by Mark Cousins
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The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (France, 1895) – a single-shot documentary that demonstrated the dramatic possibilities of screen composition.
A seventeen-year-old Lumière factory employee, Francis Doublier was charged with taking films to Russia. Louis Lumière gave him a camera, but with stern instructions, “to let neither kings nor beautiful women examine its mechanism.”2 Young Doublier presented the new Lumière films in Munich and Berlin, then travelled to Warsaw, St Petersburg and Moscow. On 18 May 1896, half a million Russians gathered just outside Moscow to see the newly crowned Tsar Nicholas II. The crowd got restive after waiting for some hours and stampeded when the rumour spread that the free beer being dispensed was about to run out. Doublier hand-cranked the camera, later saying, “We used up three [rolls] on the shrieking, milling, dying mass around the Tsar’s canopy.”3 Five thousand were rumoured to have died, but the Tsar later danced all night at the French Ambassador’s ball.
The following month, Doublier and his colleagues showed Lumière footage in Moscow, but the tragic coronation film had been confiscated by the Russian authorities; censorship had begun. The train arrived at La Ciotat as it had done around the world and audiences were amazed. Writer Maxim Gorky was there. He called what he had seen “The kingdom of shadows”.4
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In his film The Kiss, G.A. Smith filmed from the front of a moving train, an effect that became known as a “phantom ride”.
English engineer Robert William Paul was a key figure in the formative years of cinema. He started making Edison and Lumière-style cameras in the mid-1890s. He sold the cameras rather than leasing them, which meant that British filmmakers felt freer to use the equipment. This may explain why the so-called Brighton School of early filmmakers was more innovative than their colleagues in France or America. The leading figure in the School was a portrait photographer called George Albert Smith, perhaps the most pioneering filmmaker of the earliest years. Mr Smith, as he became known, built his own camera whilst Doublier was heading eastwards. In The Corsican Brothers (UK, 1898), Smith draped part of his set in black velvet, filmed a shot, rewound the film and then re-exposed the film to include the image of a ghost, which appeared to float through the original set.5
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How filmmakers like Smith achieved their phantom rides: cinematographer Billy Bitzer and this tripod-mounted camera on the front of a steam locomotive.
Smith was among the first to film action and then project it in reverse. In 1898, he shot what has since been called a “phantom ride” (10). This was a new visual experience for the audience achieved by putting the camera on the front of a moving train (11), as if it was a ghostly eye speeding through the air. In 1899 he combined this with a shot of a couple in a set modelled as a railway carriage. As they kissed the train went through a tunnel. Films with more than one shot started to emerge only in the late 1890s, and Smith’s combination of interior and travelling shot was one of cinema’s first attempts to say “Meanwhile”.
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Alice Guy-Blaché (second from left), who directed 700 short films and established one of the first movie studios, Solax.
The phantom ride was more technically thrilling than the train arriving at La Ciotat. Imagery had never achieved this before, but it would become one of cinema’s most effective ways of putting the audience in the place of a traveller. Its most commercial use to date has been in the “king of the world” sequence on the ship’s bow in Titanic (USA, 1997) and its most profound use in the massive documentary, Shoah (France, 1985). In this account of the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe the film’s director, Claude Lanzmann, sometimes puts the camera on the front of the train as he travels along the same lines as the murdered Jews. The “ghost” on the train becomes all the dead of Treblinka and of the other concentration camps.
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Guy-Blaché’s con-temporary Georges Méliès combined painted theatrical imagery and trick effects to explore the magical and stylized possibilities of cinema. This style is dated 1897.
At the same time that R.W. Paul, G.A. Smith and others such as Cecil Hepworth and James A Williamson were testing the creative boundaries of film in England, their near-contempories in France were Georges Méliès and the overlooked Alice Guy-Blache (12).6 Guy-Blaché started as a secretary to Léon Gaumont and directed perhaps the first ever scripted film, The Cabbage Fairy/La Fée aux choux (France, 1896), a comic fantasy about babies born in cabbage patches. Guy-Blaché experimented with sound, visual effects and even hand-painted directly onto film. Most of her subsequent films were biblical epics, and she created one of the first film studios, Solax, in New York State, where she had emigrated in 1907. In total she is thought to have directed as many as 700 short films, including Westerns and thrillers.7
Méliès’ role in early cinema has not been overlooked. He started his career in illusionistic theatre, but became excited by the new medium, having seen the first public Lumière screening in December 1895. While filming in Paris, his camera jammed and, a moment later, it started up again. When he viewed the printed result, he noticed that since no film was exposed during the jam, streetcars suddenly jumped forward and people disappeared. This discovery of another magical quality of film inspired him to make films like The Moon at One Metre/La Lune à une metre (France, 1896), in which we first see an observatory and then cut to a theatrical painting of the moon in close-up, as if we are looking through a telescope (13). Méliès was a great delver into cinema’s magic box, turning the realist films of Lumière into theatrical fantasies.
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Tally’s Phonograph Parlour, a typical early cinema in Los Angeles, whose shop front nestled between a milliner and a hosiery store. The hoarding reads “See the great Corbett fight.
Through accident and imagination, innovation and trial-and-error – our earliest example of Gombrich’s schema plus variation – the potential of cinema was being discovered and pushed forward by risk-takers and inquis-itive, visually talented people. On the East coast of America, the now forgotten Enoch J. Rector extended film into another area: commerce, as the photograph of Tally’s Phonograph Parlor (14) explains. Taken in Los Angeles in 1897, long before the city had become a centre for film production, it illustrates how cinema at this stage was a shop-front entertainment, vying with clothing stores on either side for the attention of passers-by. The hoarding on the front of Tally’s reads “See The Great Corbett Fight”.8 This boxing match was staged in Nevada, and filmed by Rector using a film format that would not become popular for nearly fifty years – widescreen. He invented a new camera for the process and named it a Veriscope. The film running through it was 63mm wide. Most other film of the time was 35mm.
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One of the first widescreen films: The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight. Director: Enoch Rector. USA, 1897.
This is the first example, to my knowledge, of filmmakers changing the shape of their canvas, as it were, to capture the visual spectacle of an event. There was very little editing at this stage, so Rector could not show his boxing match from multiple angles, as American director Martin Scorsese would do in his Raging Bull (USA, 1980). What makes The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (USA, 1897) so interesting is that is helps reveal the changing social standing of cinema in America at that time. A local newspaper, The Brooklyn Eye, commented on its sheer spectacle, “The man who would have predicted … that an event of the prior month would be reproduced before the eyes of a multitude in pictures that moved like life, and that lightning would move them and light them, would have been avoided as a lunatic or hanged as a wizard.”9 But film historian Terry Ramsaye’s comments are even more interesting: the film brought “The odium of pugilism upon the screen … all across Puritan America. Until that picture appeared, the social status of the screen had been uncertain. It now became definitively lowbrow, an entertainment of the great unwashed commonality.”10 French producers had identified the appeal of cinema to working-class audiences by this stage, but
had also begun to make films for and mar-ket them to middle-class customers. One company, Film d’Art, would soon begin making high-brow theatre adaptations for the screen. In Scandinavia, Germany and India, film quickly took on literary and cultural ambitions. In the US, films like The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (15) set off in a populist direction, which most follow to the present day. This explains the USA’s eventual world domination of commercial cinema and its continuing reluctance to see film as art.
The end of the nineteenth century was a heady time for cinema. It was settling into the lives of people just as Tally’s Phonographic Parlor nestled in-between a milliner and a hosiery store. It was becoming a social ritual of the public but also the schema – the visual imagination – of budding filmmakers. Whether at Tally’s or at the Shah’s extravagant palace in Tehran, where the light of the projector beam must have scattered around those jewelled rooms like a glitter ball – cinema still had everything ahead of it. Socially, technically, politically, artistically, philosophically, transcendentally, nothing about it was yet pinned down. However, the storytellers and the industrialists would change this soon enough. The First World War would redefine the world and have a lasting impact on filmmaking, with the USA becoming the dominant force. But for now, filmmakers were still playing. They had discovered “shots” – a piece of visually recorded action extended roughly in real time. Today, the strangeness of a shot is muted by our familiarity with it.
And then, stranger still, cuts were introduced. What we are looking at suddenly disappears and is replaced by something different. Méliès realized the magic of this and by 1898 multi-shot – “edited” – films started to appear. The grammar, choreography, grace or poetry of cutting – what would or would not jar visually, giving meaning to this transition – was a little way ahead. The century would have to turn and another brainy, antsy character, Edwin S. Porter, would need to stumble through the possibilities of cutting and come out the other end with some rules or, rather, norms.
For now, though, the faltering steps and discoveries continued. In England, in 1899, R.W. Paul built the first of what would become the filmmaker’s most sensuous tool, the camera dolly. This is a platform on wheels, on which a camera is mounted, so that it can move smoothly. In 1913 the Italians made Cabiria with dolly shots of such grace and frequency, that they prompted the expression “Cabiria movements”, used to describe similar pieces of film in the US. The legendary American director David Wark Griffith bettered them in one of the most complex films of the silent period, Intolerance (USA, 1916). In 1924, Germany’s master director, F.W. Murnau would use a dolly shot to represent the flight of sound from a trumpet to the ear of a listener. Later still, in the expanding landscape of sound cinema, filmmakers like Max Ophüls, Stanley Donen, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Kenji Mizoguchi, Guru Dutt, Andrei Tarkovsky, Miklós Jancsó, Bernardo Bertolucci, Chantal Akerman, Béla Tarr and Fred Kelemen would use dolly shots to express their story, political, spiritual and philosophical ideas. Their sensual conception of film will be considered later. Together they created what Western art historians would call a “baroque” approach to shot construction: something elaborate and complete in itself.
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The earliest close-ups in film tended to be motivated by onscreen characters looking through keyholes or spectacles, such as this one in G.A. Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glasses. UK, 1900.
The turn of the century ushered in more new things. Smith’s Let Me Dream Again (UK, 1900) used what was perhaps the first example of a “focus pull” – a shot where a photographer twists the barrel of the lens to make the image go from sharp to soft focus. In it, Smith pulled a shot of a man kissing a beautiful woman out of focus, cut to another soft image, then pulled it into focus to reveal the same man kissing his less attractive wife. A cheap joke, perhaps, but such techniques would be used from then onwards to indicate a dream state or heightened desire. In the same year, Smith was first with yet another cinematic innovation. W.K.L. Dickson had photographed Fred Ott sneezing in a head and shoulders shot (7), but one of the first true close-ups in cinema appeared in Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glasses (UK, 1900) (16). We know of this film only from a catalogue list-ing which says that a grandson uses the lady’s glasses to see objects “in enormously enlarged form.” Would human beings have ever seen such huge images before? In Ancient Greece, Egypt and Persia there were vast sculptures, and Italian religious art of the Renaissance sometimes featured massive depictions of biblical figures, but it was not until the close-up was used, that such enlargement becomes frequent.
Grandma’s Reading Glasses does not provide a pure example of a close-up. As with images taken through keyholes and telescopes in early cinema, using reading glasses to explain why an image is so big is only a tentative first step in the selective enlargement of film imagery. The first close-up not involving characters looking through things, whose sole function was to show the audience an element of the story in more detail, was in the work of Mr Smith once again. In 1901 he made The Little Doctor (UK), which is now lost but which was remade two years later as The Sick Kitten (UK, 1903). In this we first see a room, two children and a cat (17), the master shot. Smith cuts to a close-up of the kitten as it is given a spoonful of medicine. No-one is looking through a tele-scope yet Smith simply decided that it would be clearer and more enjoyable for the audience to see this action bigger and in more detail. Filmmakers at the time worried that cutting suddenly into a detail like this would jar an audience accustomed, in the theatre, to being at a constant distance from the action. Smith showed that this was not the case. Cinema was not theatre, the link between the two was broken, and the emphasis and intimacy of cinema was born. After this, many of international cinema’s most memorable images were close-ups: the participants in the drama of Battleship Potemkin (Soviet Union, 1925) (18), Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928), Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (USA, 1951), Nargis in Mother India (India, 1957), Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Persona (Sweden, 1966) and the cowboys in Once Upon a Time in the West (Italy, 1969) (19). In each case, these contained close-up images of actors’ faces. They became giants in the foreground. Out of such imagery grew movie stars and the devotional, psychological aspect of cinema.
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Only later did filmmakers use close-ups simply to show their audiences a dramatic incident in more detail, as in The Sick Kitten (1903), a remake of G.A. Smith’s The Little Doctor. In the wide shot (top) the facial expression of the kitten could not be seen.
Soon movies began to feature at major international trade fairs, none more extravagant than the Paris Exhibition of 1900, which acted as cinema’s coming-out ball. On a massive 82x49-foot screen in front of a huge audience, the Lumière brothers showed colour films, which would not become popular for more than fifty years, and widescreen films shot on film 75mm wide, which was bigger than that those used for the American biblical epics of the 1950s. There were also sound films with recorded dialogue and a “Cinéorama” in which the audience sat on top of a circular projection box and watched film presented on a 330-foot 360° screen, comprising ten adjacent images. Its descendants are the IMAX screens in many modern cities. However, in its original form, Cinéorama only ran twice; the ten projectors created too much heat and the audience sitting above them was scorched.
Shots, cuts, close-ups and camera-moves – these were the technical elements providing the thrill of early filmmaking. Sneezes, trains, trips to the moon, babies in cabbage patches, boxing matches, children and kittens represented sentiment, fantasy, spectacle and moralizing. Cinema was still dealing in moments, fragments of real and imagined existence. One of the most striking things about these early short films is the “Hey, you out there in the audience” component, when their characters stare straight into the camera, sometimes taking a bow. Filmmakers had not grasped that audiences could forget that they were watching a film as they were drawn into it. This component was dropped once films star
ted to tell stories, and later on, the American comedies of Laurel and Hardy broke the rules of narrative film, when Oliver Hardy stared straight into the camera, disdaining his hopeless sidekick Stan Laurel (see pages 147–48).
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Some Soviet directors used close-ups in much more polemical ways: Battleship Potemkin. Director: Sergei Eisentstein Soviet Union, 1925.
Despite being shot in Western locations like New Jersey, Leeds or Lyon, early movies were not yet made by a film industry. The medium was born non-narrative and non-industrial. It had more to do with action and novelty, it was more like a circus. However, in 1903, cinema started to abandon the thrills of the phantom ride. Direct address to the audience died out. Men like D.W. Griffith and Yevgeni Bauer came along. Movie stars were created. Italian and Russian filmmakers stole the thunder from the Americans, British and French. Film history started to get complicated. Chapters Two (1903–18) and Three (1918–28) respectively describe how story and industry came into the movies, but the films discussed in this, perhaps the most important chapter in the book, are thrilling, simple and inconsequential, as they have been, sporadically, ever since.