When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  Griffith’s advances in movie technique were soon taking on the force of a one-man revolution. Each year he came closer to making film a worthy rival to his first love—literature—and proving that his adopted profession was more than a workingman’s entertainment.

  In 1909 he created a high-tension ending that quickly became known as the “Griffith last-minute rescue.” By this time rescues of the sort portrayed in The Life of an American Fireman were failing to make the adrenaline flow— audience sophistication demanded a more artful representation of danger and suspense. Griffith achieved it in The Lonely Villa by cutting back and forth from the inside of a house where a frightened mother huddled with her children, to the bandits outside banging on her door, to the husband racing home to save his family. The impact was riveting.

  Griffith discovered that, unlike a playwright, a filmmaker could expand time to meet his needs—the action that took place on the screen during the rescue bore little relation to the amount of time that the actual rescue might have taken. And in the process of juggling these pieces of film, he learned that as each little shot was joined to the next, a rhythm could be created that made the whole flow smoothly. It was the sort of thing viewers would not notice but which would deeply affect their enjoyment of the film.

  Though Griffith’s discoveries were not all in the realm of editing, even his photographic innovations depended on skillful editing techniques for their successful execution. In 1910 in a film called Ramona, for instance, he first used the extreme long shot, a distant panoramic view; and it achieved the greatest visual impact when cut in contrast with the closer shots. The next year, in The Lonedale Operator, another last-minute-rescue adventure, he mounted a camera on a truck in order to photograph a speeding train. With this added camera angle, he had a new and thrilling element to splice into the final flurry of last-minute-rescue cuts.

  Surprising as it may seem today, at this time the one-reeler introduced by Porter was still the standard length for all movies. Who would sit for more than ten minutes for any one film? But Griffith was beginning to chafe under this limitation, and he was convinced that his films had enough art and artifice to go much longer. To his studio’s dismay, he expanded an earlier film into two reels, which initially played at separate showings. But his instinct proved correct, for audiences were soon insisting that the two reels be shown together.

  Griffith was constantly making headaches for his bosses. He overshot budgets, paid money for book rights, employed throngs of extras, and utilized expensive and lavish settings. But all this was mere preparation for the two enterprises upon which he was about to embark—The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance—mammoth projects that were designed to overshadow the spectacle films being made abroad and to reassert his industry leadership. Costing an unheard-of hundred thousand dollars and lasting almost three hours, The Birth of a Nation contained all the devices that Griffith had pioneered, and more. The scenes of hand-to-hand fighting, the contrast shots of frozen soldiers and charging soldiers, the symbolic cuts, the startling close-ups, all made the film glitter and move like nothing before. A Southern woman’s refusal to marry a Northern suitor is impassioned by a memory cut to a Union soldier killing her brother. Even the final, heroic ride of the Klansmen, intensified by cuts to the galloping horses’ hooves, is no ordinary last-minute rescue but a final confrontation of conflicting forces—the evil black man and his terrified white woman captive, the gathering Klansmen, the chilling ride. Some shots were less than a second long, while the scene itself built to a crescendo for many minutes. “It’s like writing history in lightning,” President Woodrow Wilson said after seeing it. Others, inflamed by the blatant white-supremacist attitude of the film, were moved to less civilized expressions. As if to suggest how far motion pictures had come in just a few years, Griffith’s picture did far more than provoke audience fear of an oncoming train, or hat-tossing joy over the rescue of a fire victim. The emotional impact generated by his shrewd cutting technique was such that in city after city, enraged white viewers engaged in mob action and race riots.

  As Griffith’s mastery of the medium progressed, he cut his scenes shorter and shorter. Instead of following the old theatrical convention of beginning a scene at the “beginning”—say, when a character first enters a room—he would cut directly to the important action. By the time Intolerance was released in 1916 Griffith had honed his shots down even further. Each shot, whether of a mob gathering or a striker baring his chest to the militia or a factory manager picking up his telephone, was trimmed down to a single essential fact. Although the film, which skillfully wove together four stories from four different eras, was a financial disaster, its editing achievements and long-range impact on filmmaking were great. “All that is best in the Soviet film,” said Sergei Eisenstein, the next great master of editing, “has its origins in Intolerance.”

  As Griffith reached his pinnacle and began his decline, many of the techniques he pioneered were being absorbed elsewhere in the industry. Smooth, sharp, clever cutting became the standby for the action pictures that were keeping the movie houses humming, and two producers who had been briefly associated with Griffith, Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett, were instrumental in adapting his discoveries to the everyday craft of making pictures. At one time Ince wrote, directed, and acted in his films, editing them in the kitchen of his home. As he became one of the biggest producers in Hollywood, he ceased to exercise his other talents, but he kept on editing to the end. His popular Westerns were always tautly cut, and he ruthlessly discarded anything that didn’t contribute to the progress of the action. Unconcerned about the original intentions of a film that didn’t work, he would recut it, reorder it, and change its meaning if necessary in order to make it entertain, a skill for which he would become known as “the doctor of the sick film.”

  While Ince was applying his editing talent to the cowboy picture and other action films, Mack Sennett, who considered himself a Griffith protégé, was applying the cut to comedy. The result was the Keystone Cops pictures, whose nonsense flew by faster than the audience could reason—thanks frequently to the editing-room work of Sennett himself.

  Although America led the world in filmmaking during these early years, Europe was producing its own cinematic masters, several of them with editing talents every bit the equal of their American counterparts. By the early twenties, European directors, especially in Germany, became engaged in creating a more artistic and sophisticated motion picture as they put the new techniques of photography and editing to subtler psychological, emotional, and aesthetic use. Here, too, Griffith’s influence was evident.

  Nevertheless, by 1922, when Rudolph Valentino was being cast as a bullfighter in Blood and Sand, the magic that editing could perform was still a secret shared by relatively few in the movie business. The producers of Blood and Sand expected to pay a vast sum to have Valentino, playing a toreador, superimposed onto stock footage of a Madrid bull ring. They were surprised when film editor Dorothy Arzner said she could turn the trick in the cutting room. Arzner simply intercut close-ups of Valentino making the appropriate gestures with footage from the real bullfights. No expensive laboratory processing was needed—Valentino was clearly, and safely, in the fight.

  Although editing was destined to remain the secret power in filmmaking, its effects were being felt on a wider and wider scale— and nowhere more forcefully than in films with a political or propagandistic purpose. In 1930 film producer and historian Paul Rotha would remark on the phenomenon: “A notable instance was seen at the first presentation of Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg at the Film Society, London, on 3rd February, 1929. At one portion of the film, the action was worked to a crescendo by gradual short-cutting, with the title ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ at the peak of emotion. The audience was observed to start gradually stirring, then muttering, until eventually many persons rose to their feet, cheering and clapping. I do not believe that the word ‘Soviets’ was of real importance, for had it been ‘Royalists
’ or ‘Monarchists’ the effect would have been the same, due entirely to the emotions raised by the cutting.”

  It thus evolved that in the third decade of movie history, while American moviemakers perfected the entertainment capacity of film and leading European directors explored its subtler artistic potential, the power of the film editor to arouse and manipulate—on a scale as yet unimagined in the West—was being wrought to perfection in the new world under creation beyond the Finland Station.

  Sergei Eisenstein.

  (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  4 ■ Bolshevik Editors

  The Fanatics of the Gutting Room

  LENIN: “Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important for us.”

  EISENSTEIN: “I would never have believed that my passion for cinematography would one day exceed the limits of Platonic love.”

  When the Bolsheviks took power in Saint Petersburg in October 1917, eight months after the bourgeois February Revolution that overthrew the czar, they were a very different breed of men from the rigid, closed minds that would come to power later under Stalin. Anatoli Lunacharsky, Lenin’s first minister of education, encouraged all forms of experimentation in the arts, assuring theater producers and painters alike that any work that “shocked the bourgeoisie” was sufficiently revolutionist for the new regime.

  No segment of the Russian arts signified their isolation from the rest of the world at this time more than film. Most filmmakers had fled the country, taking their equipment with them, and film stock, made from the same material that was used in high explosives, was so rare that the postrevolutionary Russian filmmakers would later be said to have produced their pictures “out of thin air.”

  With domestic resources so scarce, emphasis was initially placed on the reworking of foreign footage. Editors like Esther Shub would take imported films, recut them to adjust the ideological component, and if that meant chopping apart two capitalist features to create one Soviet feature, so much the better!

  The Russians approached the theory of filmmaking with a zeal unmatched in the West. If Marx had succeeded in dissecting the capitalist economy and laying bare its workings, then the young poets, theater directors, and writers who took to the art of moving pictures would do the same for film. And if, as Marx said, work was the basis for all value in the economy, these cinematic enthusiasts would find in editing the basis for all value in film. They maintained that the essential motion in film was not the motion that went on before the camera, but the motion that was created from cut to cut. As they saw it, the true composition of a film was determined at the cutting bench.

  Dziga Vertov, the young poet responsible for assembling newsreels of the Red Army during the civil war, was the first aficionado of editing. He proclaimed an end to film’s dependence on drama, insisting that its visual qualities were paramount and that through the proper juxtaposition of images in a “cine-essay” any idea could be convincingly represented. He was soon issuing manifestos on the subject and exhorting his comrades to follow his lead. His influence spread quickly. Both he and Shub would prove masters of the “compilation” film, in which newsreel footage and pieces of other filmmakers’ works would be welded together to make a documentary feature. In addition to being editing’s first enthusiast, Vertov may also have been its first casualty, for his later work was said to be so dominated by editorial effects and trickery that it became painful to view.

  The Russians quickly sensed in D. W. Griffith a comrade in cinematic vision. Although the Western nations had put up a trade barrier around the young Communist state, a contraband print of Intolerance reached Moscow through the astute efforts of Communist Party members in Berlin, who included the picture (originally impounded by the German government during the war) among the food and medical supplies they were smuggling into the embattled nation.

  The print made its way to the film workshop of Lev Kuleshov, a young filmmaker who, like Vertov, had emphasized the importance of editing. Kuleshov and his students would take films apart to get to the essence of what made them work and even try recutting them to see if they could improve on the originals. Intolerance was given the supreme workover and was later credited by workshop member V. I. Pudovkin and by Sergei Eisenstein as having had a major influence on Russian film. When The Birth of a Nation reached the Soviet Union in the early twenties, Lenin would invite Griffith to take over all Russian film production. But in the meantime, Griffith was accorded the same treatment as other bourgeois directors, and the capable hands of Esther Shub put Intolerance into its final Bolshevik shape.

  A determination to unlock and reveal the secrets of editing became the passion of Russian directors, and for a time film theory seemed to be a more important Soviet product than films themselves. It was this passion that led Kuleshov to hit on an ingenious experiment that has become one of filmmaking’s enduring parables. Using a piece of film depicting the old actor Muzhukhin with a perfectly deadpan expression, Kuleshov intercut identical prints of Muzhukhin’s face with three successive images: first from the face to a plate of soup, then from the face to a child playing with a Teddy bear, and finally from the face to an old woman in a coffin. People who saw the finished product naturally assumed that each time the film cut from Muzhukhin to one of the three elements, it was revealing what the actor was observing at that moment. But to Kuleshov’s delight, not only were viewers unable to perceive that each cut of Muzhukhin was identical, they frequently praised the actor for his subtle and convincing portrayal of three distinct feelings—joy at seeing the child at play, hunger upon viewing the bowl of soup, and remorse over the dead woman! Clearly there was more power in film editing than met the naked eye.

  The Russian filmmakers soon made films that substantiated the importance of their theoretical explorations. The deeply affecting films of Pudovkin and Eisenstein and later Dovshenko quickly established the Soviet Union as an important center in world cinema. Said Eisenstein, who was inclined toward philosophical bombast, of the Russian editing techniques, “We have discovered how to force the spectator to think in a certain direction. By mounting our films in a way scientifically calculated to create a given impression on an audience, we have developed a powerful weapon for the propagation of the ideas upon which our new social system is based.”

  Eisenstein came to film from the theater. He was a driven man, in tireless study and pursuit of art, whose mind swarmed with new ideas, and who, at least in the beginning of his career, was sufficiently at one with the social upheavals around him and the bureaucrats who watched him to exploit his talents successfully.

  He began as one of the avant-garde directors who flourished under Lunacharsky’s springtime of the arts. But his extreme theatrical experiments at Moscow’s Proletkult Theatre—on one occasion he brought the audience into a factory and forced them to follow the players from location to location within the building—were flailing about beyond the theater’s loosest limits.

  Aside from several months’ study with Kuleshov in 1923, his main early experiences with film were in Esther Shub’s cutting room, where he watched her remake bourgeois features and play with the outtakes to assemble experimental concoctions. In 1924 she remade Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse into a people’s picture called Gilded Putrefaction, and Eisenstein was transfixed by her performance. The next year he grabbed the opportunity to make his first film with the Proletkult players, and, in true Russian fashion, he was soon making theoretical pronouncements about his newfound medium.

  Eisenstein coined the word “montage” to refer to the way a film is pieced together, or “mounted.” The word is virtually synonomous with editing, but it carries a more potent charge, the connotation being more “the act of creation” than “the act of arrangement.” He spoke of rhythmic montage to indicate the sense of beat that is created from cut to cut, and tonal montage to indicate the play of light and dark elements; he explored directional cutting to achieve continuity of motion by having people or elements of one shot move in the same or opposite
direction as elements in the adjoining shot, and he used cutting on form, in which another sort of continuity is achieved through a similarity of structure—say, the roundness of a face giving way to the round opening of a cannon barrel.

  Of Eisenstein’s editing theories, his most famous is the concept of “shock attraction.” By this he meant juxtaposing two images in such a way as to evoke an idea or a feeling that went beyond the sum of its parts. He illustrated his point with Oriental hieroglyphic writing, in which two symbols were joined to make an entirely new idea. Such was the case, for instance, when the symbols for eye and water were combined to yield “crying.”

  All of this constituted montage. Eisenstein might have been amused by the way Hollywood later appropriated the word—to describe the portion of a film where calendar leaves drift by to indicate the passage of time or snippets of action are pieced together to represent a dying man’s memory or stock shots are interwoven for atmospheric effect, as in the opening reel of Minsky’s—for this was not at all what he had in mind.

  By all accounts, Eisenstein was convinced of the revolutionary impact of his work and the theories behind it, and he proclaimed his first picture, Strike, to be the “October of the Cinema.” Dziga Vertov he assigned to secondary importance—as filmmaking’s “February.”

  In 1925 both Eisenstein, then twenty-seven, and Pudovkin, thirty-two, were commissioned to make films about the abortive 1905 uprising against the czar. The result would be two of the monuments of moviemaking. Although Eisenstein’s film has more breathtaking power, the path Pudovkin chose, more in keeping with the narrative style of Griffith, is the one that has so far proved more enduring. Less interested in experimentation, Pudovkin told a revolutionary tale in the traditional narrative way, and he perfected the methods by which editing could make a film an exciting narrative medium. In Mother, an account of the experiences of one family caught up in the conflicts of the time (based loosely on Maxim Gorki’s book), he broke ground that Hollywood and TV are still tilling. Refining many of the editing techniques Griffith pioneered, he adapted the rapid cut used so advantageously in “last-minute rescues” to the smaller dramas and feelings of everyday life.