Dembrow, ENG195, Fall 2001

A Little History: The First Decade

The earliest movies were not really what we would call "narrative" (story) or "dramatic" films. They were not really designed to tell stories--rather, they gave us little pieces of reality, slices of life, home movies for the culture. Just consider the titles of the movies in the first Lumiere program (Dec. 28, 1895), which included Feeding Baby, Train Pulling Into the Train Station, Workers Leaving the Factory.

Nearly all the films made during the first 10 years of cinema fell into the category of documentaries: travelogues, newsreels, and bits of sporting events. For excitement, we would get dancing girls, body builders flexing their muscles, firefighters putting out fires, sharpshooters showing off their skill. We might even be given snippets of filmed theater: Sarah Bernhardt declaiming (silently) a scene from Phedre or a comic act from a vaudeville show. But these early films were not really telling stories.

The first films marveled audiences precisely because of their ability to reproduce reality, to bring the distant and the little known to life. If one wanted stories, one could go to the theater or read a book. Story-telling was not really considered an essential property of the medium.

Perhaps the main reason that early films steered away from story-telling is that their brevity limited the kinds of stories they could tell. The earliest films were rarely more than a minute or two long. By 1905 they were generally one film reel long--between ten and fifteen minutes. It was not until the Teens that we began to see films that were more than a half-hour long. These movies were simply not long enough to tell dramatic stories with any development.

Once the initial thrill of film's purely documentary abilities wore off, audiences began to hunger for fiction. By the turn of the century, the most popular filmmaker in the world was the Frenchman Georges Melies. A stage magician by training, Melies was able to bring real magic to the movies by creating the first special effects, many of which are still in use today. By using elaborate sets, costumes, and stop-motion cinematography, Melies was able to bring to the screen worlds of fantasy that were more elaborate and convincing than those to be found in the theater. Perhaps his most famous film was his A Trip to the Moon (1902), a ten-minute adaptation (much truncated) of H.G. Wells' From the Earth to the Moon.

By the middle of the first decade of this century, the most popular movies were filmed stories. Initially, they were the equivalent to filmed stage plays, with the camera sitting, as it were, in the middle of the front row of the stage and never moving. Some pioneers, however, began to expand the medium to develop story-telling techniques that were unique to cinema.

One of Edison's directors, Edwin S. Porter, made some of the first films to use properly cinematic techniques. The Life of an American Fireman (1902) related the story of a mother and child being rescued from a burning house. It stitches together different segments to tell the story. We first see the firefighters (played by actors) at the firehouse set. Then, after a close-up of the alarm ringing, we get stock footage (archive, documentary footage) of real firefighters racing in their horse-drawn fire wagons to a fire. We then see a segment of the woman and child inside the burning house (a stage set), eventually rescued by a firefighter. Finally, we get a "replay" of the rescue, this time from the perspective of the exterior of the house. To modern audiences, this "replay" will seem rather strange and the splicing together of staged action and documentary action also seems a little awkward. What we have here, though, are the beginnings of film narrative--the process of editing together pieces of a story.

A year later Porter made The Great Train Robbery (1903), considered the first Western and the first real story film. Porter directly cuts from scene to scene to show action that is either sequential or parallel. He cuts in the middle of a scene, thereby maintaining a very dynamic feel. Here is a scene breakdown of the film (thanks to David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 1990):

1. Interior of the railroad telegraph office: two bandits enter and bind and gag the operator while the moving train, visible through the office window, comes to a halt.

2. Railroad water tower: the other members of the gang board the train secretly as it takes on water.

3. Interior of the mail car with scenery rushing by through an open door; the bandits break in, kill a messenger, seize valuables from a strongbox, and leave.

4. Coal tender and interior of the locomotive cab: the bandits kill the fireman after a fierce struggle, throw his body off the train, and compel the engineer to stop.

5. Exterior shot of the train coming to a halt and the engineer uncoupling the locomotive.

6. Exterior shot of the train as the bandits force the passengers to line up along the tracks and surrender their valuables; one passenger attempts to escape, runs directly into the camera lens, and is shot in the back.

7. The bandits board the engine and abscond with the loot.

8. The bandits stop the engine several miles up the track, get off, and run into the woods as the camera tilts slightly to follow them.

9. The bandits scramble down the side of a hill and across a stream to mount their horses; the camera follows them in a sweeping vertical movement, or panning shot.

10. Interior of the telegraph office: the operator's daughter arrives and unties her father, who then runs out to give the alarm.

11. Interior of a crowded dance hall; a "tenderfoot" is made to "dance," as six guns are fired at his feet; the telegraph operator arrives and a posse is formed.

12. Shot of the mounted bandits dashing down the face of a hill with the posse in hot pursuit; both groups move rapidly toward the camera; one of the bandits is killed as they approach.

13. Shot of the remaining bandits examining the contents of the stolen mail pouches; the posse approaches stealthily from the background and kills them all in a final shoot-out.

14. Medium close-up of the leader of the bandits firing his revolver point-blank into the camera (and, thus, the audience), a shot which, according to the Edison Catalogue, "can be used to begin or end the picture."

Each of these scenes is told by means of a single shot--still a fairly primitive storytelling technique, but clearly a marked advance beyond Life of an American Fireman and earlier films. A fairly substantial story is told in a mere 12 minutes. Porter is able to tell so much because of the dramatic cuts between scenes. For example, we in scene #11 we see the posse being formed, then in #12 the posse is already in pursuit of the bandits. A big chunk of time has been cut out. We presumably are missing out on a lot of scenery, hard riding, perhaps a horse or two going lame. Instead, we cut from essential information to essential information.

This strategy of cutting out the non-essential in order better to highlight the essential will become central to the practice of making films. In a similar manner, within a few years the close-up and careful lighting will be used to eliminate the non-essential parts of the body or the room in order to focus on the essential emotion-bearing feature: usually the face.

The Great Train Robbery also uses camera movement (tilts, pans, and tracking shots of the train) both to help tell its story and to make the story visually exciting. The interior scenes look as if they were filmed on a stage set (they were), but the exterior scenes are fresh and dynamic.

The film uses editing to convey the two basic elements of cinematic syntax: continuity ("And then . . .") and parallelism ("Meanwhile . . ."). It is by no means a polished film--within the next few years other filmmakers would refine Porter's techniques and improve the flow of narration. But no one until D. W. Griffith would be able recapture the excitement, the shock of discovery, that Porter was able to create in this film. Audiences knew that they were seeing something radically different, even if they couldn't articulate why the film was so exciting. It would be the most popular film until Griffith's controversial masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1914), more than ten years later.

Griffith

Between 1905 and 1910 movies followed Porter's lead and most were constructed as a series of scenes stitched together (what we call continuity editing). This was the case for films made both here and abroad. In England a group of filmmakers who have come to be known as the "Brighton School" were making story films that were quite compelling and dynamic; probably the best known of the Brighton School films was Rescued by Rover (1905) by Cecil Hepworth. This tells the story of a young family whose domestic bliss is disrupted when a gypsy steals their baby. Fortunately, they are blessed with Rover, their faithful and ingenious pet dog, who is able to sniff out and find the beloved baby, then lead his master to the ultimate rescue. As you can see, it tells a simple, sentimental story, but it is technically quite advanced. It breaks the rescue up into a series of shots, so that we are led easily and seamlessly from one place to another. In fact, The Great Train Robbery's chase scene of two years before seems quite primitive in comparison.

Story films also proliferated in France, made by two rival companies: Gaumont (whose chief director, the very talented Alice Guy Blache, is hailed as the first woman director) and Pathe (the most important film company in the world for the first two decades of this century). However, the real impetus for change, with respect to film art, would again come from the United States, in the person of David Wark Griffith (1875-1948).

Griffith was a Southerner who initially planned to be a playwright and stage director, found himself in movies almost by accident. He was out of work, unable to sell any of his plays, so he took a job as a bit actor in Porter's 1908 film Rescued from the Eagle's Nest (an imitation of Rescued by Rover). Although initially embarrassed to be associated with the "flickers" (as was generally true of most actors and directors working in the early days of film), Griffith soon fell in love with the medium and began to dream of expanding its artistic potential. He quickly became a director (for the standard pay rate of $5 per day) for Biograph, one of the most important career moves in film history.

Even the best films of Porter, Hepworth, and Alice Guy Blache were fairly low on the aesthetic register. Many, if not most, were shot in sequence, in the consecutive order in which they would appear in the final film. They were generally shot out of doors, where there was plenty of light, so lighting effects were kept to a minimum. Retakes of flubbed scenes were rare, rehearsals were even rarer, and in general films rarely took more than a day to make.

Griffith wanted more. Fortunately for Griffith, audiences were becoming sophisticated to the point that they began to demand more. His films for the Biograph Company became tremendously successful, and Griffith felt encouraged to experiment.

David A. Cook writes both of Griffith's importance and the controversial nature of his contribution:

In the brief span of six years, between directing his first one-reeler in 1908 and The Birth of a Nation in 1914, Griffith established the narrative language of the cinema as we know it today and turned an aesthetically inconsequential medium of entertainment into a fully articulated art form. He has been called, variously, and, for the most part, accurately, "the father of film technique," "the man who invented Hollywood," "the cinema's first great auteur," and "the Shakespeare of the screen."

Yet in the sixty years since his most important work was completed, Griffith's stature as an artist has been the subject of continuous debate among film scholars, and his critical reputation has suffered more fluctuation than that of any other major figure in film history. The problem is that Griffith was essentially a figure of paradox. He was unquestionably the seminal genius of the narrative cinema and its first great visionary artist, but he was also a provincial southern romantic with pretensions to high literary culture and a penchant for sentimentality and melodrama that would have embarrassed Dickens.

Griffith was the film's first great technical master and its first legitimate poet, but he was also a muddleheaded racial bigot, incapable of abstract thought, who quite literally saw all of human history in the black-and-white terms of nineteenth-century melodrama. In one sense, Griffith presents the paradox of a nineteenth-century man who founded a uniquely twentieth-century art form, and this tension between ages accounts for many disparities of taste and judgment that we find in his films today. (A History of Narrative Film, 1990)

It would be a mistake to say that Griffith "invented" techniques such as the close-up, the pan, or expressive lighting; one can find earlier films in which such techniques appear. But in those earlier films the close-up, for example, is just a one-time effect, a gag, something used randomly. Griffith began the systematic use of such effects in order to shape the audience's response and express emotional subtleties. Between 1908 and 1912 he made hundreds of one-reelers. None is a masterpiece, but each provides a step in the creation of a unique language system for cinema.

Most crucially, he shifted the basic unit of cinema from the scene (a piece of the story occurring in a particular place for a particular duration) to the shot. Remember, before Griffith the most advanced story films were a sequence of scenes edited together. The camera stayed on until a scene was finished. If two characters were having a conversation, the scene would be shot in a frontal two-shot, appearing much as it would appear on a stage, until the conversation was over; then we would cut to the next scene.

Griffith began to cut within a scene. Thus, if two characters were having a conversation, he would start with the two-shot, but then move to a medium shot of one character making a key confession, then cut to a medium shot, or perhaps a close-up of the other character, showing his/her response, then perhaps back to the two-shot. None of these shots was dramatically complete in and of itself. Rather, these different camera setups were used as jigsaw pieces edited together to present the complete scene.

The Biograph executives were initially appalled. They felt that audiences would never accept close-ups--Why would someone who had paid to see an entire actor be satisfied to see just a piece of the actor? But audiences loved the close-ups. They could finally really see the actors, receive the full impact of the actors' emotional responses. They could identify with the character's plight in a way that simply did not happen when the camera was kept back. Also, the variety of setups and variety of shot duration within a scene made the films more visually exciting.

This method of breaking scenes down into a number of shots came to be known as the "classical editing style" or what the French called decoupage classique.

After Griffith, the scene would continue to be an important element in story construction. The best scenes were miniatures of the film as a whole--with conflict rising to some sort of climax, which might be temporarily resolved or not. Technically speaking, however, the shot became the basic building block.

A number of other changes flowed from the creation of this new editing style. With the use of close-ups, acting styles began to change. Since the close-up could register subtle nuances of emotion, actors had to "unlearn" the techniques used in stage acting. They had to learn to underact, to use slight eye movements and posture changes to register internal states. Otherwise, their acting would appear ridiculously artificial. To achieve these subtleties of acting, Griffith found it necessary to rehearse his actors extensively. The investment in time paid off, as film acting became an art in its own right, and audiences began to feel a real attachment to their favorite actors--who were becoming movie stars.

Griffith began to use fades, irises, and dissolves as transitional devices to link scenes. The straight cut would be used for editing within a scene, and these other devices used to move from one scene to another, usually showing passage of time. He also used these devices to open up flashbacks, another narrative dimension that Griffith brought to film.

Griffith was probably best known for his refinement of the technique of parallel editing or cross-cutting, where he would edit between two simultaneous lines of action--e.g., a woman being abducted by an evil suitor and her boyfriend trying to find out what has become of her. He would cut back and forth from one scene to the other as a means of building suspense and excitement. In fact, this style was known by many as the "Griffith last-minute rescue," since he used it so often in rescue films. He used cross-cutting in a similar way in his film A Corner in Wheat (1909), which juxtaposes shots of a tycoon living the high life with scenes of poor rural workers dealing with unemployment and poverty. Thematic meaning is created by the contrast between these two story lines. (A more modern example of this technique can be found in The Godfather ((1972)), where Coppola cross-cuts between a scene showing the baptism of the baby of the new Don Corleone and the gangland executions of various gang rivals.)

Griffith also experimented with dramatic camera angles (both high angle and low angle), expressive lighting, split screens, and use of soft focus. He also influenced the expansion of film length--by 1912 he was making two-reel films, by 1913 he had made the feature length film Judith of Bethulia, and in 1914 he made his epic The Birth of a Nation..

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