slows to a halt. Not every part of Strike succeeds totally. Sequences that dwell on the characteristics, methods and disguises of police informers – linking them to animals with actual animal superimpositions for emphasis – seem over-long and simplistic, and scenes showing the capitalist employers in conclave are laborious and overstated; but these are understandable misjudgements made by a young director making his first film. Also controversial was Eisenstein’s handling of the final scene of the film in which the striking workers are viciously shot down. He decided to maximise the shock value of the scene by intercutting shots of a bull being slaughtered in an abattoir, anticipating that all audiences would respond similarly and that the juxtaposition would intensify ‘reflexes of social protest’. The uneven critical response convinced him that he had been wrong. Eisenstein considered Strike to be a failure, concluding that his camera tricks were misplaced and ‘theatrical’. Ten years later he called it ‘the infantile malady of leftism.’6

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Battleship Potemkin

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In 1905 an attempt to overthrow the tsarist regime in various parts of Russia had been brutally suppressed. Twenty years later the specially set up Jubilee Committee decided to sponsor a series of films to commemorate this historic event. Eisenstein was selected to make what was to be the principal film. It was to be called Year 1905 and would recreate dozens of historic events of that crucial year in numerous separate locations. Filming began in Leningrad in June 1925, but bad weather compelled a move south, eventually to Odessa, on the Black Sea. It was here that Eisenstein first saw the long flight of marble steps leading down to the harbour that would find a permanent place in film history. The shooting script for Year 1905 provided for the story of the mutiny that took place on board the Potemkin to be covered in just forty-two shots; faced with a mid-December delivery date for the completed film, Eisenstein decided to abandon the original concept and make the entire film in Odessa with the mutiny and the massacre representative of the events of that year. These were the circumstances that led to the making of Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925). The film begins with waves crashing against rocks and a jetty, an image of violently conflicting forces that also posits the location and circumstances surrounding the events which follow. The film charts the deprivations and inhumane treatment suffered by the crew of the Potemkin which leads to a rebellion, and the subsequent threatened execution of the rebels which leads to

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mutiny. The ship’s doctor, whose refusal to condemn maggot-ridden meat had triggered the revolt, is thrown into the sea and Vakulinchuk, the leader of the mutiny, is cornered by a brutal officer, shot and killed. Vakulinchuk’s body is taken ashore through the dawn mists and, as the word spreads, the mass of the Odessa people demonstrate their solidarity with the mutineers. It is at this point that the massacre on the steps begins. A line of white-jacketed soldiers marches down the steps, firing into the crowd as they descend in panic. A woman confronting them with her injured child is shot down, as are a group who plead for reason. A young mother with a baby in a carriage is shot in the stomach and, in falling, propels the carriage down the steps to where the fleeing citizens are being brutally attacked by mounted Cossacks. Finally, the close-up face of a Cossack is fragmented into three shots as he swings his sabre. A close-up of his victim shows blood running from behind her shattered spectacles. In the final sequence of the film the mutineers sail the Potemkin to meet the squadron. Their expectations of conflict are resolved when the squadron responds to their signal to join them by allowing them through unhindered. It is not my intention to attempt a detailed evaluation and structural analysis of what is perhaps the most famous film of all time, rewarding though that might be. But there are some aspects of Potemkin that deserve comment. Perhaps the first thing that one becomes aware of when watching the film is the conventional structure of most of the scenes, which follow the standard principles of continuity editing. This is particularly true of the scene in which the ship’s doctor is confronted over the maggoty meat, but what enhances the scene are the gradual changes in pace that are introduced, the cutting between angles reflecting the tensions present in the conflict. The scene which concludes the first part of the film, in which three sailors are washing up crockery, has often attracted critical appraisal. One of the sailors takes a plate from the bucket and sees that the design on the border contains the words ‘give us this day our daily bread’. Furious at the hypocrisy of this sentiment in circumstances where the food is inedible, he smashes the plate twice against the edge of the table. Eisenstein constructs this moment from five framings of the action: BCU the sailor’s face; CU the sailor’s face; CS the sailor (head and torso); CS the table; and a 3-shot which includes the other two sailors. Well-matched fragments of these five shots are then cut together in an attempt to convey the sailor’s anger – nine shots in four seconds.7 This kind of fragmented editing is similar to that used in Strike when the foreman is knocked over by the swinging wheel. It seems to work even less well in the more conventionally constructed Potemkin, drawing attention to the method rather than conveying the anger that the sailor feels. A particularly fine example of Eisenstein’s use of editing to induce tension occurs in the scene in which Captain Golikov comes on deck in order to divide the crewmen over the issue of bad food. After an inter-title ‘Captain Golikov’:

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CS Golikov from above seen through a hatch waiting to climb on deck; he adjusts his collar and moves up the steps. 2 WS, the ladder hatch with officers lined behind. Action match Golikov up steps; officers salute. 3 MCS the hatch. Officers legs behind. Golikov continues up steps and reaches the top. 4 WS (as in 2) He turns to the officers and salutes. As their hands start to drop cut to 5 VWS showing the crew lined each side of the deck; officers drop their hands; slight overlap to achieve illusion of a perfect action match). Golikov steps forward onto a raised section of the deck facing forward. 6 WS (as in 2). As he steps up (perfect action match leg and hand), he looks off frame left. 7 MWS a line of officers on the port side. 8 MS a line of officers on the starboard side. 9 MWS a line of crewmen with a gun barrel across the top of the frame. 10 CS Golikov. 11 Extreme WS of the whole scene including the flag on the prow. 12 CS Golikov. Inter-title: ‘those satisfied with the food, two steps forward.’ Between the two titles are nine set-ups covering twelve shots all played out in twenty-seven seconds of minimal action with average shot lengths of a little over two seconds. Intercutting nine separate framings allows the inclusion of relevant detail and also sustains the interest level by placing action in a constantly changing context. Eisenstein understood better than most that conflict was contained in action which might be as subtle as a head turn or a hand gesture, or as bold as men and objects moving in wide space. The captain’s order for a group of rebellious sailors to be covered in a tarpaulin is shown with every detail of the action and the reactions of those witnessing it included. Eisenstein constructs the sequence using twenty-three shots taken from almost as many angles. The order is then given for the tarpaulin-covered men to be executed by a firing squad. Breaking ranks, Vakulinchuk calls on the firing-party to consider their actions. As the riflemen hesitate, Eisenstein builds the suspense, editing with a degree of precision and care that would be hard to match in any film made since. However, I can find very little evidence of Eisenstein’s theories in the practice; in fact, the films contain a much broader approach to film structure than the theories suggest.

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Theory built on practice

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Eisenstein’s theoretical writings date from 1928 and appeared in various publications largely during the 1930s and 1940s; they were later collected in Film Form – Essays in Film Theory. Eisenstein makes no secret that his theories are

An example: the ‘fog sequence’ in Potemkin (preceding the mass mourning over the body of Vakulinchuk). Here the montage was based exclusively on the emotional ‘sound’ of the pieces – on rhythmic vibrations that do not affect spatial alterations. In this example it is interesting that, alongside the basic tonal dominant, a secondary, accessory rhythmic dominant is also operating. This links the tonal construction of the scene with the tradition of rhythmic montage, the furthest development of which is tonal montage. And, like rhythmic montage, this is also a special variation of metric montage.9 Try as I may, I find it impossible to reconcile the experience of watching the sequence in the film with Eisenstein’s theoretical analysis of it. Because these films were different from anything seen before, they prompted the production of theories to explain and justify them. These theories focused on the structural aspects of the works; how they were edited. The French word ‘montage’ – meaning ‘putting up’ – was elevated into a practice that was considered by some to be the apotheosis of cinematic art. But rather than illuminating the films, the theories seem to get in the way. Eisenstein’s commitment to the idea that film was the greatest of all the arts seems to have driven him towards intellectualising something which does not actually conform to a rigid set of rules. It was too easy to lose sight of the fact that film is inescapably locked into photographic realism which possesses its own dynamic power, something that those who manipulate it had necessarily to respect.

The Odessa steps I will not attempt to confront in any detail what is undoubtedly the most famous film sequence in history; too much has been written about it already. I will say, however, that I have more problems with it than any other sequence in the film. I

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developed from his films; his essay ‘Methods of Montage’,8 written in 1929, begins with a quotation which posits that in art, experience precedes precepts. This essay seeks to make a case for five types of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual. Although Eisenstein’s descriptions and explanations are made in great detail and at considerable length, I find them formulaic, often obscure and sometimes completely opaque. For example, after the death of Vakulinchuk, his body in placed in a boat and taken to the shore where it is placed in a tent to lie in state; this ends the second section of the film. The third section, ‘An Appeal to the Dead’, sustains the solemn mood. Filmed at dawn with mist on the water, it shows various aspects of the Odessa harbour. Ships and boats lie at anchor or move slowly past, soft light reflects from the gentle swell of the water, sea-birds circle and land on a mooring buoy. In ‘Methods of Montage’ Eisenstein selects this sequence as an illustration of tonal montage:

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have commended Eisenstein’s handling of detail in Strike and in some earlier scenes in Potemkin where they have seemed wholly integrated into the structure, yet some details in the Odessa steps sequence seem contrived and ill-judged. At one point near the start of the scene there are four shots. In the first, a man’s knees slowly buckle as he falls to kneel on a step; in the second, a sharp tilt down anticipates another man falling in front of the camera; the third consists of six frames from the first, as the legs topple to one side; in the fourth, a wider shot, the first fallen man lies on the steps and a small boy (his son?) runs up and sits on a step above him as another man falls on the steps behind. As each of these bodies falls into its prepared space the feeling conveyed is that we are being shown a contrivance, not an occurrence. The Odessa steps sequence presents a terrible, brutal event, stylistically extended to make it not just cinematically true but psychologically true; but close-up details of a booted foot carefully treading on the arm of a fallen child, or the close-up detail of the shot woman’s stomach held so long that one begins to wonder whether there is something significant about the belt buckle, seem ill-judged and detract from its strengths. Consideration of these matters tends to fall outside the scope of the theories. One of the less commonly related facts about Potemkin is that, according to Grigori Alexandrov who worked with Eisenstein on all his silent films, Battleship Potemkin was edited in just eighteen days10 and that re-editing was still taking place while the first reels were being projected at the Bolshoi Theatre première. In a famous anecdote, Eisenstein himself confesses that editing was completed in such a panic that the last reel, ‘Meeting the Squadron’, was allegedly projected unspliced, the joins held together with spittle.11 All this throws an interesting light on how detailed and considered the editing of these last reels might have been. Much of Eisenstein’s work is brilliant, both in conception and execution, but there is something about the Odessa steps which seems too struggled-over, too intellectualised; in the process, it falls short of truth and consequently, greatness. Most filmmakers agree that trusting your material, following its lead, is crucial. I remember reading once about the Inuit carvers of walrus ivory who believe that an object already exists within the uncarved material and that their task is merely to release it. It is an experience familiar to anyone who edits film.

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October

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In 1927, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided to commission Eisenstein to make a film which, initially, was to cover the entire history of the revolution. It was to be called October (Oktyabr, 1927). Eventually it was decided to limit the film to coverage of certain key historical events culminating in a detailed reconstruction of the final days and hours that preceded the storming of the Winter Palace and the forced resignation of the provisional government. In this

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film, Eisenstein most closely followed his theories of intellectual montage, the use of visual images to express abstract ideas. The film begins with a series of shots showing flood-lit aspects of a huge statue of Tsar Alexander III, Emperor of Russia. This is followed by a classic Eisenstein montage of massed workers in movement as they ascend the steps to the statue. Ladders are erected, and in a series of constantly changing viewpoints, ropes are attached to different parts of the statue. These re-framings and angle changes obscure continuity lapses and speed the action. Cutting is sharp and shot lengths minimal. As the ropes tighten, a cut is made to massed soldiers with rifles raised as they cheer. This is followed by a cut to a mass of lifted scythes against the sky. Then an inter-title: ‘The Proletariat’s first victory on the great road to socialism.’ In jump cuts, the various parts of the statue fall from the body; the continuity deliberately altered for symbolic effect and each framing selected to emphasise the destruction. The symbols of power fall away, first the orb, then the sceptre. The shots of raised scythes and rifles are repeated and the disempowered seated figure starts to topple forward. Shots from different angles, taken with separate cameras, are cut so as to extend the fall by overlapping the action. Finally an inter-title: ‘To the citizens of Russia.’ This seems to me to be a fine example of how montage can be used to convey an idea factually and symbolically and with great power and economy. The meaning of the sequence predominates and matters of continuity, or spatial and temporal logic, are ignored. Indeed, the images seems to have been filmed at quite different times of the day, and the insertion of scythe blades, and soldiers with rifles, demand that we construct the meaning entirely through inference. Perhaps one of the most celebrated and criticised sequences in October is the ‘raising of the bridges’, which follows the massacre of Bolshevik demonstrators on Nevsky Prospect, stronghold of the reactionary newspapers. A group of bourgeois women attack and kill a young Bolshevik by stabbing him with the points of their parasols. A horsedrawn, driverless carriage, is machine-gunned and the horse killed. A group of escaping demonstrators attempt to cross the bridge; they come under fire, and a young woman is shot and killed. Then an order is given to raise the bridges, so as to isolate the demonstrating workers from their residential districts. Eisenstein constructs this sequence by rapidly cutting between a variety of viewpoints as the two sections of the bridge rise. In fact no angle is ever repeated. The slow separation of the bridge is used symbolically: it becomes a symbol of a divided people, a break from the existing political order; a severing of life through death, and a salute to the fallen. The dead woman’s long hair lies across the point where the bridge divides, and this fragile link becomes gradually separated as the last few escaping demonstrators leap across the widening gap. The dead horse, still shackled to its carriage, tumbles and hangs from the rising bascule. If there is a suggestion of artificially extended time in the way that the material is assembled,

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this is barely noticeable; the feeling conveyed is more of the inexorability of the process, and there is something majestic in the gradual widening of the gap that is echoed in wider framings of the shots. The separation complete, the bourgeoisie joyfully throw copies of Pravda into the water in triumph, and an inter-title tells us that the counter-revolutionaries have won. But the images of the papers floating beneath the bridge carry echoes of flowers thrown into a stream in honour of the dead. The harness suspending the dead horse suddenly gives way and it plunges into the river. The sunlight, reflected from the water, forms dappled patterns on the steel substructure of the raised bridge. Personally, I find this one of the most impressive, poetic and moving sequences ever constructed. As a celebration of the power of the image and the creative possibilities of editing, it stands as one of the very finest examples of cinematic art. But Eisenstein’s pursuit of intellectual montage could also be willfully obscure. At one point in the film he introduces a series of images intended to diminish the traditional concept of God, a montage of religious icons beginning with a magnificent statue of Christ and ending with a primitive wooden idol, Eisenstein’s intention being to demonstrate the direct link between Christianity and idol worship. The significance of this, and other oblique allusions, was totally lost on the average Soviet audience. On its release, the film was criticised as being excessively formalistic and over-concerned with its own artistic preoccupations.

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Collision or linkage

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Eisenstein and Pudovkin held quite different views on montage. Eisenstein believed that montage was conflict, that a concept arises from the collision of two given factors. This could be conflict of graphic directions, conflict of scales, of volumes, of masses. Close shots against wide shots, dark against light, etc. Pudovkin, on the other hand, following the teachings of Kuleshov, took the view that montage was linkage, that the shot is an element in montage, that film art derives from the considered joining together of various pieces of film, and that by joining them in different orders you get different results. In his book Film Technique, Pudovkin also took the view that editing is comparable with the way that an attentive spectator might view a scene, believing that an edited sequence should correspond to the natural transference of attention of an imaginary observer. This view, and adaptations of it, have been common currency for many years. Material can be edited to mimic the changes of attention of an imaginary observer, but to remain credible, the changes in attention must lag behind the unfolding narrative because, by definition, its development cannot be known to the observer in advance. Selection through editing, however, is unconstricted: any view, and the point at which it changes, is in the gift of the narrator-editor-director, who is able to present it quite independently of any socalled invisible presence. (I would briefly refer the reader back to the illustration given in the previous chapter regarding Murnau’s Faust, in which Margarethe’s viewpoint of the trinket box is introduced before she looks at it.)

Pudovkin’s first dramatic feature Mother (Mat, 1926) is loosely adapted from Maxim Gorky’s novel. Set during the 1905 Revolution, the film tells the story of Pelageya Vlasova who lives in impoverished circumstances with her drunken husband, Vlasov, and son Pavel. Both men work at the local factory. To get money for his drink, Vlasov joins a group on counter-revolutionaries who are paid as strike-breakers. Pavel, a political activist, secretly hides some weapons beneath his floor, but his mother sees him. Attempts to promote a strike are foiled by the strikebreakers. Pavel escapes, but others pursue Vlasov and he is shot and killed. A search of houses is made by the police. Anxious for her son’s safety, and naively believing that he will go unpunished, she betrays him. When he is arrested, given a mock-trial and imprisoned, the mother, at first distraught, becomes politically aware. She plots his escape during a May Day demonstration and they briefly meet, but the demonstrators are attacked by Cossacks. Pavel is shot and his mother, carrying the red flag, is dashed to her death as the cavalry charges. Whereas Eisenstein’s films achieve their emotional appeal via the intellect, Pudovkin, particularly in Mother, appeals directly to the emotions and only subsequently to the intellect. Eisenstein focuses on the emotions evoked through factual reconstructions of the mass movements in revolutionary history; Pudovkin concentrates on the feelings of the individuals caught up in it. Although, like Eisenstein, he cast many of the parts in his films using non-actors to achieve a quality of realism, certainly in terms of appearance and demeanour – the policeman who interrogates Pavel was played by a former tsarist officer – he recognised too that the quality of the lead performances was central in achieving the results that he sought. Vera Baranovskaya, who plays the mother, was a leading member of the Moscow Arts Theatre, where the Stanislavky tradition of psychologically realist drama was firmly entrenched; it was a tradition from which Pudovkin was reluctant to break away. In his book Film Acting,12 Pudovkin stresses the need to convey feeling through ‘gestureless’ immobility, convinced that this practice was essential to acting for the cinema. The substantial structure of Pudovkin’s first film is conventional, the scene dissection is classic and the narrative markedly dialogue dependent. Most of the scenes are constructed in ‘real time’, with action linked with continuity conventions; consequently stylistic departures stand out. For example, after Vlasov has been killed there is a brief montage of trees being blown by the wind and clouds scudding across a darkening sky, an imprecise image but in the context readable as the beginning of trouble and uncertainty. In the scene where the mother sits silently next to the coffin of her dead husband a tap drips into a basin; again the image only has relevance in context, perhaps a metaphor for the mother’s unshed tears. What seems important is that the image is integrated in the scene quite naturally; it is not out of place.13 These are examples of meaning being constructed by linkage; the brick-by-brick approach rejected by Eisenstein.

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Mother

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During the trial, Pudovkin is able to convey the bored and detached attitudes of the judges by showing one of them drawing a horse; another checks the time on a watch hidden under the pages of a book. Most accounts of Mother draw particular attention to the scene in the prison following the mother’s visit. Pavel reads the note that she has passed to him telling him that plans have been made for his escape. After an inter-title: ‘Tomorrow’, his anticipation of release is illustrated with images of water, sunlight and a laughing child all intercut with big close-ups of Pavel’s eyes and his hand gripping his bed. Although at one level this form of associative editing is fundamental to Pudovkin’s method, it is important to mention that these shots relate to a sequence of the mother leaving the prison and experiencing in reality thawing streams and the approach of spring. This makes it clear that these images are also intended to show Pavel’s imagined view of the outside world and are not simply a metaphor suggesting freedom. This would seem to be confirmed by later shots showing other prisoners imagining aspects of their rural life outside prison. The inter-title that precedes this sequence clearly says that they ‘think of freedom’. There is a very brief scene that precedes the build up to the climax and final confrontation which deserves mention. A high-angle WS shows a woman seated outside her house nursing a young child. Pelageya Vlasova – the mother – passes the house, then stops and moves back to the woman.

Film editing

CU Pelageya speaks to the woman. CU the woman, she replies and looks at the child OOS. CU the child at the breast. CU Pelageya, she smiles and looks towards the child. CU the child, turns from the breast. CU Pelageya looks to the woman. Inter-title: ‘A boy?’ BCU the child, sitting up. CU the woman. Inter-title: ‘Yes’. CU Pelageya looks towards the child with a mixture of affection and regret and leans towards him. High-angle WS (as at the start), Pelageya leans in and touches the child, then turns quickly and exits the shot.

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In this short and very simple scene Vera Baranovskaya manages to convey a whole range of emotions that sum up what it feels to be a mother, and this powerfully affects our responses to the final sections of the film. In an interview which Pudovkin gave towards the end of his life he explained that in making Mother he tried to keep away as far as possible from Eisenstein and from much of what Kuleshov had taught him, recognising that his organic need for inner emotions ran counter to what he described as ‘the dry form which Kuleshov preached’.14

As well as commissioning Eisenstein to make October to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Central Committee also commissioned Pudovkin to make End of St. Petersburg (Konyets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927). The original plan, to relate the changing climate during the city’s twohundred-year history, was rejected in favour of a largely personal account of a young agricultural worker who comes to St Petersburg just prior to Russia’s involvement with the First World War and ending with the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917. In many respects it covers the same historical ground as October, but like Mother from a much more individual perspective; the personal story being interwoven with the sweep of historical events. Ivan leaves his parents’ farm to find work in the city. He stays with his uncle and aunt, but naïve and unable to find work, is recruited as a strike-breaker until he comes to realise the reasons for the strike. He attacks his employer, is arrested and imprisoned. With the outbreak of war he is compelled to join the tsarist army, where he is exposed to the horrors of trench warfare. The progress of the war is contrasted with scenes of capitalist profiteering on the St. Petersburg stock exchange. An attempt to persuade the troops to support the provisional government is defeated when they fire on their leaders and join the proletarian uprising. The morning after the attack on the Winter Palace, Ivan’s aunt goes looking for her husband with food in a pail; she comes across a small group of exhausted soldiers, some injured, among them Ivan. She gives him food and comfort and passes the rest to the weary men. Carrying her empty pail though the grand corridors of the Winter Palace, she meets the Bolshevik leader of the strike who tells her that this is the end of St. Petersburg; this is now the city of Lenin. The most notable aspect of End of St. Petersburg is that it is constructed using several different editing styles. The film begins with a series of separate but linked shots which collectively convey a rich layer of meaning: VWS a lakeside. WS a windmill against a heavily filtered, dark sky. CS the windmill blades cutting through the frame. Inter-title: ‘Peasants’. VWS a fieldscape and sky. CU an elderly, bearded peasant farmer eating; he looks into the distance. VWS a vast skyscape. CU the peasant farmer again; he continues eating and looks down. CU his hands holding bread; he breaks it; then a match cut to: CU his face as he eats and looks off. VWS a bankside and water. The man is never shown as part of the landscape: no establishing shot, no space for viewpoint for an onlooker. The peasant is part of the constructed space and the

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End of St. Petersburg

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wide shots are linked to him, but not literally; they are not his logical points of view. The mill grinds the grain that makes flour that makes the bread that the man eats. The images are of man, land and bread. The sequence continues with shots of two other men eating – we never see the first man again – and they eventually prove to be Ivan and his father. Then we see the pregnant wife suffering labour pains, knocking over a bucket of water, going into the house; the midwife’s arrival, the youngest child running to tell his father and brother; father goes to the house, Ivan to the plough – link by link – brick by brick.15 Once Ivan arrives in the city, the scenes with his aunt and his uncle are also constructed using the linkage method of montage, with realist settings and psychologically motivated performances. Following the rural sequence which starts the film, Ivan’s arrival in St. Petersburg is conveyed differently, through a montage of views where horses do not pull a plough but stand on a pedestal frozen in bronze or pull a carriage carrying a ritually dressed official in a gold-braided uniform. The water does not reflect the sky but the Corinthian columns and domed edifices of politics and power. Sequence after sequence conveys its meaning, not through seamless continuity, but through a series of separate shots which collectively speak: five smoke-filled industrial skyscapes precede the inter-title: ‘Factory workers’ and in each shot which follows, a moving body is surrounded by steam and smoke-filled activity. A suited manager takes a worker to task for slackness, and his fellow workers’ resentment is constructed from a fast-cut montage of meaningful looks and exchanged responses. Sitting in his aunt’s basement home, Ivan watches as she tries to rock her troubled baby to sleep. As the child begins to settle, Pudovkin cuts to two landscape shots that derive from the opening sequence of the film: light on rippling water, and night clouds scudding across the setting sun, followed by a close-up of the sleeping child. The insertion of these shots does make demands on the spectator. The introduction of associative images within a stylistically different context draws attention to its intrusiveness and, although the intention is clear, it seems oddly out of place and contrived. The intercutting between soldiers suffering and dying in the trenches and the exuberant dealings on the stock exchange moves much closer to Eisenstein’s theory of a montage of collisions. Although the contrapositions seem simplistic in the abstract, the unexpected intercuts are selected and judged with such precision that the whole sequence is extremely powerful. Pudovkin then segues into a montage sequence which begins with shell cases being polished and proceeds into a bread riot, in which starving workers attack a closed bakery displaying a sign ‘no bread – no flour’, which is broken up with the arrival of mounted police. This sequence is constructed from fragments of shots edited wholly in terms of Eisenstein’s montage theory of collisions. Movement is cut against stasis, close-up against wide-shot, dark against light; the shots so short, that all that remains is an

Film poet The films of Alexander Dovzhenko are singularly unlike the work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin but, as Jay Leyda has indicated, develop the suggestions that lie within the body of their work to ‘the level of mature poetry’.16 Dovzhenko, the son of Ukrainian peasants, started out as a teacher; became an educational administrator in Kharkov; served abroad as a diplomat then suddenly turned to art and began to study painting. At the end of 1923 he returned to Kharkov and worked as a newspaper cartoonist. He continued to paint but eventually came to realise that the focus for his creativity lay elsewhere. In June 1926 he abandoned his Kharkov apartment and travelled to Odessa where he joined the VUFKU studio. His natural abilities as a filmmaker were soon obvious and in Zvenigora (1928), he made a film which, he declared later, ‘was a catalogue of all my creative possibilities’. The studio heads found it incomprehensible. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were invited to a viewing and asked to adjudicate. They defended it enthusiastically, and, while acknowledging that this early work was uneven and complex in its meanings, they confirmed that here was the work of a new and brilliant film poet. Dovzhenko’s position was that of every avant-garde artist of conviction: a failure to understand the film did not mean that the film was bad or unintelligible; if the viewer was unable to understand it, the failure was his inability to think. Dovzhenko claimed that his intention was to prompt the viewer to think. Certainly, Dovzhenko’s next film, Arsenal (1929) was a major departure from traditional film structures or presentational methods. The film is set in the Ukraine during the final stages of the First World War and the opening sequence is typical of his bold yet demanding structural method. Fade-in MS silhouette of a broken barbed-wire fence against the sky; an explosion in the right foreground obscures the frame. Inter-title: ‘There was a mother who had three sons.’ Fade-in MWS room interior. A woman stands full length. Quite still, unmoving. Inter-title: ‘There was a war.’

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impression of the event. This segues again into factory steam whistles of every sort. This head of steam causes locomotive movement to begin, gun barrels to rise, and now there is applause in close-up and close shot, in big close-up, as the bourgeoisie clap and cheer a diminutive Kerensky shot from above, dwarfed by the vast stage on which he stands to announce the overthrow of the tsar and the continuation of the war. There is no doubt that the experimental forms that are the structural basis for End of St. Petersburg and October were, for all their propagandist purpose and in spite of their many shortcomings, like nothing ever seen before on a cinema screen. Their influence was profound and remains wholly undiminished.

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WS exterior landscape suddenly obscured by an explosion right of frame. Smoke. MCS raised-angle tracking shot, soldiers in an open rail truck as it speeds along. An angle change to a closer shot. No action. No expression on the faces. WS high-angle trenches and fortifications smoke drifts across. MS interior, the woman (as before) stands immobile. WS high-angle trenches (as before). Smoke. MWS low-angle, barbed-wire and a bank. Smoke drifts. Another angle on this. WS raised-angle, a field. In the background a house and a stationary darkdressed figure. More disconnected shots, each held for an extended period of time, follow each other in similar vein. Then:

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Inter-title: ‘and the mother had no sons’. VWS field, tilted angle, woman enters top R sowing seed. MS interior, legless soldier sits alone. CS the tsar sitting at his desk. VWS a woman sowing grain as before. CS the tsar as before. MS the woman sowing WS reverse – from behind. The woman staggers and falls. CS the tsar CS a factory worker. Still. CS the tsar looks down CU over shoulder shot. He writes. BCU a diary entry, ‘Today I shot a crow’.

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What this rather bald list of shots cannot convey is the stillness existing within this slow and deliberate assemblage. Every shot, every title, is self-contained, a link in a chain that invites a collective meaning but one devoid of any familiar syntax. Few of the images in this sequence are readable in terms of their movement. It seems that action is deliberately denied them. The film does not tell a story in the accepted sense; there is no unity of form. Each sequence makes a disconnected statement about some aspect of the war and its aftermath. At the centre of the action stands the arsenal where the workers, opposed to the war’s continuance, struggle to produce weapons surrounded by the conflicts and contradictions of the civil war. The episodic structure follows a group of mutineers returning from the First World War, among them, Tymish, a Ukrainian soldier who is witness to the events of the time: the religious ritual controlling the people; the collective self-interest of the terrified bourgeoisie; the strike at the arsenal and its defeat by the armed nationalists. All this is raised by

Earth Difficulties with confronting Dovzhenk’o next film, Earth (Zemlya 1930), considered to be his masterpiece, are of a different order. Unlike Arsenal, the story of the film is very simple. The young men of a Ukrainian village collective decide to acquire a tractor to increase their productivity and make farming more efficient. Once arrived, the machine transforms their farming methods but Vasil, the village chairman and tractor driver, in his enthusiasm, ploughs over the collective’s boundaries, incurring the resentment and anger of the land-owning kulak neighbour and his son, Khoma. One evening Vasil is shot and killed. Khoma is accused but denies his guilt. Shutting out the local priest, Vasil’s father requests that his son receive a modern burial, singing songs of a new life. As the ceremony proceeds, Khoma, isolated and distraught, shouts his confession from the hilltop but his cries are unheard as the people celebrate Vasil’s contribution towards their peaceful and prosperous future. Rain falls, the crops ripen, new relationships blossom. Although the story and its presentation encompass the rural political concerns of the time, the film is also a visual poem about universal themes: love and birth, life and death; the fertile earth, growth, harvest, bread. Dovzhenko described Earth as a film that would herald the beginning of new life in the villages. On seeing the film for the first time, one is immediately aware of its stylistic difference from Arsenal; scenes in Earth are linked naturally and logically. Although inter-titles are used sparingly, the scenes are substantially based upon spare dialogue exchanges and reactions to others’ speech; on occasions it seems almost as if the film has lost its synchronous soundtrack. This concentration on close-shot faces and expressions, often isolated from any group context, is often extended by Dovzhenko to quite exceptional lengths, seeking, it would seem at times, more from the images than the material can bear. This contrasts with the sharply-cut montage sequences of ploughing, harvesting, milling and breadmaking, in which the images and the way they are edited reflect the exuberance of the activity and the villagers’ delight in the success of their collective endeavour. As night clouds gather across the harvested fields, young lovers gaze at the sunset and lie in each other’s arms. In the moonlight, Vasil sets off on his walk home and, overwhelmed with feelings of contentment, breaks into a dance. It is at

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Dovzhenko to the level of symbolism praised by Eisenstein as an example of the liberation of the whole action from the definition of time and space’.17 Arsenal is a difficult film that refuses to deliver itself to easy analysis and insists on a degree of commitment from its audience which, for many, renders it unapproachable. Yet the originality of its form demonstrates that there exists on the fringes of that marginalised area called ‘art cinema’ structural methods capable of communicating feelings and meanings in ways that seldom, if ever, come within our reach.

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this point that we see him suddenly collapse and a distant figure break from the hedge and run off. Two aspects of this deserve mention. Dovzhenko deliberately constructs the death of Vasil as a shock; the actual moment happens in an extreme wide shot and at first it is not clear what has happened. It is instructive to notice how this contrasts to a psychological-realist treatment of the event. In that presentation, Khoma might be shown lying in wait, his gun at the ready in close-up, waiting for Vasil to pass. There might even be some intercutting between the two. Khoma, anxious, tense, driven by resentment and class pride; Vasil in wide-shot, happily in love, dancing his delight at the success of the day, and so on. That kind of treatment, for all its suspense and appeal to audience identification, is the inversion of Dovzhenko’s approach. Vasil, the individual, is not the focus of Khoma’s resentment; Khoma is not the wicked embodiment of kulak greed. Dovzhenko preserves the distance; we experience the suddenness, the bewilderment, of Vasil’s collapse, and we experience it as shockingly as his family, as Yelena, his betrothed does. At first it is a mystery, and then we realise that, in killing Vasil, Khoma was not attacking the man, but was expressing his anger at what Vasil represented: the successful achievement of collective endeavour and the inevitability of social change. The second matter of interest concerns the actual length of time Dovzhenko sustains Vasil’s lone walk and dance before he is shot. The walk, before he starts to dance, lasts two minutes thirty seconds, and the dance itself, four minutes twenty seconds: together, almost seven minutes of screen time. While recognising the rights of an artist to present his material in any way he chooses, this degree of filmic longueur seems bewilderingly excessive, and although many of the scenes in the film are what might generously be termed ‘unhurried’, the length of Vasil’s walk and dance runs the risk of distancing even the most committed spectator in quite the wrong way. The funeral procession is intercut not only with Khoma’s distantly screamed confession, during which he physically seeks to enter the earth which he possessively circles, but Dovzhenko also shows us the rejected priest in his church calling on God to ‘smite the impious’, and a village woman giving birth. Finally, and most personally, we see Yelena, naked, distraught with grief, wrecking the material contents of her home as an expression of her impotent rage. In spite of the film’s success abroad, twice being included by a panel of critics as one of the ten best films of all time, on its release in its home territory the film was poorly received by both Soviet critics and audiences. It was considered ‘defeatist’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ its lyricism overriding its political message, and was attacked as ‘a highbrow delicacy with little appeal for the farmers for whom it was supposedly intended’. In the early 1930s, the creative changes brought about by the new sound technology and reassessments of the political role of all the arts put the domestic reputations of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko into the shadows.

Pressure to conform more rigorously to the Party line brought to a close one of the most innovative, experimental and influential periods in film history.

1 Vertov’s younger brothers, Mikhail and Boris, both became cameramen. Mikhail worked for Vertov on the Kino-Eye documentary series, and also Man With a Movie Camera; Boris, who emigrated to France in 1927, was Jean Vigo’s cameraman on all of his four films. 2 The description that follows is based on part of the transcript of an address that Pudovkin gave to the Film Society in Stewart’s Café, Regent Street, London on 3 February 1929. 3 For the record: French editor Henri Colpi provides a ‘nude woman, a man being murdered, and a festive table’ in ‘Film Culture’, Summer 1961. Instead of the child, Raymond Durgnat in Durgnat on Film, has just ‘a woman’; J. Dudley Andrew in Major Film Theories quotes Jean Mitry’s reference to ‘a nude woman’; Keith Cohen in Film and Fiction likes ‘a revolver’ and a ‘half-naked woman’, and Charles Barr in ‘Scope’, December 1962, draws attention to the fact that the ‘lascivious woman on a couch’ – allegedly part of the original experiment – was probably considered decadent and consequently replaced by ‘a little girl’. 4 Something similar to the neo-Brechtian presentational methods favoured by Eisenstein were used in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop (1953–61) production of Oh What a Lovely War. A successful film adaptation, directed by Richard Attenborough, was released in 1969. 5 The use of chapter headings in this, and Eisenstein’s subsequent films, underlines the episodic structure. 6 Seton, ‘The Power and the Glory of Sergei M. Eisenstein’. 7 In his detailed A History of Narrative Film, pp. 159–60, David A. Cook suggests that repeating the breaking of the plate was a creative editorial decision intended to convey the vehemence of the sailor’s anger by showing the action twice. He also identifies some deliberate overlaps in the action as having the same effect. I have to say that I find this reading questionable: the sailor appears to strike the plate twice by bringing it down first from his left then his right shoulder; the cuts seem to match the flow of action throughout and there is no jump that might suggest a repeat. Eisenstein does use jump-cuts: of the woman’s face at the start of the Odessa steps sequence and at the finish as the Cossack strikes, but not here. 8 Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 72–83. 9 My attention was drawn to this example from Eisenstein’s Film Form, p. 76, by William S. Pechter’s critical essay ‘The Closed Mind of Sergei Eisenstein’ in his book Twenty-four Times a Second. 10 Leyda, Kino, p. 196, quoting from an article by Alexandrov in Istkusstvo Kino December 1955. 11 Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, pp. 84–6. This is a very good story; apparently the spittle-made joins held in the projector but easily came apart in the cutting room later. Whether this story is apocryphal, it is hard to say. According to Alexandrov (n. 10 above), cameraman Tisse took the early reels to the Bolshoi, Eisenstein following with the penultimate reel. Alexandrov states that he joined the last reel himself and had to run to the Theatre because his motor-cycle refused to start.

Film as an agent of change

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Notes

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12 Pudovkin’s Film Technique was first translated into English in 1929 and Film Acting in 1937. Combined as Film Technique and Film Acting, they were first published in 1949. An enlarged, revised edition appeared in 1958. 13 The image of a dripping tap is, of itself, uninilected. A quite different use of it as a metaphor can be found in Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), during a kitchen seduction scene between Tony (James Fox) and Vera (Sarah Miles). 14 Leyda, Ibid., p. 209. 15 It seems that these scenes were not directed by Pudovkin but by his assistant Mikhail Doller. Doller had worked in the theatre for thirteen years before joining Pudovkin on Mother, his close connections with the Moscow Arts Theatre had been invaluable in casting both of Pudovkin’s first films. 16 Leyda, ibid., p. 252. 17 Ibid.

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12

End of an era The event that traditionally marks the beginning of the sound era occurred on Friday 6 August 1926. On the evening of that day the very first commercially released synchronised sound film made by a major studio was premièred at the Warner Theatre on Broadway. The film was Don Juan, but it was really no different than many other ‘silent’ films made during the previous decade. Like them it had dialogue inter-titles and no synchronised speech, but it did have a synchronised orchestral score and sound effects recorded on disc. What made its appearance significant was that it was the first studio-backed picture to be made with sound; the first indication that changes were taking place and that they could not be ignored. Although Don Juan pointed the way, it was Warners’ second sound film, The Jazz Singer, which opened more than a year later in October 1927, that really changed everything. The Jazz Singer was also a silent film with dialogue inter-titles but there were some synchronised songs and, most significantly, two very brief sections of dialogue spoken by Al Jolson, its star. The audiences response to hearing Jolson speak, and the film’s phenomenal commercial success ensured that ‘talkies’ were to dominate film production from that point on. The content, the form and the structure of films, and also the means by which they communicated with their audiences, would thereafter change dramatically. There were of course a large number of silent films still in production, and audiences for them, as few cinemas were equipped for sound. Many of the so-called sound films appearing over the next three years were hybrids, basically silent films with occasional sections of spoken dialogue; many had started out as silent films and had sound sections hastily added in an attempt to make them commercially competitive. Yet during these transitional years many silent films were conceived and made without dialogue or sound effects – and they reveal the extent to which silent filmmaking had, at this point in its development, attained an extremely high level of creative artistry. Because filmmakers were working within an art form that was limited to communication through the selection and editing of carefully 203

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composed, soundless, moving images, these constraints placed particular emphasis on matters of original form and style. There were dozens of excellent films made during this transitional period and many offer rich opportunities for structural analysis. The three that I have selected are significant in that, although each one could have been made using spoken dialogue instead of inter-titles, some qualities inherent in the silent-film form would have been absent; qualities that tended to disappear once speech was substituted for the richness and depth of meaning inherent in a structure based on the visual. The first film to be discussed, Casanova (192 7), is of special interest historically in that it was made by Russian exiles who fled to France following the Russian Revolution. The second is The Wind (1927), directed by Victor Sjöström who came from Sweden to Hollywood in 1923,1 and the third, Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929), was directed in Germany by G. W. Pabst. Sound came late to continental Europe; whereas American sound film production got under way early in 1928, the very first European sound films date from 1930. Diary of a Lost Girl was Pabst’s last silent film.

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Russian exiles

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The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a profound effect on the stability of industrial structures throughout the country and film production in the manner that it had existed up to that time, virtually ground to a halt. Tsarist cinema had become well established and popular, and many individuals who were central to its organisation decided that their best chance to continue with those activities was to re-establish them elsewhere. Joseph Ermolieff, head of a major production company, decided to leave Moscow and set up operations in the Crimea, taking with him a team of experienced actors and technicians. But by 1918 their autonomy was being challenged and they were under pressure to return to Moscow. The company split up, some going to Germany, others to Romania; Ermolieff, his close associates and the majority of his creative team decided to sail from Yalta to Marseilles. Once in France, Ermolieff, using his own capital and in association with Russian financiers in exile, founded the Société Française des Films Ermolieff, which released through a Pathé consortium. Ermolieff had the foresight to bring with him the negatives of many of the films that had been produced during the pre-revolutionary period and, equipped with French inter-titles these were put into distribution with considerable success. Ermolieff’s version of The Queen of Spades, made in 1916, was particularly well received. These films also helped to establish Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine as a favourite with French audiences.2 By 1920 the Ermolieff company was fully in production – Russian style being quickly integrated into French taste. In 1922 Ermolieff left the Russian émigré film colony in Paris; sold the company to his associates, Alexandre Kamenka and Nöe Bloch;

Casanova Casanova, a dashing recreation of the amorous exploits of the great Italian seducer, is a valuable example of late 1920s cinematic style. Volkoff’s film was very clearly an expensive undertaking with spacious and elaborate interior settings, a large cast, scenes involving hundreds of costumed extras and impressive location filming in Venice. Two substantial sequences – the Tsarina Catherine’s court and the Venice Carnival – are also in colour.4 Because the film was conceived to work largely without dialogue, it has few dialogue inter-titles; the episodic story is conveyed in terms of action, shot and edited with exceptional economy and pace. However, explanatory titles are plentiful, and these are used as a kind of shorthand; giving information equivalent to ‘voice-over’ links in a sound film. Unable to pay the debts accrued by his extravagant living, the subject of hundreds of petitions about his amorous profligacy and accused of villainy and sorcery by the governors of Venice, Casanova flees the city. While staying at an inn in Austria, he tries to save a young woman, Thérèse, from the unwelcome sexual attentions of her benefactor, the Duke of Bayreuth, but he is defeated and

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and then re-established himself in Berlin. Kamenka, the son of a Russian banker, renamed the company the Société Films d’Albatros after the ship that had brought them to Marseilles. Kamenka had ambitions to make more expensive and prestigious films but his filmmaking policy was also influenced by the work of avant-garde French experimentalists. He produced Le Lion des Mogols (1924) directed by Jean Epstein and Feu Mathias Pascal (1925) directed by Marcel l’Herbier, both with Ivan Mosjoukine in leading parts. Mosjoukine next played the lead in two outstanding films produced by the Société des Ciné-Romans, Michel Strogoff (1926), directed by Viatcheslav Tourjansky,3 and Casanova (1927), directed by Alexandre Volkoff. The quality that distinguishes both films is their elaborate choreography and notable pace, both films being exceptionally well served by energetic performances by Mosjoukine. Volkoff had already directed him in Kean (1924), a film based on the life of the eighteenth-century English actor Edmund Kean. In spite of its rather sombre theatricality, two sequences in particular made notable impact and were regarded as classic set-pieces by the ciné clubs: Mosjoukine’s melodramatic death scene; and a remarkable example of rapid editing, a hornpipe, danced by Kean in a London inn, urged on by an excited crowd. The use of impressionistic editing to reflect the emotional mood of a scene, used powerfully in the fast-cut train sequence in Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923), is emulated here; the pace of the editing increasing as the dance progresses. In spite of its inventive structure, it does not wholly succeed; there is evidence of timing variations between sections of action which tend to upset the rhythmic structure of the dance, but it still remains a bravura editing achievement.

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Thérèse is reclaimed. An encounter with the royal dressmaker, travelling from Paris, provides Casanova with the opportunity to steal both his goods and his identity and, masquerading as the duped M. Dupont, he crosses into Russia and presents himself at the court of the enfeebled Tsar Peter III and his neglected wife Catherine. His success in winning Catherine’s interest is threatened when he is discovered in intimate seclusion with Maria, wife of Count Mari, who are guests at a celebratory ball. Following the overthrow of the tsar in a palace coup, the newly installed Empress Catherine II orders ‘M. Dupont’ to attend upon her, but Casanova is more intent on returning to Venice in pursuit of Maria. During the Venice carnival, Casanova finds Maria at an outdoor ball, but as they are about to leave, Thérèse and the Duke arrive and Casanova is recognised. Pursued and imprisoned, he eventually effects a daring escape with the help of his friends and Thérèse, now rescued from the Duke. Casanova finally sails away promising Thérèse that he will return to claim her.5 An early sequence captures the licentious tone of the film. Casanova has arranged an extravagant farewell dinner for his current paramour, Signora Corticelli, a famous dancer who is leaving Venice. Director Volkoff goes directly to the core of the celebration with a series of deftly choreographed and graphically composed shots. 1 A high-angle top shot looking directly down onto the long dining table as the dinner progresses. It is composed so that the diners’ bodies are beyond edges of the frame. dissolve to 2

MCS the hands of the waiters as they remove the corks of several champagne bottles, all in unison.

dissolve to 3

The high-angle top shot again. The waiters, one standing to the right of every seated guest, bring a bottle into shot in perfect unison and start to fill the glasses.

dissolve to 4 5 6

CU Casanova. He lifts his glass and speaks. Inter-title: ‘Let us drink to the health of Signora Corticelli, the most beautiful of Dancers.’ CU Casanova. Many hands enter frame and filled glasses are clinked.

dissolve to 7 8 9

CU Corticelli. Inter-title: ‘To us – for whom life is love and love is life!’ CU Corticelli. She turns about, clinking glasses OOV.

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dissolve to

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10 A panning shot along the faces of the guests in CS. They raise their glasses to the CAM.

Conceived and executed with flair and economy, the sequence is typical of the dissolving montage style which had evolved during the 1920s and used extensively thereafter as a means of condensing those links that were necessary for narrative clarity but not dramatically significant. The stylisation of the framings and the balletic movements of the waiters contribute to the overall lightness of touch with which the story is told. All the sounds are suggested by the images; the corks popping and the glasses clinking, reinforcing an awareness that actuality sound is missing, and particularly evident at the points where Casanova and Corticelli speak. The ebullient line ‘ ... life is love and love is life!’ and the effervescent champagne reflect the spirit that drives the character of Casanova and the entire film. Although the absence of spoken dialogue compelled the use of an inter-title which tended to interrupt the rhythm of the editing, this was an essential part of the silent-viewing experience. The codes and conventions broke up the flow of the narrative and established a specific and unique engagement with the spectator. There was an awareness of the presentational form, a stylisation that could heighten the pleasure of watching by emphasising the separation between what was seen and what one heard in one’s head. A later scene demonstrates that the substitution of images for sounds could be very effective. Casanova is in his bedroom at the Austrian inn preparing for bed. Suddenly, he becomes aware of noises coming from an adjacent room which give him cause for concern. Volkoff uses pictures to convey the sounds that cannot be heard. The images used appear very briefly and are very fragmentary, yet manage to suggest that a young woman is attempting to resist the forceful attentions of a man. These are intercut with close-up shots of Casanova listening. All the shots consist of large close-up details, and the increase in photographic grain and loss of sharpness suggest quite clearly that most of them are optical-frame enlargements; details selected from wider shots.7 The fragmentary nature of these briefly held details introduces a degree of ambiguity very akin to something that can be heard but not seen, but because it is shown, Volkoff is able to introduce visual details that are also symbolically suggestive. The woman is dressed in light lacy clothing, the man in dark. Casanova is shown listening between each shot, or group of shots. 1

CU A shadow of a moving figure falls across the floorboards. A chair falls over. A woman’s feet run past the chair and OOS.

Casanova listens. 2 3 4

CU The woman’s hands thrust away from her. CU A man’s spurred boots step across the frame. CU The woman’s hands jerk back.

Casanova listens.

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11 WS the room. The diners begin to leave the table.6

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5 6 7

CU The woman’s hands make a pleading gesture. CU The woman’s feet step back. CU The man’s arm jerks forward.

Casanova listens. 8

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9

CU Part of the woman’s body falls backwards and a dark figure falls onto her. CU A table-top with objects on it as it starts to topple. Among the objects is a candlestick containing a candle.

Casanova listens. 10 CU The woman’s clothing being roughly handled. In the foreground the top of a dark post which occasionally catches the light. Casanova listens. 11 BCU A woman’s mouth opens and screams, a man’s hand comes up and covers her mouth. Casanova moves away from the wall and sets off to investigate. Apart from the obvious symbolism of the clothing and the movements, the use of the spurs, the candle and the dark post to suggest male sexuality are clearly intended, even if they contribute to the scene only subliminally. Certainly the scene has been brilliantly conceived and edited but it could only exist within the constraints of its silent form; regrettably, there would be no place for it once its powerful imagery was replaced by naturalistic sound. What seems to me to be important about the transitional period is that it helps to clarify the essential difference between meaning conveyed visually and audibly. The emphasis that had of necessity to be placed on the image from the very beginning of cinema had enabled a rich and complex visual language to evolve which found ways of going beyond realism in order to explore and convey subtle nuances of mood and emotion in the process of building a meaningful narrative. The use of speech and realistic sound would inevitably make a visual vocabulary largely redundant as communication became dependent much more on what could be heard than what could be seen.

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The Wind

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It was Lillian Gish, then under contract to MGM, who first proposed that the studio make a film based on Dorothy Scarborough’s novel. She had already established a successful working partnership with Swedish actor Lars Hanson and director Victor Sjöström when they had made The Scarlet Letter together in 1926 and her enthusiasm for the story was equally shared by them. Letty Mason (Gish), a gently bred Virginia girl, travels by train to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly, his wife Cora and their children. On the journey she

The last silent

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makes her first acquaintance with the relentless wind that blasts the train windows and she receives the apparently concerned attentions of Wirt Roddy, a cattle trader who is plainly attracted to her. That evening she is met at the remote station by Lige (Hanson), a young cattleman and his older working partner Sourdough, who vie for the privilege of riding beside her. Although greeted warmly by her sickly cousin she quickly realises that Cora resents her youthful presence, dislikes her refined eastern tastes and is jealous of the close relationship between Letty and her husband and the attention she receives from the local men. When Cora learns that Letty has failed to take Lige’s proposal of marriage seriously, she attacks her and tells her to leave. Letty at first seeks out Wirt Roddy as a means of escape, but learning that he is married and interested only in a dalliance, she returns to her cousin’s home; but Cora is adamant that she must go. Having no other option, she reluctantly agrees to marry Lige, a man she does not love. Letty is left alone when Lige and the local men ride off to round up wild horses driven onto the plain by a wind storm, but Roddy, who pretends to ride with them, doubles-back to the cabin and rapes Letty during the height of the storm. The following day, in total despair and taunted by Roddy, she shoots and kills him. Her attempts to bury the body are betrayed by the wind that strips the grave, gradually revealing the clothed corpse while she stares uncomprehending from the window. At this point she becomes aware that a man is trying to force open the door held fast by the drifts of sand; to her relief it proves to be Lige. She confesses her deed, the sand covers over the body again, and the film ends with reconciliation and an embrace. The first thing to mention is that the original script, following the novel, had a quite different, wholly bleak ending. In this version Letty, after killing and burying her attacker, watches as the wind mercilessly uncovers the evidence of her crime. Her mind now completely unhinged, she walks away into the wind-driven dust storm. Apparently, the tacked-on happy ending was added at the behest of the film’s distributors who were undoubtedly concerned about the effects that this grim, essentially European masterpiece would have on box-office takings. In the event, there was no way that such a simplistic coda could really change anything, other that emphasise its own artificiality. Several factors affected the film’s reception. It was first released in November 1927 as a silent film, but apart from some praise for the performances its essentially solemn theme failed to appeal to either critics or cinema-goers. The release of The Wind also occurred while the excitement generated by Warners’ The Jazz Singer (premièred the previous month) was still in full flood. Fox-Movietone’s sound newsreels where already being shown; all the talk was about the coming sound revolution. MGM quickly decided to withdraw the film, recut it and rerelease it ‘with talking sequences and sound effects’.8 Part of the problem was that most critics took the view that the film was too ‘foreign’ in its style and subject-

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matter, a common complaint about films made by European directors working in America and European films generally. Many were condemned as being ‘artistic’ which was intended to imply that they were without commercial appeal; they were not considered ‘entertainment’. Informed critical assessment is agreed that The Wind is almost certainly Sjöström’s best American film, if not his best overall, and it is ranked as a masterpiece of silent cinema. As in The Scarlet Letter, Lillian Gish is cast as an individual at odds with the society in which she is compelled to live; a central theme in much of Sjöström’s work. Many of his early films also reveal a deep response to nature and elemental forces, but, whereas in the Swedish films his characters confront the challenges of the natural world and find ways of living in harmony with them, in The Wind the elements invade and destroy the central character and are equated with violent and destructive human passions. This might partly suggest the film’s lack of appeal for an American audience who required their heroes and heroines to overcome adversity and the threats presented by the natural world with courage and endurance; qualities particular to the western, a genre which exemplified those traditional frontier values. The inter-title used to introduce the film seems quite revealing in this context: Man – puny but irresistible, encroaching for ever on Nature’s vastnesses, gradually, very gradually wresting away her strange secrets, subduing her fierce elements – conquers the earth! This inter-title seems to be the introduction to a completely different film – one that the distributors (and perhaps the producers) hoped for – rather than the one they got. The second introductory title was more likely to have been the original one:

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This is the story of a woman who came into the domain of the winds

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Suggesting that the winds were several, metaphorical as well as physical, and leaving the outcome of the woman’s intrusion into their domain uncertain. The film editor of The Wind was Conrad Nervig who began his career with MGM in 1926 and worked solely for that company until 1954.9 Sjöström made three films in succession during 1927 and 1928: The Divine Woman, The Wind, and Masks of the Devil; Nervig was his editor on all three. Sjöström clearly valued his contribution to the work and his handling of the material is masterly. Although it had long been recognised that when characters spoke to each other, in most instances it was necessary to include an inter-title showing the spoken lines; it was also evident that dialogue inter-titles had to be used very sparingly if they were not to disrupt the dramatic development of the story presented visually. Certainly by this time the use of the SRS figure to show individuals in conversation was well established, but, where possible, dialogue inter-titles would be used to bridge a cut to another angle or reframed shot. For example, a dialogue inter-title would be inserted after someone started to speak on

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a CU and they would next be seen concluding the speech on an MS, or vice versa. This offered the advantage of being able to obscure any position mismatching and maintain pace by reducing the time taken for the completion of uneventful action. When dialogue inter-titles were required to be inserted within a shot, the convention was to show the lips of the speaker beginning to move, insert the dialogue inter-title, then return to the shot as he or she completed the line, but this kind of insertion was invariably used only in those circumstances where some aspect of the speaker’s performance – a specific look or a gesture, for example – followed the speech. The inter-title had to remain on the screen long enough to be read, and this would produce a hold in the cutting rhythm that was essentially disruptive; consequently speeches were kept short and usually held long enough to be read through twice. Because dialogue exchanges using inter-titles were an intrusive element in a scene, their use was always succinct, and restricted to the essential; precedence was always given to the image. If the content of a spoken line could be inferred from its context, the inter-title would often be omitted altogether. Examples of innovative editing abound. In a side room, towards the end of a dance attended by the whole community, Lige and Sourdough vie for the privilege of proposing marriage to Letty, which leads to her failing to take Lige’s proposal seriously. The insanely jealous Cora, desperate to get rid of her, tells Letty that she must marry one of them. Beverly enters and attempts to intervene but collapses in a fit of coughing. Letty’s gesture of concern for his condition causes Cora to throw her aside brutally. At this point there is a cut to the dust storm raging outside before cutting back to Letty. The insertion of this image recurs as a visual metaphor at different points in the film, punctuating the narrative to convey Letty’s feelings of rejection, alienation and fear. The scene ends with Letty saying, ‘Don’t worry any more Cora, I know where I can go.’ Fade to black. The next scene begins in a way that, structurally, would not be out of place in a film made fifty years later. Fade-up CS Letty. Day Interior. She is dressed in outdoor clothes and the light from an adjacent window plays on her shoulder. She looks off frame right and is clearly waiting. Her manner leads us to infer that perhaps she is about to leave to go out. Her eyes seem to be following someone out of vision. We then cut to her POV: it is a man’s back. He moves sideways along the wall of the room and when we see him make a familiar movement, brushing his sleeve with his hand, we realise that it is the back of Wirt Roddy. We now cut to a CU of Letty, she starts to speak and then an inter-title is inserted – ‘You’re acting awful strange – !’ – before she completes the line in vision. Slight pause and cut to Roddy’s back. Now he stops moving and turns to her for the first time. A slight smile, a brushing of his sleeve with the back of his hand and he starts to speak. Inter-title, ‘Well, you see Letty – as it happens – I got a wife already –’. Now, a cut straight to CU Letty, this is not one of those situations where there is any value in seeing him complete the line in vision, what is needed here is Letty’s reaction. What we are given is not

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just the reaction to the line but a beat to allow us to see her response before she reacts. If this seems a little ponderous or slow, it is worth recalling that it is not so very different from how one might cut the modern equivalent using synch dialogue, perhaps with the last word laid over the cut to Letty. What seems to me to be so bold about this scene is the surprise factor. There’s no preamble, no setting up, we are taken straight into the middle of the scene between them. At first we do not even know where Letty is; it is as if events were proceeding independently of our presence. The structure exploits a quality which is unique to filmmaking: we become drawn into the scene because we have to make sense of what is shown without being prepared in advance. Not so many years earlier it would have been considered necessary to have included a title card to introduce the scene: ‘Letty decides to visit Wirt Roddy’ – or somesuch. It is also sadly true that not many years later it would have been considered important to show Letty arriving in town and crossing towards the front doors of the hotel. By first showing Roddy ambiguously – at the start we only see his back – Sjöström sustains the disorientation established in the first shot, and uses it to support the dramatic tension of the moment suddenly revealed in Letty’s line, ‘You’re acting awful strange – !’ Some other factors in the scene are of interest. After Roddy has told her that he’s married, the significant reaction CU of Letty is held quite long before cutting back to Roddy continuing to speak. Is this intended as a completion of the line? Because of the long hold on Letty, the timing invites a slightly different reading; an untitled embellishment of the truth. Then: CU Letty’s disappointed face and she turns away from him and looks out of the window. Her POV – a wide-angle top shot of the street below as Cora finishes talking to a neighbour and moves towards the back of the horse-buggy. Now a cut outside; a closer, objective shot of Cora as she prepares to untie Letty’s luggage from the back. The dramatic irony established by setting Cora’s actions against Letty’s disappointment is achieved wordlessly and powerfully and the remainder of the scene is similarly developed, virtually without recourse to dialogue inter-titles. Roddy enters the frame in which Letty is watching Cora unpack the buggy, pulls her around and tries to convince her to stay with him – no inter-title. She crosses behind him and he follows her to the door – then the only inter-title, ‘Letty – let me take you away where the wind can never follow you!’10 She quickly leaves the room. All the words spoken during the series of shots which follow are untitled: Letty leaving the hotel; Cora completing the unloading; Letty’s approach; Cora realising what is happened and rebuking her; Cora’s initial decision to drive off alone reluctantly rescinded; and finally her brusque command to repack the bags and climb aboard. All this watched from a window above by Roddy whose expression betrays that he is not to be dismissed so easily. A superb example of the ability of the image to convey an idea more powerfully than words occurs later in the film. After her marriage to Lige, Letty is left alone in

fade in CU Letty’s and Lige’s hands in the foreground, a priest with book in the background. Lige puts ring on Letty’s finger. dissolve to: CU sink full of unwashed dishes. dissolve to: CS table with oil lamp, remnants of food, uncleared crockery; an empty bottle. dissolve to: MCS Letty standing looking at the mess. MS looking through the open door – Lige and Sourdough approach. CS Letty turns and sees them. The scene continues ... This focusing on images that can deliver meaning with clarity and economy is used again during the scene which precedes their wedding night. Before leaving Letty in the bedroom to get ready for bed, Lige has made and brought her a cup of coffee. Disliking it, but feeling unable to tell him so, she has surreptitiously poured it into a water jug. Their conversation has been tentative and cautious and finally Lige leaves Letty alone to prepare for bed. Sjöström then reveals the tension that exists between them by cutting between the separate rooms as they pace about; Lige, very aware that she is wary of him, Letty fearful that he will make demands on her that she needs to reject.

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their cabin with Wirt Roddy, who has been brought there by the cattlemen to recover from an injury. Letty has brought with her from the east a stereoscope, a pair of lenses mounted on a frame which recreates a three-dimensional impression from a pair of photographs taken with a stereographic camera. The subsequent scene opens with what appears to be a shot of Letty in MCS dressed in hat and coat; a framing similar to that which opened the hotel scene discussed above. A dissolve is then made to a BCU of a pair of eyes, distorted by being seen through the lenses of the stereoscope; a cut to an MS reveals a man holding the device in front of him, his face obscured by the stereographic pictures. This third shot resolves the ambiguity of the previous two; the first was not a shot of Letty, but an image of her being looked at through the stereoscope. As the device is lowered, the man is revealed as Wirt Roddy. This reference back to the opening of the hotel scene is explicit. Sjöström again starts with ambiguities, not revealing Roddy until the third shot. Letty is presented as an image, captured and rendered immobile within the stereoscope frame, and Roddy’s eyes are revealed as owning the gaze, distorted and threatening. It is a precursor of what will follow. The narrative is developed with remarkable economy. After the hotel scene, Cora makes it quite clear that Letty can no longer stay with her family. Fade to black.

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A series of dissolves between them as they warily pace. Then a CU panning with Lige’s booted feet walking back and forth which dissolves briefly to the windblasted dust clouds outside. Letty’s pacing; Lige’s feet; his fallen coffee mug kicked aside. Then Lige’s entry into the bedroom; Letty’s turn; Lige’s approach to her played only on their feet. Now in MS he is kissing her violently and she struggles to escape. At this point, as she breaks away, she crosses to the right of the camera. She now faces him from the direction from which he entered the room: through the door, right to left; he is now looking at her from the position she has previously occupied, left to right. This sudden change of position relative to the camera is especially noticeable, perhaps partly because in so many of the set-ups preceding it, Letty has been positioned so that she looks left to right; placed invariably on the left side of the screen. I have referred earlier (see Chapter 6) to a theory which suggests that there is a tendency to respond differently to action or performances delivered from opposite sides of a two-dimensional frame and I propose to develop this theory further in Chapter 17, but what can be stated here is that there is clearly a dramatic advantage in emphasising the change of an emotional state within a scene with a physical change in the positioning of the conflicting characters, which is what happens here. Letty is now the aggressor; wiping her mouth in revulsion, she turns on him venomously. Once again, it was considered that the dramatic needs of the scene would be better served by excluding any inter-title. Instead, a cut is made to Lige’s bewildered look followed by a cut back to Letty as she continues the verbal onslaught. Only then is the inter-title inserted, ‘You’ve made me hate you! Oh Lige – I didn’t want to hate you’. His hand reaches towards his face in a gesture of confusion. She tries to explain; he starts to speak, ‘I thought you married me to be my wife – to work with me – love me – !’, and then, ‘Don’t be afraid – I won’t touch you again.’ The shift of sympathy, assisted by the change in the actors’ positions, is enhanced through fine performances and finally confirmed by the silent actions which follow. Lige picks up her comb and begins to hold it out to her, but he cannot complete the gesture and moves to place it on the side table. Then his eye falls on the jug into which she had previously emptied his gift of coffee. He tilts it towards him, then looks towards her, not with reproach, but with sadness. The absence of a verbal dimension in silent films demanded that communication be structured from a mixture of carefully tuned performances, sensitive composition and the distillation of meaning from the relationship between a single filmed image and those that preceded and followed it. Meaning could only be conveyed through what was seen, and this made demands on both the filmmaker and the spectator. The inability to use speech meant that filmic communication was essentially unreal, and this unreality gave it a unique status: its absent voice placed it in the realm of abstraction; its flow of images told more than they showed. To achieve this level of communication, both filmmaker and spectator were required to reach into a film in order to grasp the full extent of its

potential; it involved a quality of commitment that largely disappeared with the arrival of the talking picture.

Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen), filmed during the summer of 1929, was G. W. Pabst’s last silent film. Adapted from a novel by Margarethe Böhme it explores many of the same themes as Pandora’s Box, also made with American actress Louise Brooks the previous year. Much has been written about the two films Pabst made with Louise Brooks, partly because the blend of scripts, director and star proved to be a potent mix; something unique in the art of the silent film. Pabst found in Louise Brooks an ideal interpreter for his analysis of feminine sensuality. In her biography, she acknowledges that she was aware that Pabst’s feelings towards her were complex and that his casting her in the roles of Lulu and Thymiane were connected with his need to work out some aspects of his own feelings. I think that in the two films that Pabst made with me – Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl – he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the object of conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for work. He was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth. It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.11 Both films were censored by the German government both pre- and postproduction. Diary of a Lost Girl was completed in August 1929 at a length of 3,132 m., but before it could be released the censor required cuts reducing the length to 2,863 m., attaching to it the rating Jugendverbot (not for young audiences). It was widely released in September but, following attacks from sections of the German press, who branded it decadent and immoral, it was banned by the Higher Film Censor Board on 5 December 1929. The film then suffered further drastic cuts, removing 30 per cent of its already shortened length, and it was eventually released on 31 January 1930. This version was so truncated that the author of the scenario, Rudolf Leonhardt, who saw it in a Paris cinema some time later, confessed to remaining in his seat after the film had ended, convinced that the film, which ended about half-way through his original screenplay, had broken in the projector. Although the film has been significantly restored, it still retains an alternative ‘moral’ ending shot by Pabst as a pre-production requirement. Thymiane (Louise Brooks), the innocent young daughter of widowed pharmacist Robert Henning, is puzzled by the sudden dismissal of her father’s housekeeper, Elizabeth. It is her birthday, and, as the family guests leave the celebration, Thymiane is introduced to Meta, the new resident ‘housekeeper’. Soon after she learns that Elizabeth, who was pregnant, has committed suicide. Later that night she keeps an assignation with Meinert (Fritz Rasp), her father’s

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Diary of a Lost Girl

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lecherous assistant, who promises to tell her ‘Elizabeth’s secret’, but he exploits the situation in order to seduce her. The result, an illegitimate child, leads to Thymiane being placed in a harsh reform school and the baby being farmed out. Thymiane attempts to get a friend, Count Osdorff, to intercede with her father, now married to Meta, but without success. With Osdorff’s help, Thymiane and her friend Erika escape from the school. An attempt to discover the whereabouts of her baby convinces her that the child is dead, and Thymiane wanders the streets desolate and homeless. She is taken to an address given to her by Erika, which she discovers is a brothel. For the first time, Thymiane finds herself in a world which is frank and open in its dealings and where she is treated with generosity and affection. At a party in a café, Thymiane agrees to be raffled, not realising that her father, Meta and Meinert are dining there. Their shocked discovery of Thymiane’s lifestyle compels them to leave. After her father’s death, Thymiane generously renounces her inheritance in favour of Meta and her children but Osdorff, who had proposed marriage, takes his own life. At the funeral, Thymiane meets Osdorff’s uncle, and soon after marries him. Now elevated into an improved social position, she challenges the reform school system under which she suffered, and brings about change. Because the exploration of social themes formed the subject-matter of so many of his films, Pabst’s approach has often been referred to as ‘realist’; but this is something that he personally rejected, arguing that, for him, realism had no value in itself and that he chose realist themes with the intention of being a stylist, that realism was merely a means to an end. In constructing a world that goes beyond realism, Pabst is aided by a medium in which sound is absent. Much of the film has a dream-like quality, as if each scene exists only during the moments that the characters occupy it; that they are living lives remote from a real world. This feeling is particularly evident in the scenes in and around the pharmacy with its windows and glass doors leading onto the street. Outside the shop is darkness, it is never seen during daylight, and characters that come and go disappear into the darkness; no street lights; no traffic or passers-by. This is true also of those few dayexterior scenes outside the reform school, when Thymiane is being taken there, and later when escaping with Erika and Osdorff. Again, there are no occupants of the scene other than the characters themselves. Ridiculously (after all, this is a silent film), one is convinced that if one could hear anything, there would not be anything to hear. A recognition that inter-titles inevitably interrupted the visual flow, encouraged an approach whereby they were only used if the import of the content would otherwise be obscure. The absence of audible dialogue consequently imposed a need to develop a shooting and editing design, predicated on characters’ actions, which was able to inform the content much more rigorously. This could enable a considerable degree of tension to enter the structure. Pabst, in particular, sought to amplify this tension by building a scene from a considerable number of different camera positions and image sizes. This ubiquity of viewpoint was partly

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disorientating and unsettling. Because there were no sources of sound to fix or centre the content of a scene realistically, it was possible to invest the scene with a power that was centred on the image and inflected by the editing. During Thymiane’s birthday celebration, Meinert writes in her new diary, making an assignation for 10. 30 that evening. At the conclusion of the party, as the guests are about to leave, Meta arrives and is introduced as Henning’s new ‘housekeeper’. As the guests leave, Henning and Meta exchange meaningful looks. Suddenly, we are at the door of the shop and Meinert is attempting to dismiss two men who have come on an errand. Thymiane arrives at the door and looks down beyond the standing men. She steps forward; looks to each of them, then back to the ground. A slow pan and tilt reveals a stretcher and a figure covered by a blanket. In a reverse angle, Thymiane pulls back the blanket to reveal the dead face of Elizabeth. Thymiane is devastated; she runs up the stairs and into the flat where she finds her father and Meta seated in a close tête-à-tête, her father’s arm around Meta’s shoulders. Under the emotional overload, Thymiane faints. Significantly, Pabst constructs this scene without a single inter-title; the content is in the action and the performances mediated through framing and pacing. Diary of a Lost Girl exemplifies brilliantly the power of the silent film to convey meanings that transcend the verbal. Because the film can only narrate through a series of related images devoid of their natural sounds, they are able to carry a different weight of meaning. Their enforced silence demands that their content be interpreted more than realistically, and consequently the composition and framing of each shot, and the manner of its linkage to each adjoining shot, is never simply expedient or arbitrary as might be common in a realistic sound-film presentation with edits linked to the patterns of speech. In the next scene Thymiane has taken to her bed. Her aunt offers her some food and a glass of wine which Thymiane refuses and which is placed on the dressing table next to the bed. After telling Thymiane’s father that she will return the next day, and showing her disapproval at Meta’s presence, she leaves. The following scene between Henning and Meta, consists of a subtle series of exchanged looks, and movements clearly carrying anticipatory sexual overtones, as Henning follows her into a room. The aunt enters the pharmacy as Meinert is closing up and lowering the window blinds. A brief conversation between them carries no inter-titles and can be inferred as a token exchange of farewells. A cut to the shop exterior shows the aunt leaving and through the glass door Meinert locks up behind her. Then a panning shot, following the aunt as she leaves the scene, shows Meinert lowering the final blind. This lowering of blinds is clearly intended to provoke a psychological response, particularly in the way that it is shot and cut. As the final blind begins to fall, seen from the outside of the shop, an action cut is made to the interior – a CS of Meinert’s back view as the blind falls in front of him. The cut powerfully emphasises that the spectator is to be included in the events that follow and not

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excluded with the departing aunt. The falling curtain encloses the space and shuts out intrusion. Meinert turns into profile and takes out his pocket watch. A cut to a CU shows the time as 10.25. Then a quick fade out and back in – some tension in the haste – reveals Thymiane in CS waking from a sleep. Her hand finds the diary on the bed, placed there by the aunt when making room for the food and wine on the dressing table. Reminded of her assignation with Meinert, she looks towards the bedside clock – nearly 10.30. A cut to Meinert in CS. He puts his watch back in his pocket and his look suggests that he suspects that Thymiane will not come. Resignedly, he takes off his jacket. The camera pans with him to the coat hooks behind the shop counter where he exchanges it for his work coat, then continues to follow him as he walks along behind the counter. Suddenly he stops, but the camera continues the pan to reveal that Thymiane has kept the appointment and stands in the doorway leading from the flat above. Before moving on to explore and analyse the seduction scene which follows, it might be appropriate to comment on Pabst’s method of telling the story linearly with little or no use of dramatic irony. The film is structured so that the spectator is not told, nor invited to guess, the outcome of future events but experiences them as a series of surprises shared with the characters themselves. Seldom is anything signalled in advance. For example, the whole first section consists of surprise events: Elizabeth’s sudden and unexplained departure; Thymiane’s discovery that Meinert has written in her diary suggesting a meeting; Meta’s unannounced arrival to replace Elizabeth; the two men arriving unexpectedly with a body and the revelation that Elizabeth is dead; and Thymiane discovering the nature of her father’s relationship with Meta. Even Thymiane’s arrival in the shop is presented as a surprise. This structuring method allows the story to be told primarily in terms of dramatic action. In his book, On Directing Film, screenwriter, director and playwright David Mamet promotes the idea that a filmplay is best told in a series of cuts.

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Let the cut tell the story. Because otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you have narration. If you slip into narration, you are saying, ‘you’ll never guess why what I just told you is important to the story.’ It’s unimportant that the audience should guess why it’s important to the story. It’s important simply to tell the story. Let the audience be surprised.12

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Louise Brooks makes some revealing comments about the actors who played her seducers. Commenting on Gustav Diessel, who played Jack the Ripper in Pandora’s Box, and Fritz Rasp, who played Meinert, she says, ‘They were the only actors in those films whom I found beautiful and sexually alluring.’ Describing Pabst’s approach to the seduction scene, which concludes the first section of the story, Louise Brooks says:

Conceiving the seduction scenes in The Diary of a Lost Girl as a ballet, with me (Thymiane) as the seductress, he directed them as a series of subtle, almost wordless manoeuvres between an Innocent’ young girl and a wary lecher. He chose Fritz Rasp not only for the restraint with which he would play a part verging on the burlesque but also for his physical grace and strength. When I collapsed in his embrace, he swept me up into his arms and carried me off to bed as lightly as if I weighed no more than my silken nightgown and a robe.13

1 2 3 4

5 6 7

MCS Meinert looking off frame right. CS Thymiane looking at him CAM left with a serious expression. She looks away, then following her gaze steps out of frame left into the shop. MCS Thymiane. A reverse angle (crossing the line) as she moves away, stopping at the counter. MCS Meinert (as in 1) now looking off-frame left towards Thymiane OOV. He lets the work coat that he is holding fall to the floor, then steps out of frame into the shop. MCS Thymiane facing the camera looking straight ahead. Meinert comes up behind her. A pause – she begins to speak: Inter-title: ‘I am worried.’ CS Thymiane from behind showing her back and neck. Meinert edging frame right.

No necessity to return to Thymiane’s MCS for the completion of the line – which would be cumbersome – Pabst goes to a view which the spectator is invited to share with Meinert which emphasises her vulnerability. Meinert slowly lifts his left hand to touch her shoulder. 8

CS Thymiane, Meinert behind her (similar to 5 but closer), Meinert putting his right hand on her shoulder.

Although this is in fact a continuity error, it illustrates that continuity is invariably less important than dramatic intention emphasised through the framing of the shot. Meinert’s fingers tighten slightly on her shoulder. He brings his lips close behind her head and speaks. 9 Inter-title: Til tell you Elizabeth’s secret ...’ 10 CU Thymiane, Meinert behind. She turns her head slightly towards him. Meinert continues to speak. 11 Inter-title: ‘You will learn all of it ...’ 12 BCU Thymiane profile. Meinert’s face soft focus behind her, his lips continue to move.

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The seduction scene:

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13 Inter-title: ‘I will not hold back anything 14 MCS Thymiane and Meinert. She looks into his face then puts her head on his shoulder. His arm is around her and he turns her and pulls her to him. This wider framing is necessary for two reasons. Coming after the BCU, it reveals, through body language, more of Thymiane’s decision to respond to the erotic implication of Meinert’s words and by drawing back it invites both the angle change and the kiss that follows.

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15 CS Meinert and Thymiane, an angle change and a closer view. Camera tilts with them as Meinert lowers Thymiane to the ground. Her head fall back on his shoulder, her eyes closed. 16 CU Thymiane from behind Meinert. He pulls her to him and kisses her. 17 BCU Meinert from behind Thymiane as the kiss continues. He breaks away, looks round towards the hall and stairwell, then starts to lift her. 18 MCS panning with Meinert as he carries Thymiane into the hallway. quick fade to black. quick fade in. 19 MCS The door to Thymiane’s bedroom swings open and Meinert carries Thymiane into the room. Pan with him towards the bed. 20 MCS angle change. Meinert lowers Thymiane onto the bed. He sees her diary on the bed and picks it up. 21 CS his hand moves the diary across the frame. 22 CU the plate and glass of wine on the dressing table. As the diary is pushed onto the surface the glass topples and the wine is spilt.14 23 CU Thymiane. Apparently unconscious, her head on the pillow. 24 CU Meinert. A reverse angle. He looks at her. 25 MCS. Meinert’s POV of Thymiane lying on the bed. 26 CU Meinert. As in shot 24. 27 CS Thymiane. Meinert leans down to her, then pulls her up to him then lies down, his face alongside hers.

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fade to black.

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What is particularly notable about this sequence of twenty-seven shots is that only two of them are used more than once. Shot 1 – Meinert’s surprised response on first seeing Thymiane – is repeated as shot 4, when he moves towards her; and shot 24 – Meinert looking at the recumbent Thymiane – is continued in shot 26; which is conventional POV structure. This means that, excluding inter-titles, Pabst uses twenty-two different set-ups to construct the content of the scene.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

6

Sjöström’s name was Anglicised to Seastrom while working in America. This is the same actor, Ivan Mosjukhin, used by Kuleshov for his famous experiment; the spelling of his name was altered to assist French pronunciation. Tourjansky eventually went to America to direct The Cossacks for MGM starring John Gilbert, but was removed before the film was completed. He was also removed from United Artists’ The Tempest. Soon after he rejoined Ermolieff in Berlin. The Pathécolor system used for Casanova gave spectacular results. Developed by the Pathé Company before the First World War, it involved the production of a series of separate stencil masks, one for each of three colours, for every frame. These were cut by hand using a pantograph that traced the selected area, each frame being enlarged and back-projected onto a ground glass screen. Selected dyes were then stencilled onto a monochome print of the film. The method is described in detail in Brian Coe’s The History of Movie Photography, pp. 113–14. Versions of the film exist with inter-titles that name some of the characters differently. Thérèse is called Carlotta, and Maria, Countess Mari, is called Bianca the daughter of the Count. Being easy to change, inter-titles were sometimes altered to raise their moral tone – a daughter being considered more acceptable as the focus of Casanova’s amorous attentions than a wife. For the British release both the title and the name of the main character were changed. The film became Prince of Adventurers and Casanova became Roberto, either to deflect prurient interest or disguise its classic origins. Probably both. The famous sequence which follows, a sword dance performed in the nude by Corticelli and her female companions, is brilliantly executed with great verve and daring.

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This kind of structure encapsulates a method that was at the centre of a wide range of stylistic constructs to be found in silent films, particularly in these final years. By careful selection of composition and image size, and connecting shots by matching movements, Pabst’s film constructs an apparently single continuing reality which is actually fragmented. But each fragment is carefully chosen to reflect and magnify the spectator’s response to the developing emotional progress of the scene. Because of this fragmentation, at some level the spectator is made objectively aware of the construction and this has the effect of heightening the pleasure of watching. As with any presentation which acknowledges the artifice with which formal devices are manipulated to sustain emotional tension and hold it in place (opera or ballet, for example), it is possible to be both inside and outside the experience at the same time. This is not to suggest that an awareness of the importance of such cinematic constructs completely disappeared with the coming of sound, but it became diluted; a dependence on meaning expressed primarily through dialogue tended to undervalue the subtleties of balanced compositions inflected by careful editing; changes in camera angles and image size now tended merely to serve the rhythmic dictates of the spoken word.

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7

8

9

10

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11 12 13 14

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Optical printers were developed in the early 1920s to enable optical effects; fades, dissolves, wipes and superimpositions to be introduced into films with a high degree of accuracy and control. Making a dissolve involved making a print of the outgoing shot from the original camera negative up to the point when the dissolve was to occur, then gradually reducing the amount of light in the printer over the length of the dissolve to zero. The print stock was then wound back to the dissolve start point, the incoming shot negative was loaded into the printer, and the light level increased as the incoming shot was gradually superimposed over the faded latent image of the outgoing shot. If done accurately, the printed result was a gradual dissolve from one shot to the next. Until the mid-1920s, this had to be done for every dissolve in every release print of the film. Attempts made to produce an intermediate negative of the dissolve by copying a print were unsatisfactory because there was substantial quality loss. It was only after 1926 when special duplicating positive materials became available that quality duplicate opticals became viable. A description given in The American Film Institute Catalogue. This part-sound version, first released on 23 November 1928, if available, does not appear to have been the subject of any study. During an illustrious career, Conrad Nervig worked with many of Hollywood’s famous directors. He was the first to win an Academy Award for film editing: for Eskimo (1934); he was awarded another for King Solomon’s Mines (1950). This inter-title remains on the screen, inexplicably, for 16 seconds – time to read it through four times comfortably. It seems to be a mistake. Furthermore, there is evidence that at one time it was a different length; after 12 seconds there is a noticeable jump, the sort of jump evident when extra footage is added to the original cut negative, and it continues for a further 4 seconds. A possible explanation is that the original length of the inter-title was in fact 4 seconds – enough time to read it but not twice. This might have been deliberate, a final desperate bid to get Letty to stay; quickly rejected and followed by her rapid exit. Someone reassessing the titles much later, misunderstanding the reason for its short length, could have ordered it to be lengthened – something undertaken literally and rather insensitively. Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood, pp. 106–7. Mamet, On Directing Film, p. 2. Brooks, ibid., p. 107. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, pp. 306–7, quoting a letter written by Leonhardt in 1953. In his letter, Leonhardt refers with regret to this scene, and this moment, as one that was censored from the version that he saw: ‘he lays her on the bed and her feet knock over a glass of red wine which spills over the bedclothes – a symbol for those who understand, a Stimmungsbild for the others.’

13

Experiments It comes as something of a surprise to discover that the first successful attempts to marry sound with pictures are alleged to have occurred as early as 1889 when Thomas Edison’s young laboratory assistant W. K. L. Dickson is supposed to have presented Edison with a projected image on a screen, roughly synchronised with sound. In actual fact no evidence of Dickson’s claim exists; if Dickson had developed such equipment, Edison would certainly have filed a patent, and his first moving-image patents were not filed until 1891. Initially, Edison was not interested in moving pictures other than as an accompaniment to his phonograph, which he had patented in 1877. The phonograph had become immensely popular, and by the 1890s coin-operated phonographs had become a lucrative business. It was an attempt to develop a peep-show accompaniment to the recorded sound that caused the Kinetoscope to be developed; a machine that, ‘would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear’. During the years that followed, successful attempts were made by inventors working in Britain and Europe to find ways to make short films accompanied by synchronous sound. In France, Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Liolet offered minute-long performances by great stars of the theatre, opera and ballet presented in their Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, and in 1903, Oskar Messter, the German inventor and film pioneer, began to produce short synchronised performances of cabaret stars and comedy sketches, many examples of which still exist. Not all these were filmed as the sound was recorded; often the performer would be filmed as they mimed to a pre-recorded version of the song. All of these various synchronising systems depended on the phonograph as the sound-recording and playback mechanism, and the fundamental problem that these presentations faced was that there was no satisfactory means of amplifying the sound. All early phonograph recordings reproduced sound acoustically: a needle ran in a groove on a wax covered cylinder or disc and responded to small fluctuations in the surface; movements that were transmitted to a diaphragm. These faint vibrations were then amplified by linking the diaphragm to a horn, but the degree of amplification was limited; after a certain point the quality of the

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Sounds promising

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reproduction became distorted. This inability to amplify sound adequately to fill the space where the film would be projected meant that there was no way that it could compete with the presentations of silent films in large theatres accompanied by an orchestra. Consequently, filmmaking technology and artistry developed without sound, and it is interesting to speculate how films might have evolved if they had been required to lock themselves to sound recordings from the very earliest days. I have referred in an earlier chapter to the fact that before cinema was invented a performance was, almost by definition, something that was continuous from the point when it began to the point when it finished; there was no precedent for the construction of a continuity from separate parts. Therefore, instead of developing the way that it did, filmmaking might have remained little more than photographed theatre, or the short-lived novelty that Lumière had predicted: single-shot actualités – accompanied by sound. The idea of recording sound optically on photographic film by turning sound into patterns of light had been the subject of experiment as early as 1898, when the Polish-American inventor Professor Joseph T. Tykociner attempted to produce sound-modulated variations in a manometric gas flame. Further attempts to record sound photographically were made by Ernst Rühmer and Eugene Lauste in 1904. Lauste, a successful French inventor, went to the US and worked with W. K. L. Dickson at Edison’s laboratory in 1887 and later with the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. In 1909, he acquired rights to a British patent for combining picture and sound on the same strip of film using a photo-sensitive selenium cell and proceeded to develop a system which he called the ‘photocinematophone’. It was proved to work, but foundered owing to the difficulties of amplifying the sound. Lauste’s researches eventually came to an end owing to lack of finances.1 Inventors unceasingly pursued the idea of sound films, and numerous systems made brief, if unsuccessful, appearances in the years before the First World War. Edison was eventually able to develop and install a sound on disc system in some New York vaudeville theatres in 1913, but the presentation of filmed acts that were inferior to live performances, the primitive mechanical synchronising system and the lack of adequate amplification ensured the Kinetophone’s early demise. A similar British system, the Vivaphone, appeared about the same time and quickly met the same fate. One of the most promising, Orlando E. Kellum’s ‘Talking Picture Mechanism’, which first appeared in 1913, was eventually used to provide sound for two sequences in D. W. Griffith’s Dream Street in 1921. With the advent of the First World War, military necessity acted as a spur to scientific development, especially in the sphere of communications, and this took invention out of the hands of individuals and into laboratories controlled by industrial corporations. The realisation that sound recorded on film would have considerable commercial potential encouraged the search, in Europe as well as in America, for a viable, dependable system. A major stimulus to development was the successful invention of electronic sound amplification.

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In 1907, Dr. Lee De Forest (1873–1961) had developed the Audion 3-electrode Amplifier Tube, or triode, to improve radio reception, and this became essential to the development of all sound amplification systems. In fact, De Forest had himself become preoccupied with the idea of producing a practical sound-on-film device, and between 1922 and 1925 worked in co-operation with the Theodore W. Case laboratory to develop the ‘Phonofilm’ system; but demonstrations failed to impress. Being first in the field proved to be a disadvantage: Hollywood Studio bosses, faced with the enormous expense of converting studios and theatres to an untried system, showed little interest and lack of funds for further research put the system, temporarily, back on the shelf. A major player in the area of sound and speech during this period was Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) who produced microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers and were involved in producing equipment for the telephone, sound-recording and radio industries. They too considered that they should be involved with research into synchronising pictures to sound on film and sound on disc. Because they were already well established in the field of disc recording, they used their expertise to devise a way of synchronising disc recordings with picture. By 1925 they were in a position to market the system to the major film studios. The response was as unenthusiastic as that given to De Forest and ‘Phonofilm’, and for the same reasons. One studio, however, was financially more venturesome. Warner Bros. Pictures was a minor studio compared to the big Hollywood majors; they saw the acquisition of sound as a way of getting ahead of the competition. With financial assistance from Wall Street, they established the Vitaphone Corporation, which would develop the Western Electric system commercially. As far as Warner Bros, was concerned, the principal appeal of a synchronised sound system was not to make ‘talking pictures’ but to provide pre-recorded, synchronised orchestral accompaniment to all their films and so increase their appeal to audiences, particularly in the independently owned, second- and third-run theatres where most of their films were shown. Warners decided to launch the new system in spectacular style. Don Juan was an extravagantly made, romantic period drama, starring John Barrymore, which had begun as a silent film with a budget of $500,000. Producer Jack L. Warner decided to increase the budget to $700,000; their most expensive film so far. The elaborate orchestral score was recorded by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in the Manhattan Opera House, where special arrangements were made for the film to be projected on a screen. As well as the music, the film had some impressive synchronised sound effects recorded at the same time. Don Juan premièred on 6 August 1926 at the 1,300-seat Warner Theatre in New York, and the film was preceded by an hour-long synchronous sound presentation of specially filmed concert items. This began with a filmed introduction spoken in perfect synchronism by the president of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, Will H. Hays. The film, and its accompanying programme,

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was a huge popular and critical success and had record-breaking runs in major cities in the United States and Europe.

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Achievement

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Warners successful presentation compelled its competitors to face a reality they had tried to avoid: that films with synchronous sound did have considerable commercial potential. They also knew that the enormous expenses involved in conversion would be crippling. What they did all agree was that if they did go ahead, they would all proceed using the same system. There were now several available but, unlike Vitaphone, all of them were sound on film systems. William Fox, president of the Fox Film Corporation, had initially been impressed by, and had reportedly invested $100,000 in, the De Forest ‘Phonofilm’ system, but had fallen out with De Forest over Fox’s questionable acquisition of the rights to the German ‘Tri-Ergon’ sound-on-film process invented by Josef Engl, Joseph Massole and Hans Vogt. Theodore W. Case, who had worked with De Forest, had continued research with another inventor, Earl I. Sponable, and had come up with a sound-on-film system very similar to ‘Phonofilm’. Now convinced of its viability, Fox did not hesitate and bought the rights just two weeks before the Warner Don Juan première. This ‘Case-Sponable’ system he renamed Movietone. Movietone was the first sound-on-film system to be used commercially, but Fox’s introduction of films using the process was very far from spectacular; the first programme shown in New York in January 1927 consisted of a series of canned songs, performed by Spanish cabaret singer Requel Melier, which preceded What Price Glory?, Fox’s latest silent feature. Interest in sound film increased dramatically with the introduction of newsreel footage. Movietone news demonstrated that sound gave a tremendous impact to the factual coverage of historical events; audiences now both saw and heard parades, marches and the speeches of world leaders. The synchronous filming of Lindburgh’s plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, taking off on its transatlantic flight caused a sensation. A fact not lost on Hollywood directors was that Movietone also demonstrated that sound on film could be recorded very effectively in exterior locations. Warners, having made such a total commitment to sound, could now only go forward. By April 1927 they had completed construction of the first sound studio in the world and started production a month later on the film that would ensure the future of the sound film for all time, The Jazz Singer, which opened in New York on the 6 October 1927. Because of the fame that has become attached to it over the years, it is perhaps surprising to discover that The Jazz Singer is not much more than a silent film with a synchronised orchestral score, some Jewish cantorial music and seven popular songs performed by Al Jolson, its star. In many ways this was not so very different from the presentations of various concert performances – some of them including

Not as easy as it sounds Enthusiasm for the obvious advantages synchronous sound would bring to the screen had largely blinded the studios to the changes that would now have to be made to the filmmaking process. The problems were threefold. Silence during recording was essential, but everything around a film stage was noisy: stages were not sound proofed, cameras had whirring motors, camera transports trundled and arc lights produced a constant hiss. Second, sound recording required that microphones should be close to performers but not seen on the screen, and only ‘open’ to whichever performer was speaking at the time. Third, a method had to be found that would enable the films to be edited. Shot changes needed to be made during a scene but could not interfere with the continuous recording of the dialogue. In addition, background music and sound effects would still be necessary as an essential element in the final presentation. The methods that evolved during the years that followed to solve the first two problems are not directly relevant to this study. Suffice it to say that solutions were quickly found to the difficulties caused by unwanted noise without losing camera

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songs performed by Jolson – that Vitaphone had made and shown between October 1926 and February 1927. The latest of these had been received, according to Variety’s reviewer, ‘with remarkable composure, not to say indifference’. After all, for all their technical sophistication, these were only mechanically reproduced presentations of acts by popular artists, similar to those made by Oskar Messter in Germany in the years preceding the First World War. What made the difference, and entranced the audience, were not the songs but the moments when Jolson spoke. This was speech that was not addressed to the audience but to other characters in the film and was an exciting mix of intimacy and spontaneity. Synchronised speech occurs in only two places. In the first, Jolson, in the character of a famous entertainer, Jack Robin, has been persuaded to entertain a restaurant audience with a performance of ‘Dirty Hands, Dirty Face’, and during the applause, improvises around the phrase he had already made famous in his stage act: ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute – you ain’t heard nothin’ yet! Wait a minute, I tell ya, you ain’t heard nothin’. You want to hear ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie’? Alright, hold on, hold on ...’ before launching into the song. The second, and probably most effective spoken section, consists of a largely improvised dialogue sequence between Jolson and Eugenie Besserer, who plays his mother, during which he sings ‘Blue Skies’ accompanying himself on the piano. Jolson’s style was essentially casual and improvisational and above all natural, and it was this quality that gave the scene such tremendous appeal. The difference that the international success of The Jazz Singer made to the future of sound on the screen was, as Alexander Walker has pointed out, the confidence factor; the reassurance that sound was much more than just a passing attraction, it was permanent and profitable.2

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mobility; and improvements in the design and manufacture of microphones and sound equipment meant that the need to record usable sound no longer dominated the way films could be shot. The coming of sound initially placed constraints most particularly on the freedom to edit the film unhindered by anything other than the dramatic requirements of the filmed material. The creative heart of silent film was its flexibility, that it could be cut and joined at will with no primary need to respect the spoken word. Silent films were able to construct their own temporal logic: include caption cards to advance action, speed up action by under-cranking and introduce jumps in the action to maintain pace. Synchronised sound demanded a continuity bound to dialogue and action played out in real time. At the start, it put both shooting and editing into a straitjacket. The fundamental problem with sound recorded on disc was that it was inflexible; it could not be edited and there were serious problems with synchronisation. Sections of sound could be mechanically erased from a disc (and sometimes were, at the behest of censors), but as a recording medium it had considerable limitations. The Movietone system was designed to record both the sound and the pictures on the same strip of film, but whereas sound recording requires the film to travel smoothly and continuously past the sound head, images can only be recorded with the film moving intermittently through the picture gate. The solution to this problem was to separate the two, recording the sound onto the film strip after it had been through the picture gate and its passage had been smoothed. Provided this same separation was maintained during projection, everything would appear to be in synch, but this locking of the sound to the film, in a fixed, staggered relationship, complicated the ability to edit it almost as much as the Vitaphone disc system. It was not long before it was realised that the answer was to record sound on film, but independently, on a completely separate film strip running over a sound head at the same time, and at the same speed, as the film camera. This recorder was called a sound camera and it eventually became the established method of recording film sound. By recording the sound on the same material as the picture – 35 mm film – it was possible to sustain synchronisation with the picture, in a frame-for-frame relationship. Small electrical impulses coming from the microphones via a mixing desk were used to vary the intensity of a light source which illuminated a narrow slit over which the unexposed negative film passed.3 This exposure to light caused equivalent fluctuations to be recorded in a narrow band along one side of the 35 mm sound negative which, when developed, would be visible either as variations in density or variations in area, depending on which system was used. A print would then be made from this negative on to high-contrast print stock so that the heavily exposed, darker parts of the negative would print clear and the lighter parts dark. When this print was passed between a constant light source and a photo-electric cell, the fluctuating light signals would be transformed back into electrical impulses which, when amplified and played through a loudspeaker,

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would replicate the sounds originally recorded. Once the film was complete and ready for projection, a ‘married print’ was made, similar in most respects to a silent film print except that the picture size was slightly reduced to allow space for the optical soundtrack to be printed alongside. To ensure that the recorded sound passed smoothly over the sound head, it was separated from the intermittent picture gate much as it was in the Movietone system, by being positioned at a standard distance ahead. But all this was to come later. At the end of 1927, Movietone and Vitaphone was all there was. It is instructive to examine The Jazz Singer, and in particular those two dialogue scenes which had such an impact. Apart from performances of songs sung by Jolson earlier in the film, which were similar to the concert performances that had been part of previous Vitaphone presentations, the substantial part of The Jazz Singer is a silent film with dialogue captions and an orchestral background music soundtrack. During the restaurant scene, Jolson’s character, Jack Robin, is discovered by fellow diners eating bacon and eggs and is persuaded to sing ‘Dirty Hands, Dirty Face’. As he leaves his table to walk up to the band platform, a dialogue inter-title appears as he turns to his dining companion: ‘Wish me luck, Pal – I’ll certainly need it’. The song which follows, and the improvised dialogue link that leads into ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie’, are all of a piece, that is to say a continuous recording. It appears that the performance was filmed using four cameras, each fitted with a lens of different focal length so as to provide the editor with a selection of cutting angles and frame sizes; a situation almost identical to that now used in television studios to cover recordings of live events, except that the noisy film cameras were encased in individual sound-proof booths. All the cameras were required to keep running for the entire length of the recording so that the editor could cut between viewpoints without losing synchronism with the sound. The later scene between Jolson and Besserer was covered on two cameras in much the same way. What is instantly noticeable is the sense of artifice and distancing caused by the long lenses, there being no way that a camera could film closer with a standard lens without being seen by one or more of the others. It is also noticeable that the editing between shots retains all the action-cutting formulations that had become established during the late silent period, and that changes in camera angle tend to follow the musical phrasing. The editing demands made by The Jazz Singer were hardly arduous, calling for accuracy rather than insight, and the same might also be said of the very first all-talking picture Lights of New York which opened in July 1928. Lights of New York, a naïve gangster melodrama with a running time of just over fifty-seven minutes, was not considered to be a good film by any standards. The film is made up of twenty-four sequences, all but two containing dialogue. Most of the criticism levelled at the film was concerned with the inadequacies of the cliché-ridden script and the peculiar contortions of body positioning and movement that the actors had to undergo so that the microphones, usually hidden

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in obvious or inappropriate places, could pick up what they were saying. In an attempt to provide adequate cover, scenes were shot with up to six cameras, all equipped with a range of lenses, very like the restaurant scene in The Jazz Singer. This way of filming was extremely uneconomic; a scene filmed with six cameras would use only a sixth of the film exposed, and a spoilt take on one camera would render the material shot by the others unusable as well. In September 1928, Paramount issued an edict to their directors limiting the number of takes that they were permitted to print to two. This method of filming meant that the editing of all the scenes was predictably repetitive, with cutting points accompanying exchanges of dialogue and the size of shot determined by whichever camera happened to be on the actor speaking at the time. Because dialogue now affected how long a shot must be held, shot lengths, compared to silent films of the period, virtually doubled. One of the effects of having to shoot films in this way was that it denied the camera and the spectator access to the dramatic space within a scene, and prevented any selection of angles and framings that might be used to reflect the psychological development of the drama as it was played out.

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Many silent films were still in production when The Jazz Singer reached the screen. Most of them adapted to sound by adding a pre-recorded orchestral score and sound effects, as Warners had done with Don Juan. Other films produced a mix, shooting dialogue for some scenes but using inter-titles as well. Some films appeared in two versions. Alfred Hitchcock was filming Blackmail when the decision was made to reshoot the final reel with dialogue. Films released as silent were often withdrawn from distribution so that the last reel could be re-shot with synch sound, but Hitchcock had been expecting this and decided to shoot dialogue for many more scenes than the producers anticipated. The sound version of Blackmail was premièred in June 1929 and was immediately both a popular and critical success. The silent version, intended for showing in theatres not yet equipped for sound, was released two months later. Alice White falls out with her fiancé, Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber, and goes off with an artist, Crewe. When he attempts to rape her she stabs him in self-defence and kills him. Frank, assigned to the case, suspects her involvement, which is confirmed when a small time crook, Tracy, attempts to blackmail him. However, Frank convinces the police that the blackmailer is the murder suspect. During a spectacular chase around the British Museum, Tracy falls to his death and the case is closed. The first reel starts with a prologue, in which Frank is shown at work arresting and charging a police suspect. This sequence appears to be identical in every respect with the silent version, but detailed examination reveals that in every

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

CU Crewe looking obliquely off-camera R Inter-title: ‘Alice.’ MCS Alice. She appears from behind the screen (cam L) and looks towards Crewe obliquely off cam L. CU Crewe, (as in 1) Inter-title: ‘I’ve got it.’ MCS Alice (as in 3). She pleads with him. MCS Crewe. Not taking his eyes off Alice, looking almost at the camera, he throws the dress aside and starts to move forward. MWS Alice with the back of Crewe’s head and L shoulder cam-R foreground in MCU. As he moves, the camera tracks forward with him towards Alice. He gets near to her and grabs her wrists. MS Crewe and Alice but slightly favouring Crewe as they continue to wrestle.

The sound version consists of a single shot lasting 45 seconds: 1

MS Crewe and Alice behind the screen, right of frame, taking off the costume. Crewe, having taken Alice’s dress draped over the screen, holds it behind his back, then turns, puts it over his shoulder, sits at the piano CAM left and starts to play, his back to a screen. Alice, now standing in her slip, sees that her dress has gone. [Crewe continues to play the piano throughout the following dialogue] ALICE: Oh! CREWE: I’ve got it.

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instance the sound version has been constructed from alternative takes of the silent version. This would seem to suggest that Hitchcock deliberately set out to prepare two versions from the outset, or at least make provision for them. The sequence, like many others in the film, contains no dialogue and was shot silent, with music and some post synchronised sound effects dubbed on later. In preparing the two versions, some dialogue sequences shot with sound are used in the silent version with inter-titles, but there is no way of knowing if these replaced scenes that were originally shot without sound or whether Hitchcock had planned for the sound version to be used for both. From an editing point of view, the most revealing scenes are those where Hitchcock has used completely different visuals.4 Alice has had an argument with Frank in a café. Thinking Frank has left, she goes off with an artist, Crewe, and agrees to pose in costume for him in his studio. After she changes into the costume, Crewe makes an attempt to seduce her, which she rebuffs. Changing back into her clothes behind a screen, she discovers that he has taken her dress. In the silent version, this brief moment is filmed using five separate camera setups and includes two inter-titles. This is how the sequence is cut:

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ALICE: Please give it to me. CREWE: All right. Come round, come along. ALICE: Please. Please. CREWE: Come along Alice ...

Alice reaches out to take the dress from Crewe’s shoulder but he takes it and throws it aside. CREWE: There it is.

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Crewe plays some loud, discordant chords on the piano and gets up. He then turns to her and grabs her wrists and they struggle.

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In the following sequence, in order to protect herself, Alice stabs Crewe with a knife and kills him. The difference between the two versions is palpable. The freedom available to shoot and edit without constraint is manifest in the variety of structuring possibilities that Hitchcock exploits in the silent version. Selection of image size and camera positioning are made to heighten the drama, reveal the subtleties of performance, and increase identification by placing the spectator within the action. Unlike the sound version, which has to be played out in 45 seconds of real time, the silent version is constructed in cinematic time, determined by the editing. The nine shots that make up the sequence, including two inter-titles, last less than 30 seconds. One scene in Blackmail has been reprised so often that many people will have seen it who have never watched the complete film. This is the celebrated ‘Knife!’ scene from the sound version of the film. Alice and her parents are having breakfast in the living room behind the shop. In the doorway a local gossip is full of the news of the local murder and the weapon used. The dialogue consists of a monologue spoken by the gossip during which the word ‘knife’ occurs at regular intervals. 1 MCS Alice seated at the table, the CAM pans from her to a MCS of the gossip standing in the doorway and back to Alice. GOSSIP: ... whatever the provocation I could never use a knife ... now mind you, a knife is a difficult thing to handle ... I mean any knife ... 2 CS Alice. The woman’s voice becomes a blur apart from the word ‘knife’ which is emphasised by being spoken louder. FATHER [OOV]: Alice, cut us a bit of bread will you? The CAM tilts down to the bread knife and Alice picks it up. At the next repetition of the word ‘knife’ – the loudest thus far, Alice jerks the bread knife up in the air and it falls to the floor. 3 MWS the living room. The table in the foreground of the shot with the family seated and the gossip stands in the doorway at the back of the shot. Father rises to pick up the knife.

Here. You might have been more careful. You could have cut somebody with that.

What makes this scene memorable is the fact that in his very first sound film Hitchcock finds an opportunity to use sound creatively and expressionistically. By getting the actress playing the gossip to emphasise of the word ‘knife’, and placing it over a sustained close shot of Alice which then tilts down to the knife she is holding, he constructs a way of sharing Alice’s inner turmoil with the spectator in a way which is much more effective than he is able to achieve in the silent version, analysed below. It is an example of sound use and editing placement combined to powerful effect. It would seem that the scene was shot using two synchronised cameras, one covering the master shot – MWS described in 3 above – and the other covering the pans between Alice and the gossip in MCS. The CS of Alice which tilts down to the bread knife is very clearly an insert, shot later; it is a closer framing from virtually the same angle as the MCS and would have been shot without sound and positioned to match the key moment when the knife is jerked in the air. The silent version is structured quite differently: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

MCS the gossip in the doorway, as she speaks Inter-title: ‘And as I was saying and always will say – knives is not right.’ CS Alice (slightly from above). Pan from her to the bread and bread knife, the shadow of Alice’s hand falls onto the knife. CU Alice (CAM facing her directly) as she continues to reach. BCU the knife with Alice’s hand reaching towards it. MCS the bell above the shop door. It jerks and rings as the door suddenly opens. MWS the living room. The table in the foreground of the shot with the family seated and the gossip in the doorway at the back of the shot. Alice’s hand jerks the knife up and it falls to the floor. Father stands and rebukes Alice.

It is interesting to note that in the master shot of the silent version, the mother is seated to the right of camera which places her more directly facing the gossip, an arrangement which positions Alice on the left as someone overhearing what is being said rather than being the recipient of it; but in the sound version, with a different actress playing the gossip, the positions of Alice and her mother are reversed so as to facilitate a panning shot between Alice and the gossip. What is particularly revealing about this sequence is that Hitchcock establishes the extent of Alice’s tension by visually breaking it; the expressionistic shadow on the knife suddenly interrupted by an unexpected image of the shop doorbell cleverly evokes a sound that cannot be heard. When it came to shooting the sound version, he chose to do it by using the distorted dialogue expressionistically. We only need a moment’s thought to realise how less effective it would be to have the

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FATHER:

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gossip speaking without the word ‘knife’ being emphasised and then to have used the actual sound of the shop doorbell as the device that startles Alice. Cutting to the bell would have been even more inappropriate. It took very little time for filmmakers to realise that new methods had to be devised to enable them to film and edit with much greater flexibility. A first step was to film additional reaction shots with a silent camera moved in closer to the action after the master scene had been filmed, as in the Blackmail example. Shots of reverse angles or action taking place outside the framing of the synchronised shots – somebody entering a door for example, or about to enter the synchronised shot – could then be cut into the master scene as appropriate. The same approach would be used for close-up inserts of objects or written texts. All action that was complex in terms of the amount of space needed to contain it was shot without sound, and with independently recorded sound, called ‘wild’ sound, added later. Ever since the introduction of ‘synch’ sound, it has always been advantageous on occasions to film without recording sound; in Britain we refer to film shot in this way as having been shot ‘mute’. I was intrigued to discover that the American expression is ‘MOS’, and enquired why. It seems that when sound first came to Hollywood, many of the directors were of European origin and on occasions would announce to the crew, ‘The next shot we will shoot mit out sound’. The ability to put a sound-proof box (called a ‘blimp’) around the camera rather than put the camera and the operator into sound-proof booth was another important and liberating change and made it possible for the camera to move once more. Some scenes, big party scenes or musical production numbers where microphones would get in the way, could now be filmed using ‘play-back’. Prerecorded music and effects would be played during the filming, to which the performers would dance and sing while a single moving camera, often on a crane, would obtain a variety of different shots and framings either in a continuous take or as a series of shots performed against the same playback. These shots would be filmed synch, and the played-back sound recorded, but only as a guide, the original version of the sound being used in the final version. Directors and editors knew that everything would change if only they could cut and join the soundtrack. William Hornbeck, supervising editor at the Sennett Studios during this time recalled:

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The technicians that came from RCA5 and the sound people said, ‘Oh, you can’t cut, you can’t make a cut-in at all.’ So the first couple of films it was just miserable. But we learned then we could cut. Sennett used to get us into a conference, and say, ‘Look, you fellows have to learn how to do this.’ I always said, ‘Well the engineers from RCA say you can’t.’ He said, ‘The hell with that.’ We’d come in on Sunday and fool with their equipment, and he authorised it, and he said, ‘Look, I don’t care if they object to your doing it’ ... The problem was when you did cut there was an awful sound – it would go ‘bang,’ you know. Well then we

At that time, film was joined by making a small overlap, with film cement holding the two sections in register. When the sound join passed over the sound head it was ‘read’ as a sudden signal change which caused the bang. A small isosceles triangle, cut from black paper and glued across the join, caused the light passing through the soundtrack to be rapidly diminished and then increased; the air brush substituted opaque black paint which did the same job. This process was called ‘blooping’ and the small black triangle, eventually refined into an elongated diamond shape, was more often painted onto the track with quick-drying ‘blooping ink’.8 Once a method had been found to cut and join the soundtrack, it opened up the possibility of inserting close-ups carrying spoken lines into master scenes, not just reaction shots; and very soon scenes were being assembled from individual shots which had their own sound. Picture and sound cuts would invariably be made together. Film historian Rachel Low describes typical dialogue editing in the first European all-talkie Atlantic, directed by E. A. Dupont in 1929. A typical passage would cut to a speaker before he spoke, hold the shot while he delivered his lines carefully and slowly, hold it further to show him having finished and then cut away. Atlantic was shot like this, with whole conversations from start to finish, however trivial, recorded with slow and heavy emphasis.9 An alternative to filming pictures to pre-recorded sound – shooting to playback – was to add sound to pre-filmed silent pictures: post-synchronisation. One of the first films to successfully exploit this practice was Hallelujah!, director King Vidor’s first sound film, made in 1929. A romantic melodrama, featuring an all-black cast and set in the South, it is memorable for the realism of its performances and original and imaginative use of sound. Filmed on location in and around Memphis, Tennessee, the film is at its strongest when it frees itself from the formal requirements of synchronised shooting. The final sequence of the film depicts a frantic chase through a swamp which Vidor filmed with a constantly moving silent camera, achieving a fluidity impossible to achieve when recording sound. The sound effects and occasional post-synchronised lines of dialogue were recorded later. Vidor believed that sound should be used imaginatively, not just realistically. In interviews given to the press, he stressed that he intended to record noises into patterns and formalise the sound background. What is remarkable is that he and his film editors, Hugh Wynn and Anson Stevenson, achieved this before the editor’s main tool, the Movieola, was adapted to run and monitor a soundtrack locked to the picture. Before 1930 the only place to monitor sound

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devised little triangular pieces of paper which stick on where the splice was, [bloops] and the sound literally would go up and down. It would only make a puff, and we lived with that for a while. Then we got the air-brush. That still had a little puff on it. It was quite a while, till they had the push-pull sound.6 Then that eliminated your splice troubles.7

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was the projection room, and the only method of marking out changes in sound was to apply a grease pencil to barely visible fluctuations in the soundtrack. Vidor claimed that the demands made on his editors during the post-dubbing were such that one suffered a nervous breakdown.

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What had become extremely clear by the beginning of 1929 was that disc recording had severe limitations compared to sound on film, which offered considerable flexibility as a working medium. Even Warners, who had pioneered sound on disc, was experimenting with optical sound, and by the middle of that year Western Electric was considering abandoning disc recording altogether. By 1931 sound on disc had been abandoned, although cinemas retained equipment to run both systems for some time. What was recognised was that sound on film had a unique advantage over disc: as the quality of recording constantly improved, it would eventually be possible to run several tracks of sound together and rerecord them on to one track; sound ‘dubbing’ as it became known. Up until then, a dialogue scene could not be accompanied by music or any additional sound or effects; the only possibility was to record music and dialogue on the set at the same time. An example of this being achieved with considerable success was Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) directed by Josef von Sternberg for UFA and released in Germany in March 1930. Its stars were Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. Professor Rath (Jannings), an authoritarian teacher, finds some of his students looking at sexy photographs of Lola-Lola (Dietrich), a cabaret singer at The Blue Angel nightclub. Attracted by the confiscated photographs, he goes to the club, ostensibly to seek out his students. On meeting Lola he becomes entranced by her, an attraction she does not discourage. After they spend a night together, the school head indicates his disapproval of the relationship and Rath is stung into admitting an intention to marry Lola, accepting that he will then have to resign his post. They marry, and Rath enters the world of touring entertainers. His obsession with Lola leads to his gradual degradation as he is forced to play a role in a world which he fundamentally despises. Returning to the town where they first met, he reluctantly appears on stage at The Blue Angel playing a conjuror’s stooge and dressed as a clown. During the performance, Lola, standing in the wings, welcomes the amorous attentions of an attractive escapologist. Forced to exhibit his degradation in front of his former colleagues and their students and made insanely jealous by his wife’s infidelity, he becomes violently destructive and is put into a straitjacket. Eventually released, he returns by night to the school where, sitting at his former desk, he collapses and dies. Considering the ambitious demands of the project – setting dialogue and action against songs and audience reactions in The Blue Angel nightclub – the film succeeds brilliantly. Josef von Sternberg not only directed the film but also wrote the script, adapting it from the Heinrich Mann novel, Professor Unrat. Sternberg’s

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understanding of the difficulties of working with sound resulted in his placing emphasis on action and using dialogue very sparingly; but much of the credit for the way the material is handled should be given to the film editors, Walter Klee, who edited the original German version, and Sam Winston, editor of the Englishlanguage version.10 Although by 1930 the ability to assemble a scene shot with synch dialogue by cutting and joining the soundtrack was firmly established, the sound was usually constructed as a single track with dialogue sections covered by two or three cameras and mute shots inserted as appropriate. Joins would be made principally to assemble the scenes into a continuity. This meant that if a scene was required to contain different layers of sound they had all to be recorded at the same time on a single track. Sternberg devised a clever method of using the opening and closing of doors and windows to control the entry and exit of continuous sounds that existed behind the foreground dialogue and action. The method is used very effectively in a classroom scene near the beginning of the film. Towards the end of the scene, Professor Rath has set his students a writing task and turns to open a window. As he does so, we hear the sound of the school choir singing in an adjacent building. This continues over the several shots that follow: the teacher watches his students, cleans his glasses, discovers a student looking at a picture of Lola (the nightclub singer), and finally shuts the window again, but in a different set-up from the one in which it was opened, the sound of the choir is then cut off and the dialogue continues. Plainly, the off-screen choir was instructed to begin singing at the point when the window was opened then, after a period of time, which was predetermined to allow all the action to be included, the window would be closed again and the singing stopped. All the shots used in the interim would have been shot silent and positioned during editing against the choral track; the new action of the window finally closing would have been post-synchronised with the recorded sound of it being closed. Alternatively, the choral singing could have been used in much the same way as a piece of continuous dialogue and simply cut in and out of the synchronous window effects. This is a simple illustration of Sternberg’s method, but he adapts it to more sophisticated use in a later scene. The scene opens in Lola’s dressing room. She sits at a table applying make-up and is receiving the attention of some of the students; two of them stand next to her. After a brief dialogue exchange between Lola and the students, one of them opens the door at the back of the set and through it we see Kiepert, the manager, and the clown. As the door opens, there is the sound of audience laughter, music and the continuation of a song. Kiepert’s dialogue is synchronous. 1 MS Lola’s dressing room continued. KIERPERT (to the clown): Blockhead! I wanted a goldfish, not a rabbit!

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He enters the room carrying a white rabbit, closes the door and the music and singing stop. Here are the scholars again ...

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One of the students hands him some money This is the last time. 2

CS Student 3 is looking out of the window. He turns away towards frame R

3

MS as before. The student hurriedly enters frame L STUDENT 3: Rath! He’s coming!

They attempt to exit through the door but Kiepert stops them and directs them to a trap door in the floor. They open it and descend. 4

The club doorway. CS Professor Rath steps into the club. He moves to exit frame L.

Singing and accompanying music, which began on the cut, continue over the following shots. 5

A passage way. MS Rath enters R and looks around. His hat catches on a gas mantle and he starts to exit L.

6

MS Reverse angle of the above. Clown and Kiepert stand in the doorway to Lola’s dressing room, Rath enters frame R. KIEPERT: This is a surprise ...

They raise their hats to each other. Rath looks at the clown, enters the doorway, turns, and looks again at the clown. 7 8

Lola’s dressing room. MS Lola, adjusting her belt in the mirror. She turns expectantly to frame R. MCS the doorway. Rath has just stepped through; he turns to Kiepert LOLA [OOV]: Enter Professor.

He turns towards her. You’re anxiously awaited ... He takes off his hat and bows towards CAM L. Then turns and starts to close the door behind him. Just before he closes it completely, the singing on the soundtrack ends on the cut. 9

CS Rath as he closes the door completely. He turns to her. LOLA [OOV]: You’ve come back ...

10 MS Lola. Film editing

LOLA [continues in synch]: They always do.

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Rath enters the shot and the dialogue continues.

We even dubbed a film one time; actually, we didn’t dub it – we wanted to mix some music in a scene, so we got the idea of running two projection machines and having both machines with the loudest sound coming out the horns. And we recorded that. It was very bad, of course, the quality was terrible. But we did that one Sunday, all of us had watched or turned the knobs, and we ran it for Sennett, and he was delighted. He said, ‘Now you see, the engineers said we couldn’t mix sounds.’ And he ran this for them, and of course they knew what we’d done. They said, ‘Well, the quality’s no good, you can’t use that.’ And he said, ‘Never mind, now these kids got in there and they did this; now it’s up to you fellows to get the quality.’ They said, ‘Well, we always knew how to do that.’ He said, ‘I don’t care, you said we couldn’t do it.’ And by golly, they came up with a way to do it. Instead of through a projection machine, you do it through recorders and finally got dubbing started. But it must have been a year before we got them to agree it could be done.11 The term ‘dubbing’ tends to be used to cover a wide range of activities connected with the modification and improvement of a film soundtrack during the final stages of production. The word itself, is a corruption of the word ‘doubling’ and more accurately refers to the practice of adding sounds and dialogue to replace, or ‘double’, for those that are considered either inadequate or inappropriate – the replacement of dialogue with a language other than the one in which it was originally recorded is an obvious example. William Hornbeck’s use of the term in the above quotation actually refers to ‘re-recording’: making a copy of a soundtrack in order to introduce adjustments and also mix in music, sound effects, or even dialogue from a separate source at the same time.

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Sternberg’s design for the structure of this sequence is masterly. When the student opens the door to reveal Kiepert and the clown, this is evidently a cue for the audience laughter and the off-screen nightclub performance to begin, because Kiepert’s accompanying dialogue is synchronous and then continues after the door is closed and the off-screen sound is stopped. The off-screen performance which accompanies Rath’s arrival has evidently been recorded with a long run-up so that the mute shots of Rath entering the club can be positioned against it and so enable the action to coincide with Kiepert’s only on-screen synchronous line, ‘This is a surprise ...’. It then continues with Lola’s next (non-synch) lines pre-recorded against it, but off-screen, so that they can be used later, over Rath’s arrival in the dressing room while the door still remains open. Lola’s first synchronous line, interestingly also used as voice-over, comes as Rath closes the door and the offscreen sound has cut out. For all its brilliant contrivance, it was plain that this way of working had serious limitations and methods had to be found to allow different layers of sound to be added at a later stage. William Hornbeck again:

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Maintaining good quality in the early days of film sound recording called for exceptional skill and judgement. The sounds had to pass through a complex series of steps: sound waves carried through the air were turned into electrical impulses in a microphone; amplified; turned into pulses of light; exposed to light-sensitive film emulsions; chemically processed to a negative image; optically printed onto positive film emulsions; again developed chemically into positive image; run at a fixed speed over a photo-electric cell under a light source so that the tiny electrical impulses from the cell could be amplified; and finally sent to a loudspeaker and back into vibrating air waves that could be heard. Sound technicians were understandably reluctant to put their tentatively obtained recordings through yet another series of steps by re-recording them. It is invariably advantageous to shoot a film in an order very different from the way it is scripted. The story will progress through scenes played in settings, many of which will recur at different times throughout the screenplay and for practical reasons these scenes are grouped together and filmed out of continuity and only assembled in their correct order during editing. In the early days of sound recording, this method of working made it difficult to sustain fixed recording levels between scenes shot at different times in different settings. There would also be qualitative differences determined by varying backgrounds, microphone placements etc. The result was that the final soundtrack sounded very uneven, an unevenness which would still be evident when prints of the finished film were projected to a paying audience.12 Part of the projectionist’s job was to attempt to re-balance the sound as best he could during the show, and many hours would be spent by the theatre manager drawing up cue sheets to enable the projectionist to anticipate the changes. By 1929 it was mostly agreed that it was preferable to rerecord the cutting copy soundtrack to re-balance the levels and adjust tonal differences during the production process rather than leave it to the questionable judgement of well-meaning projectionists. Sound technicians reluctantly accepted the inevitability of this practice and this in turn encouraged them in their efforts to find ways to improve recording quality.

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Re-recording

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Most advances in filmmaking techniques have resulted from a need to improve technical standards which in turn encourages attempts to expand the creative possibilities of the medium. Sometimes they happen the other way around; rerecording is an important example of this. Once the principle of re-recording a single track to even out imbalances had become established, it was quickly realised that other improvements could be introduced at the same time. Sound could be faded in and out at appropriate points and, more importantly, other sounds could be added to improve the dramatic effectiveness of the scene including, and this was a breakthrough, sounds originating from another soundtrack running with it synchronously.

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Examining some of the films made during this transitional period seems to suggest that, by 1929, some editors and directors had discovered ways of adding a separate layer of music and effects to their dialogue tracks. Bulldog Drummond, starring Ronald Colman and produced by Sam Goldwyn, opened on 2 May 1929. It has a soundtrack which seems in most respects to be no different from any other sound film of that time. It is largely dialogue-based (adapted from a successful stage play); has some crude car effects over some of the exterior sequences augmented by some carefully positioned sound effects; and is apparently all constructed on one track. Careful monitoring seems to indicate that there has been quite a bit of control of the sound balance at certain points to fit in with the action and that, at two points in the film, additional music has been added behind spoken dialogue in ways that suggest that it was not being performed ‘live’ when the dialogue was recorded but added later during re-recording. The plot of the film is simply summarised. Captain ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, bored with civilian life, advertises his services as an adventurer. He receives a letter from a young woman asking his help and arranging a rendezvous at The Green Bay Inn. The remainder of the film is concerned with releasing the young woman’s wealthy uncle from the clutches of a group of sadistic villains who, under the guise of medical care, are seeking to compel him to sign his money over to them. Most of the action consists of each party outwitting the other with night sequences of derring-do in and around the two main locations – The Green Bay Inn and the Lakington Nursing Home. The film ends with the uncle finally recovered, the villains cunningly escaping their just deserts, and an affirmation of a romantic attachment between Drummond and the niece – the only appropriate ending for a comedy-thriller. The night sequence, in which Drummond first arrives by car at The Green Bay Inn, starts with a close-up of the inn sign, followed by a WS of the building. Then, preceded by headlights reflected from the walls, Drummond’s car enters the shot, stops briefly, then moves away to park outside. A cut to the WS interior of the bar shows a party of men singing and drinking in front of a large fire while a barmaid carries trays of beer to their table. Drummond enters and crosses to the bar. This seems to be a multiple, three-camera set up: one camera covering the interior activity in WS; another is used to show Drummond entering the scene and panning with him as he approaches the bar in MS; the third camera is used to provide a brief synchronous MS of the leading singer near the beginning of the scene, and then required to swing round (OOV) so as be in a position to cover Drummond in CS applauding the song before starting his dialogue. The sequence that establishes the exterior location and shows Drummond’s arrival carries two layers of sound: the sound of the car’s engine, which fits perfectly with the action, suggesting synchronous recording, and the distant sound of the drinking song which we will hear more clearly on cutting to the interior. In fact it seems quite clear that the performance of the song actually starts with the cut to the interior, and what is heard outside seems to be a reprise of the

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final chorus (minus the concluding rallentando) apparently dubbed over the sounds of the car arriving. It is possible, though extremely unlikely, that a recording of the drinking song was actually played back when filming the scene of the car’s arrival; but a similar device used later in the film seems to confirm that these are actually early examples of mixing sounds from two tracks during the rerecording process and adjusting and balancing levels at the same time. Drummond has succeeded in helping Phyllis Benton’s uncle to escape from his captors and has brought him safely to the inn, but the villains are in pursuit, and the next sequence begins with a set-up very similar to Drummond’s first arrival at the inn, except now it is raining. Again, the sequence begins with a shot of The Bay Tree Inn sign, and the exterior building; but over this we hear thunder and the distant sound of singing; this time a man’s solo voice. A cut to the bar interior now shows the singer serenading the young barmaid with a romantic ballad and accompanying himself on a concertina. At its conclusion, she asks him to play it again for her, but before he begins we cut to a romantic conversation in an upstairs room between Drummond and Phyllis. During this conversation – covered on three cameras – we hear in the distance the ballad repeated. It then continues over the arrival in the bar of two of the villains (although the young man singing is understandably now out of vision), over a shot of Drummond’s friend Algie seeing them and setting off up the stairs to warn Drummond, and ends shortly after Algie’s arrival in the room. There can be no doubt that this is a reprise, or copy of the song, dubbed over two subsequent scenes during re-recording, and there can also be no doubt that director, F. Richard Jones,13 intended that this reprise of a love song should be used to enhance the tentative romantic dialogue exchanges between Phyllis and Drummond in the upstairs room. These early uses of track layering in Bulldog Drummond add enormously to the total effect of the scenes where they are used. It was quickly realised that when background sound continues over changes of location and behind dialogue it reinforces the illusion of a continuity of time and space in an extremely tangible way. Because aural reality is perceived as a constant unbroken flow, introducing and sustaining music or effects from an apparently identifiable source helps to make a scene much more persuasively real. It marks out and establishes a section of time as believable because the ear confirms it, and the spectator is then drawn into the constructed reality of the scene more readily and more pleasurably. The very first synchronised film soundtracks had been regarded solely as a means to add an orchestral score or performances of songs to a silent film. Once it became possible to combine dialogue with an additional sound source, directors much preferred to enhance a sequence by laying in actuality music or atmospheric effects that could be identified as existing within the film’s own realistic frame of reference. Theme music was reintroduced once multi-track re-recording became possible. Bulldog Drummond is of interest technically only in that it contains these examples of primitive dubbing from a relatively early date. In most other respects

The curtain rose on Catfish Row in the early morning. All silent. Then you hear the Boum! of a street gang repairing the road. That is the first beat; then beat 2 is silent; beat 3 is a snore -zzz! – from a negro who’s asleep; beat 4 silent again. Then a woman starts sweeping the steps – whish! – and she takes up beats 2 and 4, so you have: Boum! – Whish! – zzz! – Whish! and so on. A knife sharpener, a shoe maker, a woman beating rugs and so on, all join in. Then the rhythm changes: 4: 4 to 2: 4; then to 6: 8 and syncopated and Charleston rhythms. It all had to be conducted like an orchestra.16 Mamoulian refers to this as a ‘Symphony of Noises’. When he came to directing his first film, Applause for Paramount during the early summer of 1929, it is understandable that he aspired to achieving an equivalent degree of invention on the film’s soundtrack. What he discovered was that he would have to fight for every innovation that was made. Applause is a backstage musical, a tear-jerker set in the world of tawdry burlesque theatre. Kitty Darling (Helen Morgan) is an ageing stripper who

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its use of sound is rather crude, particularly over action scenes shot without dialogue, which often seem to contain spot effects but no other sound at all; opportunities to exploit the use of a second track in these situations are never taken up. The reason for this can only be a matter for speculation. It is generally agreed that sound technicians during this period tended to take a very inflexible attitude to the recording of sound. The problem was that most of the technical expertise in sound recording had developed through radio, telephony and other audio-specific activities such as phonograph recording, and in the main was dedicated to the pursuit of high quality based on an understanding of essentially scientific principles. Film sound technicians also saw that objective as the only acceptable way of evaluating their contribution, and diligently insisted on it. This position of dominance in the technical hierarchy inevitably led to clashes with creative directors who regarded technology as being only a means to an end, and not an end in itself. One such director was Rouben Mamoulian whose first film, Applause, was premièred on 30 August 1929.14 Mamoulian was a brilliant theatre director who went to America in 1923. Over the next three years he established himself as an inventive director of operas and operettas culminating in a highly successful Broadway production of Porgy, the stage play that later became the basis of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess which Mamoulian also directed in 1935. Mamoulian believed that the theatre ‘should utilize all forms of expression that come within its scope by harmoniously combining in one production dialogue, dramatic action, dance, song, and music’.15 His ability to compose and choreograph natural sounds and movements is powerfully recalled in his description of a scene in Porgy which he added to Dorothy Hey ward’s play.

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struggles to raise her young daughter and retain her love while faced with her daughter’s need to lead her own life and achieve independence. Mamoulian wanted to make a film that went far beyond the dialogue-bound, talking theatre that so many movies at that time were using as a model. He wanted above all to capture the atmosphere of the rather tawdry, vulgar and sad burlesque theatre world in which the story is set. He also wanted to get the action out of the studio and capture the essence of New York locations, taking his camera for one scene inside the New York subway.

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Everyone was against change, against rocking the boat, or rather, moving the camera or jigging the sound. You have no idea how cumbersome sound and camera equipment was at the beginning. It was like walking around with a bungalow on your back. The camera had to be enclosed in a booth so that the whirring of the motor didn’t get on the sound track, and the sound technicians kept telling you that ‘mixing’ was impossible. For a certain scene in Applause, I insisted on using two separate channels for recording two sounds: one, soft whispering; the other, loud singing; which later would be mixed, so the audience could hear both simultaneously.17 Mamoulian is referring to a scene set in a cheap hotel bedroom on the first night after Kitty’s daughter, April, has left her convent school and arrived in New York. Her mother sits beside the bed and sings the only kind of song she knows – a burlesque number – as a lullaby. As she sings, the girl fingers a rosary and whispers a prayer. The technicians’ reluctance to consider a solution to this recording problem – recording the output from two microphones onto separate recording channels and mixing them during re-recording – was apparently overcome only after Paramount chief, Adolph Zukor, personally intervened. Throughout the film, Mamoulian uses sound to emphasise spatial dimensions that exist beyond those constructed by the film and which are often outside the space that the characters are seen to inhabit. Capturing sounds which exist on the edges, or only peripherally to the foregrounded dialogue went completely against the current notions of what constituted acceptable sound; which was to eliminate anything that might disturb the clarity of cleanly spoken and recorded dialogue. Although Mamoulian recognised that the film camera and the sound camera were capable of rendering a believable reality, he was even more persuaded of their power to convey truth through stylisation and poetic rhythm.

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I was convinced that sound on screen should not be constantly shackled by naturalism. The magic of sound recording enabled one to achieve effects that would be impossible and unnatural on the stage or in real life, yet meaningful and eloquent on the screen.18

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In his second film, City Streets (1930), Mamoulian used a character’s voice on the soundtrack to produce an audible inner monologue over a silent close-up. It was

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perhaps the very first use of dramatic voice-over. His detractors argued against it, convinced that an audience would not understand what was going on. Mamoulian successfully argued that, in the silent cinema, audiences had no difficulty in accepting stylisation, simile and visual poetry, and that sound could be used in the same way. In fact Rouben Mamoulian was in good company. Soon after the sound film became a fact of life, voices had been raised expressing concern for the direction that the sound film would take. Already commonly referred to as ‘talkies’, the fear was that a dependence on naturalistic sound and speech would mean that films would become little more than screened theatre with so many other creative possibilities shut out. Of these voices, three of the most prominent had spoken from the USSR, where the importance of film as an artistic and ideological force for understanding and change had its greatest proponents. On 5 August 1928 a statement appeared in the Leningrad magazine, Zhizn’ iskusstva, signed by three notable members of the Soviet Union’s film industry: Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov. The statement correctly predicted a tendency for the content of many films to be dominated by verbal rather than visual considerations and warned that editing, the cinema’s fundamental tool for the production of meaning, could degenerate into being merely a device for facilitating the visible alternations of sounds or speech. Calling for experimentation that sought an enrichment of cinematic meaning through non-synchronisation, the writers argued that an image tied to its natural sound became prosaic, and was thereby prevented from having independent meaning. However, the statement acknowledged that the sound film would usefully remove what were referred to as Impasses to the cultured cinematic avant-garde’; sub-titles and ‘explanatory’ montages, images inserted solely to convey that which might more effectively be spoken. It is impossible to know to what extent the statement was influential; certainly its appearance and promulgation in 1928 was opportune, given the primitive state of the American talkie at that time. The shortcomings of the existing system were only too well-recognised by the more perceptive and talented filmmakers working in America and Europe, and the creative challenges which the statement identified would have their effect in some quarters both then and later. Yet in spite of the creative potential of asynchronicity, the simple fact was that movies that had characters who talked and sang in settings made real by the addition of sounds were popular and profitable; too much experiment was risky. Although it seems evident that, by the end of 1929, re-recording dialogue tracks and adding ‘actuality’ music and sounds from a second track was becoming accepted practice in some quarters, this did not signal a universal acceptance of its being quickly taken up everywhere. Like so many technical and creative developments, adding a sound layer during re-recording was introduced tentatively, together with accepted methods in which sounds were mixed ‘live’ during filming and also substantially post-synchronised afterwards. Evidence of

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this multiple method can be found on soundtracks of many films made during 1930, one notable example being Lewis Milestone’s Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. With the introduction of the sound Movieola in 1930, the ability to manipulate sound tracks in the cutting room took a giant step forward. This viewing machine was similar to the first one introduced in 1924 but was now equipped to run both the picture and the optical soundtrack, locked together or independently, the sound head being fitted with an optical track reader similar to that found on a projector. Another editing tool had been invented that would keep multiple picture tracks and sound film tracks together in a frame-to-frame relationship during the editing process. This was the synchroniser: pairs of sprocketted wheels attached to a common shaft that rotated within a metal frame. Separate rolls of film could be fed into the device and held in place by small rollers; these kept the separate strips of film in place so that they could be marked, cut, joined and run together.19 Before very long, film editors were able to use these tools with great facility. A young British film technician, Daniel Birt, wrote an article for Close-Up magazine in September 1931 explaining how the synchroniser could be used.20 For the cutting copy separate prints are made of the sound and mutes, and these are threaded each over a sprocket in such a way that their synchronising marks are all in line. The sound is thus in synchronisation with each of the mutes and, as they are all moved together by turning the handle, they are kept in synchronisation throughout their entire lengths. Since the sound is on a separate film, the sound taken with one (shot) can be made to overlap another (shot); mute, not taken with sound, may be cut into a (shot); (and) sound can be cut to run with a mute with which it was not taken. In the same article, Birt explains the extent to which sound mixing during rerecording had, by 1931, become standard practice.

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Not only may a single sound-track be recorded, either at the same or a different sound level, but several tracks may be run at the same time and mixed on a panel, while sound may be added from the floor. 21... Two tracks, taken separately, may be dissolved one into another; fades may be made; sounds can be distorted by running them through the projector faster or slower than the speed at which they were taken. 22... It is also possible to add any degree of artificial echo from an echo room ... and to alter the balances of frequencies with a frequency control.

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The use of an echo room was a relatively recent development, used to good effect in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931). Post reporter Stewart Smith (Robert Williams) has married wealthy Anne Schuyler (Jean Harlow). Reacting against a requirement to attend endless stuffed-

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The basic principles of Lauste’s device were later developed into the RCA sound on film system called Photophone, which eventually became the industry standard. Walker, The Shattered Silents, p. 40. This variable intensity light – the ‘Aeolight’ – was particular to the Movietone system. Methods developed later, which used a ‘light valve’ in which the light source remained constant and the size of the aperture varied in response to fluctuations in the recording signal. This study of scenes from the two versions of Blackmail is partly based on the detailed analysis made by Charles Barr, ‘Blackmail, Silent & Sound’, published in Sight and Sound, spring 1983. RCA (Radio Corporation of America) was established by General Electric, like Western Electric, it was a major American corporation. Their sound-on-film system used a variable area soundtrack, whereas Movietone and Western Electric used variable density systems. Following improvements, it was demonstrated that the variable area system produced a far superior result. In 1934, the variable area wave trace that formed the soundtrack was split into two, setting a wave peak against a wave valley. Because the tracks were 180° out of phase, distortions caused by splicing were cancelled out. The improved track was called ‘push-pull’.

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shirt receptions and missing his more earthy newspaper cronies, he elects to stay home. Lonely, and bored with playing hopscotch by himself on the tiled floor of the vast Schuyler mansion, he discovers that the hall has a fine echo and persuades the stuffy butler, Smythe, to try it out with him. This playing with echoes is engagingly exploited: commenting on the physical and emotional emptiness of the Schuylers’ home and quite evidently making the most of the latest technical sound novelty. By 1933 improvements in recording technology made it possible to mix the output from several independently recorded music, dialogue and effects tracks and produce a composite soundtrack without significant loss of quality. This provided considerable creative flexibility and made it possible to achieve a sense of heightened realism and spatial depth not previously obtainable. Dialogue and sound effects could now be recorded in studio conditions, or post-synchronised, so that they were clear of any extraneous sounds; they could be cut, joined and overlapped, seamlessly. Recordings of actuality music or sound atmospheres – crowds, traffic, wind, rain and thunder – could be laid behind the spoken lines, to produce a feeling of continuity and presence seemingly inseparable from the experience of reality itself. Now that sound could be manipulated on the editing bench with the same flexibility as picture, all the means were in place that would quickly be refined into a cinematic form that would remain largely unchanged, and unchallenged, for the next twenty-seven years.

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Thompson and Bordwell ‘From Sennet to Stevens – an Interview with William Hornbeck’. Blooping with black ink could only be used on positive prints of the soundtrack, thus gradually reducing the light as the film passed over the sound head. On joined sections of the soundtrack negative it was necessary to make the bloop transparent so that it would produce the black diamond when it was printed. This was achieved by punching a diamond-shaped hole in the track area where the joins occurred. Low, The History of British Film 1929–39, p. 86. Atlantic was one of the first films to be shot in three languages simultaneously and the agonisingly slow delivery of the lines is only really apparent in the English version. The film was shot in two versions simultaneously, a common practice throughout the late silent period. By common consent, the German version is generally considered to be superior. Thompson and Bordwell ‘From Sennet to Stevens – an Interview with William Hornbeck’. The soundtrack of Blackmail provides a useful example of this. F. Richard (Dick) Jones was a well-established director of comedies during the silent period, working principally for Mack Sennett. Bulldog Drummond was his only talkie and his last film. King Vidor’s Hallelujah!, mentioned earlier, was released on 20 August 1929. Like Bulldog Drummond, it too has been mixed at certain points from two tracks to enable distant dialogue or singing to continue behind foreground dialogue. Sarris (ed.), Hollywood Voices – Interviews with Film Directors, p. 62. Robinson, ‘Painting the Leaves Black’, Sight and Sound, summer 1961, an article based on an interview with Mamoulian. Sarris (ed.), Hollywood Voices – Interviews with Film Directors, pp. 63–4. Sarris (ed.), Hollywood Voices – Interviews with Film Directors, pp. 64–5. This tool is still used in editing rooms, with the addition of magnetic sound heads, a modification made in the 1950s when optical sound was replaced my magnetic. Throughout the silent period, and for some time after, it was common for a single shot to be referred to as a ‘scene’. I have inserted the word ‘shot’ in parentheses to clarify Birt’s meaning. This refers to the addition of specific sound effects performed live in front of a microphone during the re-recording process. Early sound reproducers were in fact modified projectors running soundtracks only.

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Cutting inside the studio system By the mid-1930s the Hollywood studios had become bound together into a system of standardised production and marketing, films were being made within a very specific and manageable system of technical and narrative conventions and an agreed moral code of acceptable content had been introduced. These factors together defined what were considered to be the parameters of public interest and audience taste and determined the particular kinds of stories suitable for production and the methods that could be used for their presentation. Since the rise of the studio system in the early 1920s there had been a gradual erosion of the film director’s authority and the producer was now securely in place as the key functionary; a new generation of studio managers and production heads had come to power. Three men stand out as key figures who laid the foundations, set standards and determined practices that were to dominate four decades of commercial filmmaking: Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck and David O. Selznick. An example of the basic contradictory nature of the Hollywood studio system can be found in a memo sent to Ben Schulberg, Managing Director of Production at Paramount Studios, by Selznick when he was working there in 1930. It concerns a script written by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy. Eisenstein had adapted the novel at Paramount’s behest in anticipation of directing the film. Selznick confessed to Schulberg that the script was the most moving he had ever read and that he found it so effective that it was ‘positively torturing’. Convinced that such a depressing screenplay could never be ‘entertainment’, he sought to persuade Schulberg to drop the project which he believed would be nothing more than a ‘glorious experiment’, a vain gamble made purely for the advancement of the art – something that he considered not to be Paramount’s business. Asserting that, while he was not against trying new things, he felt that they should be kept ‘within the bounds of those indulged by rational businessmen’. The project was abandoned.1 Examples of the fundamental incompatibility of art and commerce can be found in most accounts of filmmaking inside the studio system. Irving Thalberg’s curbing 249

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of Eric von Stroheim’s creative excesses date from the early 1920s when Thalberg was executive in charge of production at Universal. Arriving as Stroheim was preparing his third feature, Foolish Wives, he was determined to restrain the director’s propensity for squandering time, resources and money on his extravagant productions. Nevertheless, Stroheim’s completed film, which he intended to release on exclusive engagements as a two-part feature, ran three and a half hours. Thalberg was convinced that a film of this length would appeal to neither audiences nor exhibitors and when Stroheim refused to shorten it, Thalberg banned him from the editing room and supervised the recut himself. The film was released early in 1922 with a running time of 107 minutes; half its original length. The most notorious clash between the two men occurred over von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), regarded by some to be a ruined masterpiece and others as a monument of folly. It began as a Goldwyn Picture Corporation production, but during shooting the studio was involved in a merger and became Metro-GoldwynMayer, with Irving Thalberg as the new production head. Stroheim’s original completion of the film ran to forty-two reels – not far short of ten hours. The studio demanded it be substantially shortened and he cut it to twenty-four reels. Further demands resulted in a version supervised by friend and fellow director Rex Ingram who worked with his regular editor Grant Whytock to reduce it to 18 reels. This was designed to be exhibited in two parts with an interval between. Although this might have been a viable commercial compromise, on Thalberg’s instructions the film was removed from Stroheim’s control and reduced to a mere ten reels under the supervision of scriptwriter June Mathis, then a story editor at MGM. This mutilated version is all that remains. The studio system was one based upon pragmatism; the circumstances affecting production and personnel could, and would, always be adapted to accommodate what the producer considered to be in the best commercial interests of the film, and consequently of the production company or studio. For example, most of Selznick’s 1937 production of The Prisoner of Zenda was directed by John Cromwell, but W. S. Van Dyke was brought in to re-shoot the fencing scenes and towards the end of filming Selznick had some difficulty persuading leading actor Ronald Colman to consider George Cukor as director of a retake for just one important dialogue scene. This expedient approach could also affect technical personnel. English cinematographer Harry Stradling was peremptorily removed from Selznick’s Intermezzo (1939) and replaced by Gregg Toland; later he was assigned to Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), but feeling under constant strain that Selznick would find his work on that film unsatisfactory, he asked to be removed and was replaced by George Barnes who won an Academy Award for his work on the film. Selznick’s tendency to overwhelm his productions made the possibility of any kind of creative collaboration largely redundant. During location filming on Duel in the Sun (1946), Selznick gave strict orders that not a single angle on any scene should be photographed until he had been called to the set to check the lighting,

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the set-up, and the rehearsal, and in most instances he would make changes. He would then remain on the set until he had approved a take.2 Selznick’s insistence on controlling how the film should be shot eventually caused director King Vidor to quit. During Hollywood’s golden age, directorial involvement at the editing stage would vary from studio to studio. At MGM, in nine cases out of ten, the director would work much like a stage director, his involvement ending on the last day of filming. The situation was similar at Warner Bros, where directors were attuned to a factory-based assembly-line production system. Having no involvement with the pre-production process, they would often be handed a script just a few days before starting filming. Even top directors like Roy del Ruth, Michael Curtiz or William Dieterle could expect to work on four or five films a year with little involvement with pre-production and their duties did not include editing supervision; as soon as principle photography was completed on one picture they would be assigned to another. This practice was later continued by Zanuck when he became head of production at 20th Century-Fox where he would personally supervise the editing of every film from rough-cut to completion. Selznick’s view on this was slightly different. Once a film was shot, and the editor had produced a rough assembly, he believed that the director should produce his own cut, after which it would be seen through to completion by the producer – usually Selznick himself. The director was invited to be involved until the picture was finished, but there was no obligation for him to do so. Few accepted the offer, preferring to move on rather than engage in lengthy and fruitless debates over content and structure. Selznick’s awareness of the importance of editing, and the extent to which it enabled the producer to control the final result, led to a close working relationship with editor Hal Kern. Kern first worked with Selznick at MGM and their association developed into Kern supervising the editing on all Selznick’s subsequent productions. In mid-May 1939, Selznick became concerned about the slow progress of filming on Gone with the Wind which had been before the cameras since the end of January. He suggested that Hal Kern should spend virtually all his time on the set discussing with director Victor Fleming simpler, and consequently faster, ways of shooting a scene. These might include the use of pans and dolly-shots instead of complex crane shots; accepting a take that, although not satisfactory in every respect, would be used only in part; and shooting 2-shots instead of close-ups which were unlikely to be used.3 Fleming had been taken on when Selznick parted company with George Cukor, his original director, only a few weeks into filming. After three gruelling months, with cast and crew often working eighteen-hour days, Fleming collapsed. Sam Wood, who replaced him, was retained after Fleming returned and the work was split; he directed the morning shift and Fleming the afternoon. The first rough assembly of Gone with the Wind was completed early in July 1939 and ran almost six hours. Re-editing continued throughout July and August,

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with editors often working round the clock. By late July the film was still running five hours, but so mangled with cuts, additions and replacements, that it was virtually unwatchable; one of Selznick’s secretaries spent two weeks sitting at a Moviola preparing a shot-by-shot transcript. It took another month of intense work to reduce it to its final three hours forty minutes. In his book King Vidor on Film Making, Vidor refers to the practice of shooting close-ups without necessarily intending to use them but because they could be used to shorten or eliminate a scene.4 Under the studio system, many producers would regularly demand that directors covered every part of every scene with individual close-ups solely to give complete freedom to whoever was supervising the editing. This is confirmed by a memo Selznick sent to Hitchcock during the filming of Rebecca, in which he expressed his concern that Olivier’s performance contained too many long pauses and asked for some scenes to be covered also in close-ups. Having the editor on the set to ‘prod the director’ regarding matters of pace was something which Selznick encouraged regularly. His continual anxiety about the performance tempo of Rebecca caused him to write again to Hitchcock (with copies to editors Hal Kern and James Newcom), recalling that on Gone with the Wind, George Cukor, aware of this problem, would have Hal Kern on the set to insist that every scene he directed was being played too slowly while he was actually shooting it. Hitchcock’s response to the suggestion that Kern should do the same for him is not on record, but it is nonetheless an interesting reflection on the producer-director relationship that Hitchcock gave complete control of the editing and post-production of both Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945) to Selznick. However, when he completed Notorious, made the following year, he supervised the editing and post-production himself. The dominance of the producer inside commercial film production is endemic, commonly militating against directorial preference and damaging the creative integrity of the work. This continues to be the case. Examples from the 1990s of this kind of power-play are manifest in some of the films made by actor-directorproducer Kevin Costner who, having become a well-established actor, eventually gained total control over a film with Dances with Wolves (1990) in which he acted, co-produced and directed. His decision to hand over the directing role on his next film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), to colleague and long-time friend Kevin Reynolds, resulted in creative differences during shooting and ended with Reynolds and editor Peter Boyle being locked out of the editing room. Costner was then able to supervise the film’s completion unhindered – and is no doubt responsible for evident editorial imbalances and some overcut action sequences. The Bodyguard (1992) met a similar fate; director Mick Jackson’s cut of the scripted film being declared too long at 149 minutes, Costner and writer Lawrence Kasdan took over, removing twenty minutes and most evidence of the love affair which was central to the plot. The reasons are unclear. Concerns over length are unlikely to be the real

Cutting the costs – replication Another example of the system’s wholly pragmatic approach is exemplified by the occasional practice of replicating a film. For a producer, the advantages of duplicating a completed film were substantial; by carefully copying a success, considerable sums of money could be saved on original design and costume planning; on music scoring and recording. By not shooting unnecessary scenes, or camera angles within scenes, filming days could be reduced to a minimum. This unusual production method is of particular interest because it involves editorial matters that are directly concerned with dramatic structure. Pépé le Moko is a French film, stylishly directed by Julien Duvivier and featuring Jean Gabin in the title role. Released early in 193 7, it was an immediate success, ranking as the top film in many countries, including Japan. It quickly became, and has remained, a cult classic. American independent producer Walter Wanger, realising that there was significant commercial potential in an English-language version, purchased the world rights and set about withdrawing domestic prints from distribution. John Howard Lawson was engaged to write the English adaptation and John Cromwell to direct. Charles Boyer was cast as Pépé and Hedy Lamarr, making her first appearance in an American film, as Gaby, the glamorous romantic interest. Pépé is a charming, cultured, bank robber and jewel thief, sought by the French authorities but able to hide out in the Casbah, the multicultural native section of Algiers. Provided he stays within the maze of winding alleys and stairways among a population of natives and outcasts with reasons to mistrust officialdom, he is safe from arrest. Escaping from a police raid, he meets a beautiful Parisian tourist, Gaby Gould, and they are instantly attracted. Gaby is tricked into keeping away from the Casbah, and Pépé, desperately seeking to follow her to

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reason. Nick Schenck, chief executive of the Loew Organisation, MGM’s parent company, was once asked his opinion regarding the ideal length to release a film. He replied: ‘How long is good?’5 One possible reason could be concerns that any suggestion of sexual explicitness in the relationship between Frank Farmer (Costner) and Rachel Marron, played by black singer Whitney Houston, could have had adverse affect on box-office returns in certain American states. It seems that few films are free from interference if there are concerns that some aspects of their form or content might affect their commercial prospects. Even Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), that brilliant parody of religious and political orthodoxies, lost a key scene during editing. The reasons have never been given, but a reading of the original script suggests that it might have offended Zionist sensibilities. Parody, it seems, has its limits, even for the Pythons. The fact that the removed scene made the sudden appearance and mass suicide of the Judean People’s Front in the final sequence quite inexplicable, was simply ignored and appears to have passed viewers and critics largely unnoticed.

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Paris, is betrayed by his girlfriend, Inès, and is arrested. Pépé watches the boat leave from the dockside taking Gaby and his hopes with her. In the French version he commits suicide, in the Hollywood version he is shot by police as he runs towards the departing ship. When comparing the two versions, what at first seems astonishing is the extent to which the settings, costumes, actors’ physical appearance, and action within each scene, have been carefully replicated. The original score was also used. With few exceptions, the Algiers scenario follows the original, but there are some new scenes added to the Hollywood version, mostly in the interest of making the story more explicit, and one notable excision; there is also a major repositioning of one scene. The dialogue in the French version has a very noticeable poetic quality which sits comfortably with the softer and generally warmer tone evident in the performances and in the way that it is directed. The film is a fine example of French 1930s poetic realism. Duvivier’s framings take risks with eye-lines and camera positioning which bring a quality of the unexpected to many of the scenes; nothing is predictable. These qualities, and an acceptance that understatement can sometimes be eloquent, defines its difference from Algiers. A good example occurs in a scene towards the end of the film. Pépé has arranged to spend an evening with Gaby alone but she is tricked by Inspector Slimane into staying away. In the Hollywood version, Inès finds Pépé alone and depressed and, realising why, she jealously upbraids him; they argue and Pépé storms out. In the French version, Inès arrives and wordlessly takes in the situation, there is an exchange of looks and Pépé leaves. In scenes involving his two main characters, Duvivier seems acutely aware of the psychological implications related to the direction that they should face within the frame. He goes to some trouble to ensure that Gaby, who represents desirable, positive values, is mostly shown looking towards Pépé from screen left, and that Pépé, who is imprisoned both within the Casbah and metaphorically within himself, looks towards her from frame right. In his version, John Cromwell often seems to have deliberately reversed the positions of the actors on the screen. The reasons for this are obscure, given the extent to which character placing and action are so precisely replicated elsewhere, but when comparing the two versions this repositioning seems less satisfying; the emotional thrust of the scene unbalanced.6 Cromwell also moved one complete scene, putting it quite a bit later. This is a scene between Pépé and Inès in which he expresses his dissatisfaction with life in the Casbah and his desire to return to Paris. In the French version this scene occurs immediately after his first meeting with Gaby and is indicative of the influence that the meeting had on him. In the Hollywood version it was decided to place the scene later, immediately after Inspector Slimane has cleverly arranged for Gaby to revisit the Casbah eager to encourage the relationship that will bring Pépé out, so that he can be arrested. I suspect that the repositioning was an

The power of the preview One aspect to the studio system that was central to its evaluation procedure was the universal dependence on the preview. The usual practice with sneak previews was to arrange to run the film secretly for an audience in a cinema after the advertised programme had ended, when preview cards would be distributed and completed by those members of the audience who stayed to see the film. The practical means used to set up these viewings are of interest. The version of the film that was previewed was the cutting copy, or workprint, edited to the point

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editorial decision made during post-production to emphasise Pépé’s dissatisfaction immediately before the scene during which he meets Gaby for a second time. This change typifies the American version which puts clarity of exposition before other considerations. Like some other reworkings made in the copy, I think this actually improves Cromwell’s version of the film. However, its position in the original, used to emphasise Pépé’s dissatisfaction with life having just met Gaby, seems equally right. This raises interesting questions about film structure and the extent to which character development and narrative flow affect each other. The scene in the French version that is omitted from Algiers is one of the most poignant. Pépé is waiting at Mère Tarte’s for Carlos to return from delivering a letter. During the wait she recalls her youth as a cabaret performer and, tears running down her ageing face, plays on the gramophone a song that she used to sing. The lyric concerns a young man who travels to New York with high expectations but who ends up impoverished, longing for the Paris that he left. The reason it was omitted from the Hollywood version is self-evident, but its use in Pépé le Moko is illustrative of the poetic, rather reflective mood which the American film fails to capture. Apparently, Algiers was not as commercially successful as had been hoped, doing less than average business in most areas where it was released, yet Walter Wagner made a satisfactory profit on the deal because the film cost so much less to make than an equivalent, original film made at the time. This successful formula encouraged Selznick to buy and replicate a Swedish film, Intermezzo. Originally directed by Gustaf Molander and released in 1936, it featured a young Swedish actress called Ingrid Bergman in the leading role. The rights to the film were purchased, and Bergman was put under contract by Selznick. Gregory Ratoff directed the film, duplicating the Swedish version in much the same way that John Cromwell had duplicated Pépé le Moko. The result was also a commercial, as well as critical, success. In the early 1950s, Selznick was able to sell to MGM the rights to The Prisoner of Zenda, made in 1937. The film was duplicated scene by scene and set-up by set-up, using the original script; a Moviola was kept on the set to run a print. MGM also adapted Alfred Newman’s original 1937 score. This Technicolor version was released in 1952 and although it was well received, the original is generally considered to be better.

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when the producer felt that it was important to obtain some audience reaction to the film before bringing it to completion. The separate soundtrack would contain a mix of the dialogue – roughly dubbed to balance any serious variations in the sound levels – and a stock music track. This would be compiled from sections of music chosen for their suitability from a stock kept and used regularly for this purpose. In the preview-theatre projection room this soundtrack would be run synchronously with the picture, using ‘dummy heads’ which could be attached to the projectors.7 It was then a simple matter to make further changes before any subsequent preview and so on. The response of a preview audience would often result in considerable changes being made. Following the first sneak preview of the 1937 version of A Star is Born there were twenty-seven pages of retakes which accounted for about one-sixth of the final film. Further previews followed before a satisfactory result was considered to have been obtained.8 A preview of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) resulted in scenes being re-shot in order to replace an actor. The part of the leading character’s mother was originally played by Zasu Pitts, who had established a reputation in serious roles – von Stroheim’s Greed to name but one – but had lately achieved some success as a comedienne. During the preview it was noticed that her performance was causing laughter and some confusion. Her scenes were consequently reshot, with Pitts being replaced by Beryl Mercer.9 When they worked together at MGM both Thalberg and Selznick shared the view that the version shown to a preview audience was not the finished film but simply the raw material which would be reshaped after taking into account the audience’s response. This practice of making changes to fit in with audience preferences, while possibly enhancing a film’s commercial prospects, often involved abandoning carefully considered matters of dramatic balance and narrative logic simply to accommodate the majority preferences of an audience which had originally come to see quite a different film from the one they were now being invited to judge. Selznick eventually came to realise the pointlessness of this approach, acknowledging that to recut a film like Rebecca according to the reactions of an audience that had come to see a Marx Brothers or Joan Crawford picture would be of no use at all. His solution was to preview the film to an audience that had paid to see it, a practice which certainly seems to have significant advantages.

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Making films inside the factory-oriented studio system required that they should be made within the time allocated, and the measure of this was the amount of cut footage that could be produced in a single day’s filming. Cut footage, was the amount of screen time produced by editing that day’s work, and anything that fell short of two minutes thirty seconds a day was considered alarmingly slow. Some directors accommodated to the working methods that made this kind of output

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possible with ease. One such was William Dieterle, a German director who came to Hollywood in 1930 under contract to Warner Bros. Well respected for his meticulous craftsmanship and technical proficiency, he was a director who could be relied upon to follow the script and bring pictures in on time and often under budget. For example, during a typical day’s filming on The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Dieterle completed three scenes for which he shot 22 set-ups and 44 takes – an average of only 2 takes per set-up – and produced 4 minutes 5 seconds of cut footage. On his best day during that week’s filming, he completed another three scenes for which he shot 31 set-ups and 52 takes, resulting in 6 minutes 50 seconds of edited film; the week’s filming produced 23 minutes 30 seconds of cut footage. For other directors this kind of factory-based efficiency was low on their list of priorities. William Wyler had established a reputation for his writing and directorial skills during his long and productive association with independent producer Sam Goldwyn, and in 1937 Warners contracted him to work on the screenplay and direct Jezebel (1938), an adaptation of Owen Davis’s stage play that had run on Broadway in 1933–34. While Dieterle’s method depended on editing between shots to construct the meaningful content of the scene, for Wyler the basis of drama was more related to the shifting spatial relationships of the characters to each other and the settings in which they moved. Consequently, his approach was based upon the developing shot which could cover the field of action in depth and in which changes of focus would be used to direct the spectator’s attention to the dramatic fluctuations of the text. These intricate camera set-ups and elaborate movements, often using long takes, demanded lengthy rehearsals for both cast and crew. A typical shooting day on Jezebel might result in three scenes covered by just 4 set-ups and 36 takes – an average of 9 takes per shot – producing only 1 minute 50 seconds of cut footage. On one filming day just one scene was shot; there were 8 set-ups and 5 7 takes which, when edited, produced just 20 seconds of screen time. Wyler’s search for the perfect shot placed considerable strain on performers who would be required to speak the same lines, repeat the same movements and make the same gestures through countless takes. He was aptly nicknamed ‘90-take Wyler’. Although Jezebel went 28 days over its optimistic 42-day schedule, the result was a highly regarded commercial and critical success which won Bette Davis her second Oscar and significantly increased the prestige of the studio. The technological developments in camera lens design and the faster film emulsions that came into use during the late 1930s opened up a new range of possibilities for cinematography, and directors were eager to exploit the shooting methods that these innovations made available. In-depth photography, increased camera mobility, the long take: all militated in favour of a style that could be unobtrusive and totally integrated with its subject. Certainly, the adoption of these shooting methods reduced the dependence on editing as the principle means of developing the narrative, and in that sense the move towards a more realistic

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presentation of action within filmic space also made redundant some of the scenedissecting practices that had been in place for many years.

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The shooting and editing principles that evolved through the 1930s, particularly with regard to the editing of dialogue, determined very largely how sound films would be edited internationally from that point on. Before considering the principles that underlie those practices with which we are now so familiar, it will be valuable to chart how shooting and editing practices changed as a result both of technological developments and styles of presentation which have continually sought ways to efface evidence of their means of production. In the early 1930s, shooting and editing were directly linked to the constraints demanded by the new sound technology. The requirements of multi-camera filming, with sound recorded on disc, established a filming pattern which used a master wide shot as its basis with other cameras isolating closer sections of dialogue and action. These could then be cut against each other or into the master shot while still maintaining a sound continuity. It was a pattern of shooting which functioned best inside a setting which could avoid for all practical purposes the existence of a fourth wall. Early recording practice required that the carbon and condenser microphones, which were nondirectional and ultrasensitive to ambient noise, had an amplification stage that was very close to the microphones themselves, and this required special recording conditions which in turn limited the ways in which the images could be filmed. There was also the need for the camera to be blimped, using a variety of methods, and this affected its manoeuvrability. The main emphasis was on obtaining good-quality dialogue, so ways had to be found to adapt established scene-dissection conventions to the requirements of sound. An analysis of some of the scenes in Taxi!, directed by Roy del Ruth for Warner Bros, and released in 1932, can be used to clarify the point. Although shot with single camera, many scenes were still constructed around a master shot with cuts made in and out on the camera axis with minimal angle changes. These axial framings placed considerable demands on the actors and the script supervisor – ‘the script girl’ – to ensure that the actions and body positioning were replicated each time the scene was played because of the need to match action across the cut. Of course this remains, and has always remained, a basic requirement of continuity filming but it is less critical when there are changes of angle and reframings between set-ups as typically in SRS schemata. Taxi!, is a minor melodrama, set during the Depression, about warring New York City cab drivers. It features James Cagney as a hot-headed activist and Loretta Young as his feisty love interest. The film has a running time of under seventy minutes and its uneven narrative development suggests that some scenes were removed during post-production, probably following unfavourable previews.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Exterior garage, painted sign on the window: Independent Garage – Cabs for hire’. VWS circle of seated cab drivers with Nolan speaking, standing on a rostrum in the centre. MS low angle, Nolan (and later Sue Reilly). MCS as in 3. MCS Sue Reilly, seated, applauded by the cabbies (in soft focus behind her). CS Nolan, seated, reacting to Sue Reilly’s address to the cabbies. MCS 2-shot Nolan and Reilly confrontation standing on the rostrum. CS favour Reilly as she speaks, Nolan edging frame.

Particularly noticeable is that there are no group shots of the cabbies reacting to the speeches and the only inserts are the two seated MCS and CS (set-ups 5 and 6) which are used to show Reilly when she is first introduced by Nolan, and Nolan’s reactions during Reilly’s speech when she pleads for negotiation rather than violent confrontation. All the other six set-ups are loosely based on a set of framings taken from one aspect and the scene is played out using twenty-four shots. The continuity of the scene is held together by cutting on movement across the cuts and sustained by the logical flow of dialogue exchange and response. Cuts in the action tend to follow the speech pattern rhythms but it is noticeable that, whereas a cut wide benefits from a beat before the incoming line of dialogue, a cut in to a closer framing is made more acceptable if the dialogue comes in hard, distracting attention from any action mismatch. The conflict that is set up between the two protagonists in this scene is followed soon after by another, a night exterior in which Nolan sees Reilly and accosts her. The confrontation builds through a series of cuts in on the axis from VWS to MS to MCS all of which frame the couple in profile 2-shots before switching to SRS figures using over-shoulder framings. The heated argument is cut without overlaps; a picture cut matching every dialogue alternation. Although many scenes are structured using variants on basic SRS formulations, it is interesting to note that, commonly, scenes which feature Matt Nolan and Sue Reilly together develop the action through a series of varyingly framed 2-shots. This kind of framing was considered particularly desirable in

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Unscrupulous mobsters are making violent attempts to force independent taxi owners out of business. A meeting is called where cab driver Matt Nolan (Cagney) makes a speech calling for a collective violent response to mob intimidation. His pleas are talked down by Sue Reilly (Young), daughter of a cab owner who has been jailed for killing a mob hireling. The scene begins with Nolan’s speech; he then introduces Sue Reilly whose plea for peaceful negotiation angers Nolan. He confronts her on the platform and she angrily leaves the room. The scene is played through using just eight set-ups:

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scenes that explored romantic attachments between the characters, and it provided another advantage: the 1.33:1 screen aspect ratio required that in close two-shots the actors had to be framed in profile with their faces in close proximity, a degree of intimacy which could be exploited for dramatic advantage. This kind of framing, and the axial editing that sustained its use, can commonly be found in many films of the period. MGM’s Grand Hotel, also released in 1932, contains some particularly interesting examples. An early scene, in which the Baron (John Barrymore) engages in a flirtatious conversation with Miss Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford), is played as a series of 2-shots with cuts made during movement so as to deflect awareness of any action mismatches when cutting between wide and close framings. The characters move around each other, changing places within the confines of a tight frame which visually reinforces their mutual attraction – they seem to be linked. The editing, by Blanche Sewell, proceeds with a degree of mastery that seems at first quite exceptional for such an early date but which only confirms that, in some hands, this kind of seamless continuity editing was securely in place more or less from the beginning of the decade. Dialogue lines flow across cuts made on action, or during head-turns; picture and dialogue cuts are made anticipating angle changes, reframings, and reverse-angle responses with confidence and remarkable skill. As in Taxi!, SRS alternations are almost always framed as over-shoulder twoshots, close-up singles being used only to support moments of exceptional dramatic impact. This tendency to minimise the use of close-ups and close shots, something which becomes more noticeable towards the end of the decade, can in part be explained by the fact that, because dramatic emphasis could more subtly be conveyed through spoken dialogue, there was less need for visual support. Cutting to a closer framing directly in on the camera axis with no change of angle, is a convention that has remained in place since the very earliest days of filmmaking and it is an important structuring figure, particularly when used to isolate a section of action from a much wider framing, but its use within closer framings, quite apart from the action-matching difficulties that it presents, does tend to draw attention to its basic artificiality: the sudden cutting in to a close-up suggesting a significance that does not necessarily match the dramatic need of the moment. A noticeable decline in its use from the mid-1940s might be traced to a preference for the more realistic structures necessarily part of the documentary coverage of events during the Second World War and the work of the influential Italian neo-realist filmmakers during the years that followed. Thereafter, a cut to a closer framing tended also to be accompanied by a change in camera angle.10 Working with a soundtrack that was separate from the picture during editing gave a remarkable degree of flexibility and creative control; cuts in the picture could be made in response to aspects of performance and could enhance the content and meaning of a scene irrespective of whoever was speaking. This creative freedom was exercised as soon as practicable and would appear to be

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Behlmer, Memo From: David O. Selznick, pp. 55–6. Ibid., p. 413. Principal photography on Gone with the Wind finished on 27 June 1939. Vidor, King Vidor on Film Making, p. 131. Behlmer, Memo From: David 0. Selznick, pp. 390–1 This matter of screen positioning is sometimes complicated by the fact that some leading actors, aware that one profile was more flattering to their appearance than the other, could insist that they be framed taking their preference into

Talking pictures

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regularly in use with single-camera filming as early as 1930. It is therefore unusual to discover, in some films made as late as 1932, cuts in dialogue regularly matched with a simultaneous cut to the speaker. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and The Old Dark House (1932) are particularly pertinent examples of this. The reasons are unclear, but it could be related to the fact that these films were edited by Clarence Kolster, a film editor whose career spanned the transition to sound and whose editing methods were conditioned by the limitations of the developing technologies. With the introduction of sound in 1927, Kolster left Warner Bros., where he had been employed as an editor since 1922, and he then remained uncredited on any film until 1930 when he joined Tiffany Productions, a small independent studio specialising in low-budget films. When Tiffany switched to sound, they adopted the RCA Photophone system which, when first introduced, like Movietone, recorded sound on the same strip of film as the picture but with a twenty-frame displacement – sound being recorded five-sixths of a second ahead of the picture. When cutting the film, this displacement had to be taken into account in order not to lose any frames containing sound, but fundamentally it meant that cuts in the sound always had to be accompanied by cuts in the picture.11 The difficulties this caused meant that these single systems were soon relegated to newsfilm use and the double system began to be adopted by the major studios by mid-1929. Whether or not these working practices influenced Kolster’s editing approach cannot be determined with certainty, but I think it is a reasonable guess. Kolster joined Universal in 1931 having edited six films for Tiffany Productions; of the first five films he edited for Universal, four were directed by James Whale. In most respects the basic principles of scene dissection remained and still remain in place because they can guide the spectator unobtrusively through a smoothly flowing narrative. Shot selection can reveal as much or as little as is necessary to serve the demands of the story, and sound and dialogue can be set against images to reflect the required changes in dramatic emphasis and so enhance the essential meanings within a scene. Editing is all about selection and emphasis, and determining how film editors have sought to achieve those objectives in the detailed handling of spoken dialogue are matters to be confronted in the next chapter.

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account. John Barrymore was sometimes referred to as ‘the great profile’ (it was his left). 7 Behlmer, Memo From: David 0. Selznick, p. 554. 8 Schatz, The Genius of the System, p. 186. 9 Ibid., p. 85. 10 Although it never completely disappeared as an acceptable structuring device, the cut in on the camera axis began to come back into favour during the 1990s, its use being reclaimed by a new generation of filmmakers exploring new uses for old conventions. 11 In practice, this meant that the last word or syllable of an outgoing line of dialogue would have to appear slightly overlaid onto the incoming shot of the responder. Conceivably, the common technique of cutting to the incoming picture slightly ahead of the sound during a dialogue exchange may have derived from an early realisation that this helped to increase the pace of a scene.

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Dialogue

15

This fragmentary exploration of film history as seen through the prism of film editing, has now reached a point where past and present meet. By 1935, after four decades of innovation and technological change, the fundamental principles that determined the structural presentation of the dialogue-driven, commercial sound film were securely in place and would remain so for the next sixty years and beyond. Consequently, the task of this and the following chapters will be to explore the ways that films are structured and the theories that inform those structures in terms of what is recognised as traditional film-editing practice. Any considerations of the way that dialogue is edited must begin by acknowledging that the structuring methods that editors use to reveal the essential meanings within a set of dialogue exchanges have changed hardly at all since the early 1930s; certainly by 1932 the fundamentals were widely understood. Although directors and editors have worked together during the following decades to explore the limits of those methods in order to redefine the possibilities within the relationship of images to sounds and synchronised speech, certain basic practices are recognised as essential if the dramatic needs of the spoken narrative are to be served.

Performances For the most part, scenes in films are a mixture of action and dialogue; and the actions and reactions, movements, glances, looks and gestures which the actors bring to the characters as they speak and listen are an essential and important part of every scene. How, then, is it possible to discuss dialogue on its own? Well, I do not think that is actually what I want to do; maybe dialogue is not the right word for it, perhaps it would be better to call it editing performances, which is much closer to what I mean. But then again, it is not only the performances, it is also text, not just the meaning that each actor invests into the scene (and on some occasions one has the strong impression that the actor does not actually understand the words that he is speaking), but the content of the line which suggests what we should see when it is being said. The content is both the text and 263

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the way it is delivered and the emphasis and meaning will alter depending on what we are shown as we hear it. The scripted dialogue represents only the core of the scene’s meaning. This can be demonstrated every time an editor comes to cut a dialogue scene; the scripted words seem to indicate a likely cutting point based on the sense of the line, but when that point is reached in terms of the performance it is very likely to be inappropriate. Every dialogue scene has to be edited in a way that relates to all those variables that constitute its content and these alter, not just between scenes, but between shots and takes. Some time ago I was editing a dialogue scene between a male and a female character and had run through the different takes of each of the shots, identifying which parts of which takes I would use for each part of the scene and noting them on the script. I then cut the scene and ran it. Something seemed wrong. Certain aspects of the woman’s performance which I had noted seemed to be missing. I quickly realised that I had mistakenly used part of a rejected take, rather than the preferred one, for a substantial part of the scene: I would have to recut it using the correct take. What became immediately apparent as I began to substitute the fresh take for the existing one was that although the points where the actual dialogue switched between the actors remained much the same the visual cutting points vis-à-vis the exchanges made with the male actor had to be different: differences that would be difficult to define even if the two versions could be compared. Some time later, on another film, the leading actor was replaced two weeks after filming began. Many scenes had already been cut and now they were shot again, thereby offering an unusual opportunity to make comparisons. One particular scene was a two-way conversation between a man and a woman; the actress was the same in both versions. Understandably, the actors’ performances were very different; the dialogue, of course, remained the same but what was particularly interesting was that the woman’s performance was also very different. Although her interpretation of the character had the same psychological motives, she interacted quite differently with the replacement actor. Comparison of the two versions confirmed that the way a scene is edited has much more to do with performances than text. In most instances the performances given during a series of dialogue exchanges will be those determined by the actors during rehearsals of the scene and accepted by the director at the time of shooting.1 Occasionally, the director might require that the scene should be played at a different pace or that an actor should give a different reading to a line or change the emphasis of a speech, but, in the main, once a satisfactory measure of tone, pace and performance has been established it remains consistent, additional takes being shot to exclude errors in delivery or misjudgements in emphasis as well as for technical reasons relating to looks, gestures, action, or, indeed, related to adjustments of framing, focus or camera movements.

More than words can say For the purposes of analysis, it will be helpful to examine the verbal and the visual elements of a series of dialogue exchanges separately. Scenes filmed using a series of single-camera set-ups usually only try to record usable-quality sound for the character who is on-camera. The off-camera actor being invariably off-mike as well. This means that each line of recorded dialogue is a separate entity. Examination of its shape and sound means that the editor has to consider not only the pace and rhythm of the recorded words but the pause that the speaker might make before speaking; the breath that precedes the first word and the breaths and pauses that are made during the speech. All these are important parts of the performance and will usually be retained, at least for the first assembly. When considering speech, is should be noticed that the pause occurring after somebody has stopped speaking is invariably controlled by the next person to speak. Once a recorded speech comes to an end, and by that I mean immediately after the last word, the beginning of the line delivered by the next speaker, including any pause or breath, will be found on that actor’s on-mike sound and is an essential part of the speech which follows. In this way the verbal content of the selected sections of dialogue can be pieced together so that the pace and rhythm of the performances are retained. Although this is fairly obvious when dealing with actors who are all working hard to deliver a strong performance at all times when filming, it must be said that this is not always the case. Dialogue exchanges are commonly filmed with one actor being the subject of the scene while the other is either out of shot or seen at the edge of the frame or with the camera looking over his or her shoulder. Once these shots have been completed the camera is moved to the reverse position featuring the other actor and the whole scene is played out again. Most actors,

Dialogue

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The pacing and rhythm of the dialogue that is established by the actors during the filming of the scene will usually be retained by the editor for the first cut. This is important because on viewing a first assembly of the entire film the director will reasonably expect to see a re-enactment of the scenes much as performed, even though there might be significant reassessments during the editing process. Different editors will approach the editing of a dialogue scene in different ways. Some will use an approach based on an instinctive response to specific fragments of performances gleaned from numerous takes and assemble them in script order. Others might aim to produce a complete assembly of the scene based on selections made during filming (selected takes or parts of takes identified by the director at the time and noted by the script supervisor), comments made by the director during the rushes viewing,2 and their response to performances, taking into account the extent to which they integrate into the edited scene as a whole. Once this first assembly is complete it will be altered and improved during the continuous process of addition, subtraction and adjustment.

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when not actually being filmed but required to deliver their lines out of vision will produce performances every bit a good as when they are actually on camera: they recognise that, although not in vision, the delivery of their lines is an essential part of the business of performing and essential to produce a good result. When cutting between exchanges of dialogue delivered by actors who approach their work in this way all is straightforward and the prescriptions regarding pacing and timing which I have mentioned apply. When actors fail to give a credible performance off camera it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to construct a believable presentation of the scene. The main problem is that when an actor is not on camera, lines tend to be delivered more quickly; this means that the on-camera reactions filmed in those circumstances tend to be too short and will not fit against the more considered performance delivered on camera. Often, it is a matter of actors just not understanding the importance of providing a credible off-camera performance and they will merely feed the lines, not realising the extent to which it is likely to have a deadening effect on the featured actor’s performance, and possibly that own actor’s part as well, when it is intercut with the one then being filmed. Instances of this occurring are fortunately rare and, when it does, a director may well intervene to ensure that at the very least the correct pace of the scene is sustained by the actor speaking out of vision and usually off mike. On rare occasions, it is sometimes necessary for an off-screen actor’s lines to be spoken by the script supervisor or an assistant director. I recall an instance where, because an actor was required to leave the set early (he was performing in a play later that day), the camera angles in which he appeared were shot first then, after his departure, the reverse angles showing the other actors were filmed with his lines being read in. There are also well-authenticated stories concerning highlypaid film stars who arrogantly considered that it was quite unnecessary for them to be required to deliver lines when they were not actually on camera, and it is perhaps surprising to learn that in the past some well-regarded directors seem to have been untroubled by this practice. During the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), producer David 0. Seznick became concerned that, during a key scene – the ‘confession’ towards the end of the film – the close-ups of both Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine had been filmed with the off-screen lines read in by the script supervisor. Selznick wrote a memo to Hitchcock, telling him that he considered that both actors would do better if they had the other to play to, and also that he knew of few directors who would permit such indifference of actors to each other’s performance.3 When it comes to determining how the visual elements are to be cut during a dialogue exchange it is only possible to indicate in the broadest terms how the selection of a cutting point in the picture will effect the spectator’s response. There are various factors to consider. Let us consider the most basic kind of dialogue exchange, one in which the editing of the visuals follows, more or less, the alternations in the dialogue. For the sake of this illustration we might assume that when the conversation starts it is devoid of drama or tension, just two friends

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chatting. The obvious approach would be to make the picture cut from speaker to speaker at the point where the sound was cut – immediately after the outgoing line was completed. This would make good sense; once the line has been spoken, the interest switches to the listener and we look for the reaction and the response. The pause, or beat, that follows the spoken line allows the visual reaction to be seen before the character speaks. Now, let us suppose that the conversation becomes less affable: one of the characters has started to disagree with something that his friend has said. The pace of the conversation starts to increase; the pauses between the individual speeches get shorter. To maintain the same cutting point in the visuals as before would prevent us seeing all the next speaker’s reaction before his or her response. Consequently, to show all of the reaction, the cutting point would have to be advanced: the cut made earlier, before the outgoing speaker has completed his line. How much earlier would depend on the specific situation but it could be as little as two or three frames or as much as a complete word or even more. Cutting ahead at the end of a line is more a measure of the force with which it is delivered and the nature of the reaction rather than the content of the line itself. In some instances this technique, of regularly making the picture cut a few frames before the end of an actor’s line, has tended to be adopted as a quick and easy way of artificially injecting pace into an otherwise slackly performed scene, and examples of its use, with cuts being made predictably to each speaker in turn, can commonly be found in many quickly made, television-drama imports. In his excellent book on film-editing practice, film director and former editor Edward Dmytryk draws attention to the fact that in spoken English the subject of a sentence is invariably placed near the beginning and that it is followed almost immediately by the predicate.4 The remainder of the sentence can be of any length and usually consists of explanatory, enlarging or modifying phrases, but the sense of the statement invariably comes at the start. This can often lead to interruption, particularly if the discussion gets heated. Let us explore what happens as the two conversing friends in my example start to disagree. As the argument gets underway they start to interrupt each other; consequently the visual reactions to the outrageous allegations being made by each of the characters start well before the outgoing speech is ended. If the speech is a long one, the editor will want to show the listener’s reaction during the speech, perhaps showing him trying to interrupt, returning to the speaker again as he rants on and then probably cutting back well ahead of the end of the speech so as not to miss the full thrust of the spoken retort. The editing rationale that seems to make sense in the illustration analysed above can be applied in broad terms to a scene where the two players are not matched in terms of the intensity of their response. Let us suppose a situation where one character is taking the other to task for something he has done wrong: perhaps a man has returned home late from work and forgotten his son’s birthday party; his wife is not best pleased.

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The dialogue tracks would, as before, be assembled to retain the rhythms and pacing determined by the actors as they performed the scene, but what would be noticed is that, because the wife would be driving the conversation, taking a dominant position, the husband’s responses are likely to be defensive and somewhat apologetic. The wife would make an accusation and this might be followed by a pause as the husband considered what was likely to be the most appropriate response. Whatever it might be, it is likely to be brushed aside straight away as the wife quickly follows up with another jibe. The pattern of the conversation would most likely be characterised by pauses before the husband speaks and responses from the wife that were either immediate or beginning over the end of his excuses. The points at which the visuals might cut against these dialogue exchanges could, once again, follow the performer’s rhythm; ending sharply with the conclusion of the wife’s lines to show the husband considering a response, then once he has made his excuses, cutting quickly with the sound as she disdainfully rejects them. In fact there is much to be said for cutting to the husband’s reaction before the end of the wife’s lines on the principle that we are interested in seeing how he responds to her assertions and then possibly cutting to her before he finishes to see the look of disdain before she cuts in. This would tend to give a more even-handed view of their disagreement; for although her fast responses confirm her dominance of the scene, cutting away from the husband before he stops speaking offers an opportunity to observe her as she accepts the content of his line, strengthening his speech because we are hearing it against her reaction. By not cutting the exchange in this way but by actually going the other way – holding his image after he has spoken and starting her line on his image before cutting to her in full flight – her dominance of the scene is strengthened. One additional point might be made concerning the position of the spectator, as party to these dialogue exchanges for the first time. By controlling the point at which the image is cut, the editor, for the most part, will seek to select points that display the best visual content of the scene – the best and most relevant qualities within each actor’s performance – from a position of foreknowledge: he or she has scrutinised the rushes and knows the best bits of each take. The spectator is thereby provided with a privileged and enhanced view of the content. Occasionally, however, it will be necessary for the editor to adopt a position that assumes no preknowledge in order to convey the impression that the content is being witnessed for the first time; what might be regarded as the cinematic present tense. This is a common strategy, readily demonstrated by using an example of a scene during which two people sitting in a room and engaged in conversation, are interrupted by a knock on the door followed by a third person’s entry. There could be very few, if any, circumstances in which it would be appropriate to cut to the door before the sound of the knock. The most obvious construction would be to hear the knock, show a reaction from one or both of the on-screen characters, and a look towards the door with the spoken line, ‘Come in’, preceding, or laid over the

Dialogue

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cut to the door as it begins to open. The same rationale might apply during a series of dialogue exchanges when one of the characters delivers a piece of information that is a shock or a surprise to the other. Because we must assume that it is also a surprise for the spectator, it would be inappropriate to cut ahead to the listener before the surprise was delivered. Indeed, it might be preferable to stay briefly on the speaker during the pause that would inevitably follow, strengthening their ownership of the moment and simulating unexpectedness. This need to convey a sense of immediacy – of dialogue being heard by the spectator for the very first time – becomes particularly relevant within a scene where there are several characters involved. Having, let’s say, established a series of close-up interchanges between two of them – which might well involve cutting ahead at the the end of a speech in reasonable anticipation of a reply – another character suddenly and unexpectedly interjects a comment, it would plainly be inappropriate to cut to that speaker just before the line is delivered. Leading the sound, letting the first words of the spoken interjection precede the picture-cut to the speaker, would be one way of conveying the impression that the comment in unexpected and apparently happening in real time. Alternatively, it might be appropriate to show the potential interjector listening to the off-screen exchanges; reacting to them and then speaking. This would be an example of editing from foreknowledge; ideally used in a situation where the interjection was dramatically important to the development of the scene. Exploring the editing of dialogue in this way is intended solely to indicate how the selection of different visual cutting points can effect dramatic balance. I have chosen some exaggerated examples in order to make a point, but adjustments are always appropriate in order to either strengthen the dramatic tone within a scene or present the content in a way which accurately reflects the tensions that drive the performances. Thus far I have attempted to simplify this analysis by artificially concentrating on situations where the editing largely follows alternations in the dialogue. In practice, cutting a dialogue scene in this way would almost certainly produce a predictable and uninteresting result. Most dialogue scenes in films seldom consist of repetitive alternations of close shots; depending on the directorial style, a scene will be covered, wholly and in part, by a wide range of framings, actors’ movements, camera movements, etc. It might be helpful, therefore to examine an actual scene from a well known-film, John Ford’s classic western: Stagecoach (1939). Stagecoach is an important text for the study of editing; Orson Welles claimed to have learned how to edit films by running a print of the film forty-five times at the Museum of Modern Art. Stagecoach’s film editor, Dorothy Spencer, is one of the giants from the early years of Hollywood with a string of notable features to her credit. During her fifty-year career she was nominated for an Academy Award on four occasions; Stagecoach was the first. A disparate group of adventurers travel by stagecoach between two frontier posts, from Tonto, Arizona to Lordsburg, and are threatened by an Apache

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uprising as they make their way across Indian territory. A drunken doctor, a gambler, the pregnant wife of an army officer; a whisky salesman; a crooked banker and a saloon girl, Dallas, who has been forced to leave town, make up the party led by driver Buck and US Marshal Curly Wilcox, who rides shotgun. En route they pick up the Ringo Kid, an outlaw who has escaped from prison. On reaching Apache Wells, a staging post, they are forced to stay the night when Lucy Mallory’s baby is born unexpectedly. An unspoken bond has been struck between Dallas (Claire Trevor) and the Ringo Kid (John Wayne); they are clearly attracted to each other. Dallas walks outside in the moonlight and Ringo follows her. It is a key moment which opens up new possibilities within the developing narrative. What follows is the scene as it appears in the edited film with the dialogue and cutting points indicated. Although this is set out separately from the main text, this is not to suggest this is the way the scene was originally scripted. An MWS with a low rustic fence leading away to camera left. On the far side we see Dallas approaching; Ringo follows a short distance behind. He steps through a gap in the fence and speaks as he comes forward. She turns to face him. It is interesting that Ford places the characters not only on both sides of a fence, but at the point where a support post is most obtrusively between them. RINGO: You oughtn’t to go too far, Miss Dallas. Apaches like to sneak up

and pick off strays. You visiting in Lordsburg? DALLAS: No, I – I have friends there; maybe I can find work. (She turns

fully to him. ) Look Kid, why don’t you try to escape? Why don’t you try to get away? RINGO: I aim to – in Lordsburg. DALLAS: Why Lordsburg? Why don’t you make for the border now? RINGO: My father and brother were shot down by the Plummer boys. I

guess you don’t know how it feels to lose your folks that way. Cut to a profile 2-shot of Ringo and Dallas. She reacts and turns slightly away from him. DALLAS: I lost mine when I was a kid. There was a massacre on

Superstition Mountain. RINGO: That’s tough, especially on a girl.

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DALLAS: We only gotta live, no matter what happens.

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RINGO: Yeah, that’s it. (pause) Look, Miss Dallas (As Dallas turns her head

towards him. Cut to CU Ringo.) You got no folks, neither have I, and well ... maybe I’m taking a lot for granted but ... I watched you with

that baby; that other woman’s baby ... well (Cut to CU Dallas) I still got a ranch across the border, it’s a nice place ... a real nice place ... trees, grass, water. There’s a cabin half-built (pause on Dallas); Cut to CU Ringo) a man could live there ... and a woman. (Cut to CU Dallas) Will you go? DALLAS: But you don’t know me. You don’t know who I am.

Cut back to profile 2-shot as before go? DALLAS: Oh, don’t talk like that.

Dallas suddenly breaks away and moves to pass behind him. Cut to low angle MWS of CURLY approaching obliquely towards CAM right. He takes two steps. Cut to MWS reverse angle. DALLAS walking away and RINGO starting to follow her. CURLY (V/O): What are you doing out here, Kid? (They both stop and react

to his voice. Dallas walks on. Curly enters the shot CAM right. To Ringo.) Stick close to the reservation. fade out This scene is conceived and shot using a classic structure: a wide shot, in which the characters establish their spatial relationship within the scene, which develops via a two-shot into close-ups for the emotional centre and back out again the same way. It is important to note that the 2-shot actually favours Dallas, so that she is able to play both towards and away from Ringo. Ringo is quietly controlled and single-mindedly confident; Dallas is anxious and uncertain about herself and her feelings. The scene is more about her reactions to Ringo’s proposal than the proposal itself, and the 2-shot allows greater access to her performance. Many less confident directors might have covered most of the scene using 2-shots from both angles and this would have provided an opportunity to move into alternating 2shots earlier in the scene, say at the point where she turns to him: Look Kid, why don’t you try to escape, why don’t you try to get away? The following exchanges might then have used this postulated reverse 2-shot favouring Ringo for: I aim to. In Lordsburg. and also the later line: My father and brother were shot down by the Plummer boys.

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RINGO: I know all I wanna know. (Pause, they look at each other) Will you

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But this would have placed unnecessary emphasis on Ringo’s responses; balanced the scene to his disadvantage and taken all the strength from the first cut which, when it comes, shifts the emphasis directly to Dallas and her past. John Ford was famous for never shooting more aspects of a scene than he believed necessary so we can be certain that a 2-shot favouring Ringo was never shot. The second cut, to a CU of Ringo, is made at the point where the main substance of the scene is to be delivered. All the dialogue that preceded it has been crafted with great economy to bring us to this point. DALLAS: We only gotta live, no matter what happens. RINGO: Yeah, that’s it. (Pause) Look, Miss Dallas

Cut to CU Ringo Spencer does not make the cut in the pause after ‘that’s it,’ largely because this would have prevented us from seeing Dallas turning her head towards him, but it would also have pre-empted the situation, suggesting foreknowledge of what is to come. By waiting until Ringo indicates that he is about to say something significant with the preamble: Look, Miss Dallas and then making the cut to CU Ringo, the content is revealed in the present tense – the spectator is placed in the presence of the text only as it unfolds. You got no folks, neither have I, and well ... maybe I’m taking a lot for granted but ... I watched you with that baby; that other woman’s baby ... well The cut that follows, from the CU of Ringo to the CU of Dallas, is to a reaction shot only – Dallas does not speak. The cut could have been made at a number of points during Ringo’s speech, but Dorothy Spencer selects the perfect point. We see Dallas, plainly moved, only during the lines that describe a possible future for a woman who needs to escape her present: I still got a ranch across the border, it’s a nice place ... a real nice place ... trees, grass, water. There’s a cabin half-built (pause on Dallas) and the pause is held on Dallas for some 10 frames before cutting to the continuing CU of Ringo. He is looking at her, then he glances down and back up continuing:

Film editing

a man could live there ... and a woman. (Cut to CU Dallas) Will you go?

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Only the briefest pause on him before the cut to Dallas’s CU and then the proposal is hard-in following the cut to her. It is fairly obvious why a cut is made to Dallas’s CU after ‘and a woman’, we need to see her reaction to his explicit meaning.

Will you go? DALLAS: But you don’t know me. You don’t know who I am.

Again, the briefest of pauses after she speaks before cutting out to the 2-shot, and he speaks immediately, driving the shot. Any pause now would weaken the moment by building in needless hesitation: Cut to 2-shot go? DALLAS: (She makes as if to accept his offer, then changes her mind) Oh,

don’t talk like that. Dallas suddenly breaks away and moves to pass behind him. Here is one of those situations where there is more to be gained from moving out to the 2-shot rather than continuing to play the exchanges on CUs. It is stronger to see both of them when he repeats ‘will you go?’ and she hesitates, and it also shows both of them as she leaves. It is easy to forget when working with close-ups that, although a CU emphasises a reaction, it also excludes the simultaneous reaction occurring on the other angle. Put simply, a CU can exclude as much as it includes. Analysing this fragment of Dorothy Spencer’s work on Stagecoach in considerable detail might tend to give the impression that the process of editing film is calculated and rational rather than instinctive and intuitive. In fact it is all of these things. There are times when a decision is made because logically it will produce a predictable result. At other times a cutting point will be selected because it feels right: judging the length of a pause, for example, or determining how long to hold a shot before something happens or before cutting to a different angle.

Rhythm Any discussion about film editing will inevitably sooner or later raise the matter of rhythm. It tends to be used rather as a compendium word, a sort of catch-all which tends to obscure as much as it reveals about something that is difficult to define. In fact there are many rhythms contained within the filmed and recorded material which arrives in the editing room. Speech has its own rhythms and contains a mixture of stresses and variations in pitch constructed in cadences very like music. The performances that make up a scene contain speech rhythms that are fundamental to the editing process; they are the least changeable element and although adjustable in some measure – pauses can be lengthened or shortened, sentences and phrases can be omitted or their order changed – the verbal line that runs through the scene has to be allowed to convey the meaning invested in it by the spoken performances with all the stresses and cadences intelligibly in place.

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RINGO: I know all I wanna know. (pause: they look at each other) Will you

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For example, an attempt to shorten a pause in a speech beyond a certain point will sound completely wrong because the rhythm established by the words that precede and follow it will immediately reveal it to be false. However, considerably greater latitude is possible when adjusting the pauses between lines spoken by different characters, and it is not uncommon to increase the pace of a scene well beyond that produced during filming. By the same token, pauses can be lengthened, sometimes by doubling the pause – adding the off-camera pause timing to the on-camera one, or taking a moment of silence from some other part of the take. Speeding up dialogue exchanges by omitting pauses between lines and cutting ahead for reaction has become standard editing practice in some American films and television dramas series in recent years; it pushes believability to the limits on occasions, but generates a remarkable tension in the scenes in which it is used, partly perhaps because the artificial injection of pace pushes the speech rhythms almost to the edge of what is acceptable. As has been demonstrated earlier in this chapter, there is much greater flexibility when it comes to positioning the picture cuts within a scene. For the most part, shot changes tend to follow the rhythms that are established in the speech patterns with a pause being used to accompany a picture cut. Part of the reason for this is that, by making the picture cuts fit rhythmically with the shape of the sound, they are not intrusive and integrate with the natural beats in the speech. By the same token, it is possible to choose cutting points that sit uncomfortably with the speech rhythms and this provides a tool whereby cuts made during a dialogue scene can produce an unsettling effect. Selecting cutting points that bisect dialogue erratically when one character is speaking and not the other provides a way to affect the balance of the scene and reflect the tensions built into the performances. It will also be evident when considering the question of speech rhythms that different words contain different stresses and that cuts made against softly stressed syllables can have a different effect from those that accompany explosive consonants. The positioning of cuts against words is commonly used to determine emphasis and convey meaning, and instances of dialogue being carefully positioned in this way can be found in most films. A particularly memorable example of its use can be found in a short scene in Camille (George Cukor, 1936). Camille was edited by Margaret (Maggie) Booth, who ranked among the top editors at MGM during the 1930s, becoming their supervising editor in 1939, a position she held for twenty-seven years. This famous film, based on the play La Dame aux Camélias, by Alexandre Dumas, tells the story of the love of a young man, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), for a cocotte, Marguerite Gautier (Greta Garbo). As their relationship develops, Armand persuades Marguerite to leave her benefactor, the Baron de Varville, and move into the country for the benefit of her health. Marguerite’s friend, Nichette, is due to marry her fianceé, Gustave, and Marguerite arranges a country wedding for them.

Dissolve to a garden exterior WS the guests are grouped behind the bride and groom who stand before a priest who speaks the marriage service in Latin. Cut to an MCS of the priest, bride and groom. PRIEST: Semper vivat ...

Cut to Prudence standing next to Gaston and starting to get emotional, she nudges his arm and he eventually gives her his handkerchief and she starts to dab her eyes. PRIEST (OOV): With this ring, I thee wed. GUSTAVE (OOV): With this ring, I thee wed. PRIEST (OOV): And I plight unto thee my troth. GUSTAVE (OOV): And I plight unto thee my troth. PRIEST (OOV): (Cut to close 2-shot of bride and groom) Amen, (the word is

split over the cut) Nichette as she puts a ring onto Gustave’s finger PRIEST (OOV): With this ring, I ... (Cut to CU Armand who turns his head to

look off left to Marguerite) ... thee wed. NICHETTE (OOV): With this ring, I thee wed. PRIEST (OOV): And I plight unto ... (Cut to CU Marguerite who looks up, off

right to Armand, and down) ... thee my troth. NICHETTE (OOV): And I plight unto thee my troth. PRIEST (OOV): In Nomine Patris ... (Cut to close 2-shot bride and groom (as

before)) ... et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. GUSTAVE and Nichette kiss.

Cut to Prudence and Gaston as before, then pan across to the bride and groom for congratulations and dialogue continuing. What is so clear about the way this scene is cut is that there seems to be nothing arbitrary about it at all. Virtually none of the dialogue is actually used synchronously, partly because the words of the marriage service are repetitive and well known but mostly because the interest lies not in the process of Nichette and Gustave getting married but in others’ reaction to it; plainly, George Cukor’s

Dialogue

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(Cut to two-shot of Armand and Marguerite, they look towards each other. ) Christum dominum nostrum. Amen.

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intention. Note how, once the relationships of the characters and their groupings have been established, Margaret Booth uses the first part of the ceremony to introduce some light-hearted business between Prudence and Gaston, then during the part where Nichette makes her vows she uses the words to underline the bond between Armand and Marguerite, revealing their awareness of the significance of the moment. On both occasions the cuts to the CUs of Armand and Marguerite are accompanied by the word ‘thee’ PRIEST (OOV): With this ring, I ... (Cut to CU Armand who turns his head to

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look off left to Marguerite) ... thee wed. NICHETTE (OOV): With this ring, I thee wed. PRIEST (OOV): And I plight unto ... (Cut to CU Marguerite who looks up, off

right to Armand and down) ... thee my troth. NICHETTE (OOV): And I plight unto thee my troth.

Film editing

It is worth pointing out that this entire scene would almost certainly have been filmed with the dialogue being spoken over all the closer shots so as to provide the actors opportunities to react appropriately to the vows being made. However, because there is some latitude in adjusting the reactions with regard to the lines being spoken out of vision, and these seemed to have been positioned with a good deal of regard to their content, we can be certain that considerable editorial judgement was at work. I suspect too, that the shot of Prudence with her handkerchief business was not necessarily filmed with the intention of placing it where it eventually ended up. Plainly, it would have placed a considerable strain on the actress to sustain her tearful joy throughout the whole series of exchanged vows, and it seems fairly clear that the cut to Prudence and Gaston that ends the sequence, and which develops into a pan across to the happy couple, is a continuation of the performance used near the start of the scene. Edward Dmytryk examines this matter of timing dialogue against cuts and draws particular attention to a dialogue scene in Love Affair, a film directed by Leo McCarey in 1939, which Dmytryk edited.5 Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne play star-crossed lovers, Michel and Terry, who have met on a ship sailing from Naples to New York. On arriving, they agree to meet, after a six-month separation, at the top of the Empire State building. On her way to the meeting Terry is seriously injured in a traffic accident and, faced with life as a cripple, refuses to contact her distraught lover. Michel eventually traces her to her home but he is unaware of her condition. She successfully conceals her handicap by remaining seated throughout his visit. This is Dmytryk’s description of the performances and the way he edited the scene:

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Boyer’s pride and Dunne’s reluctance lead them both to avoid the truth as they recount their versions of the missed rendezvous. Yet this is the climax of the film, and it is mandatory that the truth emerge despite the

This question of determining the point at which a cut should be made to maximise the content of a scene is central to every aspect of editing. It is impossible to define outside the performances actually selected for use, and these can vary from take to take. Dmytryk makes the point well: The editing of such a sequence demands as much timing sensitivity as does the staging. The cutter must feel the exact point in the delayed reaction at which the viewer will look for a counter-reaction, and a cut made at this point will inevitably be proper and smooth. To elucidate these matters of timing and ‘feel’, I have selected a scene from Scent of a Woman (1992), directed by Martin Brest and edited by William Steincamp, Michael Tronick and Harvey Rosenstock.7 This film concerns a journey of discovery made by two oddly-matched individuals, a scholarship student and a blind, retired lieutenant-colonel, who spend a Thanksgiving holiday weekend in New York. Most of the film consists of a series of dialogue scenes between the two men which are used to advance the plot, establish character and motivation, and chart the changes that occur as their relationship develops. The way that these performances are edited provides a useful insight into the way the subtexts within the scenes are revealed. Charlie Simms, a scholarship student at an upper-class, New Hampshire boarding school applies for a job caring for a sightless, former lieutenant-colonel, Frank Slade, whose niece and family are spending the Thanksgiving holiday weekend away. Slade is a bitter, heavy-drinking, disillusioned military man who has built his life on external values. Fundamentally a life-loving sensualist, he finds his blindness intolerable and secretly decides to conclude a weekend of extravagant pleasure by committing suicide. Charlie Simms is recruited as his aide, and comes to like and admire the humanity behind Slade’s rancorous exterior. Their developing relationship helps both men rediscover a belief in their own selfworth. The short section that follows is the concluding part of a long scene (nearly seven minutes) in which Charlie meets Frank Slade for the first time. During the early part of the scene, Frank adopts a provocative tone to demean the student. When the young man attempts to assert himself, Frank falls back on military jargon to express his irritation at being challenged, which only emphasises the

Dialogue

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fact that it is never voiced. Obviously it could be done only through ‘attitude’ or reaction, but not obviously. Boyer and Dunne were masters of reaction. In this climactic scene, their ‘looks’ had to belie their words, but in a most subtle fashion. These ‘looks’ came after the spoken lines, being, in a sense, reactions to their own words. Therefore, it was necessary to stay with each close-up after the speaker’s line had been completed, if only for a brief moment. Only then could a cut be made to the necessary reaction and response, at the finish of which would come another subtle ambiguous look’.6

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pathetic emptiness of the threats and confirms his real powerlessness. The selected sequence starts with Frank asking Charlie about his appearance: (MCS) FRANK: How’s your skin, son, I like my aides to look presentable? (cut to MCS) CHARLIE: Well, I’ve had a few zits; but my roommate, he lent me his

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Clinique because he’s from Chestnut Hill and he used to get ... (fast cut to Frank, interrupting him) FRANK: The history of my skin, by Charles ... (cuts to Charlie (reacts)) ...

Simms. (cut to Frank (fast in)) FRANK: You patronising me, puly? (cut to Charlie (Frank OOV)) Huh?

You givin’ me that old ... (cut to Frank) ... prep school palaver. Baird School. Bunch o’ runny-nosed snots in tweed jackets all studying to be George Bush. (cut to Charlie) CHARLIE; (stung, but deciding to make a retort after a brief deliberation): I

believe President Bush went to Andover – Colonel. (pause held at the end) (cut to CS Frank) FRANK: (long pause): You sharpshootin’ me, punk? (cut to Charlie)

(reaction) (then cut to Frank) Is that what you’re doin’? (cut to Charlie (Frank conts. OOV)) Don’t you sharpshoot me. (cut to MCS Frank) You’ll give me forty, then you’ll give me forty more, then you’re gonna pull KP. The grease pit. (cut in to CS Frank) I’ll rub your nose in enlisted men’s crud ‘til you don’t know which end’s up! D’you understand? (cut to Charlie reacts – lost for words) (cut to Frank) FRANK: What d’you want? (cut to Charlie)

Film editing

CHARLIE: What d’you mean, what do I want? (cut to Frank)

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FRANK: What d’you want here? (cut to Charlie)

charlie (now not so certain about it): I want ... I want a job.

(cut to Frank) FRANK: (after a pause, scornfully): Oh God, you’re touching. (after long

pause, cut to Charlie (reacts)) (cut to MCS Frank. He turns on the record player which is next to him) (cut to MS Charlie. He is uncertain what to do; looks round at the door)

FRANK: Still here, poor mouth? (cut to MCS Charlie. Frank cont. OOV)

Huh? (cut to CS Frank) Convenience store, my ass. Hustling jalapeño dips to the appleseeds. (pause) Go on, dismissed, (cut to MCS Charlie uncertain what to say: has he got the job or not?) (cut to CS Frank. Hard in) Dismissed! (cut to MCS Charlie. He turns and leaves) (cut to WS Frank. Turns the record player back on) The way that the scene has been shot is instructive. Apart from a brief insert when Frank’s grand-niece comes to the window, the scene is covered using six setups, three on each character. Once Charlie enters the room neither character moves. Frank is seated in the dimly lit room illuminated only by a shaft of light from a single window which, falling slightly on Frank, separates them. The three set-ups covering Frank are a wide shot into which Charlie edges, used near the start of the scene to establish the space between them (and finally to isolate Frank in the empty room after Charlie leaves), and an MCS and CS which are framed tighter on Frank than the equivalent shots of Charlie. This provides Frank with greater dominance of the scene. Charlie’s closer shots are, as indicated, slightly looser than Frank’s and there is also a medium shot used only twice in the whole scene, once near the beginning after he enters the room, and again at the end when he is uncertain whether to leave or not. (MCS) FRANK: How’s your skin, son, I like my aides to look presentable.

(cut to MCS Charlie) CHARLIE: Well, I’ve had a few zits; but my room mate, he lent me his

Clinique because he’s from Chestnut Hill and he used to get ... (fast cut to Frank, interrupting him) FRANK: The history of my skin, by Charles ... (cut to Charlie (reacts)) ...

Simms. This laying over of the last word, or part of the last word, is a standard editing strategy to inject pace into the scene and is justified here because the put-down sharply increases interest in Charlie’s response.

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(cut to MCS Frank. After a pause he turns off the player)

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(cut to Frank (fast in)) FRANK: You patronising me, puly? (cut to Charlie (Frank OOV)) Huh?

You givin’ me that old ... {cut to Frank) ... prep school palaver. Baird School. Bunch o’ runny-nosed snots in tweed jackets all studying to be George Bush. (cut to Charlie) CHARLIE: (stung, but deciding to make a retort after a brief deliberation): I

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believe President Bush went to Andover – Colonel. (pause held at the end) Several points might be made here. Frank’s line is not laid over Charlie’s extended reaction which it could be; Frank’s words need to be used for maximum effect so that ‘You patronising me, puly?’ is cut in hard and fast on Frank, justifying the subsequent cut to Charlie for, ‘Huh?’ where again, we are given Charlie’s reaction to the challenge. As Frank continues, we need to remain with Charlie for his reaction but must select the most effective point at which to cut back to him. By cutting back for ‘prep school palaver’ the cut comes with the subject of the sentence and shows the actor savouring the alliteration in the phrase. Plainly, best value lies in staying for all of the line, which is what happens, then cutting quickly to Charlie to see how he reacts to the ‘George Bush’ slight. Charlie’s reaction and response is the next point of interest and because this is a rare moment when Charlie chooses to asserts himself, provision is made for the spectator to react – a pause before cutting to Frank. CHARLIE: (stung, but deciding to make a retort after a brief deliberation): I

believe President Bush went to Andover – Colonel. (pause held at the end) (cut to CS, after long pause Frank) FRANK: You sharpshootin’ me, punk? (cut to Charlie)

Film editing

(Reaction) (cut to Frank) Is that what you’re doin’? (cut to Charlie (Frank OOV)) Don’t you sharpshoot me.

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The first thing to note is that the cut to Frank is to a close shot – almost a close-up. This anticipates that Frank’s response is likely to have a raised emotional level – which it does. But what is particularly interesting is that in looking closely at the shot it is possible to detect that the long pause before Frank speaks has been artificially extended. Clearly, it is a crucial moment which changes the direction of the scene and benefits by being sustained. By retaining part of Frank’s reaction as he listens to Charlie’s off-mike line, his actual reaction can be lengthened and used to heighten the dramatic moment. The subsequent exchanges follow the rhythm of the lines with the cuts.

What is interesting about the editing of the next line is that it begins by changing the image size back to the MCS before cutting in, an example of ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ – draw back to leap better. (cut to MCS Frank) FRANK: You’ll give me forty, then you’ll give me forty more, then you’re

(cut in to CS Frank) I’ll rub your nose in enlisted men’s crud ‘til you don’t know which end’s up! D’you understand? By retreating from the close shot of Frank in the previous exchanges and using the MCS for ‘You’ll give me forty ...’, etc, it enables a cut-in to accompany and strengthen the climax of Frank’s (empty) threat: FRANK: I’ll rub your nose in enlisted men’s crud ‘til you don’t know

which end’s up! D’you understand? (cut to Charlie, reacts – lost for words) (cut to Frank) What d’you want? (cut to Charlie) CHARLIE: What d’you mean, what do I want? (cut to Frank) FRANK: What d’you want here? (cut to Charlie) CHARLIE: (now not so certain about it): I want ... I want a job. (cut to Frank)

(after a pause, scornfully): Oh God, you’re touching. (long pause) The brevity of the above exchanges and the need to sustain a balance between the two positions demands that they be cut as alternations and it assists the dramatic edginess of the exchanges. No quarter is given by either man and no phrase is softened by being placed over a reaction. Frank then turns on his record player, partly to reaffirm his dominance of the space and exclude Charlie, partly to see what Charlie will do, and also to introduce an element which absolves Frank from having to accept or reject Charlie; he needs him for the furtherance of his plan but is uncertain at this point whether Charlie is right for the job. It also absolves the scriptwriter from having to make this part of the film conclusive. The scene has actually been about establishing character and it is necessary to keep all the plot possibilities open. (cut to MCS Frank) (He turns on the record player which is next to him) Dialogue

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gonna pull KP. The grease pit.

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(cut to MS Charlie) (he is uncertain what to do; looks round at the door) The medium shot of Charlie has been used only once, when he first entered the room, now it is used to good advantage a second time to emphasise Charlie isolated by Frank’s switching on the music and switching off Charlie. He is uncertain whether to go or not, and the space around him emphasises his dilemma reducing his size relative to the frame and offering him space into which he feels unable to move.

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(cut to MCS Frank) frank: (after a pause he turns off the player): Still here, poor mouth? (cut to MCS Charlie (Frank OOV)) Huh? (cut to CS Frank) Convenience store, my ass. Hustling jalapeño dips to the appleseeds. (pause) Go on, dismissed, (cut to MCS Charlie, uncertain what to say: has he got the job or not?) (cut to CS Frank) (hard in) Dismissed! (cut to MCS Charlie, he turns and leaves) (cut to WS Frank, turns the record player back on) The MCS of Frank includes the record-playing business as it is switched off and prepares for the final close shots of Frank. Apart from ‘Huh?’, which again invites the possibility of a reply that does not come, all Frank’s lines are spoken in vision to maximise the character’s presence. Finally, the wide shot that opened the scene emphasises Frank’s isolation in a room that he can listen in but cannot see. The scene is an important illustration of dialogue editing in that it deals with a situation which reveals subtle nuances of character and where dramatic balance must be sustained even when one character has most lines and controls the dramatic situation. It also strives to underline the point that although editing must involve timing, instinct and responsiveness to rhythm and balance – all those useful abstractions which are trotted out to ‘explain’ the editor’s role – much of the craft is simply founded on a logical response to the material and the task of working out how to show the content of a scene to its best advantage.

Notes 1

Film editing

2

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3 4

Some experienced screen actors will give a subtly different performance on every take of every shot, apparently believing that a performance can only be better if it is also different. This can open up some useful editing opportunities. The practice of viewing rushes with the producer, director and key members of the crew is an important stage in the process of filmmaking which has become something of a luxury. Only productions which are sufficiently well funded can afford to provide the time and facilities at the start or end of a filming day for rushes or dailies to be properly assessed. Behlmer, Memo From: David O. Selznick, p. 334. Dmytryk, On Film Editing, p. 56.

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6 7

This film was remade by Leo McCarey in 1957 as An Affair to Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, and references to it played an important role as a plot device in Sleepless in Seattle in 1993. The film was remade in 1994 under its original title with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Dmytryk, On Film Editing, pp. 62–3 The reason why several film editors are often credited with work on a film is often difficult to determine. A significant contribution made by a senior member of the editing team occasionally justifies a shared credit and is often a valuable aid to promotion. I know of several instances where editors and directors, have been replaced because of ‘creative differences’ or where the need to make a deadline requires several editors to work together in order to get a film finished. All these circumstances might justify multiple editing credits. Editing that runs over schedule will sometimes require that another editor completes the work because the principal editor has contractual obligations to another film; there are reports that two shorter versions of Scent of a Woman were tested at previews but proved less popular than the version eventually released. This re-editing may well have involved major editorial input by others.

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5

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16

The final rewrite

When you talk about passion for film, you’re not talking about 16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm film – although it’s important to like the physical aspect. It’s a passion for living with characters. It becomes your life ... It’s the last stage of the writing. It’s the final rewrite. Film editors Dede Allen and Richard Marks from an interview for American Film, November 1985

When a film is released in the cinema or first transmitted on television, it is presented as a completed work with the implication that it reached the screen as a fully realised original concept. It is rare that the problems and difficulties that had to be overcome to bring the film to completion are made known or even considered relevant.1 Production companies will go to some lengths to ensure that creative disagreements and difficulties inherent to the production process remain unknown. Indeed, when a technician or actor is contracted to work on a film they undertake not to make public any information connected with their engagement. Films invariably come to completion only after considerable creative struggle and, because this chapter is concerned with the processes of change that take place once a film goes into production, the nature of those changes, and the extent to which they are commonly resolved during the editing process, are particularly relevant to this study. Many films begin shooting using a version of the script which is not necessarily considered to be final. In many instances it will be the latest of many versions that just happened to be current on the day that filming was scheduled to begin. During the shoot, there will be rewrites of the script that are intended to improve, clarify, embellish or shorten the dialogue, and rewrites that omit scenes considered inessential and therefore removed to accommodate an overstretched shooting schedule. Occasionally, scenes that have already been filmed will be re-written and shot again because of some narrative ambiguity which only became apparent during the first stages of editing. Once filmed, scenes sometimes play differently 284

from the way that they read on the page because performances sometimes introduce elements that elide the written intention.

When editing, the intention is to maximise the spectator’s response to the dramatic developments taking place within the scene. This is done by determining the points at which the cuts will occur and deciding which framing is most appropriate at each cutting point. The content of each scene is displayed at a number of levels: the dramatic intention of the written text is one level of meaning; the specific motivations of each of the characters is another; the director’s selection of framing, camera movements and characters’ moves during a scene a third. These three elements are flexible, and vary in a number of ways. The scripted dialogue can be altered during filming and sometimes between takes, so that different takes contain different words, or orders of words. The dialogue can be removed or altered during the editing process; speeches can be shortened – sections removed, or occasionally repeated for dramatic or practical necessity. Although in most instances the practice of shooting additional takes is simply to obtain the best performance from the actor,2 performances will inevitably vary between takes: changes of emphasis in words and phrasing provide subtle variations of stress and meaning, and some actors deliberately alter the emphasis on every take. Gestures, looks and glances, facial expressions and physical moves can and do vary between takes. The director might require an adjustment to an actor’s performance or actions to provide alternative possibilities during the editing process. Sometimes some ‘business’ or an action will provide an unexpected variation in performance which will require an alternative or additional angle from which to shoot the scene or part of the scene. These are the materials from which the editor will initially construct the film and which continue to be available as a pool of possibilities when adjusting the emphasis of the content and refining the shape of the performances when working with the director. Once the editor has completed the first assembly of the film, the director will view the result and the next stage begins. Alternative takes will be assessed and sometimes used to replace those indicated as preferred during filming. Adjustments to the balance of the content will be made by shortening, repositioning and sometimes dividing scenes. Often lines of dialogue, and sometimes sections of the film, are removed entirely. The reasons for this relate to the difference between a piece of written work and its performance; dramatisation brings additional qualities to the work which will often render parts of the written text redundant. Examples of this are common in the theatre, where changes are commonly made to the text of an original stage play during the rehearsals. The process of honing and refining continues until the director feels that a point has been reached where the producer, or producers, of the film should see his or her ‘cut’ of the picture. Thereafter changes will be made, both small and large,

The final rewrite

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First assembly to fine cut

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until there is agreement that the film has reached its final form: the fine cut. At this point the film is ‘locked-off which means that the final stages – sound editing, music composing and recording, sound mixing, negative cutting and grading of the final print – can proceed unhindered by any further changes.3 What eventually reaches the screen is usually several steps away from the initial intention and seldom the work of a dominant, single-minded, directorial authority bringing a finely conceived, original concept, effortlessly to fruition.

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The director, the script and the film In modern film production, the director has considerable freedom to interpret the scripted intention in terms of the way that each scene is filmed. To give an example of the way that a section of script can be changed and developed before it becomes a scene in the finished film, I will use a fragment from a two-part television drama, Comics (1993), directed by Diarmuid Lawrence from a script by Lynda La Plante. Fratelli is a corrupt mobster who has arranged to have his cousin ‘hit’ so that he can take over his West-End based drug operation. Johnny Lazar, a stand-up comic, witnesses the killing but the victim’s briefcase containing a diary which gives details of illegal-drug shipments has got into the wrong hands. The police suspect Fratelli and his minder, Moreno, of being involved in the killing. This is the scene as scripted: 135. Int. Fratelli’s manor house drawing room – night POV Fratelli’s drawing room window. Judd drives out a plain police car, sitting beside him is Kelly. He looks back at the house. Cut back to: Drawing room, as Fratelli lets the curtain fall back into place. Moreno is sitting on the sofa with a glass of beer in his hand. He is rather uncomfortable. FRATELLI: Why are the cops suddenly turning their attention to me? I

Film editing

hope that witness was taken care of ... (tosses newspaper) Been nothing in the papers. Still no briefcase, and I have five days before the heat is on. If that diary ... (Mrs Fratelli passes the door. She looks through the glass panel then walks away, we can see Fratelli’s two children in their night clothes. Fratelli rises, walks to the door. ) One moment, I want to say goodnight to my children ...

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Throughout the above scene, the television has continued and midway the Des O’Connor show starts. It is only when Fratelli walks out that Moreno pays any attention to the television. On screen is a close-up of Lazar, announced by Des O’Connor. Moreno slowly gets to his feet. He moves closer and closer to the screen.

First, let me chart the changes that were made to the scripted scene by the director. The scene starts with a view through the front door of the house as a car sets off down the drive. Moreno is in the process of shutting the door as the car pulls away. The camera pans right with him as he enters an adjacent room to reveal Fratelli at the back of the shot. Moreno crosses the frame and stands edging frame right.

hope that witness was taken care of ... (tosses newspaper) Been nothing in the papers. Still no briefcase, and I have five days before the heat is on. If that diary ... As Fratelli starts speaking he moves towards the camera, passing Moreno and coming into a CU, then on the line, ‘... Still no briefcase ...’ turns towards Moreno who is now facing Fratelli. We are now looking at a close 2-shot favouring Moreno for, ‘... and I have five days before the heat is on. If that diary...’. His speech is interrupted by the noise of a tap on a door, and Fratelli turns his head to look off frame right. An insert of his POV shows his wife and children standing behind the closed, glazed, double doors that lead into the stairwell lobby. A return to the previous shot follows as Fratelli smiles, and without looking at Moreno, he speaks his line: FRATELLI: One moment, I want to say goodnight to my children ...

And he exits frame right. A cut is then made to the stairwell lobby, from behind Mrs Fratelli and the children, and looking through the glazed doors as Fratelli approaches and enters the scene. He picks up his son, and the camera pans right with him as he sets off up the stairs followed by his wife and daughter. Moreno, who has followed Fratelli out of the room and is now edging frame left, reacts on hearing Lazar’s name introduced on the television which is somewhere out of shot. He exits frame right and the next shot shows him entering the kitchen where a POV shot of the TV shows Lazar starting his act. The differences are immediately apparent. Whereas the script set the scene entirely in one room, the director has orchestrated the action to move through four separate spaces and achieves this with five shots. The use of multiple spaces increases the amount of visual stimulus and maintains a high interest level but so does the way that they are used. The first shot might be considered as having five sections. The departure of Judd and Kelly which is also an introduction of Moreno; Fratelli in WS feeling aggrieved; Fratelli now in CU taking control of the frame and placing responsibility for his concerns on Moreno now in CS; and finally, Fratelli’s warm response to his wife’s intervention. The second shot – Fratelli’s POV of his wife and children, is used as a positive interruption, not merely a casual distraction which leaves

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FRATELLI: Why are the cops suddenly turning their attention to me? I

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Fratelli to interrupt himself and decide to follow his wife. The third shot, by focusing on the family directly, elaborates the irony in the interplay between the innocent children and the ruthless businessman, and finally, by placing the TV in a fourth space, it removes it from being a potentially distracting presence during the scene and gives it more dramatic emphasis: it becomes something that commands Moreno’s attention after the central activity is over. The amount of editorial intervention in the structure is minimal and revolves principally around the moment when Fratelli is interrupted. It is also useful in illustrating the objective-subjective alternations which are the basis of the conventional mode of dramatic presentation. In that the spectator shares Moreno’s view of the departing police, we can assume that the scene commences from a subjective view; in fact the script’s first words for the scene are: ‘POV Fratelli’s drawing room window’. The subjective convention requires that if there is to be a interruption we cannot know about it until it happens, so that Mrs Fratelli’s knock on the connecting doors must be positioned on the soundtrack to start before Fratelli gets to the end of the line, ‘If that diary ...’. Laid just before the word ‘diary’, it prompts Fratelli’s head-turn, which is the glance which precedes a POV. The shot of Mrs Fratelli and the children seen through the glass doors is then shared with the spectator and, once its content is clear, the convention requires a return to the previous shot; in this case for Fratelli’s final line to Moreno before he exits screen right. The next shot, outside the room with the family in shot but facing away, is objective in that it does not actually belong to anyone, and its function in narrative terms is to display the irony in the situation as mentioned above. The end of this shot resolves on Moreno as he hears the introduction of Lazar on the TV talk show, and at this point although we share the experience with Moreno, we watch his reaction objectively, even when we see his view of the TV with Lazar starting his act. The example given above illustrates how the original scripted intention can be expanded to increase the dynamics of the scene and strengthen its content. The next example is more directly concerned with the way that changes are made to a scripted scene at different stages: before filming commences, during the actual rehearsal and shooting on the set, and finally during the editing. It is particularly useful in illustrating how a problem related to the meaning of a scene is solved by restructuring and re-editing the content. This scene is taken from an episode in a television police drama set in India, Bombay Blue. Two British policemen have been investigating the apparent murder of a young woman, Mary Carter, the paid travelling companion of wealthy Jane Ballinger – a woman of about the same age. Mary Carter’s passport, personal effects and her largely unidentifiable remains have been discovered in the boot of Jane’s Ballinger’s burnt-out car; her head has been shaved, and there are three puncture wounds in her chest. After interviewing suspects and following up numerous dead-end leads, Superintendent Mayberry and his Indian colleague, Constable Tarun Dev, come to suspect that they are investigating a case of stolen

identity: that it is Mary Carter who has murdered Jane Ballinger and is now passing herself off as her former employer. She is arrested and taken to the police station for questioning. The scene showing her interrogation and confession is set out below as originally scripted. Substantial parts of the scene were excised during editing, the lines of dialogue that were retained are shown in bold typeface.

MAYBERRY: The note book ... The one you gave Inspector Marati? JANE: Yes? MAYBERRY: All that stuff about the fire temple and the Saraswami

Giri? It was genuine wasn’t it? JANE: Yes. It was Mary’s, I told you. She was obsessed with all

that nonsense. MAYBERRY: You mean you were obsessed with it Mary. JANE: I am not Mary Carter! Why won’t you believe me? TARUN: Have you ever had your hair dyed? JANE: What are you talking about? TARUN: We’re expecting a forensic report. On a strand of hair

taken from a brush in your hotel room. LAWYER (protesting mildly): This evidence was removed without her

knowledge? MAYBERRY (cool): I’m afraid so. But there’s plenty more where that came

from, (beat) You see, examined under the microscope it will become apparent that your hair is natural brunette ... dyed blonde. (On Jane) TARUN: Can you explain that? (Jane Ballinger shakes her head. In trouble

here. ) We’re right aren’t we? You are her? You’re Mary Carter? (A pause. All eyes on Mary Carter. She nods her head, and now a different voice emerges from her. Not the clipped toned of the Jane Ballinger that she’s trying to be. ) MARY: Yes. MAYBERRY: You want to tell us what happened? (Mary pauses, then in her

own less clipped tones) MARY: Jane Ballinger hired me ... as a dogsbody. At first it wasn’t too

bad. But then ... The woman was a spoilt little cow ... Bullying me ...

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Scene 3 7. Day. Int. Police station. Interview room. Day 4 open on Jane Ballinger. An Indian lawyer sits behind her with a pen and paper. Wider, we find Tarun and Mayberry opposite her.

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She made fun of my interest in Saraswami Giri ... and everything ... She belittled me ... TARUN: That a reason to kill her? MARY: We’d gone for a drive ... An argument started ... She told me I

was finished ... ‘my services were dispensed with’ ... Something in me snapped. I grabbed her by the throat ... and ... it just happened. Then I panicked ...

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MAYBERRY: Panicked? All looks very well planned to me ... MARY: I hid the body in the boot for three days... Time to think... It

wasn’t planned... I mean I didn’t plan to kill her ... TARUN: Why shave her head, the three wounds?

(Mary looks at Tarun) Some kind of ritual killing was it? Did some of your friends up at the fire temple have a hand in this? MARY: No ... I gave you the notebook to mix things up. I didn’t shave

her head or make the wounds. MAYBERRY: Then who did?

(Mary looks strangely at Mayberry) MARY: Sometimes destiny takes your hand. The moving moves you ...

tarun: Sorry? (beat) What we do is neither good nor bad, it is our karma ... Jane Ballinger was destroyed by the mother god ... A sacrifice ... through her death I was born again ... (smiles ethereally) All destruction is creation. MARY: It was Shiva ... Kali took my hands.

MAYBERRY: In our book it’s murder. MARY: You may frown at these things, but Shiva smiles ... and I am

happy ...

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(Mayberry and Tarun exchange a look: Is this woman unbalanced, or is this another performance?)

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The first thing to mention is that before the scene was shot a decision was made to exclude the Indian lawyer from the scene altogether. It was not simply a matter of budget restrictions, although that was certainly a consideration, it was principally because it was felt that the presence of the lawyer added little or nothing to the scene. Various small changes were made to the dialogue during rehearsals but the main change was to begin the scene with a slightly later section and then revert to the question about the book. This was because an earlier scene had concluded

with the sample of hair being taken from a hair brush and the reordering improved the development of the scene. TARUN: Have you ever had your hair dyed? JANE: What are you talking about? TARUN: We’re expecting a forensic report. On a strand of hair taken

from a brush in your hotel room.

MAYBERRY: It will show that your hair is natural brunette ... dyed blonde.

And then continuing back to the top with: MAYBERRY: This note book ... The one you gave Inspector Marati? JANE: Yes? MAYBERRY: All that stuff about the fire temple and the Saraswami Giri?

It was genuine wasn’t it? The scene was then shot, and played entirely through, as written. Scene 37 was covered from various camera positions using a total of nine setups, seven of them covering different framings of the three characters and two showing Jane/Mary’s POV through the window of the room, one showing an empty view, the other showing the guru, Saraswami Giri. This shot does not appear in the script. It was an addition, arranged to be filmed on the day at the request of the director because he felt that it might be needed when the scene came to be edited. He was right. Before the scene was filmed, there had been some concern about how Mary’s rather sudden confession would be read by the audience. The scripted intention seemed to be that she was a clever woman who had planned the murder of her employer very carefully from the outset, trusting that she would get away with it. But now, seemingly found out, she confesses, but in such a way as to suggest that she is of unsound mind in the hope of getting a reduced sentence. But all this was difficult to convey. The actress did her best but certain ambiguities remained; was she a fraud or actually insane? The first assembly of the material, which followed the scripted intention – that she was cleverly masquerading – did not really convince. It was generally agreed that whatever conclusion was reached it could not be an ambiguous one. This meant that the only possibility was to suggest quite clearly that Mary was insane, and this was where the shot of the guru standing in the window came in. The scene was re-cut in such a way as to suggest that at the point of deciding whether to sustain the pretence of being Jane Ballinger or confessing, she would ‘see’ the guru, her POV of the window would show the Saraswami Giri standing outside, but our view of the window, with Mary also in the shot, would not show the guru. Result: we could only conclude that ‘this woman is mad and that’s why she did it’. The fact that Mayberry and Tarun did

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Then removing the lawyer’s line and simplifying Mayberry’s to:

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not believe her was less important structurally than that the story had a positive resolution. Using two established editing conventions: a POV shot, shared with Mary and read as ‘this is Mary’s view; the guru appears be outside the window’, and a wider view of Mary looking at an empty window readable as ‘this view of Mary and the window demonstrates that only Mary sees the guru, he is clearly not there’, a switch is made from the internal, shared perspective to the external, narrated perspective. To further clarify this, it was considered necessary to do two things: add an additional line from Mayberry over her face when she first turns to the window, a sort of prompt to trigger her response, and, second, remove a lot of necessary ‘justification’ and ‘explanation’ dialogue which really belonged to the original reading of the scene. The final re-cut went like this: TARUN: Have you ever had your hair dyed? JANE: What are you talking about? TARUN: We’re expecting a forensic report. On a strand of hair taken

from a brush in your hotel room. MAYBERRY: It will show that your hair is natural brunette ... dyed blonde.

jane (defiantly): Yes? TARUN: We’re right aren’t we? You are her? You’re Mary Carter? JANE: I am not Mary Carter! Why won’t you believe me? MAYBERRY (deciding to change tack): This note book ... The one you gave

Inspector Marati? CU Mary – Mayberry edging frame R JANE: Yes? MAYBERRY: All that stuff about the fire temple and the Saraswami Giri?

It was genuine wasn’t it? JANE: Yes. It was Mary’s, I told you. She was obsessed with all that

nonsense. MAYBERRY: You mean you were obsessed with it Mary.

CS Mary with empty window frame in background she turns towards it. (Here was added an extra wild-track (WT) line recorded later and laid over Mary’s CS.) MAYBERRY (WT line over): But it isn’t nonsense is it Mary, it’s the truth.

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Drop what you are not, so that you can become what you truly are.

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This last sentence was borrowed from an earlier scene in which it was addressed to Mayberry by Saraswami Giri. Then:

CU Mary. She reacts to something out of vision. CU. Mary’s POV of the window: the guru is standing outside. CS Mary and the empty window – no guru. MAYBERRY: You are Mary Carter, aren’t you?

MARY: It was Shiva ... Kali took my hands, (beat) Jane Ballinger was destroyed by the mother god ... A sacrifice ... through her I was born again ... (smiles ethereally) This last speech included appropriate reaction shots of Mayberry and Tarun. Comparing this final version with the original clearly illustrates the extent to which lines of dialogue have been either repositioned or omitted altogether. It should be emphasised that the scene was reworked many times before arriving at the final version.

Addition and subtraction As indicated by the previous example, during the continuous process of re-editing and reassessment, some scenes will be re-cut, shortened, lengthened, positioned at different points in the narrative and sometimes omitted altogether. Repositioning or omitting scenes from the ‘cut’ of a film can sometimes have knock-on effects on the clarity of the narrative and measures have to be found to restore the resulting imbalance. It is also not uncommon for confusions to become apparent from juxtapositions between scenes in the film which were actually quite clear in the script but altered during filming. A fascinating example of this can be found in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) edited by Terry Rawlings. Set in Los Angeles in 2017, the plot revolves around the tracking down and elimination of four ‘replicants’ (androids who have escaped from captivity on a space colony and come to earth). Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is the blade runner, a cop assigned to track down and destroy them. One of the replicants, Leon, while under investigation, has attacked Holden, his interrogator, and escaped. Deckard visits Leon’s hotel room and discovers photographs that provide valuable clues. In the next scene we meet the leader of the rebel replicants, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), for the first time and the shots that introduce this important character are very powerful. Yet the moment is a complete contrivance. This part of the scene was never shot, it was constructed during the editing process from out-takes filmed for a completely different purpose. After Deckard has discovered the photographs in Leon’s hotel room, a cut is made to a long shot night exterior. This is followed by a BCU of a clenched hand with Batty’s voice-over: ‘Time enough’. The next shot is a close-up of Roy Batty apparently looking down at his hand. The sound of tapping on glass causes him to

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(Mary looks at Tarun)

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to look up and off-screen left, in a determined and purposeful way. A cut to the exterior of a ‘VidPhon booth’ shows Batty stepping into the open and joining the hatless, raincoated figure of Leon. After a brief dialogue exchange they walk off together. A perceptive viewer seeing the film more than once might notice that the shot of the clenched hand is actually an out-take of a shot used much later in the film during the final chase, when Batty’s dying body is failing to respond and he forces a nail into his palm to sustain feeling in his hand. The same viewer might also notice that Batty’s close-up and look off camera left, is also repeated during Batty’s scene with Tyrell, the billionaire owner of the Tyrell Corporation and the replicants’ originator. An out-take of Batty’s look to Tyrell just before he kills him has been flopped over and used here,4 and confirmation can be found in the unavoidable retention of part of Tyrell’s hand on Batty’s shoulder in the flopped version. This little 2-shot scene was contrived from other material after the second sneak preview, when it was decided to omit a shot of Batty making a phone call to the eye-maker’s lab. My point in drawing attention to this piece of editorial sleight-of-hand is to stress that editing practice often goes well beyond working with the material provided, and the problems of altering content and reconstructing meaning are a part of the process that is not always fully understood. Every film requires changes to be made in the balance of scenes and the nature of their construction that take it beyond the blue-print of the script and the initial intentions of the director. The finished film is always a matter of re-evaluation and compromise at every stage, and the struggle to achieve the best possible result takes place in the editing room. The foregoing example of addition, contriving an unshot scene, is comparatively rare. On the other hand examples of subtraction are remarkably common and the reasons are much the same; once the script has been realised in terms of actual performed and directed scenes it becomes a different beast, with a life of its own. The released version of Blade Runner offers us a puzzle. Many commentators have observed that during the scene in which Bryant the police chief is briefing Deckard, he refers to six replicants having initially escaped and come to earth: three men and three women; he then tells him that one got killed while attempting to break into the Tyrell Corporation building. This ostensibly leaves five for Deckard to track down and destroy and yet the completed film presents us with only four. An examination of the script also tells us that the ‘missing’ replicant’s name was Mary, described as an image on a video screen which is showing the rebel replicants and their inception dates. Early versions of the script included several scenes featuring Mary, and actress Stacey Nelkin was originally cast in the role. Ridley Scott, interviewed by Paul Sammon for his book on the making of Blade Runner,5 says that the character was dropped three weeks into filming because of budget restrictions. However, the version of the script dated

23 February 1981, which seems to be the final draft, contains no other reference to Mary apart from that noted above.6

I have used examples of a scene being created during the editing process and scenes having sections removed, all in the interests of strengthening the film. And because these interventions can have a potent effect it might be interesting to look at an example where the editor has repeated a moment for dramatic emphasis. Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) contains some brilliant examples of filmmaking and some equally fine examples of film editing by Gerry Hambling. Two FBI agents, Ward (Willem Defoe) and Anderson (Gene Hackman) travel to Jessop County, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights workers. Their attempts to make progress are frustrated by the resentment of the racist inhabitants and the intractable attitude of the sheriff and his deputy, Clinton Pell (Brad Dourif). Anderson enters a bar with the intention of provoking a response that might reveal something about the missing activists. Pell is sitting at a table with Anderson, and the barman, Frank Bailey, sits with them, provoked into revealing his resentment. FRANK (CU): I don’t give two shits whose side your Mr Hoover’s on boy.

All I know is we’ve got five thousand niggers in this county who ain’t registered to vote yet, and as far as I’m concerned they never will. So you can tell your stiff suits up there in Washington DC that they ain’t goin’ to change us one bit. (Frank looks across to Pell and back to Anderson) ‘lest it’s over my dead body, or a lot o’ dead niggers. At this point there is a pause and a cut to an MCS of an onlooker who smiles and turns to look off camera left. Cut to an MCS of two other onlookers. One of them smiles in response. Over this pause can be heard the distant sound of a car passing in the street outside. ANDERSON (CU): You’d kill, Frank? Is that what you’re sayin’? FRANK (CU): I wouldn’t give it no more thought than wringing a cat’s

neck, (nods) and there ain’t a court in Mississippi that would convict me for it. ANDERSON (CU): (a pause, then he looks at Pell): How about you Deputy?

How are you with wringing necks, huh? PELL (CU): Jus’ keep pushing me, Hoover boy.

(Anderson CU) (Frank’s hand comes into frame and grabs Anderson’s lapel. And as Anderson is pulled forward ...) FRANK (CU): Get this straight you crowing old fucker. You tell your

queer-assed nigger bosses up north they ain’t never goin’ to find them

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Multiplication

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civil rightists down here. So you might as well pack up your bags and head your ass back up north where you belong. (Anderson grabs Frank’s genitals. Frank yells)

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At the end of this line, in the middle of the word ‘north’ there is a cut out to an MS of Frank and Anderson and we can therefore see clearly how Anderson has grabbed at Frank. As soon as the yell on this shot has ended Hambling cuts in again to the CU of Frank, repeats the action and Frank yells again. Then another cut, this time to the CU of Anderson, and the action and yell are repeated for a third time. Clearly, Hambling has repeated the moment when Frank is grabbed and yells, using the action from each set-up. The result is that we get the impression that he has tightened his grip twice more after the initial grab, multiplying the moment, with the result that it seems more violent and is much more effective. ANDERSON (CU): Now you get this straight shit-kicker. Don’t you go

mistaking me for some whole other body, (he tightens his grip and Frank yells) You gotta have your brains in your dick if you think we’re just goin’ to fade away. We’re gonna be here ‘til this thing’s finished. A short pause on Frank’s CU, then as Anderson turns his head towards Pell, cut out to the MS with Pell in the foreground as before. Anderson puts his beer bottle on the table, his right hand still holding Frank’s genitals, and pulls his jacket aside reaching towards his gun holster. ANDERSON: How about you Deputy?

(Pell CU) (glances down to Anderson’s gun and back up to Anderson) ANDERSON (CU): You think this gun’s just for show? You get to shoot people once in a while. A pause, then Anderson’s face tenses as he squeezes really hard and jerks Frank over. Then a fast cut to Frank’s CU as he begins to topple, then out to the MS as before as Frank and the chair hit the floor. A cut to CU Pell as he reacts, then to Anderson in CU as he swigs from the bottle and turns to Pell. ANDERSON (CU): Thanks for the beer.

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(he gets up and leaves)

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There are a number of editing decisions contained in the above scene, in addition to the multiplication device, which are of interest. The insert of the onlookers and their reaction to Frank’s outburst seems to be carefully placed for maximum effect and I get a strong feeling that this moment of tension has been built in the editing; the pause seems quite clearly to have been extended beyond that likely to have been provided by the actors during the dialogue, and the car passing on the

FRANK (CU): I don’t give two shits whose side your Mr Hoover’s on boy.

All I know is we’ve got five thousand niggers in this county who ain’t registered to vote yet, and as far as I’m concerned they never will. So you can tell your stiff suits up there in Washington, DC that they ain’t goin’ to change us one bit. (Frank looks across to Pell and back to Anderson) ‘lest it’s over my dead body, or a lot o’ dead niggers. Hambling elects to cut to Anderson for: ‘ain’t registered to vote yet, and as far as I’m concerned’, cutting back to Frank half way through ‘concerned’. We can’t read Gerry Hambling’s mind but I think that his decision might be rationalised as follows. The use of the word ‘niggers’ is deliberately provocative and prompts a desire to see how Anderson reacts. The insulting phrases in the speech are much more effective if they are seen as they are spoken, so it’s helpful to choose that part of the speech which is basically information to be carried over to Anderson, and this means that interest level will be sustained by adding the weight of Anderson’s reaction to the least vehement words in the speech before returning to Frank for his strong ‘they never will’. Cutting in the middle of the word ‘concerned’ prepares us for ‘they never will’ and allies the cut with the strong syllable ‘concerned’ which is better than either before ‘concerned’ or ‘they’ which are weak. The line: ‘Washington, DC that they ain’t goin’ to change us one bit’ is used to carry a CU insert of Pell, and this if followed by Frank’s look towards Pell and back to Anderson during the last line: “lest it’s over my dead body, or a lot o’ dead niggers’. Cutting to Pell at this moment is appropriate because it both places him in the scene and links him with Frank through its content, ‘they ain’t goin’ to change us’ and prepares us for Frank’s look to Pell which follows. The cut to Pell accompanies the ‘DC’ in ‘Washington, DC’ and as it is the emphatic consonant it adds strength to the cut to Pell. Note also that after Pell’s line: ‘Jus’ keep pushing me, Hoover boy.’ Hambling cuts back to Anderson as if looking for a response. Frank’s hand coming in to grasp Anderson’s jacket therefore takes everyone by surprise; Anderson, Pell and the audience. It is an example of the editor taking a subjective line for maximum dramatic effect.

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soundtrack fills the space and emphasises the silence. In all probability, the reaction shots from the onlookers would have been filmed as reactions to what was being said, but the strength and tension in the performances of the principals would have been weakened by cutting away from them during their dialogue. Hambling therefore constructs a place for them to heighten the tension. It should be noted that apart from those moments when the action demands that a cut be made to the MS for purposes of clarifying the action, the whole scene is played on close-ups to maximise the intensity of the feelings expressed. The reaction shots of the principals during the scene have also been judged with extreme care. Frank’s first speech to Anderson is quite long so that an insert of Anderson’s reaction at some point is essential.

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The strength of the dialogue invites most of it to be played with the speaker. Hambling provides a CU insert of Frank at the very end of Anderson’s speech: You gotta have your brains in your dick if you think we’re just goin’ to fade away. We’re gonna be here ‘til this thing’s finished.

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Before cutting to a CU of Frank for ‘finished’ which verbally hits him with the word, then pausing on Frank before turning to Pell which is immediately picked up in the MS so that we can see the bottle put down and Anderson’s hand push his jacket back. This illustrates how the editor occupies two positions at once. He knows what will happen next, being familiar with the development of the scene, but at the same time he represents the spectator who has been placed in a position of responding to the scene as it unfolds, so the cut will not be made to the MS until the action – Anderson’s head turn towards Pell on the CU of Frank – suggests it. This does a number of things: it smoothes the cut by making it on the action; it lets the action suggest its own development by widening the framing so that we will see whatever occurs next; and it narrates the tale from a position of foreknowledge. The preceding examples will have given some indication of the adjustments, alterations, and changes that take place during the editing process, in every instance to improve or enhance the original scripted intention and also the director’s intention: constantly to rebalance the filmed material to find the very best interpretation of the scene and to weave into that interpretation the very best moments from several takes of each of the performances. Editing involves the last rewrite of the script, the final shaping of the content and defines the way that a film is brought to completion and prepared for its commercial release.

Notes 1

2 3

4

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5 6

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There are, of course, important exceptions and Stephen Bach’s book, Final Cut, which chronicles the problems that beset the making of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), is one of the best. Retakes are also regularly made to accommodate technical problems concerning camera operation and sound recording. In fact, re-editing aspects of a film after the so-called ‘lock-off’ point is remarkably common, particularly during the later stages of feature-film production. Concerns about the commercial potential, and sometimes the social or political aspects of a film, can surface at any time resulting in complicated and often expensive changes being made before, and sometimes after, the film is released. Flopping over a shot, which involves making a copy from the original negative but with the imagery reversed laterally, is occasionally done to accommodate a disconcerting eye-line or a confusing movement. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. In fact, scenes showing Holden in hospital, included in the 23 February script, were shot in late April 1981 but eventually removed from the film as redundant.

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Cinema and psychology

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Money and methods The main driving force behind the making of films commercially is the need for the product to attract extremely large audiences and consequently generate substantial profits. Films are expensive to make and there is a clear relationship between the production values – often reflected in the size of the budget and the prestige of the undertaking – and their profitability. Profits ensure that a production company can continue in business and there is always the hope that a future production could exceed expectations and be exceptionally popular, prestigious and profitable. But there has always been the possibility of failure too, and the higher the stakes, the greater the risk and the bigger the loss. Consequently, it has been a central concern of production companies throughout the history of commercial cinema to find ways of minimising the risk of failure. This has ensured that a prescribed set of production and creative practices has dominated the form, style and content of mainstream commercial cinema. The most evident of these is the shooting, structuring and editing of filmed material to produce an unbroken continuity in the flow of the narrative which at all times is contiguous to, and based on, realism as its principal mode of address. Storylines usually focus on an individual or a group of individuals and their interactions, liaisons and conflicts, which are invariably psychologically based and determine the nature of the action. In most instances the stories posit a situation of equilibrium which becomes unstable as a result of accident, misfortune, or an identifiable lack or need which a character or characters has to satisfy. The central section of the film is concerned with providing the need, or overcoming the unstabilising elements and eventually restoring balance and order. In the main, the kinds of stories which lend themselves most readily to this kind of treatment are set within a cinematic world which is familiar, and deals with conflicts and emotions which are easily understood. The spectator is encouraged towards an emotional identification with the characters in the film through the controlled use of framings and linkages which emphasise the changes in dramatic balance, while sustaining a perception of seamless continuity.

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Perception

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Experiments in psychology provide some interesting and relevant explanations for the way that we perceive the edited content of a film. One experiment involves placing words that make a phrase or sentence inside each of three triangles thus:

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This demonstrates that it is common for us to make assumptions about what we perceive without necessarily being aware of the patterns of sensation that prompted them: we see quickly and easily what we expect to see. This goes a long way to explain why continuity editing is apparently invisible. A cut from an MS of a character bending down to pick an object from the floor to his/her hand retrieving it in CU can be perceived as a continuous action because there is a leap which carries perception (continuous action) beyond sensation (awareness of the cut). Of course it is possible to perceive the cut as a join between two separately filmed angles, in which case the dramatised activity being presented will not have engaged our attention. William James, in The Principles of Psychology, points out that attention both selects and suppresses; attention is both a reinforcing and an inhibiting agency.1 If you choose one line of thought, you necessarily reject others. The psychology of perception demonstrates that we instinctively strive to construct meaning from what we see. Traditional film narratives proceed as a continuous flow of related images arranged in such a way that they will evoke a response based upon the spectator’s recognition and understanding of the elements contained in the structure. Because the images and sounds, unlike words, cannot always convey their meaning with precision, the spectator is required to infer the meaning by reference to his or her own experience. The individual scenes or sequences that make up the narrative may not necessarily be explicit in terms of their individual content, but perceived in the context of other scenes the spectator should be able to infer their relevance to the unfolding structure as it develops. Although these intentions are contained in the original script, the editing process ensures that the filmed material is organised into a form which ensures that the dramatic implications carried forward through the steps of the narrative are fully and adequately understood by the spectator. The process makes the content of the film meaningful.

The arrival of sound, the recording of synchronised speech and the enhanced realism that came with it, established a relationship between characters, time and space which was much more enclosed and less flexible than before. Much more emphasis was placed on structures which facilitated editing between exchanges of dialogue, and shot-reverse-shot alternations became a standard editing pattern. The continuous dialogue flow within the shared space enclosed the characters and the spectator at a level of involvement that was psychologically binding. Alternations that moved between close-ups, close shots, and over shoulder framings could be used to increase or decrease the spectator’s awareness of the emotional fluctuations within the dialogue and the degree of reaction revealed by the characters as the scene developed. These became the conventions of a particular mode of address which is ‘realist’ but not real. A film constructed in this way uses subterfuges to persuade the spectator that what is being perceived is an unbroken continuity inside which he or she is allowed a privileged and unacknowledged presence. It is a construct that relates more to a dream state wherein moments are selected because of their psychological significance at an unconscious level, rather than as a conscious perception of reality during an even, unbroken flow of time. In his book, Theory of Film, German film theoretician and historian Siegfried Kracauer argued that the principal aim of cinema is ‘the redemption of physical reality’,2 whereas traditional arts offered perspectives on life transformed by their expressive means, cinema, at its most profound, presented life as it actually is. Kracauer took the view that the other arts exhaust their subject-matter in the process of creative exploration whereas cinema’s tendency was to expose it. Despite the fact that cinema has always been concerned with methods of dramatic presentation that do more than display reality through photographic means, Kracauer insisted that these were simply practical means, and argued that they should be limited to support what he believed was the primary function of the medium: recording and revealing the visible world. Yet films have always depended upon structural devices to present and advance their narratives which have no correlation with reality or anyone’s experience of it. Examination of the many devices that filmmakers have invented and woven into the texture of films, and which have then become the conventions of film language, suggests a continuing exploration to find ways that go beyond the realistic properties of cinematography in an endeavour to convey meanings and comment upon the human condition through the form as well as the materiality of the medium.3

Screen directions The firm establishment of the SRS pattern in editing is due partly to it being an easy and controllable production method enabling the selection and use of the best

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Closing the space

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parts of different takes. In some instances, both actors need not be present on the set: for example retakes involving one character can have the OOV lines read in; it is a shooting and editing method that is essentially artificial and consequently tends to work against spontaneity. SRS also provides opportunities to increase the pace of dialogue exchanges, a practice commonly used in American TV series. Overcutting and overlapping dialogue can be used to inject a spurious sense of pace; certainly this is true of some production-line films where rapid changes of viewpoint in SRS are used to deflect weaknesses in script, structure and performances. The alternations that are the basis of the SRS structure have by definition to include eye-lines directed either right to left, or left to right. In most instances the placing of actors is most likely to be a matter of expediency based upon the design of the set, the position of the camera and the moves which best suit the logical development of the action within the pro-filmic space. There can be other considerations. There is a curious aspect to the structuring of characters’ positions and movements which I have noticed both while editing and in the process of viewing films. There is a tendency, common to western culture, to respond to a flow moving from left to right in two dimensional space more positively than one that moves from right to left. The reason for this might relate to the fact that because we read in a left-to-right direction – books, music, comic strips – we consider that direction to be both fluent and ‘right’. This in turn could relate to the fact that the right-handed majority often seem able to write and draw across a page from left to right with greater ease and without the difficulties sometimes associated with lefthandedness.4 There are also the connotations of the word ‘sinister’, meaning left, suggestive of threatened evil; unlucky or malign, and ‘dexter’ meaning right, from which the positive connotations of ‘dexterous’ derive. All this might be considered to validate the idea that within a frame, a movement, an action or even the direction of a look has a tendency to connote negativity if the look or direction of the flow is right to left, and positivity if left to right.5 I have noticed that some film directors will require actors to reverse their position relative to the camera at some point within the action to underline some change in the dramatic flow of the scene. Literally, a volte-face. These tendencies offer possibilities that might be used to convey meaning because their forms and configurations can be linked to intuitive psychological responses. For example, the deliberate use of this repositioning to strengthen a change of emotional tone during a scene was examined in Chapter 12 during a confrontation between Letty and Lige in Victor Sjöström’s The Wind. Another exceptional endorsement of a director’s awareness of the significance of directional eye-lines can be found in The Killer (Diexue Shuang Xiong, 1989). This film, by Hong Kong director John Woo (Wu Yesen), uses a story of an ‘honourable’ hit-man and the cop who pursues him, to explore themes of justice, love and

Transitions Transitions are almost by definition evidence of a narrator’s presence; they are the moments that indicate or substitute for the caption in the silent film which breaks the flow and provides information about time or place as the narrative progresses. Recognition of a need to make filmic transitions that were seamless and not disruptive have been part of filmmaking practice from the very beginning. Many early films used lap-dissolves to make transitions between every shot: Méliès favoured this kind of transition in his early films; it was used by Edwin Porter in The Life of an American Fireman (1903); instances of its use can be found in Cecil Hepworth’s Alice in Wonderland (1903) and many of the films that he made later. According to Barry Salt, the use of a dissolve to indicate a time lapse was not established as a convention until the later 1920s.6 The dissolve is just one of many codifying devices that distort the reality of the photographic image for creative purposes but which have become an unquestioned part of cinematic presentation. Screen wipes are more self-evidently transitional devices, which perhaps accounts for the rarity of their use. However, the studied artificiality of some of them has attracted their ironic use in comedy, commonly in slapstick comedies of the 1930s and 1940s but perhaps never better than in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). It appears that instances of fades, in which a scene darkens to black or lightens from black, were rare before 1912 after which they started to become commonly used to represent a time lapse between shots. It seems also that in 1913 the convention was used to indicate the start and end of a flashback although dissolves were more commonly used for this purpose. The iris-in and -out also belongs to the post-1913 period, when an extra large iris diaphragm was developed that would attach to the camera regardless of the lens in use. This was also used to produce an iris mask or vignette. Eventually, the fade-in and the fadeout became a convention suggesting an extended time interval, while the dissolve represented a brief one, although these were tendencies that lent themselves to a good deal of flexibility in their application. Some years ago I was watching a rerun of an episode from a 1980s American TV cop series, Cagney and Lacey. At one point towards the end of the episode, a

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morality. Towards the end of the film the two men discover a mutual respect for each other when compelled to defend themselves against a common enemy. In order to clarify structurally this change in their relationship, at two points in the narrative director John Woo deliberately transgresses the 180° convention of shot-reverse-shot structure. He shows the two men at first confronting each other and later conversing with each other, and on both these occasions cuts ‘across the line’ so that they both face the same direction relative to the spectator – towards frame right. Both men are thereby placed in the positive position; actually and metaphorically ‘on the same side’.

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sympathetic FBI agent has been killed in a shoot-out while heroically protecting the eponymous cops. Stunned, Lacey runs forward and holds the man in her arms; helplessly, she watches him die. A slow dissolve, virtually a superimposition, sustains the dramatic shock of the moment which eventually resolves into a highangle wide-shot of the whole scene as police cars arrive in the background. They stop short of Lacey and the dying man, and another slow dissolve is made back to the previous close shot as the agent dies. It is an effective and unusual use of the convention, signifying a reluctance to let go, to move on; a need to sustain the moment in order to reflect its emotional intensity. The picture dissolve is a completely artificial device, divorced from any kind of reality, but used in this way, its codified intention is clearly readable. It functions as it does because it distances the spectator at one level yet sustains identification at another.

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Slow motion

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Slow motion is used in similar ways; perhaps one of the most familiar is its use to expand moments of violence and death. An early use for this purpose occurs in The Seven Samurai (Kurasawa, 1954) and also The Left-Handed Gun (Penn, 1958). Sam Peckinpah made it prescriptive in The Wild Bunch (1969) after which it became an established cinematic code which signified the horror and finality of death but also established a distance that was both pleasurable and contemplative. Perhaps one of its most effective and memorable uses can be found in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933). Vigo’s film is a satire on authority and rebellion set in a boys’ boarding school where the students are regularly given zeroes when they fail to measure up to standards of behaviour imposed by their teachers. The film ends with a student rebellion on the school’s commemoration day, when all the local dignitaries are assembled. The night before the special day, the boys begin their united stand against authority by ripping up and throwing around the trappings of the school dormitory. The chaotic scene suddenly becomes transformed into slow motion as feathers from the pillows fly and the night-shirted boys leap and tumble in an elegant ballet. A sleeping teacher has his bed up-ended in an image that is a parody of saintliness and the whole scene takes on the appearance of a religious parade celebrating joy and liberty. Slow motion is also used by François Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451 (1967), to emphasise the barbarity of book burning. The film is set in an unspecified future time when firemen are required, as part of their duties, to track down and find books that have been hidden by their owners. These are then burnt, as they are considered subversive to the state. A search-and-find operation led by Montag, the film’s main protagonist, is filmed at normal speed; it is when the flame-thrower is turned onto the books that their destruction is deliberately slowed down, stressing the insane destructiveness of the moment. Slow motion is now commonly used to stress the emotional significance of an activity or a moment in time; Martin Scorsese uses the device effectively in Raging Bull (1980) but in various ways.

Fast motion Speeded-up motion was standard practice for most films made during the silent period and not just comedies. Kevin Brownlow has done considerable research into the subject and concluded that although it is virtually impossible to determine a ‘correct speed’ for films made much before 1928, the speed at which they were required to be projected was in most instances always faster than the speed at which they were shot.7 This is just one more example of the extent to which silent filmmakers acknowledged that films were a construct which presented a distillation of reality, and were intended to be understood as such. Distortions have always been a part of these constructions in that they comment on the meaning of the work as a whole. Synchronous sound and dialogue made these kinds of distortions impossible or irrelevant. However, the humorous possibilities of speeded-up action, continued to be exploited, perhaps most memorably by director Dick Lester in the two Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965). Lester directed another comedy about this time, The Knack (1965) based on a play by Ann Jellicoe. In one scene the character played by Michael Crawford discovers that his bathroom is full of beautiful young women clothed in nothing but towels. His flight down the stairs and across the hall is speeded up by undercranking the camera, but Lester also repeats the shot three times with jump cuts between. The form makes its point well, the speed conveys the character’s excitement and the repetition his need to sustain it.

Displaced sound Reference has been made in an earlier chapter to creative value of using a character’s spoken voice-over as a means of advancing, or commenting on, the narrative as it unfolds or used as an audible inner monologue (see Chapter 13). Essentially non-realistic sounds or dialogue displaced from their synchonous source are accepted as important structuring devices. Interviewed in 1983, shortly before he died, veteran film editor William Hornbeck recalled that he believed that he was one of the first to adopt the technique of leading the sound

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Behind the opening credits we see, in wide shot, Jake LaMotta (De Niro) shadow boxing in slow motion. This both clarifies the subject of the film and shows the character isolated in the only place where he believes he can achieve recognition: the boxing ring. The device is also repeatedly used during the fight reconstructions to powerful effect, conveying both the brutality of the conflict and the perverse doggedness of LaMotta’s character. Elsewhere, a quite different use of slow motion is used to convey LaMotta’s jealous feelings about his wife; his points of view being slowed down to suggest his insecurities as realistic dialogue continues over entirely innocuous scenes.

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(though not the dialogue) of an incoming scene ahead of the picture cut when editing I Want to Live (1958) for director Robert Wise.8 Although Hornbeck disliked the technique, Wise insisted that it was something that would be widely adopted. He was right; and the practice developed, with dialogue phrases also regularly leading the cut. This completely unrealistic device, used appropriately, was found to be very effective, impelling the narrative flow and commanding spectator attention. There does seem to be evidence of this practice being taken up increasingly from the late 1950s, but I was particularly surprised and delighted to find an instance of Dorothy Spencer leading dialogue as early as 1939 in her editing of John Ford’s Stagecoach. In a sequence near the beginning of the film, the stagecoach arrives in the main street in Tonto and some of the passengers climb out to stretch their legs. Lucy Mallory, who is travelling to meet her husband, is approaching the door of the Tonto Hotel when she is recognised by her friends, Captain and Nancy Whitney. After a brief conversation the three enter the hotel. A cut to the interior shows the group preparing to sit at a table, but the first two words of the accompanying dialogue line, spoken by Nancy – I’m so glad to see you, Lucy. Sit down with us and have a cup of coffee’ – precede the cut to the interior. Of course, this is not quite the same as leading the dialogue into a scene where there has been a major change of time and place; that kind of bold use would come some decades later, but the principle is the same – the dialogue is led in order to elide some of the action on the cut and so increase the pace of the narrative. Because sound is a fundamental support of cinematic realism, its removal can enable objectivity. There is a moment in Onegin (1999), a very conventional film in most respects, when Tatyana, who has witnessed the death of her sister’s fiancee in a duel, unexpectedly brings the tragic news to her mother and sister. Although the scene is played out in a series of close shots, all synchronous sound is removed. The characters’ shocked response and extreme emotional distress, seen but not heard, carries an impact made doubly effective by the unreal silence.

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Flashbacks

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Matters involving the flashback, which might be defined as an image, or a segment of film, that is understood to accord with an occurrence that took place at an earlier time, are as complex as they are commonplace. In fact an entire book has been devoted to the subject.9 The flashback’s relevance to this study is that it represents one of the many cinematic codes that require the spectator to step outside the developing narrative in order to interpret it. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) uses flashbacks to isolate key moments in the life of a borstal boy as he takes part in a cross-country run, competing against a public-school team. The flashbacks carry the main narrative, which episodically presents the reasons for his imprisonment. His running is an expression of a freedom that the prevailing, repressive social

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system disallows. Easily able to win the race, he deliberately loses as a protest against the attitudes and values of a society which disadvantages him and others of his social class. In The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), Clint Eastwood plays a wounded Union soldier, John McBurney, recuperating in a small school for girls in the American south. He passes himself off as a Confederate and sets up jealousies among the women which end in his death. His descriptions of the events which precede his discovery by the women are revealed as lies by showing images behind his words which demonstrate his duplicity. We infer that the images are the truth and that these are provided by the narrator of the tale so that we can appreciate the irony. The flashbacks that show events from the past in the lives of the women are understood to be narrative but subjective, belonging to the character recalling them even though they themselves appear inside the recollection. The method devised for flashbacks in The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965) is original. Film editor Ralph Rosenblum describes in his reminiscence, When the Shooting Stops ... the Cutting Begins, how he and director Sidney Lumet worked closely together to experiment with a technique of flash-cutting to introduce fragments of memory from the leading character’s past. Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) is an embittered Jewish pawnbroker who lives and works in New York where his Harlem pawn shop is the front for a black pimp and racketeer. Alienated from everyone and regarding them as scum, he is haunted with recollections of his past, when he and his family were sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Nazerman’s journey from misanthropic alienation to traumatised feeling is punctuated with flashes of memory from his past. These intrude on his daily life and compel him towards an anguished empathy with the disadvantaged social victims that inhabit his world. Flash-cutting was used to introduce fragments of Nazerman’s memory; inserting just a few frames of a recollected image into the scene that prompted it. Gradually, longer sections of the inserted image were introduced at closer intervals until the memory scene was completely established. Getting a balance that conveyed the intention with the right amount of precision involved lengthy experiments, and many permutations were tested until the right formula was found. The effect of this device was remarkably powerful, adding considerably to a film that already contained a significant emotional charge largely owing to an exceptionally fine performance by Rod Steiger. As Rosenblum points out, within a very few years the pioneering flash-cutting device was taken up by others, notably the advertising industry who have always had a sharp eye for effective innovation. It was, without question, a significant advance in extending film’s ability to suggest the hidden workings of the mind; although as Rosenblum admits, it came about after one of the slowest and most laborious searches in filmmaking history.

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Direct address

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A convention which has from the earliest years become an established and virtually inviolable part of mainstream cinematic practice has been the injunction that actors should never look at the camera. In fact, in 1910, The Kleine Optical Company, a member of the powerful Motion Picture Patents Company, and the largest domestic distributor of foreign films in America, issued an instruction requiring companies to ban the practice. The look or glance at the camera is considered to be an address made explicitly to the spectator. This is because at the moment that it occurs it marks a deliberate departure from the convention that the film’s narrative is unfolding within a continuity that is quite independent of any perception of it. In that sense it is considered to be disruptive of the traditional structures of mainstream cinema. Because it breaks the flow of conventional narrative, the look to the camera tends to be used to indicate an extra layer of meaning within the film’s construction. One might expect to find instances in early Soviet cinema, and these are common in Eisenstein’s work although less so in Pudovkin’s. However, there is a moment in Mother when information about the planned prison escape has been telephoned to the police. An instruction is given – ‘don’t spare the bullets’ – and the next shot shows a Cossack loading his rifle; he turns and looks directly at the camera, a moment that is quite chilling. A more surprising, but memorable use, occurs in Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927). In Paris, Jeanne has been briefly reunited with Andreas, her Communist lover, and they decide to spend the night at a hotel together. The couple are shown approaching the hotel exterior, where they pause in close shot. It is at this point that Pabst asked his actress to look at the camera and give a slight quizzical smile before entering the hotel; it is very typical of the subversive irony that underlies much of Pabst’s work. The look to the camera has a long-established tradition in comedy: most of the great screen comics, Chaplin in particular, were aware of its ironic possibilities, and Laurel and Hardy used it to punctuate every film they made together. It also made a regular appearance in the ‘Road to ...’ movies which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made between 1940 and 1962. Because newsreel and documentary footage make a direct link between the image and our acceptance of it as unquestionably true, the acknowledgement of the camera’s presence in that context has established a code which we read as confirming the reality of the moment. It is a code which, by making a link between the direct look and the spectator, establishes a truth that stands outside its own presentation. The trenchant power of this code has been used to powerful effect in the films of Peter Watkins. In all his films, notably those that explore fictional narratives using the conventions of documentary – Culloden (1964), The War Game (1966), and Punishment Park (1971) – the look, or address to the camera, is used to confirm the emotional truth of the moment. It conveys the passivity of the

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Highland clansmen in Culloden stoically awaiting the arrival of the English battalions; the fear, fatigue and suffering of those facing the reality of a nuclear attack in The War Game; the anger and defiance expressed by the dissenters in Punishment Park contrasted with the distrust and hostility of the police. Watkins extended his use of the direct look for dramatic ends in later work, memorably in Edvard Munch (1974), and the subsequent use of this reflective device by other filmmakers confirms its acceptance as an important filmic convention. Not only has the direct look been codified as an acceptable device within film narratives but the direct address to the spectator has also been successfully used as a parallel narrating device in a number of films. The first, Alfie (1966), directed by Lewis Gilbert, was based on a stage play by Bill Naughton who also scripted the film. It was a bold and effective transfer to the screen of the ‘aside’ – comments made directly to the audience by a character in a play. The aside, common in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, was considered an acceptable part of theatre until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, by which time popular taste had all but banished literature from the stage. Because the aside was retained in music-hall, pantomime and popular melodrama such as Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn, it became associated with dramatic forms that were incompatible with the newly literate theatre of the time which catered for a middle-class audience. It was a period which saw the establishment of realist trends in the theatre reflected in the plays of Granville Barker, Pinero, Ibsen and others. Between the wars, Brecht’s Epic Theatre offered the challenge of freer and more fluid presentation that returned to more traditional theatrical devices of songs, masks, extravagant costumes and settings as well as direct address. Naughton’s adoption of the aside and its successful transfer to film was directly linked to a modern revival in the theatre after 1955 which, among other things, recognised the dramatic strengths of this popular practice. The popularity of Alfie, quite apart from the engaging performance by Michael Caine as its eponymous anti-hero, was undoubtedly linked to the accessible ironies within the form. Confirmation that the aside-to-the-audience was appreciated as an intelligent, cinematic mode of address came with the release of Shirley Valentine in 1989, also directed by Lewis Gilbert. It was an adaptation of writer Willy Russell’s successful show which played extensively on Broadway and in London’s West End. Pauline Collins played the Liverpool housewife with romantic yearnings, to great acclaim both on the stage and in the film. The success of these two films suggests that the effective handling of the ironies evident in the two-level structure might have relevance to the screen adaptations of novels which contain both a compelling dramatic narrative and also the presence of an author able to manipulate its development. This was the difficulty facing Harold Pinter as adaptor of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Pinter’s solution was to construct two story levels, in which the characters were seen both as actors making a film of the story and as historical characters within the story. The problem with this solution was that the audience had

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difficulties in identifying with the characters at both levels. The actor couple existed within a film reality that implicitly questioned the credibility of the performed couple. Each detracted from the ‘reality’ of the other. In the end one felt engaged by neither. An experiment which attempted to confront the difficulty of introducing the narrator into the film text more directly was carried out by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet in his Trans-Europe Express (1967). Robbe-Grillet himself plays the author, and he and two colleagues, travelling on the train on which the story unfolds, are introduced at regular points in the narrative as they attempt to discuss and create it. The experiment was generally considered unsuccessful. The difficulty has to do with the objective separation of two independent strands that are seen to exist within the text of the film. This can work in the novel because there is an acknowledgement that the narrative is being related in a past-present; the author is an integral part of the tale because he is telling it, but always outside the narrative itself. The problem does not exist if the narrator is also a character within the text giving a first person account and speaking voice-over the action. Notable examples of this include The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Also acceptable is the use of voice-over action delivered by an authorial voice, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Tom Jones (1963) being two particularly successful examples of the form.

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Fragmentations and full stops

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Devices which distort the realism of the film image in order to distance the spectator and compel a sharpened awareness of the different levels of meaning within the film’s text are recognised as valuable and increasingly acceptable parts of film language. Jump-frame step-printing, which is used commonly in film and TV advertising, is an example. This has its origins in the need to film astronauts during their circuits of the earth during the early days of the space race, before the invention of videotape recording. Because these flights lasted several hours and sometimes days, film was used to record the astronauts’ faces, but running very slowly through the camera; exposing no more than three frames every second. This meant that a roll of film would last eight times as long as film exposed at the normal speed and a 1000-ft. roll of 16 mm film could be made to last nearly four hours. The resulting film would then be printed by repeating each frame eight times and the resulting jerky result was strange but compelling. The use of this device for creative ends has been adopted and used with notable success in pop videos and advertising films. Its adoption by an important prize-winning director, Wong Kar-Wai, is discussed in the next chapter. Perhaps the most commonly used isolating device is the freeze-frame where action, suddenly halted, draws attention to the significance of the image and objectifies our perception of it. In Goodfellas (1990), Martin Scorsese freezes action

Jump cuts The origin of the jump cut was explained in Chapter 1. In the early days, a camera would be set up to cover an event but the cameraman would only crank the camera if something of interest was occurring, then he would stop turning until something else happened. This produced a jump in the action which came to be called a jump cut. An example of this was given with reference to Birt Acres’s filming of the 1895 Derby. Méliès alleged that he discovered the magical possibilities of jump cuts by accident, and they were then used in most of his trick films. The jump cut could also be used to achieve a special effect, as in the substitution of a dummy for the policeman in the struggle and fall from the roof in Daring Daylight Burglary (1903). In these early years, jump cuts would regularly occur as a result of accidental breaks in the film being repaired, with the inevitable loss of frames; this accidental effect was commonly introduced deliberately to speed up a section of tardy action. Because the jump cut was recognised as being disruptive to the unbroken flow of a realistic narrative, efforts were made to avoid it wherever possible. However, integral with the aims of the Soviet experimental filmmakers was the desire to construct a cinema that was opposed to, and wholly different from, the existing dominant forms. This validated a whole set of possibilities including the creative use of the jump cut. These abound in the early films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, perhaps most memorably in the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin which, after the inter-title ‘suddenly’, cuts to a close-up of a woman’s face jump cut into three sudden jerks. The scene concludes with a close-up of a mounted Cossack, his slashing sword jump cut three times for emphasis as he smashes a woman’s pince-nez in that famous image from the film.

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to isolate various moments for subjective narration. This strengthens identification with the central character and, importantly, encourages a degree of empathy with his concerns. One of the earliest, and also one of the most powerful and memorable uses of this device is Truffaut’s freezing of the final image in Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) as Antoine, having run into the sea, turns accusingly to face the camera. Ever since the invention of cinematography it was observed that, when the camera operator stopped cranking the camera, there was a tendency for the shutter to remain open. This caused the film frame that remained in the gate to become fogged, and these fogged frames were removed by cutting and splicing. With the invention of motorised cameras, it was noticed that, when the camera was switched off, the inertia of the mechanism caused the last few frames before the fogged frame to be gradually and increasingly over-exposed and the action slightly speeded up. Towards the end of the 1990s, this anomaly was put to creative use, notably in commercials where it was used as a self-reflective comment on the nature of the cinematographic process.

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The disruptive, yet effective, possibilities of the jump cut would appear to have had no place in the seamless continuities that dominated filmmaking between 1930 and 1960, but in that year a film appeared that would mark the beginning of a changed attitude to the possibilities of presentational form. The film was Breathless (A Bout de Souffle, 1959); the filmmaker was Jean-Luc Godard. The importance of Godard is that he was a filmmaker who, while working within the mainstream of French cinema, considered himself to be in opposition to it, striving to make films that questioned both the values of society and the ways in which those values were implicated within the structures of most mainstream films. In Breathless, his first feature, he introduced spatial and temporal ellipses, jump cuts, which emphasised the narrative processes rather than concealing them within the traditional conventions of ‘invisible’ editing. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is a charming small-time crook and self-centred opportunist. In the opening sequence he steals a car, abandoning his female accomplice, and sets off to drive to Paris. Godard establishes the transgressive form of his film from the outset with jump cuts used to link together moments that establish Michel’s character and strip the narrative to its essentials. Michel conveys his intentions and immediate reactions by speaking aloud. At one point, over a travelling scenic shot, he explains that he is very fond of France, he then turns to look directly at the camera (filming from the back seat) and says, ‘if you don’t like the sea, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like the city, then you can get stuffed!’. Soon after, he is chased by two police motorcyclists for speeding; his car stalls and he pulls of the road. The second cop sees him and approaches; Michel casually shoots him and runs off. The actual shooting is constructed, quite perfunctorily, using four, very brief, jump cut shots. Godard rejects any melodramatic or suspenseful treatment of the event and this underlines the sudden and awful pointlessness of Michel’s action, presenting it as both shocking and truthful. The remainder of the simple plot, which is reduced by its fragmented structure to essentials, concerns Michel’s arrival in Paris; his failed attempt to borrow money from a former girlfriend from whom he then steals; his amorous pursuit of Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student working as a journalist; his successfully avoiding the bumbling cops who are tracking him down; his betrayal by Patricia, and his eventual death from a policeman’s bullet. Most of the action scenes and the extended dialogue exchanges are filmed using a hand-held camera; jump cuts being used within a scene to isolate separate sections of naturalistic small-talk. This dialogue is unconnected with the plot but progresses our understanding of the characters; their relationships and motivations. Throughout the film, Godard introduces oblique references to American cinema, and Michel is presented as someone who identifies with the tough-guy screen persona of Humphrey Bogart. But the narrative content and form of Breathless deliberately subvert the conventions of mainstream cinema and compel the spectator towards a re-evaluation of the social attitudes and values which that cinema reflects.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

6 7 8 9

James, Principles of Psychology. Kracauer, Theory of Film. I have not seen it as part of my task to enter here into the formalist versus realist debates that properly belong within considerations of film theory. I share the view of film critic and theorist André Bazin, that ‘cinema’s existence precedes its essence’ and that whatever might be deduced about cinema must be based on what had been done rather than on some abstract theoretical system. However, Bazin’s influential writings on film theory are important and reflect valuably on some of the more formalist considerations being advanced in these chapters. See the two volumes of essays by André Bazin, What is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray. The association of ‘left’ with awkwardness or difficulty is common to many languages; French has gauche and German link – translated as both ‘left’ and ‘awkward’. Evidence of these responses can be found in some superstitious beliefs; for example in Germany a black cat crossing one’s path from left to right connotes good luck, but bad luck if right to left. Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, p. 195. Brownlow, ‘Silent Films – What was the Right Speed?’, Sight and Sound. Thompson and Bordwell, ‘From Sennett to Stephens’, The Velvet Light Trap. Turim, Flashbacks in Film.

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Godard believed that it was not possible to put radical content into traditional forms without compromise and the films that he made during the early 1960s are important and have been immensely influential. His later films departed markedly from accessible forms, becoming difficult, complex, overtly political and aimed increasingly towards audiences that were already committed to leftist views. Breathless also marked a change in the form of the art film which, since the early 1950s, had worked principally within realist traditions which emphasised the interior psychological states of its protagonists rather than their individual engagement with disruptive or confrontational circumstances. These films, made by such directors as Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni, always contained stylistic indicators of a specific authorial presence; metaphors were conflated with the filmic text or fully integrated into the style. The jump cuts in Godard’s Breathless, however, were unmissable, and insisted that the form was inescapably linked to the content of the film and its meaning. Of all the unreal film-structuring devices discussed in the previous paragraphs, the jump cut is the one which most clearly confronts traditional continuity conventions. It is the most fundamental transgression of those editing methods devised to obscure their own existence. A jump cut is open and honest; it tells us that film is just cut up bits of imagery trying to convey some truth. This might be considered a more direct path to a film’s content than one wrapped in a cloak of invisibility.

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18

Beyond invisibility

Making a difference Previous chapters have explored how the American cinema, during the 1920s and 1930s, looked towards melodrama as the basis for its narratives whose principal aim was to seek a direct emotional response from an audience; an identification with the film’s central characters whose personal problems invariably sprang from some psychological character flaw. The dominance and influence of this kind of escapist cinema was extensive. The presentational forms that had become institutionalised under the American studio system, were universally comprehensible and made a film’s content readily accessible to the greatest number of people with the least amount of effort. The characters in these films tended to be motivated by moral weaknesses often compounded by guilt or greed, jealousy or lust, which invariably led towards violence and death. What was especially noticeable in these melodramas was that their characters’ motivation was seldom related to any external social circumstances which affected peoples’ lives and determined their behaviour. The influential movement that sought to confront this kind of cinema, and which became known as neo-realism, evolved in Italy directly as a reaction to ‘the escapism, spectacle and rhetoric of the Fascist era’.1 Its leading theorist and scenarist was Marxist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini who, in 1942, urged Italian filmmakers to move towards a cinema of social realism; one that reflected the realities that ordinary people faced in their daily lives. Neo-realism liberated filmmaking from the confines of the studio and many of the shooting, structuring and editing conventions that were the basis of production methods. But the quality that best defines the movement was its capacity to link its themes both to the details of everyday existence and the diversity of shared community life. Its influence was internationally extensive, with many films being made that focused directly on aspects of a recognisable world, exploring issues that directly concerned the lives of the audience. The history of filmmaking demonstrates that the form and content of films need not be restricted to prevailing patterns founded on the ubiquitous Hollywood style 314

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and that there are perfectly viable, interesting and challenging ways of communicating stories and ideas using alternative cinematic means, which are often provocative and revealing. Such films, which tend to be loosely categorised as ‘art’ cinema, often require that an audience participate in the production of the meaning of the film beyond the level of its narrative, and this can offer possibilities for a different, and sometimes richer, enjoyment and understanding of the content that goes beyond the more accessible presentation methods centred on identification and suspense. Yet there can be difficulties with this. Filmmaking which sets out to place the spectator at a distance in the interests of greater objectivity runs the risk of denying any of the pleasures associated with traditional film forms. There have to be different levels of engagement, otherwise boredom will ensure that all desire to continue viewing evaporates. The search for alternative narrative forms, used to explore ways in which cinema can communicate at levels outside the immediate concerns of plot and character, can be traced directly to the French New Wave, which might be seen as the culmination of the movement against traditional cinematic forms that began with neo-realism, and particularly to the work of Jean-Luc Godard. The extent to which Godard has influenced the style, form and content of films by directors such as Bertolucci, Pasolini, Wenders and Fassbinder among the Europeans, and Scorsese, Penn and Altman in America, has been profound. These directors have in their turn influenced a new generation of filmmakers who refuse to regard film form as something inflexible and ‘given’, but malleable and adaptable to their own creative needs. Notable among these is Quentin Tarantino whose acknowledgement of Godard’s influence is manifest in his ability to integrate content with a form that insists that we recognise film as an observable artifice. Pulp Fiction (1994) might be considered the perfect exemplar of Godard’s famous dictum, that a film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order. Perhaps the most obvious and pervasive tendency deriving from Godard’s attack on the seamlessness of conventional continuity forms was that action developing in time no longer had to be made inconspicuous. For example, conventional orthodoxy decreed that making a cut to a later scene in which a character remained on-screen on both sides of the cut, was unacceptable because it emphasised the time jump; disrupting the narrative flow. Traditionally, the cut to the incoming scene would have been required to start with a view into which the character would appear – through a doorway, or round a corner – or the camera would follow some action that would eventually reveal his or her presence. Surprisingly, once implemented, any discontinuity resulting from a cut made to a new scene with a character remaining on screen during the ellipse went unnoticed; audiences had no difficulty inferring that there had been a transition in time and place despite the anxieties of film-grammar traditionalists. As a device, it allowed the narrative to move forward more quickly and sustained attention levels.

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Before 1950, the lap dissolve was firmly established as the necessary cinematic convention for indicating a time-space transition, but this was to change. Film historian Barry Salt draws attention to cuts being used as the sole transitional device between scenes in Benvenido, Mr Marshall, a Spanish film directed by Luis Berlanga in 1952, a practice which he, and his script-writing collaborator Juan Antonio Bardem, continued to use in later films, notably Bardem’s Muerte di un Ciclista (1955).2 Salt points out that although Berlanga and Bardem’s innovative space-time transitions seem to have been an important influence in Europe, these tendencies were roundly denounced by film critics Truffaut and Godard when they first appeared, as was J. Lee Thompson’s Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), for the same reasons. Whether or not these kinds of transitions were increasingly being used by European filmmakers, Godard’s adoption and radical development of them in his first film was regarded by many filmmakers as a full endorsement of their acceptability. Certainly some British directors who had pioneered, or been influenced by, the Free Cinema documentary movement, and who were turning their attention towards proletarian, social-realist subjects in the early 1960s, accepted that the use of the cut as a preferred transition between scenes added a degree of no-nonsense rigour to their films. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960), A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961), A Kind of Loving (Schlesinger, 1962) and This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963) helped fix a trend which soon became a convention. In This Sporting Life, an injured professional rugby-league footballer, Frank Machin (Richard Harris), undergoes emergency dental surgery. These scenes are sharply intercut with his background story. A former mineworker, Machin is exploited by the club’s managing élite for his ruthlessness as a rugby player, while seeking, and failing, to establish an emotionally based relationship with his widowed landlady, Margaret Hammond (Rachel Roberts). From the start, Lindsay Anderson and his editor Peter Taylor show a determination to pursue a flashback-based narrative using bold cut-transitions. The opening sequence consists of a fast-edited montage of close shots which abandons continuity in order to emphasise the violence within the body-contact sport of rugby-league football. The images are accompanied only by harsh thuds and grunts as the participants struggle for possession of the ball. Gradually, crowd noises are added – a roaring background to the conflict. A grudge confrontation leads to a scrum-down, and disputed hooking of the ball provokes a blow to the face of the main protagonist, breaking his front teeth. A sudden cut to a steel drill boring into a coal-face, followed by pans and cuts to Machin, its operator, acts both as a metaphor for his pain and a means of identifying him a working miner. A cut back to the field, confirms his injury and another, equally sudden, shows him descending a flight of stairs in a small house and collecting a tea-flask from the kitchen table. A guarded exchange of glances between him and a woman tending her young children then pans to reveal a pair of obsessively polished boots standing next to the kitchen range.

Popular art In his study of American cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Robert Philip Kölker, considering the films of a group of filmmakers which included Penn, Altman, and Scorsese, identified them as filmmakers who were, ‘refusing the classical American approach to film, which is to make the formal structure of a work erase itself as it creates its content’.3 Some of the formal strategies used by Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull and Goodfellas to draw attention to the fact that the film being seen is an artifice, intended to be perceived beyond the limitations of its narrative, have been touched upon in the previous chapter. Scorsese seems always to have experimented with the possibilities of cinematic address in his films, and in collaboration with editor Thelma Schoonmaker has succeeded in linking fast-paced dramatic narratives with presentational devices which do more than just show, but draw the spectator into the creative work so that it becomes seen and consequently understood. A structuring tendency, manifest particularly in Goodfellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991), is the blurring of the distinction between scenes; transitions being made using a straight picture cut but with the incoming dialogue led – the sound of the incoming scene being introduced before cutting to it; or alternatively carrying sound over from a preceding scene so that it is denied completion. Where appropriate, Thelma Schoonmaker has a fragmentary approach to continuity, with the structure of a scene built as a montage and its content reduced to essentials. Careful analysis of her work on dialogue in Scorsese’s films reveals a regular sharpening of pace. Dialogue exchanges will commonly be retimed; sometimes with pauses extended to increase tension, or overlaps introduced to make responses more assertive. Cuts on action will often elide a continuity match in the interests of pace. The Jewish wedding scene in Goodfellas begins with the traditional wine glass being wrapped. Then a cut, showing the hand drawn away, finds the wrapped glass now on the floor ready to be smashed by a foot. A fragmentary montage of images carrying voice-over narration resolves with a jump cut sequence of Karen the bride, showing her hands in closeup receiving gifts of money from her new mafia family. This is immediately followed by a jump cut sequence of the donors kissing her cheek. Any continuity

Beyond invisibility

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Cut-transitions link these plangent and understated images together in a way that seems to demand that their meanings be understood. It is an important restatement of the way that image-driven filmmaking engages the spectator. This is storytelling with an economy that enables, in a later scene, a straight cut to be made from Frank being helped from the dentist’s chair, to him walking, now coated and scarved, down the corridor that leads into the street. During the nightride home in the manager’s car, another sudden cut shows us Frank’s recollection: when he first drove his flash, white roadster, and in a montage of shots we see him driving past the endless, terraced, back-to-back houses that line the grey streets.

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possibilities seem to have been rejected in favour of a structure which objectifies the action, foregrounding the significance of the moment. Scorsese has been called ‘the only director in Hollywood whose devotion to cinema justifies everyone’s notions of popular art’.4 The bold use of these editing strategies in mainstream cinema confirmed that continuity within the shot was no longer obligatory; that fragmentation of the image through jump cutting was as acceptable as any other editing practice, provided it enhanced the dramatic intention. Filmmakers seeking to expand the structural possibilities of the medium now confidently adopted these practices, acknowledging that a new set of editing conventions had entered the canon which were now increasingly acceptable. An interesting example of this can be found in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992). The bad Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel), an NYPD cop, is seriously in debt because of his addiction to crack, heroin and alcohol. He hopes to clear the debt by betting on the Dodgers in the National Baseball Championships. The Dodgers lose, and instead of paying the debt he persuades the bookie to let him double his stake on the following game. Towards the end of the film, the lieutenant is driving his car to an assignation and listening to the commentary of the crucial baseball game on the car radio. Ferrara jump cuts within the single shot of the journey to include only the key moments which reveal that the Dodgers are losing the game. Although the films of ex-underground filmmaker Ferrara might be regarded as more fringe than mainstream, his bold use of jump cuts to advance the narrative helped confirm that structural discontinuities in both picture and sound were also an acceptable editing convention with important creative possibilities. It was about this time that these were explored and developed further in an American television series, Homicide: Life on the Street.

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Homicide: Life on the Street, a series about a team of homicide detectives working in Baltimore, first appeared on American TV on 31 January 1993. It was developed out of a need to find a cop series with no gun battles and no car chases, where the energy would come from the characters, the performances, and shooting and editing forms that would break some rules. The use of a hand-held camera where the operator was free to decide what was the centre of interest in a scene meant that the actors, unsure whether they were on camera or not, were obliged to stay in character throughout and were never able merely to feed lines in common with traditional filming practice. In this kind of filming there was no fourth wall. The centre of the action is the police headquarters incident room overseen by Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto). An early episode is typical of the shooting and editing style used throughout the series: the dialogue and action are shot, most of the time, using a hand-held camera which follows the action and focuses on the dialogue exchanges as they develop. A sense of documentary realism is

Beyond invisibility

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obtained by letting the camera respond to the exchanges of dialogue rather than anticipating them. Several commentators have remarked on similarities with the shooting and editing style in the films directed by actor John Cassavetes, notably Shadows (1961) and Faces (1968). In Homicide, each section of dialogue and action is covered several times but not in the conventional way. Every repeat of the scene is covered using the same fluid and unpredictable shooting coverage but from a different angle on the scene. The scene is eventually edited from whichever of the possibilities proved to deliver the best or most meaningful performance at any moment, irrespective of the niceties of smooth continuity, consistency of angles, action or eye-line matching. This freedom to select for the integrity of performance above all other considerations brings a vitality and freshness to the construction which easily overcomes any awareness of disjointedness and recalls the reply given by Alexander Korda to editor William Hornbeck, who was disconcerted by Korda’s rather Germanic shooting inconsistencies, ‘The audience has to know that the camera has gone to the other side.’5 After a very short time this rather bold structuring method becomes wholly acceptable. This is not to suggest that the editing of a series of dialogue exchanges for example, would necessarily be structured other than conventionally if that produced the most satisfactory result. Often there is a mix, for example, the episode under discussion has a scene in a diner containing a conversation between Detective Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty) and a prostitute in which there is a straight jump cut introduced at one point on one of Bolander’s close-ups, followed by a cut out to a wider framing with an eyeline mismatch; thereafter the following dialogue scene is structured using conventional shot-reverse-shot alternations. A little later, Detectives Bolander and Munch are sitting in a car at night on the look-out for a suspect. The camera, situated in the back, frames their profiles, and during a long conversation between the two men there is no cutting and no need for it. Typical of the style of the series, the conversation has nothing whatever to do with the reasons for their presence and offers an opportunity for revelations to be made about their personal lives. In this instance Bolander asks Munch if he has ever been with a hooker, referring back to the earlier scene which revealed that the divorced Bolander and the hooker were mutually attracted. Suddenly, through the windscreen, a figure is seen crossing in front of the car. Bolander recognises him as the suspect, and both men start to get out. The action then progresses with a series of jumps forward in time, during which the suspect is challenged, made to kneel with his hands on his head, handcuffed and arrested. There are two aspects deserving mention: the scene is shot with the hand-held camera preceding the detectives towards the suspect, their spoken challenge is heard but not seen, and the camera covers the action twice, from two different angles. The editing discontinuities collapse time and space by omitting unnecessary pauses in the action and dialogue while still retaining a fluent continuity on the sound track.

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A parallel storyline, set in the incident room, concerns difficulties that Detective Bayliss is having in pursuing a case. His successive frustrations are intercut with several other parallel events and at one point, during a telephone conversation with Captain Barnfather, his frustrations result in him unwisely calling his superior a ‘butt-head’. Later, Lieutenant Giardello is surprised to see Barnfather arrive in the incident room at night and out of uniform. Barnfather’s reply to Giardello as he marches past is, ‘Your office’. A later return to this storyline next begins with Giardello confronting Bayliss about Barnfather’s complaint and suggesting that he apologise. This conversation between the two men is fragmented using the disjunctive shaping already indicated. At one point, a cut is made to an MCS of Bayliss to isolate a gesture of disbelief just for the gesture, before continuing with material selected from the best of the alternatives. The scene concludes with Giardello telling Bayliss, ‘What’s true doesn’t matter – you now have two choices, your truth or your job.’ As he speaks the camera tracks round into an over-shoulder framing favouring Giardello. The cut to Bayliss which follows is made ‘across the line’, a bold transgression of traditional continuity’s most sacrosanct rule and this is done, not for a line from Bayliss, but to show his expression of defeat. These discontinuities focus attention on the integrity of the image, of a particular moment, isolating and documenting it. From the beginning of this series, the freedom to edit material outside established frames of reference encouraged experimentation in ways of conveying emphasis. In the very first episode, a young suspect is about to get into a car that he has stolen. Suddenly, to his and our astonishment, there are flashing blue lights and sirens. This moment of shock is given extra punch by being repeated three times using jump cuts followed by close-ups of his anxious expression as he looks round at the previously hidden police presence. The same device is used memorably in another episode when a young suspect puts a gun to his head, threatening suicide; the repeats reflect the horror experienced by the watching detectives. In yet another episode, an angry Detective Frank Pembleton bangs his fist down on a table and jump cuts multiply the action, this time to convey the intensity of his emotional state. This kind of editing, first used in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin almost seventy years earlier, had no place within the invisible continuities of realist form. It is now possible to apply this rediscovered principle in any situation where the need to strengthen a gesture seemed necessary or appropriate. It is interesting to compare later episodes with the first, pilot episode, where a certain lack of confidence is revealed in the reluctance to abandon traditional methods completely. For example, a three-way conversation in which Detectives Fenton and Howard interview a witness is covered on close-ups and intercut in the usual way, probably because there is no action in the scene. Hangovers from standard practice are detectable on the soundtrack where a hospital scene relies on a flow of tannoy announcements to maintain continuity, and dialogue continued over an incoming scene for purposes of exposition seems oddly old-

Breaking the Waves Breaking the Waves (1996) marked the return of Danish film director Lars von Trier to the cinema screen after a period making The Kingdom (1994), a hospitaldrama series for television. The latter was a bizarre, black-comedy melodrama, a supernatural soap opera shot with hand-held cameras. Von Trier had first come to international prominence with an English-language film made in 1984, The Elements of Crime, about a detective’s attempts to solve a series of child murders, which von Trier has described as a sort of latter day film noir’. 6 This, and two subsequent films, Epidemic (1987) and Europa (Zentropa, 1991) were all criticised for their operatic style, obsession with technique, and lack of character interest. Von Trier admits to being almost fetishistically attracted to film technology, a fascination which led him towards the formalist experimentation in Europa which has been criticised for its ‘hollow aesthetic virtuosity’.7 Breaking the Waves is set in a small Presbyterian community on the west coast of Scotland. The film begins with a naive local girl, Bess, requesting permission from the church elders to marry Jan, an oil-rig worker. The local community disapproves, but the match is welcomed by her best friend Dodo, who is her brother’s widow and a nurse at the local hospital. Bess, having discovered the joys of sexual bliss, becomes emotionally fixated on her husband and is unable to deal with his return to the rig. She asks God to bring him back to her as a test of her faith. He is returned, but paralysed from the neck down as the result of a serious accident on the rig. Bess is consumed by guilt. Jan, under the influence of medication, persuades Bess that she should take lovers and describe her experiences to him. She comes to the view that she is responsible for his disability and that by prostituting herself she will be given redemption and Jan will recover. Banished by the church and the community, Bess visits a ship avoided by the local prostitutes where she is sadistically abused. Her death, as a result of her injuries, miraculously leads to Jan’s recovery.

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fashioned.Detective Munch tearing paper from his typewriter followed by a cut to a suspect tearing up his statement has a studied self-consciousness about it which seems a bit glib, and repeating dialogue from an earlier scene over Munch looking at photographs of a woman’s corpse seems stylistically out of place and rather too neat; at least it was not echoed. A series of jump cuts from selected takes, that cover Munch talking as he drives, seems a valid use of this radical structuring approach but, given that the dialogue flows smoothly over the picture cuts, it is puzzling to hear an added tyre squeal used to bridge a sound cut. But then this was episode one; several series later these remnants of artificiality had gone. Director Barry Levinson was given an Emmy award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Direction for his innovative work on the pilot episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Since then, this long-running series has won numerous awards and received considerable critical acclaim wherever it has been shown.

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In 1995 Lars von Trier published a manifesto, Dogma 95, which set out to be, ‘a rescue operation to counter certain tendencies in the film today’. Its principal stand was against the components of Illusory’ film: studio sets and lighting; rocksteady camera operation; background music; post-synchronised sound; the smoothing of sound edits in re-recording; and the augmentation of natural sound with ‘sound effects’. The manifesto required that its signatories should work only in real locations with a hand-held camera shooting in available light. There were other preferred tendencies which involved the use of available props and the absence of set dressing. Films made within the terms of the manifesto would move towards naturalism and ‘purge film so that once again the inner lives of the characters justify the plot’. The final requirement was that the film would remain unsigned by its director. Films made within the terms of the manifesto would carry a certificate of authenticity.8 Although Breaking the Waves was released in 1996, it was not made within the terms of the manifesto. For example, some interiors were filmed in a Copenhagen studio and the film did not remain unsigned; in fact the director’s name fills the title frame and the film title is superimposed over it, but in most other respects it appears to follow the manifesto’s precepts. One very quickly accommodates to the natural, slight unsteadiness in the camera operation and also to the picture and sound ellipses. In many respects the shooting and editing style are very similar to that used in Homicide and explored earlier in the chapter. The main difference is that unlike Homicide, jump cuts in the picture are invariably accompanied by evident breaks in the sound. Like Homicide too, shots are jump-cut to retain and maximise their essential content so that the narrative is delivered in a kind of shorthand. If this seems brutal, it is more than compensated for by the increase in density of the content, which then becomes foregrounded. This is the film’s strength, for carried above all else is the remarkable integrity of the excellent performances, and these take on a quality of enhanced truth because the photography supports that truth with its occasional losses of focus and the uncertainties of its framings. The jump-cut editing, in isolating moments from what is recognised as an unbroken filmed continuity, emphasises this truthfulness; it is so obviously not a careful construction that it confirms its own reality. According to cinematographer Robby Müller,9 von Trier always worked to a script and there was no improvisation.8 There was also very little rehearsal, the director often using the first take, believing that otherwise the performances would become artificial. A scene filmed accidently out of focus (because a remote control had been de-calibrated) was not repeated because von Trier wanted to protect the spontaneity of the performance. Throughout, any retained roughness in the filming was because the director gave precedence to performances. Many reverse angles in dialogue scenes are covered without regard for left to right, or right-to-left framing consistencies and this, too, quickly becomes something which confirms the reality of a pro-filmic world that exists in three

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dimensions and which, because perceptions of it are not limited to a twodimensional filmic ‘reality’, seems more honest and more true. This structuring system sets up phenomenal tensions largely because it is so unfamiliar. The next shot or framing is always unpredictable and constantly surprising; shocking almost. The other unfamiliar and disconcerting element is the silence that hangs heavily behind the action and the dialogue. In the familiar world of film and television drama, the soundtrack is always full, either with atmospheres or augmented with appropriate ‘scene-setting’ sound effects, and always running behind it is the background music, reassuring in its ability to convince that what is being seen and heard really is an artificial construct because there is no background music in the real world. The absence of extraneous sounds is particularly evident in the scene that leads up to Jan’s departure by helicopter. Jan and Bess, together with Dodo and Jan’s workmates, wait for the helicopter to arrive. Apart from some desultory conversation, the scene is soundless. There’s a brief shared moment when a hipflask is passed around. Nobody has much to say; the length and tedium of the wait is emphasised by the jumps forward in time employed to shorten the scene. The effect of the cutting is to stress the growing tension in Bess. Suddenly, she is running away, followed, resignedly, by Jan. Again, the distance they travel is truncated through the editing which measures the reality of time and space by fragmenting it. Bess runs up a steel ladder beneath a massive, steel containercrane and hammers out her frustration and anger on the crane’s frame with a length of steel pipe. Jan arrives and she turns on him in a desperate flailing of hands and arms. He takes the pipe and repeats her hammer blows on the frame, endorsing her right to rage. The tension released, he is able to hold and comfort her. The silence behind this scene is palpable. There is no theme music; no emotional handrail; you are not told what to feel, you are left with the emptiness and the silence. The anger, hammered on the steel frame, echoes round the empty space but cannot fill it. There are no seagulls, no seawash, no wind in the steel girders, no words. The absence of all these familiar, reassuring sounds leaves an emptiness that is quite disturbing. One feels deprived, and when Bess is left alone after Jan has returned to the rig, we do not share her feelings of deprivation because we empathise psychologically; we don’t share those feelings at all, we have them, because we are ourselves deprived. This goes a long way to explaining the emotional power of the film. The editing, the whole structure, emphasises separation. The painful separation of the couple; the separation within Bess, who speaks both God’s words and her own; and the separation insisted upon by the strictures of the religious beliefs – self-denial splitting self from self. All this is contrasted with its opposite: the celebration of the couple’s sexual union and the linkages of love. These oppositions exist within the film’s form. Breaking the Waves was awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996.

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Although the Dogma 95 manifesto was drawn up at about the time that von Trier was preparing and filming Breaking the Waves, the first film to carry its certificate of authenticity was not released until 1998. This was Festen, directed by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, although, in keeping with the requirements of the manifesto, he remains uncredited. A party of family and friends converge on a large country house to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the patriarch, Helge. During dinner, Christian, the eldest son, makes a speech in which he accuses his father of sexually abusing his sister Linda and himself when they were both children. Linda had committed suicide shortly before, and a confessional letter is found and hidden by her younger sister, Helene. Embarrassed by Christian’s allegations and doubtful of their truth, the guests ignore him and the celebration continues. Christian then makes another speech accusing his father of his sister’s murder and, refusing to apologise to his father at his mother’s request, accuses her of knowing of the abuse but ignoring it. Eventually the truth of Christian’s accusations is confirmed when Helene reads her sister’s letter to the assembled guests. This scant outline of the film’s plot cannot do justice to what is in fact a rich and complex narrative. As with von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the conscientious use of hand-held camera and available-light filming gives the film a sense of documentary immediacy, and this lends a tangible feeling of truthfulness to some quite exceptionally fine performances. The shooting and editing succeeds in achieving the same degree of density and economy achieved in Breaking the Waves, but fails to capture the sense of shocked bewilderment that runs through most of von Trier’s film. Partly, this could be because Festen’s plot plays out over a shorter time-frame and is more concerned with rapid responses played out in terms of cause and effect. But throughout, Festen stays true to its Dogma 95 precepts, rejecting the artistry of carefully framed compositions and mood lighting; ‘invisible’ continuity editing and the artifice of a musical score intended to enhance or support dramatic content. There are significant similarities in the films so far discussed in this chapter. What marks all of them is a desire to explore alternative ways that filmed images and sounds can be structured outside the traditional formulations that are the bedrock of mainstream cinema. These experimental departures compel the spectator to confront a film language that is unpredictable and unfamiliar, one that speaks with the honest explicitness of street language or slang. A filmmaker who has taken these alternative possibilities into different directions and marked them with his own originality is Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai.

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Wong Kar-Wai (Wang Jiawei) was born in Shanghai in 1958 and raised in Hong Kong. His early influences were Russian literature and afternoon cinema visits with his mother. After training as a graphic designer he spent two years in television production at Run Run Shaw’s TVB and then joined Cinema City, initially as a scriptwriter. He began directing in the late 1980s and two of his films have explored existing film genres: As Tears Go By (1988), a gangster romance that conjures images and moods similar to those evoked in Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and Ashes of Time (1994), a visually stunning costume drama set among dissaffected killers and victims and containing images of great beauty: long panoramas across sun and sand; exquisitely lit facial close-ups; and images of translucent fabric trembling in the wind. The stylised sword-play sequences are filmed using a technique which has become a mainstay of action sequences in all his recent films. Action is filmed with the camera running at a slow speed – ten frames a second might be typical – and each frame is subsequently double or triple printed. The result is a fragmented comment on the event rather than an examination of it; violence is removed from its relationship to reality and given an artificial, cartoon quality. In Wong Kar-Wai’s films, violent action is never presented as being central to the film’s main concerns, only incidental to them. What is important is the way that people relate, or fail to relate, and the accidental ironies that bring people together or drive them apart. For example, in Fallen Angels (1995), a hit-man carries out a mass assassination, filmed using the fragmented stop-frame method just described, and escapes onto a bus. There, he is recognised by an old school friend who tries to sell him insurance and ends up inviting him to his wedding. Wong Kar-Wai has been described as Hong Kong’s ‘premier cinematic iconoclast’.10

Chungking Express Chungking Express (1994) is a two-story film set in present-day Hong Kong. The first story begins with He Qiwu, plain-clothes cop 223, patrolling the crowded alleys of Chungking Mansions and bumping into a raincoated woman wearing a blonde wig and dark glasses (all shot using step-printed stop-frame). Suddenly, shots ring out and he sets off in an unsuccessful pursuit of a suspect, narrowly missing the raincoated woman again. The frame freezes and his voice-over commentary tells us that, ‘at our closest point we were. 01cm apart .55 hours later I was in love with this woman.’ Through a mixture of voice-over and telephone conversation, we learn about the break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend, May. He consoles himself by buying on each day in April, a tin of May’s favourite food, pineapple, each with a 1 May 1994 expiry date. He is convinced that by that date, his birthday, she will

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have returned to him: she does not. Intercut with He Qiwu’s failed attempts to woo May is the story of the raincoated woman. Betrayed by a group of Indians she has paid to smuggle heroin, she eventually tracks them down and takes violent revenge (more step-printed stop-frame). Drowning his sorrows in a bar, He Qiwu decides to fall in love with the next woman to enter. This proves to be none other than the exhausted woman gangster. Any expectations that the love affair will now blossom are dashed when she falls asleep fully clothed in their hotel room, while He Qiwu consoles himself with TV and chef’s salad. This ironic tale of the plain-clothes cop and the woman gangster concludes with her revenge killing of an American dealer and the successful dumping of her disguise, while He Qiwu goes for an early morning run. Finally he is given the task of introducing the setting and characters for the next story before disappearing from the film. This story, set in and around Midnight Express, an all-night cheap eatery, follows the attempts of Faye, the eatery’s kitchen-help to make a relationship with uniformed cop 663. Dumped by his airline-stewardess girlfriend, he fails to recognise Faye’s devotion, even though she cleans his flat in his absence, having purloined a key. Eventually 663 discovers her and proposes a date, but Faye declines and leaves for California (Faye plays the song ‘California Dreaming’ endlessly). A year later, now an air stewardess, she returns to find cop 663 now resigned from the police and running Midnight Express. Once again the principal device for advancing the action turns on the jump cut. Qiwu’s telephone calls are thus conflated into a monologue that explain his attempts to restore his relationship with May, and his voice-over explains his checking the expiry dates on tins of pineapple. The woman gangster’s recruitment of the Indians, and details of the drug-smuggling preparations, are conveyed through a fragmentary montage of shots that lead to her being duped at the airport. Every scene is advanced via a series of ellipses that ignore any convention of time or space, continuity being provided by the music pulsing on the soundtrack. Wong Kar-Wai freely uses any presentational means to underscore and contribute to the meaning of the narrative. A sequence in which the woman gangster, desperate to get information about the double-crossing Indians and convinced that an Indian shopkeeper knows more than he will tell, kidnaps his young daughter, hoping to force information from him. The economy with which the sequence is handled is an object lesson in minimalist narrative structure. 1

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Shop interior. The owner leaves the woman in his shop and goes into the back room. She takes the child, who is sitting on the counter and exits. Father in from the back room and sees girl missing. Fast pan off. Jump cut to CS father on the phone, ‘Where’s my daughter, what do you want?.’ MS a diner. Child sitting at a table. Pan with waitress as she crosses, reveals woman in phone box, ‘If I don’t hear in half an hour you won’t

The woman tracks down and shoots the Indians, is pursued and eventually makes her escape on a subway train. This whole sequence, which contains every element of the shooting and the chase over several locations, is shot using the step-printed stop-frame effect which, when edited to its essentials, collapses the time taken for the action very like an animated cartoon. The pace is reflected in the racy music, there is no suspense and there is never any doubt that she will get away. Although this short section of action tells the story, the form of the telling confirms its insignificance: it is meant to be fun. Cutting back to He Qiwu reveals him searching for, and finding, the last tin of pineapple on the supermarket shelf on the last day of April, and a jump-cut sequence shows him eating the lot. In a funny yet futile series of phone calls, he calls all his old girlfriends, and in a final irony ends up offering a shoulder to lean on to the woman gangster he had the premonition about in the opening shots of the film. Wong Kar-Wai mischievously compels us to speculate upon the fact that He Qiwu could only have known that the woman he brushed past at the beginning, would be resting on his shoulder at this point if he had already seen the film. Like Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, he must already know the end at the beginning, but the irony comes from our realisation that he never knows who she is. It is all part of the fun; this is only a movie and it makes its own sense. Finding her still asleep at dawn, he carefully cleans her shoes and makes for the running track. When his bleeper goes off, its a message that says ‘the woman in 702 says Happy Birthday’. ‘Something’, he Qiwu confides in voice-over, ‘I will remember all my life’. In the second story, Cop 663’s nightly visits to the Midnight Express eatery to take chef’s salad back to his air-stewardess girlfriend merge into one. The only way Wong Kar-Wai signals the days passing is by changing the clothes worn by Faye. The form of the film delivers nothing easily; it demands attention but rewards it with economy. The narrative constructions are realised with a beautiful simplicity. Cop 663’s relationship with the air stewardess is defined in one long, jump-cut

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see her again.’ She hangs up. Pan with her as she crosses to sit next to child eating ice-cream. 5 MS the diner. Jump cut. Woman seated, smoking a cigarette. 6 MCS father next to phone, head in hands. 7 MS the diner, woman speaks to waitress, ‘Miss, another ice-cream.’ 8 CS father head in hands, slight track in. 9 MS the diner. Woman rises and crosses to the phone. Waitress crosses shot. 10 MS the diner. Jump cut, young girl at table, waitress clears dishes, pan with her to reveal empty phone box. 11 WS the diner. Jump cut. Pan father as he enters, crosses to seated daughter and hugs her. 12 MS exterior street at night. Woman walks along obliquely. Voice-over: ‘some people will sell their kids for money, he’s not one of them.’

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scene. In the foreground of a shot showing the interior of his flat, 663 holds a small model plane which he carves through the air. Facing him in MS, his girlfriend, wearing a skirt and bra, mimes to the sound of an English voice intoning the familiar litany of an airlines safety information announcement. This is accompanied by the song ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’ which might also be playing in the flat or simply providing a romantic, and ironic, comment on the action. 663 abandons his toy plane and playfully pursues his air stewardess through a series of jump cuts into a passionate embrace. The action and the soundtracks all end together. The next day she leaves a ‘goodbye’ letter for him at the Midnight Express. When 663 comes by later, Faye tells him about the letter. He suspects its contents and decides to drink his coffee before reading it. In a wideshot of the counter, 663 is framed drinking his coffee at one side with Faye gazing at him on the other. We know that for each of them time is standing still because their movements seem to be in slow-motion, but more particularly it is confirmed by the fact that the passers-by, silhouetted in the foreground, are speeded up. The meaning of the scene is enhanced, as the form and the content unite. The films examined in this chapter share many similarities. All bend the form to provide explorations of human emotions; love, loss, alienation and loneliness. Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves has a painful bleakness within it that seems to sit somewhat ill with its faith-confirming conclusion, and Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen distils some black comedy from a situation where dinner guests must handle accusations of child abuse with polite equanimity. Humour and truth go hand in hand through all the episodes of Homicide, and all these qualities are given an ironic twist through the richness of form that make Wong Kar-Wai’s work so delightful to watch.

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As earlier paragraphs have shown, the last decades of the cinema’s century have witnessed an interesting shift away from the convention-bound filmmaking traditions that dominated the mainstream during the cinema’s golden age. Certainly, the conventions of classic, realist continuity cinema remain central and will continue to serve the future needs of commercial production for some time to come for they are the building blocks of a universal language with a proven ability to convey subtleties of meaning both persuasively and invisibly. But the exponential growth of information technology, with its dependence on competing means of presenting and packaging audiovisual content, has prompted the evolution of new languages with a different set of conventions. Computer-game designers, pop-promo directors, film and TV advertising agencies, have found it profitable and necessary to rewrite the rules of audiovisual address. These new languages, exploiting constantly evolving digital techniques, have become a quickly learned and powerful shorthand way of conveying ideas and sustaining

Notes Parkinson, History of Film, p. 150. Salt, Film Style and Technology, History and Analysis, p. 322. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, p. 9. This view was somewhat revised with the publication of the second edition in 1988 where he found evidence of a return to a more classical Hollywood tradition. 4 Hoberman, ‘Sacred and Profane’, Sight and Sound. 5 See Chapter 6, p. 87. 6 Björkman, ‘Naked Miracles’. 7 Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film. 8 Questions have been raised concerning the sincerity of purpose behind the Dogma 95 manifesto. Its international publicity value and the omission of the directors’ names from the credits inevitably guaranteed that they would be discovered and publicised. If one adds a tendency towards a rather liberal interpretation of the manifesto’s precepts, notably in Mifune (1999), it seems possible that there could be other motives at work. 9 Thompson, ‘Production Slate’, American Cinematographer. 10 Stephens, ‘Wong Kar-Wai and the Persistence of Memory’, Film Comment. 1 2 3

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interest. We might therefore expect to find evidence of these formal devices entering the mainstream; their appearance in a first feature by commercials director Guy Ritchie, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), is a notable example. However, for all the panache associated with these modernist tendencies their usefulness will depend upon the extent to which they can be used to explore levels of meaning beyond the facile gloss of attention-grabbing incongruities and spatial anomalies. New forms, that reach into possibilities of linking manipulation with metaphor; that truncate and fragment sounds and images in order to enhance an audiences perception of the moment, can sometimes carry the heart of meaning much more directly towards understanding once released from the confines of realism. There can be little doubt that a future cinema will continue to explore these fascinating alternatives.

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Appendix

In the main text of Looking at the Invisible I have avoided as much as possible any detailed references to the technological aspects of film editing, largely because much of this is not relevant to the creative considerations which have been my principal concern. However, in order to give as comprehensive a picture of editing practice as possible, it will be helpful to touch upon these matters here. One of the most surprising facts about film-editing technology is that until about 1916 there was none. There were only two ways to view the images on a strip of film; one was to run it through a projector, and the other was to look at the strip held over a light box or suspended in front of one. At least the projected image was animated, but there was no way that the projector could be stopped with film in the projector gate without the risk of the inflammable cellulose nitratebased film catching fire: the stationary frame would instantly be ignited by the heat from the carbon-arc lamp.1 So the only way that a film editor could determine where to cut was to make notes, or require the projectionist to mark the film with a wax pencil during projection. A simpler and much preferred way involved the editor holding the film with one hand in front of a light box and pulling it up in a series of quick jerks. Astonishingly, editors became so adept at this practice that many continued to use it even after mechanical animating devices became available. An article published in the American Picture Play magazine in May 1916 entitled The Film Surgeon’ gives what was probably one of the very earliest accounts of the film editor’s role.2 The article makes no mention of any mechanical device used to run the film; it refers only to the film surgeon’s implements being ‘a pair of scissors and a can of cement glue’. The article also mentions that, ‘from eight o’clock in the morning until five-thirty in the evening, he runs miles of shiny film through his fingers, and every time his eagle eye comes across parts that he knows the public isn’t going to want, he takes his scissors and cuts them out.’ At this time, the image on 35 mm was much bigger as it covered the whole width of the film between the sprocket holes. After the introduction of sound, it was reduced in size to allow for an optical soundtrack to run alongside the picture area, and, proportionally, this also increased the thickness of the frame line. 330

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Another remarkable fact recorded is that the length of an edited section of film was not calculated by winding it through a measuring wheel, but by weighing it on finely balanced scales; one ounce being the equivalent of twelve and a half feet of film. There is certainly evidence that, by 1916, primitive viewing devices were in use; sometimes made by adapting the transport mechanism of a projector, the film being pulled intermittently by a sprocket wheel, which was hand-cranked, and viewed through a magnifying glass positioned in front of the aperture. The illumination was supplied from the light box on which the device could stand; film would be held in one hand and fed into the bottom of the mechanism while the other hand cranked the handle. The origins of this device seem to be rather obscure, but what is known is that a Dutch mechanical-electrical engineer named Iwan Serrurier, who had emigrated to the United States in 1904, had spent his spare time developing an early movie projection system that he patented and called ‘Moviola’, a name suggested to him by one of his children. In September 1924, a film editor working at the Douglas Fairbanks Studio was shown the small projector and suggested that it might be adapted for use as a viewing device. Serrurier took it away and soon returned with his new Moviola Editing Machine which the studio immediately bought. Soon, the demand for the machine had outstripped Serrurier’s production capabilities, and the Moviola Midget was then manufactured under licence by Mitchell Camera. The Moviola eventually came to be mounted on its own table, with the film running through it collecting in a bin at the back. Film was still fed into it by hand and it was now equipped with a variable-speed motor operated by a foot pedal. The picture was illuminated from behind using a bulb fitted inside the machine, and viewing was through a magnifying lens mounted on the ‘gate’. This could be opened like a hinged door to locate and remove the film, or swung aside to facilitate marking the film with a wax pencil. The origins of the Moviola are well documented; but information about how film was joined during this early period is more difficult to trace. Sections of film had to be joined in a way which would enable them to run through a projector gate without jumping and without falling apart. This was achieved by cutting the film just ahead of the first frame of the incoming shot and scraping away the narrow band of photographic emulsion so as to reveal the small surface of cellulose nitrate beneath. Solvent was then applied to this thinned area and the join made by holding it carefully in register with the last frame of the outgoing shot. The solvent bonded quickly and the result was a strong, thin, largely unseen join. Whether this was done aided by anything more sophisticated than a simple clamping mechanism and registering device seems not to have been recorded; however, in the early years, all this would have been done by hand. Barry Salt has observed that between 1907 and 1913 the convention of tinting scenes different colours, to reflect mood or atmosphere, stabilised; standard colours

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being then used for specific purposes – blue for night, orange or amber for candlelit interiors etc. 3 Throughout that period, and for many years afterwards, every distribution print was assembled individually from shots, scenes and titles printed and tinted appropriately by the laboratory and then cemented together by teams of young women employed expressly for the purpose. In 1918, photographic equipment manufacturers Bell & Howell first put onto the market a film joiner that enabled the process to be done more quickly and accurately. Initially designed to join sections of negative it was set to provide a splice only 132 of an inch wide so that the join was not visible when making the positive print. Because there was a demand for a machine that could be used to repair damaged projection prints and speed up join-making when assembling work-prints, Bell & Howell adapted the machine to make 3 32 of an inch splices and by 1922 these joiners were standard cutting-room equipment. The operator would sit at the machine, which consisted of a small table with the splicer mounted on it in two sections, each used to hold the two ends to be joined using registration pins. Once in place, foot-pedals were operated to cut the film and display the surface to be scraped. This would be done by hand with a separate scraper. Then ‘film cement’, amyl acetate, was applied to the scraped area. The right foot-pedal would then be lowered, bringing the two sections of film together and clamping the join. These models were equipped with a small internal heater element to speed the drying. Later adapted to join 16 mm film as well, these joiners were still in regular use in cutting rooms until well after the introduction of the tape splicer in 1963.4 In the very earliest days it was not considered necessary to establish a relationship between the camera negative and the print that was made from it except by using a number chalked on a ‘slate’ and photographed at the start of each take. Once the ‘slate’ was removed from the print, the only means of identifying its negative was by eye-matching. At that time it was also part of the film editor’s job to cut the negative to match the edited cutting-copy or workprint; and eye-matching was difficult, particularly if their was little movement during the shots. In an attempt to solve this problem, Eastman Kodak introduced edge numbering on its negative film stock in 1919. Called ‘key numbers’, these increased serially by one digit at sixteen-frame intervals and were intended to be printed through onto the positive as a reference. However, film laboratories where concerned that adapting their printing machines to allow light to pass through the film edge would prevent proper contact between the negative and the positive stock, resulting in a loss of focus: they refused to cooperate. Eventually they were pursuaded, but it seems that this was not before 1924.5 Once optical sound became the industry standard for sound recording, it became necessary to adapt the Moviola to run both sound and picture in synchronism, and in 1930 the sound Moviola became available. This was equipped with a sound head fitted with an optical track reader very like that used on a projector. Because sound was only required to be run at one speed, the sound-

In the 1970s, latex ink was replaced with heat-sensitive foil strip applied by using a heated numbering block. The 16 mm film gauge, and equipment to handle it, had been around for many years before improvements in the quality and the light sensitivity of 16 mm film stock encouraged a significant increase in its use for television purposes. In Britain, in the mid-1960s, the Acmade company redesigned its 16 mm, magnetic-headed synchroniser, fitting it with a picture head that used a rotating prism mounted between the film and a light source to produce intermittent back projection. This was the Acmade Pic-sync, later enlarged and motorised to become the Compeditor. Its popularity encouraged manufacture of a 35 mm version. The rotating prism was a device that was fundamental to the design of a viewing machine that had been developed in Germany during the 1930s. This was a table-based machine on which film and soundtracks would lie on their sides on flat rotating plates. The film, passing in front of a multi-faceted, rotating prism illuminated from behind, could then be back-projected onto a screen via a series of mirrors.7 These machines, developed by the Wilhelm Steenbeck Co of Hamburg in the early 1930s, soon became the principal editing tool in Germany. During the 1950s and 1960s the Steenbeck, which was manufactured to a very high engineering standard, then began to be successfully imported into Britain and

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head transport was driven with a constant-speed motor operated by a foot switch. The drive shaft of the picture head could be locked to it, so that the two could be run together. By unlocking this connection the picture could be driven on its own, using the variable-speed foot control. In America and Britain, this machine, with minor improvements, became the cutting-room workhorse for the next thirty or forty years; the only major modification being the removal of the optical head and the fitting of its magnetic equivalent with the introduction of magnetic sound in the early 1950s. The other editing tool which was introduced with the arrival of sound has already been mentioned in Chapter 13 (see p. 246). This was the synchroniser, used to keep multiple picture tracks and sound film tracks together in a frame-toframe relationship during the editing. With the eventual introduction of magnetic film, the synchroniser was equipped with magnetic heads; sound could then be monitored independently of the Moviola. Although the synchroniser was excellent at keeping film and sound tracks together when they were locked into it, as soon as they were removed and set aside, apart from any wax-pencil marks put on by the editor, there was no visible relationship between them. To solve this problem, the rubber-numbering machine was invented. First available in 1932, it was basically a machine designed to print a preselected number on to the edge of the film and soundtrack; a number which increased serially each time the printing drum rotated. Provided the starting points were synchronous, the number, occuring every sixteen frames, could be printed to match the picture with its soundtrack at any point. It was called a rubber-numbering machine because the ink was made using a quick-drying latex.6

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America.8 Eventually developed to run both 16 mm and 35 mm, with twin soundtrack and multi-picture heads, it became internationally established. Its success encouraged competition. In America the KEM flat-bed editing table, made by KEM Editing Systems Inc, became Steenbeck’s chief rival; but in Britain, although various attempts were made to produce a home-manufactured alternative, nothing was really able to compete with the excellence of the Steenbeck. Every editor has his or her own favourite viewing and editing machine, but whichever piece of equipment is preferred, film still has to be cut and joined. From the very beginning, one of the chief problems with cutting and joining was that every time a join was made, because the join consisted of an overlap, a frame was lost in the process. Each time a join was taken apart and remade, or a shot was shortened that later needed to be lengthened, more frames were lost. To restore length, frames of black would be added – ‘build-up’ – resulting in sudden losses of picture and sound when running the film. This meant that reprints of shots would have to be ordered, which caused delays and additional expense. In the early 1960s an Italian manufacturer, Dr. Leo Catozzo, invented a tapejoiner, the Costruzione Incollatrici Rapide (CIR). The enormous advantage of the CIR joiner was that it cut the film exactly through the frame line. No frames were lost because the film could be joined and rejoined using unperforated, clear polyester tape that had a highly transparent adhesive, so transparent in fact, that it was possible to read the printing on the outside of the central core through all the layers on an unused reel. Pressing down the handle of the joiner secured the join, cut off the excess tape and re-perforated the sprocket holes. Any shot could be reconstituted in its entirety simply by unpeeling the tape, re-attaching the previously removed section and remaking the join. In America during the 1950s, a transparent adhesive tape called Permacell was used for joining film. It was preperforated, had the same dimensions as 35 mm film, and enabled joins to be remade very quickly and easily. This tape was used in Britain during the late 1950s, but its use declined with the widespread adoption of the CIR joiner. In America, pre-perforated tape remained the preferred method of joining film. The tape-joiner significantly altered editing practice. Before tape-joiners, decisions about a cutting point had to be made based upon an evaluation that had either to be arrived at slowly, made loosely to accommodate the possibility of later reassessment, or made according to a set of formulaic principles that were reliable, if predictable. The tape-joiner changed all that. Now it was possible to take risks and try alternative possibilities; experiment with something not tried before. Because it could be quickly and easily put right, making mistakes and getting it wrong did not matter. Furthermore, it was now possible to assess the cut as soon as it has been made; cut a whole sequence and view it instantly. Before the tapejoiner, film and track had to be marked on the frame line; physically cut with scissors through the adjacent frame, and held together on the assembly reel with a clip. It was then passed to the assistant for joining, with frames being lost at every

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join. Only then could it be viewed. Now there could be instant replay, and changes and improvements made as a scene was assembled; the editing process was speeded up and a higher level of concentration maintained. More of the editing time could be used in decision-making and cutting, and less spent handling. It did not mean that one had less time to think, rather that one had more. There are direct parallels here between using a typewriter and working on a word processor; in film editing, the tape-joiner was the precursor of the word processor in that it enabled changes to be made without losses. Which brings us to the most recent changes in film editing technology: computerised editing. The introduction of computerised editing systems marks the most significant change ever to have occured in film-editing practice in that it excludes the materiality of the process almost entirely. Several competing systems were developed during the late 1980s, all similar, but two became more securely established than others: Avid Technology, which was developed in America, and Lightworks Editing Systems Ltd., developed in Britain. All these computer-based systems have been termed ‘non-linear editing systems’ to differentiate them from linear-editing methods. Linear editing refers to the process of producing an assembly of shots by copying each one from an original source. It is a method originally devised to edit material shot on videotape that could not be physically cut and joined. It originally had two fundamental disadvantages: because progress could only be made by copying, each time a copy was made the quality of the image would be reduced; and once an assembly order had been determined it could only be altered by copying or beginning again. With the introduction of digital recording, an original could be recopied indefinitely with no quality loss and the flexibility of linear editing as a practice was significantly improved. Film editing has, from the beginning, been a non-linear system because the film material can be cut and joined in any order, and the order changed infinitely with no quality disadvantages. This applies to the cutting copy, or workprint only; once the editing is finished the workprint is used as a guide to enable the original negative to be cut and conformed to the edited version. Prints struck from the cut negative would then be fair copies of the original edited intention. Computerised, non-linear editing is fundamentally a video-editing system in which film that has been transferred to videotape, or material originated on videotape, is recorded digitally into the computer memory in such a way that it can be easily recalled and identified for instant access. This means that sections from any part of it can be assembled in any order and rearranged and adjusted at will. The system provides all the flexibility available when working with film and its synchronous, or non-synchronous, sound elements, but with instant access to all the material and virtually no handling. Furthermore, it is possible to compile and retain alternative versions of the edited scenes; the information necessary to recall any version is stored digitally as a series of readily accessible numbers – the edited versions are virtual, they do not exist in reality. Once a satisfactory result

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has been obtained, the computer records onto a floppy disk all the information necessary to replicate the edited form. This is called an Edit Decision List (EDL). This enables either the original film negative, or the master videotapes, to be automatically conformed to produce a copy that matches the edited version. The same process enables the sound to be auto-conformed to the edited requirements. Assessments of the various editing stages are made either by viewing the edit in the editing room on a television monitor, or by making video copies and sending them off for assessment elsewhere. However, during the editing of a feature film, it is necessary to view the later stages of the edited film projected in the usual way. Consequently, prints of the selected film rushes are conformed to replicate the computer-edited version using the EDL information as a guide. This produces a conventional, projectable, workprint that synchronises with the computer-edited soundtrack and which can be adjusted to accommodate any subsequent changes before the film reaches completion. Computerised technology has simplified the means with which films can be edited and, by removing many of the laborious tasks associated with the work, has made space for a greater and more careful consideration of the creative meanings behind what we do. Long may it remain so.

Notes 1

2 3 4

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5 6

336

7 8

Commonly known as ‘celluloid’, this highly flammable material was responsible for a large number of fires in early cinemas, resulting in many deaths. Legally enforceable regulations requiring that projection booths be of brick construction and isolated from the viewing room were introduced quite early on. Regulations in film-cutting rooms were also very stringent: all equipment, film cans and racks were required to be made of metal, and metal bins used for waste film were required to have a lid that would spring shut automatically. There was also a requirement for waste to be removed daily. The introduction of non-flammable cellulose acetate as a film base very much later was considered an important development in the safe handling of film. Reprinted in American Cinematographer, summer/autumn 1983. Salt, Film Style and Technology, History and Analysis, p. 101. The eventual need to accommodate an optical soundtrack required that the picture area be reduced both in width and height in order to maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio. This resulted in an increase in frame line width, and consequently, a splice, that was nearer 3/16 of an inch wide. Thompson and Bordwell, ‘From Sennett to Stevens’. In 1988, I was editing a film in Germany and took a film-numbering machine with me together with some other equipment. The numbering machine fascinated the German film editors who had never seen one before; it seems that they still required their assistants to mark the sync references by hand. When first designed, the Steenbeck had a front projection system. Wilhelm Steenbeck & Co. was a small business specialising in the high-quality precision engineering work. In the early 1930s they were approached by

Appendix

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producer-director Dr. Arnold Fanck, a former geologist, mountaineer and documentary filmmaker, who had initiated the popular trend in German ‘Mountain Films’ during the 1920s and 1930s. Fanck worked with Steenbeck on designing the first flatbed viewing and editing table for which the company then became internationally famous.

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Bibliography

Books Bach, S., Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, London, Jonathan Cape, 1985. Bazin, Α., What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967. Behlmer, R. (ed.) Memo From: David 0. Selznick, New York, The Viking Press, 1972. Berger, J., ‘The Moment of Cubism’, in Nikos Stangos (ed.) John Berger: Selected Essays and Articles, Penguin Books, 1972. Bordwell, D., Narration in the Fiction Film, London, Routledge, 1986. Bordwell, D., Staiger, J., and Thompson, K., The Classical Hollywood Cinema, London, Routledge, 1985. Bowser, E., The History of American Cinema Vol. 2, ‘The Transformation of Cinema – 1907– 1915’, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. Branigan, E., Narrative Comprehension and Film, London and New York, Routledge, 1992. Brooks, L., Lulu in Hollywood, New York, Random House Inc., 1982. Brown, K., Adventures with D. W. Griffith, London, Seeker & Warburg, 1973. Brown, M. W., The Story of the Armory Show, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D. C., 1963. Brownlow, K., The Parade’s Gone By, London, Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd., 1969. _____, Hollywood – The Pioneers, London, Collins, 1979. Burch, N., Life to Those Shadows, London, BFI Publishing, 1990. _____, Theory of Film Practice, London, Martin Seeker & Warburg, 1973. _____, To the Distant Observer, ‘Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema’, London, Scolar Press, 1979. Card, J., ‘Influences of the Danish Film’ in Marshall Deutelbaum (ed.), ‘Image’ on the Art and Evolution of the Film, New York, Dover Publications, 1979. Coe, B., The History of Movie Photography, London, Ash & Grant, 1981. Cohen, K., Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979. Cook, D. Α., A History of Narrative Film, London and New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1990. Dmytryk, E., On Film Editing, London, Focal Press, 1984. Durgnat, R., Durgnat on Film, London, Faber & Faber, 1976. 338

Eddy, A. J., Cubists and Post-Impressionists, Chicago, 1914. Eisenstein, S. M., Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949. _____, Immoral Memories, an Autobiography, London, Peter Owen Ltd., 1985. Eisner, L., The Haunted Screen, London, Thames & Hudson, 1969. Elsaesser, T. (ed.), Early Cinema: space-frame-narrative, London, BFI Publishing, 1990. Field, S., Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, New York, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1979. Green, M., New York 1913, New York, Macmillan, 1988. Griffith, Mrs D. W. (Linda Arvidson), When the Movies Were Young. Benjamin Blom 1968 (reprint of 1925 edn). Hepworth, C. M., Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer, London, Phoenix House, 1951. Huff, T., Charlie Chaplin, London, Cassell & Co Ltd., 1952. Jacobs, L., The Rise of the American Film, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939. James, W., The Principles of Psychology (reissued), Dover Publications, 1950. Jesionowski, J. E., Thinking in Pictures, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1987. Kolker, R. P., The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema, New York, Oxford University Press, 1983. _____, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, New York, Oxford University Press, 1980, 1988. Kracauer, S., From Caligari to Hitler, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1947. _____, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York, Oxford University Press, 1960. Leyda, J., Kino, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1960. Low, R., The History of British Film 1929–39, ‘Film Making in 1930s Britain’, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Lynton, N., The Story of Modern Art, Oxford, Phaidon Press Limited, 1980. Mamet, D., On Directing Film, London, Faber & Faber, 1992. Mast, G., A Short History of the Movies, revised by Bruce F. Kawin, New York, Macmillan, 1992. Mottram, R., The Danish Cinema 1895–1917, Metuchen, NJ and London, The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1988. Musser, C., Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1991. Neergaard, E., The Story of Danish Film, trans. Elsa Gress, Copenhagen, Det Danske Selskab, 1963. Parkinson, D., History of Film, London, Thames & Hudson, 1995. Pechter, W. S., ‘The Closed Mind of Sergei Eisenstein’, Twenty-four Times a Second, New York, Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1965. Pudovkin, V., Film Technique and Film Acting, Vision Press, 1958. Rosenblum, R., When the Shooting Stops ... the Cutting Begins, New York, Penguin Books, 1980. Salt, B., Film Style and Technology, History and Analysis, London, Starword, 1983.

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Gish, L., The Movies, Mr Griffith, and Me, London, W. H. Allen, 1969.

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Sammon, P. M., Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, London, Orion Books Ltd., 1996. Sarris, Α., ‘Rouben Mamoulian talking to Andrew Sarris, 1966’ in Hollywood Voices (ed.), Andrew Sarris, London, Martin Seeker & Warburg, 1971. Schatz, T., The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-making in the Studio Era, New York, Pantheon Books, 1989. Shearer, D., ‘Douglas Shearer’ in Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein (eds), The Real Tinsel, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1970. Sklar, R., Movie-Made America, New York, Random House, 1975. Thomson, D., A Biographical Dictionary of Film, London, André Deutsch Ltd.

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Turim, M., Flashbacks in Film, New York and London, Routledge, 1989. Vidor, K., King Vidor on Film Making, New York. David McKay, 1972. Walker, Α., The Shattered Silents, London, Harrap, 1971.

Articles in journals Barr, C., ‘Blackmail: Silent & Sound’, Sight and Sound, spring 1983, 123–6. ------, ‘Some Other Aspects of Editing’, Scope, December 1962, 16–21. Birt, D., ‘The Principles of Film Recording’, Close-Up, September 1931, 203–6. Björkman, S., ‘Naked Miracles’, Sight and Sound, October 1996, 10–14. Bordwell, D., ‘Dziga Vertov – An Introduction’, Film Comment, spring 1972, 38–42. Bottomore, S., ‘Shots in the Dark – The Real Origins of Film Editing’, Sight and Sound, summer 1988, 200–4. Brownlow, K., ‘Silent Films – What was the Right Speed?’, Sight and Sound, summer 1980, 164–7. Burch, N., ‘How We Got into Pictures’, Afterimage 8/9, spring 1981, 22–39. Colpi, H., ‘Debasement of the Art of Montage’, Film Culture, summer 1961, 34–7. Gaudreault, Α., ‘Detours in Film Narative – The Development of Cross-Cutting’, Cinema Journal, 19(1): 39–59 autumn 1979. Griffith, D. W., ‘The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America’, Los Angeles, privately printed pamphlet, 1916. Hoberman, J., ‘Sacred and Profane’, Sight and Sound, February 1992, 8–11. Robinson, D., Tainting the Leaves Black’, Sight and Sound, summer 1961, 123–7. Salt, B., ‘Film Form 1900–06’, Sight and Sound, summer 1978, 148–53. ------, ‘The Unknown Ince’, Sight and Sound, autumn 1988, 268–72. Seton, M., ‘The Power and the Glory of Sergei M. Eisenstein’, The Movies: The Illustrated History of the Cinema, 122 (2428): 9 (1982). Stephens, C., ‘Wong Kar-Wai and the Persistence of Memory’, Film Comment, JanuaryFebruary 1996, 12–18. Sunila, J., ‘Slaving over a hot Steenbeck with film editors Dede Allen and Richard Marks’, American Film, November 1985, 43–6.

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Thompson, A. O., ‘Production Slate’, American Cinematographer, December 1996, 18–22.

340

Thompson, K. and Bordwell, D., ‘From Sennett to Stevens – an Interview with William Hornbeck’, The Velvet Light Trap, summer 1983, 34–40. Vaughan, D., ‘Let there be Lumière’, Sight and Sound, spring 1981, 126–7.

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Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates a note number on that page.

Abyss, The 74 Acmade Pic-sync 333 Acres, Birt 12, 14, 311 Adolfi, John G. 112–14 Adventurer, The 161–2 Adventures of Dollie, The 61–2 After Happiness 180 After Many Years 69, 110 Alexandrov, Grigori 201n.11, 245 Alfie 309 Algiers 254–5 Alice in Wonderland 47, 303 All Quiet on the Western Front 246, 256 Altman, Robert 315 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company see Biograph Anderson, Lindsay 316 Animated Picture Studio, An 58 Antonioni, Michelangelo 313 Apfel, Oscar 133n.4 Applause 243–4 Armory Show, The 116–17 Arrivé d’un train en gare à La Ciotat 9 Arsenal 197–9 As Seen Through a Telescope 21, 32, 38, 40 As Tears Go By 325 Ashes of Time 325 Assassination of the Duc de Guise, The 71 Atlantic 235 Atlantis 77–8 Attack on a China Mission 23–4, 26–7

Avid Technology 335 Bad Lieutenant 318 Bamforth, James 20–1, 22 Bamforth Company, The 20 Bank Burglar’s Fate, The 112 Bardem, Juan Antonio 316 Bargain, The 121–3 Barker, Reginald 120–7 Barnes, George 250 Barque sortant du port 9, 33 Battleship Potemkin 186–90, 311, 320 Bazin, André 313n.3 Beban, George 123–5 Beguiled, The 307 Bell & Howell 332 Benvenido, Mr Marshall 316 Bergman, Ingmar 313 Berlanga, Luis 316 Bertolucci, Bernardo 315 Biograph 22–3, 60, 62 Birt, Daniel 246 Birth of a Nation, The 136–40, 143 Bitzer, G. W. “Billy” 61 Black Dream, The 74 Blackmail 230–4 Blade Runner 293–5 Blaue Engel, Der 236–9 Blind Husbands 99 Blom, August 76–8 Blue Angel, The see Blaue Engel, Der Bodyguard, The 252–3 341

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Bombay Blue 288-93 Booth, Margaret 274 Boyle, Peter 252 Braque, Georges 115–17 Breaking the Waves 321–4 Breathless 312–3 Brest, Martin 277 Broken Blossoms 163–5 Bromhead, A. C. 35 Brooks, Louise 215, 218–19 Brown, Karl 141–2, 146–7, 150 Brownlow, Kevin 2, 133n.4, 141, 143–4, 305 Bulldog Drummond 241–3 Burch, Noël 2–3, 4n.2, 54 Buy Your Own Cherries 50–1, 55

342

Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 170–2 Cabiria 72, 143–4 Cagney and Lacey 303–4 Caine, Michael 58 Camille 274–6 Campbell, Eric 158, 176n.2 Cape Fear 311 Capra, Frank 246 Casanova 204–8 Case, Theodore W. 225–6 Cassavetes, John 319 Catozzo, Dr Leo 334 Caught in the Rain 158 Chaplin, Charlie 157–62 Cheat The 127–32, 157 Cheval Emballé, Le 56–7, 63 Christensen, Benjamin 168-70 Chungking Express 325–8 CIR joiner 334 City Streets 244–5 Clark, Mabel 53 Collins, Alf 35–6 Come Along Do! 14, 49 Comics 286–8 Corner of Wheat, A 68–9 Costner, Kevin 252 Coward, The 125–7 Crisp, Donald 164 Cromwell, John 250, 253–5 Cubism 115–17 Cukor, George 250–1, 274–5

Culloden 308-9 Cure, The 160–1 Curtain Pole, The 63 Curtiz, Michael 251 Dances with Wolves 252 Daring Daylight Burglary 41–2, 311 De Forest, Lee 225–6 del Ruth, Roy 251, 258 DeMille, Cecil Β. 127–32, 133n.4 Démolition d’un mur 7–8 Desperate Poaching Affray 34–5, 41, 51 Detective Burton’s Triumph 112 Diary of a Lost Girl 204, 215–21 Dickens, Charles 110, 142 Dickson, W. K. L. 223–4 Dieterle, William 251, 257 Dinesen, Robert 74–5 Dmytryk, Edward 267, 276–7 Doctor Strangelove 46 Dogma 95 322, 324, 329n.8 Doller, Mikhail 202n.15 Don Juan 203, 225 Doré, Gustave 15–16 Double Indemnity 310 Dovzhenko, Alexander 178, 197–201 Drive for Life, The 66 Duel in the Sun 250–1 Dupont, Ε. A. 93–9, 235 Duvivier, Julien 253–5 Earth 199–200 Eastman Kodak 332 Easy Street 158–60 Edison, Thomas 223 Edison Manufacturing Company 22, 29 Edit Decision List (EDL) 336 Edvard Munch 309 Eisenstein, S. M. 178, 183–93, 245, 249 Elements of Crime, The 321 Elfelt, Peter 73 End of St. Petersburg 195–7 Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Don Basin 180 Epidemic 321 Ermolieff, Joseph 204–5 Escomatage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin 13

Faces 319 Fahrenheit 451 304 Fallen Angels 325 Fall of Babylon, The 155 Fanck, Arnold 336n.8 Fantômas 105 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 315 Fatal Attraction 61 Fatal Hour, The 63, 66 Faust 175–6, 192 Fellini, Federico 313 Ferrara, Abel 318 Festen 324 Feuillade, Louis 105–6 Finish of Bridget McKeen, The 37n.8 Fire! 26–7, 29, 31 First National Pictures Inc. 158 Fitzhamon, Lewis 51, 54 Fleming, Victor 251 Flying Circus, The 75 Foolish Wives 250 Ford, Francis 119 Ford, John 132n.2, 269 Four Devils, The 74–6 Fox, William 226 Fox Film Corporation 226 Frankenstein 261 Free Cinema 316 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The 309–10 French New Wave 315 Fugitive, The 33 Gad, Urban 74 Gance, Abel 205 Gardener, The 78-9 Gaumont, Léon 35, 105 Gay Shoe Clerk, The 40 Gilbert Lewis 309 Gill, Michael 2 Gish, Lillian 141, 151, 155n.l, 164, 208-10

Godard, Jean-Luc 312–13, 315–16 Goldwyn, Sam 257 Golem, Der 173 Gone with the Wind 251–2 Good Veteran and the Children, The 59 Goodfellas 310–11, 317 Grand Hotel 260 Grandma’s Reading Glass 21, 32, 65, 182 Greaser’s Gauntlet, The 62–3 Great Circus Catastrophe, The 78 Great Circus Disaster, The 78 Great Train Robbery, The 41–8, 54, 64–5 Greed 99–103, 250 Greenaway, Peter 4n.3 Griffith, David Wark 27, 44, 57, 60–9, 82–3, 85–7, 108-10, 135–55 passim, 163–5 Guazzoni, Enrico 135 Haggar, William 33–5, 41, 51 Hallelujah! 235–6 Hambling, Gerry 295–6 Hanson, Lars 208-9 Hard Day’s Night, A 305 Hart, William S. 121 Haunted Curiosity Shop, The 59 Häxan 168-70 Hay don, Frank 39 Hepworth, Cecil 22, 47, 51 Hepworth Manufacturing Company 51 Her First Adventure 63 His Last Fight 112 His Phantom Sweetheart 113 Histoire d’un crime 28–9 Hitchcock, Alfred 230–4, 250, 252, 266 Home Sweet Home 146, 156n.16 Homicide: Life on the Street 318-21, 322 Hooligan in Jail 23 Hornbeck, William 87, 234–5, 239, 305–6 How a British Bulldog Saved the Union Jack 55 100 to 1 Shot, The 56, 63 Illusions Funambulesques 59 Immigrant, The 161 Ince, Ralph 33, 112–14 Ince, Thomas H. 118n. 5, 119–27

Index

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Essanay 158 Europa 321 Ex-Convict, The 49 Execution, The 73 Execution of Czolgosz and Panorama of Auburn State Prison, The 29

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Independent Motion Picture Company 107 Ingeborg Holm 79 Ingram, Rex 250 Inquisitive Boots, The 39 Intermezzo 250, 255 Intolerance 69, 144–55, 181 Invaders, The 119–20 Italian, The 123–5 Italian Straw Hat, The 176n. 3 I Want to Live 306

Film editing

Jackson, Mick 252 Jaenzon, Julius 79 Jaenzon, Henrik 79 James, Henry 110 James, William 300 Janowitz, Hans 170–1 Januskopf, Der 173 Jardinier et le petit espiegle, Le (aka L’Arroseur arrosé) 9 Jazz Singer, The 203, 209, 226–7, 229 Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company 127 Jezebel 257 Jolson, Al 203, 226–7 Jones, F. Richard 242 Judex 106 Judith of Bethulia 135–6, 155n.2 Juggernaut, The 33, 114 Juve contre Fantômas 106

344

Kamenka, Alexandre 204–5 Kar-Wai, Wong 310, 325–8 Kasdan, Lawrence 252 Kean 205 KEM 334 Kern, Hal 251–2 Kessel and Bauman 118n.5, 119 key numbers 332 Keystone Film Company, The 15 7–8 Kid, The 161 Kid Auto Races at Venice 157 Killer, The 302–3 Kind of Loving, A 316 Kinetoscope 36n.3, 39, 223 Kingdom, The 321 Kino-Pravda 179–80

Kiss in the Tunnel, The 19–20 Klee, Walter 237 Kleine Optical Company 70, 308 Kleptomaniac, The 49, 55 Knack, The 305 Kölker, Robert Philip 317 Kolster, Clarence 261 Korda, Alexander 8 7 Kracauer, Siegfried 301 Kuleshov, Lev 104n. l, 180–3 L’Affair Dreyfus 27 Ladies’ Skirts Nailed to a Fence 21 Laemmle, Carl 107, 118n.5 La Plante, Lynda 286 Lang, Fritz 89, 99, 171 Lasky, Jesse L. 127 Last Days of Pompeii, The 71 Lauste, Eugene 224 Lawrence, Diarmuid 286 Leaving Jerusalem by Railway 17 Left-Handed Gun, The 304 Leonhardt, Rudolf 215, 222n.14 Lester, Dick 305 Let me Dream Again 21 Levinson, Barry 321 Leyda, Jay 181 Life of an American Fireman, The 29–32, 46, 48n.4, 303 Life of Charles Peace 34, 51 Life of Emile Zola, The 257 Life of Moses 107 Lights of New York 229 Lightworks Editing Systems Ltd. 335 Lind, Alfred 74–6 linear editing 335 Lion Hunting 81, 183 Little Doctor, The 32 Loafer, The 83–4 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 329 Lonedale Operator, The 85–7, 141 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The 306–7 Lonely Villa, The 66–8 Love Affair 276–7 Love Me and the World is Mine 93 Love of Jeanne Ney, The 88-9, 173–4, 308

Magicien; Illusions fantasmagoriques, Le 13 Magnificent Ambersons, The 310 Magnusson, Charles 78 Maltese Falcon, The 310 Mamet, David 218 Mamoulian, Rouben 243–5 Man With a Movie Camera, The 180 Marvin, Arthur 61 Marvin, Henry Norton 60, 136 Mary Jane’s Mishap 33, 3 7n.8, 42, 62 Mathis, June 250 Mayer, Carl 170–1, 176n.8 McCutcheon, “Old Man” Wallace 60 McCutcheon, Wallace jnr. 63 Medicine Bottle, The 65–6 Méliès, Georges 12–14, 27–9, 58, 70, 303, 311 Messter, Oskar 223 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 250–1 Mifune 329n. 8 Milestone, Lewis 256 Million Bid, A 113 Mills of the Gods, The 111 Mississippi Burning 295–8 Mitchell, Robert 14 Modern Hero, A 174 Molander, Gustaf 255 Monty Python’s Life of Brian 253 Mosjoukine, Ivan 205–8 Mosjukhin, Ivan 181–2 see also Mosjoukine Mother 193–4, 308 Mother and the Law, The 142–4, 155 Mothering Heart, The 141 Motion Picture Patents Company, The 70, 107 Mottershaw, Frank 41–2 Moulin Rouge 93–9 Movietone 226, 228 Moviola 235, 246, 255, 331–3 Muerte di un Ciclista 316 Müller, Robby 322 Murnau, F. W. 89–93, 175–6

Musketeers of Pig Alley, The 69n.4 Mutual Reliance-Majestic 136, 158 Mysterious Portrait, The 58 Mysterious X, The 168 Mystic Re-incarnation, A 59 Neergaard, Ebbe, 76 neo-realism 314 Nervig, Conrad 210 Newcom, James 252 New Janitor, The 158 New York Motion Pictures 119 non-linear editing 335 Nordisk Films Kompagni 73–4 Norton, Charles Goodwin 14 Nosferatu 89–90, 173 Notorious 252 October 190–2 Old Dark House, The 261 Olsen, Ole 73, 81, 104n.1 Onegin 306 Outlaw and His Wife, The 166–8 Ox Wagon 14 Pabst, G. W. 88-9, 99, 173–4, 204, 215–20 Pandora’s Box 215 Paramount 249 Parker, Alan 295 Par le trou de serrure 39 Partie d’écarte, La 6–7 Pasolini, Pier Paulo 315 Pastrone, Giovanni 72 Pathé, Charles 28 Pathé Frères 21, 28, 70 Paul, Robert W. 12, 14, 49 Pawnbroker, The 307 Penn, Arthur 315 Pépé le Moko 253–5 Permacell 334 Physician of the Castle, The 66–7 Picasso, Pablo 115–17 Piccadilly 93 Pillow Book, The 4n.3 Pinter, Harold 309 Platinum Blonde 246–7 Pommer, Erich 171

Index

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Lumet, Sidney 307 Lumière, Antoine 7 Lumière, Auguste 6–10, 12 Lumière, Louis 6–10, 17

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Pompiers à Lyon 26 Porter, Edwin S. 28-32, 40, 42–9 Primal Call, The 82–4, 105 Prisoner of Zenda, The 250, 255 Pudovkin, Vsevolod x, xi, 178, 181–3, 192–7, 245 Pulp Fiction 315 Punishment Park 308-9 Purviance, Edna 158 Quatre Cents Coups, Les 311 Queen Elizabeth 71, 107 Quo VadisP 71, 135, 155n.2

Film editing

Raging Bull 304–5, 317 Raid on a Coiner’s Den 55 Raskolnikov 173 Ratoff, Gregory 255 Rawlings, Terry 293 Rebecca 250, 252, 266 Repas de bébé, Le 6 Rescued by Rover 51–4, 61 Reynolds, Kevin 252 Ritchie, Guy 329 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 310 Robbery of the Mail Coach 41 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 252 Rosenblum, Ralph 307 Rosenstock, Harvey 277 Roue, La 205 Rough Sea at Dover, A 14 Rühmer, Ernst 224 Runaway Match, The 35–6

346

Salt, Barry 36n.5, 60, 63, 112–13, 303, 316, 331 Sands of Dee, The 71 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 316 Scarlet Letter, The 210 Scenes from my Balcony 38 Scent of a Woman 277–82 Schatz, Der 173 Schenck, Nick 253 Schoonmaker, Thelma 317–18 Schulberg, Ben 249 Scorsese, Martin 315, 317–18 Scott, Ridley 293–4 Selznick, David O. 249–52, 255–6, 266

Sennett, Mack 157–8 Serrurier, Iwan 331 Servant, The 202n.13 Seven Samurai, The 304 Sewell, Blanche 260 Shadows 319 Sheffield Photographic Company, The 41 Shirley Valentine 309 Sjöström, Victor 78-80, 166–8, 204, 208-14 Smith, George Albert 18-21, 29, 31–3, 36n.6 Smith, Jimmy 141–2 Smith, Rose 142 Société Film d’Art 71 Société Française des Films Ermolieff 204 Sorkin, Mark 174 Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière, La 6 Spellbound 252 Spencer, Dorothy 269, 273, 306 Spiders, The 89 Sponable, Earl I. 226 Squaw Man, The 127, 133n.4 Stagecoach 269–73, 306 Star is Born, A 256 Steenbeck 333–4 Steincamp, William 277 Stevenson, Anson 235 Stiller, Mauritz 78-80 Stop Thief! 24–6, 34 Stradling, Harry 250 Strike 184–6 Sullivan, C. Gardner 124 Sunrise 91–3 Sunset Boulevard 310 Svenska Biografteatern 78 Svilova, Elizoveta 180 Sweet, Blanche 141, 155n.2 Tarantino, Quentin 315 Taste of Honey, A 316 Taxi! 258–60 Taylor, Peter 316 Ten Commandments, The 127 Terje Vigen 166 Thalberg, Irving 249–50, 256 That Fatal Sneeze 54 This Sporting Life 316–17

Uncle Tom’s Cabin 43, 47, 49 Universal Film Manufacturing Company 107, 261 Urban, Charles 41 Urry, George 39 Vampires, Les 105 Van Dyke, W. S. 250 Variety 93 Vaughan, Dai 9 Vertov, Dziga 179–80 Vidor, King 235, 251 Vigo, Jean 304 Vinterberg, Thomas 324 Vitagraph Company, The 55–6, 60, 68 Vitaphone Corporation 225 Volkoff, Alexandre 205–8 von Sternberg, Joseph 236–9 von Stroheim, Erich 99–103, 250 von Trier, Lars 321–2 Voyage dans la Lune, Le 27

Wallis, Hal Β. 174 Wanger, Walter 253, 255 War Game, The 308-9 Warner, Jack L. 225 Warner Bros. 174, 225 Watkins, Peter 308-9 Weary Willie in the Park 22 Welcome Intruder, A 108-9 Welles, Orson 269 Wenders, Wim 315 Western Electric 225 Whale, James 261 What Price Glory? 226 White Slave Trade, The 76–7, 107 White Slave Traffic, The 77, 107 Whytock, Grant 250 Wiene, Robert 171–2, 176n.10 Wild Bunch, The 304 Wilhelm Steenbeck & Co. 333–4 Williamson, James 23–7, 29, 31 Wind, The 204, 208-14, 302 Winston, Sam 237 Wise, Robert 306 Woman in a Dressing Gown 316 Woo, John 302 Wood, Sam 251 Wrath of the Gods, The 121 Wyler, William 257 Wynn, Hugh 235 Zanuck, Darryl F. 249, 251 Zavattini, Cesare 314 Zecca, Ferdinand 28-9, 38, 56–7 Zero de Conduite 304 Zukor, Adolph 107, 164, 244 Ζ venigora 197

Index

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Thompson, J. Lee 316 Through Darkened Vales 109–10 Tiffany Productions 261 Tillie’s Punctured Romance 157 Toland, Gregg 250 Tom Jones 303, 310 Totheroh, Roland 158 Traffic in Souls 77, 80n.4, 107–8 Trans-Europe Express 310 Trewey, Félicien 7 Tronick, Michael 277 Truffaut, François 311 Tucker, George Loane 107–8 20th Century Fox 251 Tykociner, Joseph T. 224

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