The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  19

  Close-ups have remained among the most powerful devices available to directors. Few used them more dramatically than Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West. Italy, 1969.

  1. Edison’s preoccupation with the Kinetoscope led him to underestimate the appeal for audiences of watching projected images communally and, as a result, to fall behind in the race to perfect cinema. The arrival of the home DVD in 1997 looked to some, who admired its fine sound and image reproduction, like a moment in film history when audiences might finally abandon cinemas altogether and return to the more private experience afforded by the Kinetoscope. This has not proved to be the case.

  2. Quoted in Kino by Jay Leda.

  3. Ibid.

  Inventors from Germany, Belgium and Austria also contributed to the evolution of early cinema. In particular, Max and Emil Sklandonowsky trumped the Lumière brothers by selling tickets for a pioneering screening in Berlin on 1 November 1895. As the titles of the film screened are not known, as the conditions of the screening could not be characterized as a cinema, and as the Sklandonowksys did not continue to contribute to the evolution of cinema as did the Lumières, few film scholars accord them the founding role in move history. Both set of brothers, as well as the other inventors, built on earlier entertainment forms including magic lantern slide shows, tele-scopic projections in camera obscuras and table-top spinning devices such as zoetropes. The work of Laurent Mannoni and David Robinson, amongst others, details this pre-history and is beyond the scope of the present volume.

  4. In the review of the Nizhni-Novgorod fair in his local newspaper in 1896.

  5. Barry Salt’s Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis is an invaluable chronicle of the history of film style. While I do not agree with all Salt’s generalisations, his accumulation of detail is unparalleled.

  6. A third French figure in these early years, Ferdinand Zecca (1864–1947), is also worth mentioning. Directing between 1901 and 1914, he was, between 1905 and 1910, the head of production at Pathé. Zecca’s early use of flashbacks was notable, as was his interest in social subjects, as the titles alone of Histoire d’un Crime/The Story of Crime (1910) and Les Victimes de l’Alcoolisme/Victims of Alcoholism (1902) suggest. Zecca pioneered elements of the chase sequence in movies, but his fantasy and trick films were not as distinctive as those of Méliès.

  7. See Anthony Slide, editor, The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché, Scarecrow Press, 1986.

  8. John Kobal’s photographs and Kevin Brownlow’s annotations in Hollywood: The Pioneers, Book Club Associates, London 1979, collects this and many other important photographs of the time.

  9. Quoted in Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1926.

  10. Ibid, p286.

  20

  Sexuality and eroticism in the screen persona of Theda Bara.

  THE EARLY POWER OF STORY (1903–1918):

  How thrill became narrative

  2

  The world’s first aeroplane flight took place in 1903. Two years later, Albert Einstein published The Special Theory Of Relativity which argued that the speed of light, the flickering stuff of cinema, is the only constant in the universe. In Britain the suffragettes were agitating to obtain the vote for women. In his 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, gave faces like African masks to two of his five naked women, and caused a scandal. In 1908, the Model T Ford went on sale for the first time in the US. Around 1910, a new music called jazz emerged in New Orleans and two years later, a massive ocean liner, the Titanic, sank off the coast of Newfoundland. In 1914, a gunshot in Sarajevo sparked a war in Europe that would cause millions of deaths. In 1917, two Russian revolutions deposed the Tsar and established the world’s first workers’ revolutionary state.

  21

  Visitors to the St Louis Exhibition watched shots photographed from a real train while sitting in a static one.

  With politics, science and art in turmoil, initially it might seem difficult to argue that film during this fifteen-year period deserves our attention, but it does. This was a time of far-reaching and enduring change in which Western cinema went from a predominantly thrilling, immediate novelty to a more absorbing psychological experience. Not until the mid-1970s would this balance in mainstream cinema revert to favour thrill.

  22

  The Life of an American Fireman. These four images feature the intercut version, between 1903 and 1905.

  In 1903 not a single film had been shot in the then tranquil Hollywood hills. Light was not being used expressively in films and there were no stars of the silver screen. Editing, close-ups, and dolly shots – the techniques that had been discovered in the earliest years of cinema, had yet to be applied or explored self-consciously and systematically, and the first great directors who would articulate the medium were still to emerge. By 1918, cinema had its first artists: Yakov Protazanov and Yevgeny Bauer in Russia, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller in Sweden and David Wark Griffith and Charles Chaplin in America. This chapter looks at the careers of these men and charts the emergence of Hollywood, the star system, feature-length films and how Western movies discovered the power of stories. Japan had the most developed film culture in the East. However, it did not follow this path and the implications for the art of cinema were profound.

  Audiences were becoming tired of the quick thrills of the earliest movies and new attractions had to be discovered. In response to this, the 1903 St Louis Exhibition featured Hales Tours, which included earlier footage of phan-tom ride shots projected inside a railway carriage, manipulated to simulate the movement of a real train. Directors became intrigued by which tricks worked and which did not, like the technique of having actors look off-screen and then cutting to another location, about which they were supposed to be thinking. Audiences did not understand this and it soon died out. On the other hand, chase sequences were later found to have a magnetic power as they consisted of pure kinetic action. And filmmakers learnt to say “Once upon a time…”, and “then this happened…” or “Meanwhile”. How did they evolve the techniques of suspense and anticipation?

  The beginning of the answer can be found in 1903, in the work of the dynamic, entrepreneurial Pennsylvanian, Edwin Stanton Porter. He was born in 1869 and in his twenties worked for a marketing company when he helped arrange one of the first public screenings of a film in New York’s Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, on 23 April 1896. Soon he was making pictures, such as The Great Train Robbery (USA, 1903). His The Life of an American Fireman, also made in 1903, is less written about than The Great Train Robbery, but is more revealing.

  22 continued

  The original version of The Life of an American Fireman, 1903.

  Director: Edwin S. Porter. USA.

  Its most celebrated sequence (22) is the arrival of a fireman outside a blazing house. The image cuts to a room inside the house where the fireman rescues a mother, then cuts to an exterior shot of the mother left on the street. The camera then returns inside the house to show the rescue of the mother’s child by the fireman and then reestablishes itself outside again. For many years, film historians claimed this was the first example of continuity editing. The image cuts from exterior to interior to exterior to interior and the audience follows this rescue narrative, despite the space of the street suddenly disappearing from the screen and being magically replaced by another space, the room. This would not have been possible in the theatre and until Porter’s apparent innovations in 1903, directors assumed that such spatial jumps would confuse audiences.

  The truth about Porter’s achievements in shooting and cutting this film is more complicated than it appears and reveals much about the evolution of storytelling technique in film-making.1 Another print of the film exists in the archives, which shows all the street action in one continuous shot and then the interior action, similarly in one sequence. Film historians used to believe that this version was a “rough cut”, which Porter had yet to fin
e tune. However, it has recently become clear that this film was closer to the original release print. Only in later years, once intercutting was discovered, did Porter or someone else belatedly “improve” the more theatrical version by editing. The intercut version has a continuous time line – we see everything in the order in which it was done – but the space is fragmented. It doesn’t jar because we understand that we are seeing what the fireman did next. The more theatrical version doesn’t fragment the space, but repeats the time like an action replay. Cinema had learned to follow the flow of the action from one space to another. This made chase sequences possible, liberated movies and emphasized movement. Nearly every scene we look at in this book will, in some way, use this basic storytelling device. The continuity implied, “Then this happened”. Within ten years of The Life of an American Fireman, Porter had experimented with sound, widescreen, colour and three-dimensional movies, long before they became popular. He was bankrupted by the 1929 Wall Street Crash and died, forgotten, in 1948.

  23

  Actors turning their backs to the camera marked the beginning of the end of frontal, theatrical cinema. The Assassination of the Duc de Guise. Director: Charles le Bargy. France, 1908.

  American Fireman was a landmark; schema plus variation. Theatrical cinema was giving way to action cinema and tableau imagery started to look dated. Out of this difference, D.W. Griffith evolved, as has every narrative filmmaker thereafter. Continuity editing led to longer movies. The first feature-length film was The True Story of the Kelly Gang, made in Australia by John Tait in 1906. In 1907, cinematic innovation went up a gear. Charles Pathé’s The Horse that Bolted took the lessons of Porter’s fireman film and advanced them. Here, a restless horse outside a house begins to wreck things around it, while inside the house, its rider dallies unaware of the commotion outside. Pathé cut between outside and inside just as Porter had done. The action of the horse and its rider were separate, simultaneous events. Unlike Porter’s continuity editing, this was parallel editing, the origin of “Meanwhile” in the cinema, the way in which filmmakers to this day contrast events, build tension or advance two storylines concurrently. The technique was brilliantly realized by director Alfred Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train (USA, 1951), by intercutting a character playing tennis with another trying to frame him by planting incriminating evidence at the scene of a crime. The suspense film, The Silence of the Lambs (USA, 1990) played with the conventions of parallel editing by suggesting a congruence of plot at odds with the narrative.

  1908 saw even more additions to the cinematic box of tricks. Shadows began to be used in film lighting to give more depth to the photographic image. In the American film A Yiddisher Boy (USA, 1908) a man in a street fight remembers an event from twenty-five years earlier. The shot of that memory is the first flashback acknowledged by film historians. In the same year, André Calmettes and Charles le Bargy directed L’Assassinat du duc de Guise/The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (23) for the French company, Film d’Art. Although not the first film company to look to adapt novels and plays for the screens, its self-consciously high-brow cinema, aimed at theatre-going audiences, was better marketed and more successful than most. The so-called heritage films made by Merchant Ivory in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s are the progeny of The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, often deriving from literature and emphasizing diction, set design and verbal nuance.

  The social implications of films such as this and the one-hour film Les Amours (Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton, France, 1919) which featured the theatre-star Sarah Bernhardt and which was imported to the US by Adolph Zukor, were considerable. Cinema had opened its doors to new, wealthier audiences, who would demand more comfortable and stylish cinemas than the nickelodeons, shop-front outfits and music hall auditoria which had hitherto been the sites for cinema. They wanted weightier subjects too, and the film world would accede to this. Within a generation, movie palaces or atmospherics would be built; places where ordinary people could feel like royalty for a night and where film became a medium of contemplation as well as sensation.

  The Assassination of the Duc de Guise may seem static now, but at the time, its photography and staging broke new ground, as can be seen in image to the left. The camera is at waist height, at a time when shoulder height was the accepted norm in American and most of European cinema. Notice how some of the actors in the image have turned their backs to the camera. This was new. Most films until this date had been frontal, their action facing outwards. The implications of this “inwardness” were extensive. If the audience wanted to see the actors’ faces whose backs are turned, the camera had to be brought into the middle of the scene and turned towards the audience and the actors. It would be another four years before this technique, “reverse angle shooting”, would start to be used. But this simple still from a starchy theatrical film seems to illustrate why it came about.

  I say “seems to” because in Japan something very different was happening. The country’s first projected films were, as in many other countries, the package of Lumière 1897 shorts. Home-grown production then developed swiftly, along Western lines, and by 1908 four production companies were making films. Shochiku established itself later, survives to this day and is the most famous company in Japan. It produced plays before it got into the film business, a precedent almost unheard of in the West.

  24

  Theatrical framing and acting styles in A Tale of Loyal Retainers. Director: Makio Shozo. Japan, c. 1910.

  That Japanese film grew out of theatre is profoundly important. The majority of that country’s films made throughout the period covered in this chapter, looked like filmed versions of the two dominant styles of popular theatre – kabuki and shimpa. The camera recorded the entire scene frontally. The actors wore traditional costume and make-up and male actors would portray women as well as men. The actors did not make contact during fight scenes and all movement would periodically freeze to emphasize a moment. When characters died, they performed a backwards somersault. More significantly, a benshi would usually stand behind a lectern by the cinema’s screen, explaining the events, commenting on the characters and sometimes making sound effects. By 1908, these benshi had begun to have some say in how films were produced, for example arguing for longer scenes which gave them more time to talk and describe. Some benshi became famous and many communities had their own favourites. They dominated Japanese film exhibition until the late 1930s and their presence meant that characters did not appear to be talking in early Japanese films, as this was the benshi’s job. Critic Noël Burch has argued that their storylines were sometimes “outside” the flow of imagery and were an echo of a profoundly un-Western aspect of Japanese culture.2 This separation of word and image is reflected in early traditional handscrolls in which sophisticated images were interspersed with a written storyline; there was no attempt to integrate the two.

  So it was with cinema. While Porter, the Duc de Guise film and other Western directors were beginning to tell stories “from within”, Japanese cinema was not. The still to the left (24) is from a film, but visu-ally it is extremely similar to the theatre image we have just seen. To say that most Japanese films until the 1930s have to be understood in conjunction with a foreground narrator is not to suggest that they were made in a lazy fashion. Rather, they were derived from a visual tradition where space played a different role. Contemporary kabuki theatre stages tended to have flat backdrops, and their exquisitely painted handscrolls and screens, as well as prints, which proved to be so influential on Western painters, similarly emphasized shallow space and the surface of the paper, rather than illusionistic perspective. So while the Duc de Guise film seems to Westerners to be too “flat”, this would not be a sensible response in Japan. Although Japanese audiences and filmmakers saw Western films and liked them, they did not feel the same need to put the audience visually at the centre of the story as Western directors did between 1908 and 1918. It was only after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War
that Western-style storytelling becomes dominant in Japanese cinema.

  INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICA

  As filmmakers started to learn about depth and narrative in America, a fight over film copyright was brewing. The Patents War (1897–1908) began, when Edison realized that ownership of the rights of this burgeoning medium was vital. Since he had not invented the film itself (that was Eastman) he patented the sprocket holes in the film by which it was clawed through the camera. Anyone who wanted to use film with sprocket holes, which was everyone, had to pay Edison.

  Other film producers – all still on the East Coast of America – were furious at this and many of them refused to pay. This compelled Edison to join forces with an old enemy, American Mutoscope and Bioscope Company, to lend weight to his claim to ownership. The result was the aggressive Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a very Anglo-Saxon group whose intention was to keep independent Jewish producers like Carl Laemmle out of the increasingly lucrative film business. The formation of the MPPC (also known as The Trust) in effect ended the Patents War, but not the disputes between competing vested interests. In 1910, Laemmle defied the MPPC and, following their example banned the MPPC in the courts, thus igniting a second round of legal battles which became known as the Trust War. All hell broke loose and in 1912 a legal ruling was established against MPPC’s claim to own sprocket holes. The Trust War finally ended in 1918, after a six-year court battle when the courts declared the MPPC an illegal trust but before that, the MPPC’s counter attack had a number of historic outcomes. The independent production companies went as far away from the East coast as possible in order to escape prosecution for using a loop in their cameras. Their destination was a sleepy Southern Californian town called Los Angeles, the City of the Angels, whose low taxation and lively theatres made it more appealing than other distant cities. Today’s Hollywood evolved from these pioneers. Laemmle opened Universal Studios in 1915 and, twenty years later, he sold it for $5 million.