Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
was fairly simple; the out-of-order shots were assembled according to the pre-existing
script, and intertitles added. Numerous positive prints were then run off by the laboratory
and the film was ready for sale to the exchanges.
THE BEGINNING OF NARRATIVE
There was a 'crisis' in transitional cinema around 1907, signalled by complaints in the
trade press about lack of narrative clarity, as well as by exhibitors' increased use of
lectures in an attempt to make films understandable to their audiences. Films were poised
between an emphasis upon visual pleasure, 'the cinema of attractions', and story-telling,
'the cinema of narrative integration', but conventions for constructing internally coherent
narratives had not yet been established. In the transitional years, between 1907-8 and
1917, the formal elements of film-making all became subsidiary to the narrative, as
lighting, composition, editing were all increasingly designed to help the audience follow a
story. Integral to these stories were psychologically credible characters, created through
performance style, editing, and dialogue intertitles, whose motivations and actions
seemed realistic and helped to link together a film's disparate shots and scenes. These
'well-rounded', believable characters, resembling those of the then fashionable realist
literature and drama, contrast sharply with the earlier period's one-dimensional stock
characters drawn from the melodrama and vaudeville comedy skits.
The increased use of editing and the decreased distance between camera and actors most
obviously distinguish the films of the transitional period from their predecessors. The
tableau or proscenium arch shot, showing the actors' entire bodies as well as the space
above and below them, characterized the early cinema. However, towards the beginning
of the transitional period the Vitagraph Company began using the so-called '9-foot line',
staging the action about 9 feet from the camera, a scale that showed the actors from the
ankles up. At around the same time in France, Pathé and companies under its influence,
Film d'Art and SCAGL, also adopted the 9-foot line. By 1911 the camera had moved yet
closer, producing the three-quarter shot that became the predominant scale of the
transitional cinema and indeed of the entire silent period. In addition to moving the
camera closer to the actors, film-makers also moved the actors closer to the camera. In
chase films the actors had exited the shots in close proximity to the camera, but during the
transitional period the practice became standardized, deliberately employed to enhance
dramatic effects, as in a shot from The Musketeers of Pig Alley ( Griffith, 1912) in which
a gangster slinks along a wall until he is seen in medium close-up.
The decreased distance between action and camera not only enabled identification of the
actors and the development of the star system, but also contributed to the increased
emphasis upon individualized characters and facial expression. Editing was also
developed for this end; both to emphasize moments of psychological intensity and to
externalize characters' thoughts and emotions. The three-quarter scale already permitted
audiences to see the actors' faces more clearly than before, but filmmakers often cut even
closer at climactic points. This was designed to encourage fuller viewer involvement in
the characters' emotions, and not, as in early films like The Great Train Robbery, simply
for shock value. For example, in The Lonedale Operator ( Griffith, Biograph, 1911)
burglars menace a telegraph operator ( Blanche Sweet) and attempt to break into her
office. As Sweet desperately telegraphs for help, the film cuts from a three-quarter to a
medium shot, allowing a closer view of her fearful expression.
Editing was also used more directly to convey characters' subjectivities. In the earlier
period, film-makers had adopted the theatrical 'vision scene', using double exposure to put
the character and a literal embodiment of externalized thoughts in the same frame. Life of
an American Fireman ( Edison, 1902), for example, uses this device to show a fireman
thinking of an imperilled family, who appear in a balloon slightly above him and to his
right. This convention continued in the transitional period, as in The Life Drama of
Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empress Josephine of France (Vitagraph, 1909), in which
the divorced and distraught Empress reaches out to a superimposed vision of her erstwhile
husband. But the film's companion reel, Napoleon, the Man of Destiny, approaches the
conventional flashback structure of the Hollywood cinema, in which a 'present-day' shot
of the character authorizes the film's presentation of the 'past'. Napoleon returns to
Malmaison shortly before his exile to Elba and, as he 'thinks' of his past, the film cuts
from him to reenactments of battles and other events in his life.
The transitional period also saw the emergence of the editing pattern that is most closely
associated with character subjectivity: the point-of-view shot, in which a film cuts from a
character to what the character sees and then back to the character. This pattern did not
become fully conventionalized until the Hollywood period, but filmmakers during the
transitional period experimented with various means of 'showing' what characters saw. In
an early example, Francesca da Rimini (Vitagraph, 1907), there is a cut from a tableau-
scale shot of a character looking at a locket to an insert close-up of the locket. In The
Lonedale Operator, Enoch Arden ( 1911), and other films, Griffith cuts between
characters looking through a window to what they see, although the eyeline match seems
'imperfect' by today's standards.
This last kind of editing, of course, not only externalized characters' thoughts but helped
establish the spatial and temporal relations crucial to narrative coherence, both in the
same scene (roughly, actions occurring at the same place and time) and between scenes
taking place at the same time in different locations. In the earlier period film-makers
occasionally broke down the space of a shot, selecting details for closer examination, as
in Grandma's Reading Glasses. While not as prevalent as it was later to become, this
analytical editing was sometimes used in the transitional period to highlight narratively
important details rather than, as in the earlier period, simply to provide visual pleasure. In
The Lonedale Operator, for example, when the burglars eventually break into the
telegraph operator's office, she holds them at bay with what appears to be a revolver but a
cut-in reveals to be a wrench. While analytical editing was comparatively rare,
conventions for linking the different spaces of one scene together, to orientate the viewer
spatially, became established practice. In fact, part of the suspense in The Lonedale
Operator depends upon the viewer having a clear idea of the film's spatial relations. When
the telegraph operator first arrives at work, she walks from the railway office's porch into
an outer room and then into an inner room. Following the principle of directional
continuity, the actress exits each shot at screen right and re-enters at screen left. When the
burglars break through the outermost door, the viewer knows exactly how much further
they must go to reach the terrified woman. Here, character movement links the shots, but
various other conventions, many relating to the relative position of the camera in
successive set-ups, also arose for establishing spatial relations.
The Lonedale Operator also provides an example of an editing pattern primarily
associated with the name of its director, D. W. Griffith. He became famous for the
crosscutting, parallel action, or parallel editing through which he constructed his spine-
tingling last-minute rescues. Several pre-Griffith films, however, show that, while the
Biograph director may have conventionalized parallel editing, he did not invent it. Two
1907 Vitagraph films, The Mill Girl and The Hundred-to-One-Shot, cross-cut between
different locations, the latter even featuring a somewhat attenuated last-minute rescue.
Several Pathé films from 1907-8 also contain fairly brief parallel editing sequences, the
plot and editing of one, A Narrow Escape ( 1908), prefiguring Griffith's The Lonely Villa
( 1909). But from his earliest films, Griffith experimented with cutting between pursued,
pursuer, and potential rescuer, and he and other American directors soon developed
parallel editing beyond the fairly elementary form seen in French films. The climax of
The Lonedale Operator, for example, cuts from the menaced heroine, to the menacing
burglars breaking down doors, to the hero in the cab of a speeding locomotive, to an
exterior tracking shot of the onrushing train.
When Griffith first began directing at Biograph in 1908 his films averaged about
seventeen shots, increasing fivefold to an average of eighty-eight by 1913. The later
Griffith Biographs probably feature more shots per film than those produced by other
American studios, such as Vitagraph, during the same years, but American film-makers as
a general rule tended to rely more heavily on editing than did their European counterparts,
who were concerned more with the
mise-en-scène
and the possibilities of staging in
depth. American films tended to stage the action on a shallow plane, with actors entering
and exiting from the sides. Particularly toward the beginning of the transitional period,
they even used painted flats, making no attempt to disguise their theatricality. By contrast,
European films, particularly the French and Italian, began to create a sense of deep space
not possible in the theatre. Lowering the camera to waist level from its previous eye level
facilitated shooting in depth; the reduction of the empty space above the actors' heads
produced both a larger, closer view of the characters and much more contrast between
characters closer to and further from the camera, permitting the staging of action in the
foreground, midground, and background. Convincing threedimensional sets for interior
scenes, often with doors that gave glimpses of an even deeper space behind the set, added
to the illusion of depth. The use of doorways and contrasting light and shadows often
enhanced the feeling of deep space in exterior shots, as seen in Romeo and Juliet (Film
d'Arte Italiana, 1909). In one shot, Romeo returns to Verona and walks through the dark
shadow under an arch into the well-lit deep space behind. The next shot, Juliet's funeral
procession, is a graphic match cut to the shadowy arched doorway of a vast church out of
which pours a huge cast. The film holds the shot long enough for the many gorgeously
costumed extras to wind past the camera, the lengthy procession drawing the eye back to
the church door.
The American cinema's emphasis on editing rather than
mise-en-scène
was coupled with
the development of a new 'cinematic' performance style that contributed to the creation of
credible, individualized characters. Film acting began increasingly to resemble that of the
'realist' drama and to reject the codified conventions of an older performance style,
associated primarily with the melodrama. The earlier or 'histrionic' style was predicated
upon the assumption that acting bore no relation to 'real' or everyday life. Actors
expressed themselves through a pre-established lexicon of gestures and poses, all
corresponding to pre-specified emotions or states of mind. Movements were broad,
distinct, and forcefully performed. By contrast, the newer or 'verisimilar' style assumed
that actors should mimic everyday behaviour. Actors abandoned the standard and
conventionalized poses of the 'histrionic' style and externalized characters' thoughts and
emotions through facial expression, small individuated movements, and the use of props.
Two Griffith Biographs made three years apart, A Drunkard's Reformation ( 1909) and
Brutality ( 1912), illustrate the differences between the histrionic and verisimilar styles. In
both films a wife despairs over her husband's affection for the bottle. In the earlier film,
the wife ( Florence Lawrence) collapses into her chair and rests her head on her arms,
extended straight out in front of her on the table. Then she sinks to her knees and prays,
her arms fully extended upward at about 45 degrees. In the later film the wife (Mae
Marsh) sits down at the dining-room table, bows her head, and begins to collect the dirty
dishes. She looks up, compresses her lips, pauses, then begins to gather the dishes again.
Once more she pauses, raises her hand to her mouth, glances down to her side, and
slumps a little in her chair. Slumping a little more, she begins to cry.
The changing use of intertitles during the transitional period also related directly to the
construction of credible, individualized characters. Initially, intertitles had been
expository, often preceding a scene and providing fairly lengthy descriptions of the
upcoming action. Gradually, shorter expository titles dispersed throughout the scene
replaced these lengthy titles. More importantly, dialogue titles began to appear from 1910.
Film-makers experimented with the placement of these titles, first inserting them before