by Mark Cousins
D.W. Griffith, mentioned several times in the story so far, now becomes central to it. Griffith was born in 1875 to a recently impoverished politician and war hero. He started his career as an actor, tried his hand at writing plays and attempted to sell stories to Edwin S. Porter. From 1908 to 1913 he made 400 short films, including The Curtain Pole (USA, 1909), one of his rare comedies which nonetheless established a crazy style that would dominate comic movies for the remainder of the silent period. So stimulating were his methods that he soon had a devoted troupe of actors including Lillian Gish, Blanche Sweet and Donald Crisp and was working with one of the best cinematographers in the film industry, Billy Bitzer, who had made his reputation at The Productive Biograph Studio. Bitzer disliked the crispness of conventional film photography and made the edges of his own imagery slightly darker by placing a vignetting hood around the lens hood, “adding class to the picture” as Bitzer himself described it,7 and influencing the look of dramatic film in America for a generation. Despite the claims of earlier film historians and his own publicist, D.W. Griffith did not invent any of the key elements of the language of cinema. He did, however, more than any other filmmaker give films an interior human life. He applied greater emotional finesse to extant film techniques, collaborating brilliantly with actresses, minimizing their gestures and contrasting gentleness and ferocity. He understood the psychic intensity of a lens and allowed Bitzer to explore diffused photography and back lighting, which gave a halo to hair and made actors stand out against backgrounds (32).
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Cinematographer Billy Bitzer used halo lighting on actors’ hair to make them stand out visually from the sets.
Griffith made perhaps the most famous and certainly the most controversial film of the whole silent era, The Birth of A Nation (USA, 1915). Like most of his work, this film looks like it was shot in his native Kentucky and glows with an affection inherited from his father for the Southern states. It was a history film, a state of the nation work designed to appeal not only to middle-class audiences in the tradition of Film d’Art, but to those who flocked to epic, exciting films too. It was also an inflammatory film about which serious newspapers could editorialize. It told the story of two families from opposing sides of the American Civil War – the Camerons in the South and the Stonemans in the North – whose sons and daughters fall in love with each other. When the North wins, one of the Cameron sons becomes leader of the Ku Klux Klan. He and the clansmen triumphantly rescue Elsie Stoneman from an aggressive mixed-race suitor and the white couples marry.
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The astonishing battle scene from D.W. Griffith’s Civil War film The Birth of a Nation (USA, 1915) added to its inflammatory impact.
The film’s production was almost as big as Cabiria. It required an unprecedented six weeks of rehearsal, its budget was $110,000 and its running time was around three hours, depending on the version and speed of projection. It featured epic battle scenes (33); when they were shot the action was cued across their vast spaces with coloured flags. Such scenes alternated with others of brilliant emotional control. A Southern officer returns home to his once fine house, which is now burned and decrepit. His sister greets him and, as they embrace, he notices that the white tufts of ermine on her dress are cotton wool. As he goes to his mother in the doorway, he is enfolded within her arms and she is concealed by the frame. Her joy and sadness is all the more moving for being unseen. No-one in cinema to this date had better used the power of suggestion or understood how a schema becomes dated and needs to be renewed. A later American master filmmaker, John Ford, would copy this scene in Pilgrimage (USA, 1933) when a mother reaches her hand out of a train window. Such moments as these, combined with the performance of Griffith’s star Lillian Gish as Elsie Stoneman and the triumphant chase sequences, edited to the music of Wagner, prompted the then President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, to say, “It’s like writing history with lightning.”
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The visual influence of Pastrone’s Cabiria…
34 continued
…can be clearly seen on this production design for the Babylonian set of Intolerance. D.W. Griffith. USA, 1916.
As the storyline suggests, The Birth of a Nation was appallingly racist. Black senators were shown as drunk and unclean. Demonstrations for and against the film took place after some screenings; many protested the film’s depictions of African Americans, others attacked black audience members. The KKK had been disbanded in 1877, but such was the power of this film that historian Kevin Brownlow wrote that “On Thanksgiving Night, 1915, in Stone Mountain, Atlanta … 2,500 former Clansmen marched down Peach Tree Avenue to celebrate the opening of the film.”8 By the mid-1920s, KKK membership was four million.
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The composition, scale, placement of extras of frieze-like set design and costuming of this scene in Griffith’s Intolerance all clearly derive from Edwin Long’s 1875 painting The Babylonian Marriage Market (opposite).
Griffith saw Pastrone’s Cabiria the year after completing The Birth of a Nation. He was stunned by it, and in particular by its dolly shots. Inspired by this and by the novels of Charles Dickens (he even said, “Dickens intercuts, so will I”), he abandoned the Kentuckian mythology of his father and raised his sights to a three-and-a-half-hour film about “love’s struggle through history”. Illustrations 34 reveal the sources of Griffith’s visual ideas for Intolerance, which became the film’s title. The first (34 top) is from Cabiria, the second (34 bottom) is one of Griffith’s colossal Babylon sets which stood near Hollywood Boulevard, before demolition (it was partly rebuilt in 2001). Like many serious filmmakers, Griffith also used painting as a source of visual inspiration. Illustrations 35 (top left and right) show how direct such influences can be.
The film attempted to explore the theme of intolerance through history by intercutting Belshazzar’s feast in Babylon (fifth century bc), Christ’s passion, the massacre of St Bartholomew (sixteenth-century France), modern day gangsterism – all linked by Lillian Gish rocking a cradle and finished by a premonition of Armageddon. Griffith filmed the Babylon sequence from hot-air balloons and rigged up a type of dolly shot in mid-air, by placing the camera on a moving tower, which was a first. His story-telling was highly innovative: he would take storyline A so far, stop it, then go to storyline B, advance it a certain amount and return to storyline A and pick up where he had left off. This confused many of the audiences and the film did less well commercially then A Birth of a Nation for which, to some critics of the time, it seemed like an apology.
Intolerance appears stodgy today, but its relevance is twofold. First it took intercutting a stage further than Pathé’s The Horse that Bolted. His intercutting is not saying “Meanwhile”. He cut between different time periods, between events that were not happening simultaneously. He was not cutting for action (Porter) or temporally (Pathé), but was doing it thematically. He was saying, “Look, these very different events are examples of the same human trait” – intolerance, or the failure of love. Intolerance’s greatest contribution to the history of cinema was that it ambitiously showed that a cut between shots could be a thematic tool, that it could be an intellectual signpost, asking the audience to notice, not something about the action or story, but about the meaning of the sequence. Secondly, it had a huge impact on other filmmakers. Soviets such as Eisenstein, studied it and wrote about it. The Viennese-American director Erich Von Stroheim attempted to top its ambition. And in 1921 Minoru Murata made an atypical Japanese film that didn’t follow the tradition of flattened imagery and heavy benshi narration, having been encouraged to do so after seeing Intolerance.
Murata was one of the modernizing pioneers of Japanese cinema and wanted to move beyond the historical dramas that had been the staple of that country’s fledgling film culture. Rojo no Reikon/Souls on the Road (Japan, 1921) (36) intertwined four storylines, including one about a penniless son returning home and another about two convicts who are greeted with kindness by people they mee
t. The intercutting between time periods is handled with greater complexity than in Intolerance. At the end of the film, the stories come together when the two convicts find the impoverished son, dead in the snow. The result is the first landmark film in Japanese history.
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Intolerance’s parallel storytelling impressed Japanese director Minoru Murata to such a degree that he copied it in his Souls on the Road. 1921.
The influence of Intolerance did nothing for its profitability. Griffith had risked his own money on its $2 million budget, which made it one of the most expensive films of all time, and as a result he was in debt for the rest of his life.
In the period from 1903 to 1918, many of the ingredients of Western storytelling cinema fell into place: continuity cutting, close-ups, parallel editing, expressive lighting, nuanced acting and reverse angle editing: an impressive array of techniques.9 However, one is missing, perhaps the most important one. Its exact origin is difficult to trace, but it appeared at the very end of this period – “eye-line matching”.
The two illustrations to the right show how eye-line matching works and why it so important (37). They are from a 1911 film, The Loafer (USA), and feature the very early use of rough reverse angle editing. A close inspection of these shows that something is wrong. In the first, the actor is looking slightly to the left of the camera (37 top). In the second (37 bottom), the man he addresses looks slightly to the right of the camera. The effect is disconcerting when cutting between the two of them. It appears as if they are talking to each other while looking away from each other. If the second man had looked to the left rather than to the right, it would still have disoriented the viewer because it would have appeared that both actors were looking to some unseen event to the left of camera while in conversation. Only if man one was looking right and man two was looking left would their conversation have been spatially clear and their eye-lines have matched. Western cinema had been striving for this absolute clarity and the majority of filmmakers mastered this last crucial element of narrative filmmaking by the mid-1920s. Only in Japan and, later, in modernist cinema, would eye-line matches not be the norm.
An estimated ten million men lost their lives in the First World War. The Armenians suffered almost mass genocide at the hands of the Turks and the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires collapsed. Germany’s borders had been closed to all foreign art, including films, since 1916 and Russia’s borders had been similarly closed off from 1914. Russians fleeing the 1917 revolutions created a diaspora, settling in France and other countries.
During the period covered by this chapter, the medium of cinema had become adult and wildly ambitious. It had discovered the power of story and had evolved a complex set of devices for constructing narratives. In its haphazard creation of a star system, it had directed itself towards romance and the sublime. Movie palaces like Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles were constructed (38). These screens were the grand palaces of entertainment cinema, showing formulaic films, as well as those by significant directors such as Griffith. The movies of the other pioneering directors of this era – Protazanov, Sjöström, Stiller, Bauer, Phalke and Murata – often found large audiences in their own countries too, but those of Bauer, Phalke and Murata were less widely seen. Cinema already had a handful of mature talents.
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Eye-line matching had still not been perfected in 1911. These two men in the film The Loafer appear to be staring in opposite directions, yet they are supposed to be talking to, and looking at, each other.
This is only partially because of the cultural specifics of these filmmakers concerns. Far more important was Hollywood’s opportunism during the First World War. Importing few films between 1914 and 1918, it had a virtual monopoly on North American cinemagoers and visual entertainment. As the national industries of European countries such as France, which had been developing since the turn of the century, stalled under the exigencies of war, so Hollywood strengthened rapidly. And when the fog of war cleared in 1918, a powerful new North American entertainment oligarchy, ultimately controlled by the financial interests of Wall Street, came into view; one of its first actions was to flood European cinemas with its recent productions. The indigenous industries could not respond.
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By the end of the First World War, cinemas had evolved from simple shop-fronted buildings such as Tally’s Phonograph Parlor and had begun to look like cathedrals. Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre, Los Angeles.
The next decade would witness a massive expansion of film style around the world. Audiences would flock to cinemas, stars would attract fanatical attention and every aspect of film form would be explored. The 1920s would be cinema’s most lucrative and creative decade.
1. Earlier films by Méliès and Williamson perhaps solved the problem of how to get a character from one space to another, but these do not reveal as much as The Life of an American Fireman.
2. Burch, Noel, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Scolar Press, 1979.
3. This was not the first time that partially or fully staged scenes had been shown to audiences as documentary footage of real historical events. One of the most famous instances of this was J. Stuart Blackton and A.E. Smith’s Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (USA, 1898) which was filmed in New York City and sold as an actual event in the US Spanish War. The unscrupulous Mr Blackton followed its success with The Battle of Santiago Bay (USA, 1900), in which cut-out boats were filmed in a large tub and naval smoke was provided by his wife puffing on a cigarette.
4. Sadoul, Georges, Dictionary of Films, University of California Press, English translation 1972.
5. Quoted in Leyda, Jay, Kino, op. cit.
6. Salt, op. cit., p. 95.
7. Quoted in Brown, Karl, Adventures with D.W. Griffith, Faber and Faber, 1973.
8. Brownlow, Kevin, in Hollywood: The Pioneers, op. cit.
9. Sound had still to make an impact on storytelling, of course, and will be dealt with in a later chapter. Transitional devices such as wipes between one image and the next had not yet become widespread but are less fundamental to film grammar than continuity editing, shot size and eyeline matching.
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The scale and design of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has influenced directors and artists for generations. Germany, 1927.
THE WORLD EXPANSION OF STYLE (1918–28)
Movie factories and personal vision
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Cinema in 1918 was perhaps too young to fully to engage with the complex realities of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Films like Intolerance (USA, 1916) were ingressions into the world of ideas, and the warring powers in the turbulent mid-decade years were not above using film for propagandist purposes, but those works that maturely addressed the historical upheavals of the era were few and far between.1 What cannot be discounted is Wall Street’s reluctance to challenge federal and foreign policy, especially when both coincided with its own interests. Such conservatism from on high worked its way down the command structure of the film world and made it difficult for ambitious or radical filmmakers to pose tough historical questions in their work.
By the time of the collapse of the American economy in the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the cultural landscape would have changed. In just over a decade, cinema became both the most popular international form of entertainment and a serious chronicler of the human soul. The primitive filmmaking of the early 1910s with its simple shots, raw frontal acting and rapid action, unmoderated by the tastes and expectations of the middle classes, was disappearing. Like a humpback whale it went deep under water. There would be rumours of sightings in 1950s America in melodramas such as Johnny Guitar (1953) and in the films of Sam Fuller, but it would not be until the 1960s and the flickering emergence of African and Latin-American cinema, together with the extraordinary films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the 1960s underground directors, that primal cinema would resurface. In the over-sophisticated film world of the 19
80s and 1990s, films with some of the same elemental power began to emerge from Iran. The filmmaking of the 1910s had returned.
From 1918–28, filmmakers applied their techniques with increasing sophistication to every aspect of experience – the instinct to create laughter, questions of how we see and hear, the lives of people on the margins of communities, the dynamism of cities and how their residents behave, the unconscious and more abstract questions about life, science and the future. Once filmmakers around the world realized that their medium could do complex things, they stretched creativity to the limit and dazzled themselves and their colleagues with new discoveries. Not until the 1960s would there be so much stylistic innovation in the cinema, and the excitement of the 1920s is still palpable today.
This chapter starts in America as the components of its new film industry fall into place. The characteristics of the new industrially produced films, especially their most innovative examples – the comedies of Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton – will be looked at in detail. The various international challenges to the studio system will then be discussed: naturalism in Scandinavia, impressionism in France, expressionism in Germany, editing in the Soviet Union and the continuing frontal style of Japan. During this process, landmarks of film history and its seminal works will be encountered.
THE BEGINNING OF HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN ERA
During these years investment in cinema increased tenfold. In 1917, a court order dissolved the old Motion Picture Patents Company and Edison’s old sparring partners, the independents, started to build movie empires. Film factories were established and movies were assembled in a production-line system rather like Model T Ford automobiles. There was a free-for-all. People who had previously only produced films, invested in distribution, the business arm that sold their films to the cinemas. The next logical step was for them to buy the screens themselves to ensure a guaranteed outlet for their product. This was achieved with money from New York bankers and businessmen and the resulting system was, as in other industries, called “vertical integration” and guaranteed a continuous production line.