APPROACHES TO FILM
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Pioneers of the
Early Cinema
Thomas Edison |
August and Louis Lumière
|
George Méliès | Edwin S.
Porter | D. W. Griffith
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here to view the introductory slideshow
As
they were sponsored by Thomas Edison (1847-1931), the first movies were not
intended to be silent—or, for that matter, projected.
Edison had instructed his principal assistant, William Kennedy Laurie
Dickson, to copy the design of the Phonograph, in the process etching
photographs onto metal cylinders, but that design proved unworkable.
Dickson,
whose contributions to the cinema were considerable, and Edison developed the
Kinetoscope in 1891. With
action shot in the first film studio, the “Black Maria,” Kinetoscope parlors
opened in 1894 and quickly became popular throughout America.
Items such as Sandow the Strong Man and The Kiss (right)—
and the number of vaudeville acts and
boxing bouts were, in effect, little more than unedited lengths of footage, no
longer than the action itself or the particular strip of celluloid. Neglecting
to take out overseas patents, Edison completely dismissed the potential of
projection and concentrated on exploiting the peepshow, which he believed would
be just another fad in a novelty-hungry age. His misjudgment would turn out to
be both avaricious and costly.
Video
(requires, as do those below, RealPlayer, available as a free download from www.real.com):
August
& Louis Lumière
The
age of inventions culminated in the event that traditionally signals the birth
of the cinema: the first demonstration to a paying audience of the Lumières’
Cinematographe
in the Salon Indien, a basement room of the Grand Café
in Paris, on December 28, 1895. In essence, August (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948)
simply won the race to find a workable method of combining the Kinetoscope with
the magic lantern. Many contemporaries had competed, and others had given public
demonstrations of their projectors before December 28, 1895, but it is this date
that historians hold sacred. The Lumières
merit elevation above their peers. Their portable, handcranked cameras
(invented by Louis in a single night when unable to sleep), capable of shooting,
printing and projecting moving pictures, were soon filming around the world to
produce a catalogue of general, military, comic and scenic views, as well as
living portraits. The limitations of Dickson's studio-bound shorts were soon
exposed alongside the Lumières
more spontaneous 15-20 second slices of life. Reflecting the composed look of
contemporary photography rather than the theatrical tableau, their “pictures
in motion” had a depth of scene that contributed to the realism of the train
pulling into the Garc de la Ciotat and a basic narrative pattern of beginning,
middle, and end that informed even the Workers Leaving the Factory. The
naturalism and bustle of many of their actualities (actuality films)
foreshadowed the style of the Soviet Kino-Eye and the Italian Neo-Realists,
while Baby's Lunch has a distinct home-movie feel. Also on the Lumières'
opening bill was L’Arrosure Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled),
the first screen gag and the earliest narrative film.
Video
(requires RealPlayer, available as a free download from www.real.com):
Considering
the length of its prehistory and the comparative spans required by the novel and
the other arts, the speed with which the cinema developed its complex code of
instantly recognizable narrative symbols and its own grammar and poetics is all
the more remarkable. Yet few were willing to concede that film, with its roots
in pulp fiction, comic strips, popular photography and melodrama, was an art,
dismissing it as a fairground attraction or a magician's prop. Ironically, it
was a French illusionist, George
Méliès (1861-1938),
considered by many “the father of the narrative film,” who was to become the
screen's first true artist.
Between
1896 and 1906, his Star Film company made in excess of 500 films, of which fewer
than 140 survive. 
Producer,
director, writer, designer, cameraman and actor, Méliès
is attributed with the first use of dissolves, superimposition, time-lapse
photography, art direction and artificial lighting effects. His range of subject
was equally impressive: trick shorts, fantasies (Cinderella, 1899),
historical reconstructions (Benvenuto Cellini, 1904), docudramas (The
Dreyfus Affair, 1899), and science fiction adventures, the most famous being
the thirty-scene A Trip to the Moon (adapted from a Jules Verne short
story), which has now been restored with its original narration.
(MTV aficionados may recognize the film as the inspiration for The Smashing Pumpkins
video for "Tonight Tonight.") Méliès
broke from the photographic impulses of the primitives to show that the movie
camera could lie. He recognized the difference between screen and real time and
conceived a bewildering array of optical effects to expand the parameters of the
fictional film story. Chaplin called him 'the alchemist of light' and D. W.
Griffith claimed “I owe him everything.”
And his influence on Jean Cocteau was demonstrable even as late as
Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast.
Yet the Méliès
camera was always a spectator with a front-row view, complete with stage
entrances and scenery that prevented action in depth. Some accused him of
producing kitsch, others of “genteel pornography,” but Méliès’s
chief failing was a dearth of imagination which prevented him from exploiting
fully the cinematic techniques he had devised.
Video
Yet
not even Méliès
could reproduce the excitement generated by the films of Edwin S. Porter (1870-1941).
During his time as an Edison projectionist, Porter had begun to appreciate that
the syntactic unit of the narrative film was not the scene (as thought Méliès)
but the shot. The Life of an American Fireman (1902) remains significant
for a number of genuine innovations, including the depiction of onscreen
thought and the use of documentary footage for a fictional purpose, while the
techniques of cross-cutting and creative geography taught audiences how to make
mental associations between events without the benefit of a rigid chronology.
Porter
did incorporate parallel cutting into his next film, an embryonic Western, The
Great Train Robbery, in 1903. The action began by following traditional
editing conventions, but Porter soon started cross-cutting for rhythm and pace,
overlapping shots to increase tension. The diagonal movement of the characters
across the screen, in-camera “matting” to give the impression of the passing
scene, the depth of training to convey privileged information to the audience,
the depiction of onscreen thought, the use of documentary footage, and the use
of pans and tilts to follow the action all added to the fluidity and intensity
of the narrative. Regrettably, there was no intercutting within scenes, the
interiors (in stark contrast to the realism of the exteriors) were woefully
synthetic and the acting highly theatrical; still, 
The Great Train Robbery
established the basic principles of continuity editing and did much to widen the
vocabulary of film's universal language. Its post-production tinting was one of
the first uses of color for artistic effect.
Porter's revolution gave cinema a new spatial and temporal freedom, but
like Méliès
he was unable to keep pace with public demand and retired in 1915. Although he
had included an extreme close-up of the ringing alarm in The Life of an
American Fireman, Porter had filmed The Great Train Robbery
exclusively in long or medium shot, apart from its shock finale, a close-up of a
bandit firing directly at the viewer.
Video
In the 45 or so films he directed or supervised between
1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith shaped the basic elements of film-making into the
language and syntax that would serve cinema for over half a century. Yet for
much of this period Griffith was largely unaware that he was transforming filmic
expression. Contrary to the above declaration, the "father of film
technique" was not an innovator. Instead, he was an intuitive refiner and
extender of existing cinematic methods, which he combined with the conventions
of Victorian art, literature and drama in order to tell his stories in the most
effective way.
Within five years of his directorial debut, Griffith had
completely mastered the film form. Although The Adventures of Dollie
(1908) was an incongruous mix of realism and clichéd melodrama, it had an
instinctive narrative fluidity and symmetry. Griffith composed carefully to
utilize the whole frame and often used deep focus and long shots to heighten the
drama.. He cut on action throughout, allowing the narrative content to determine
the placement of the camera and the timing of the cut, and the last-minute
rescue (which was to become something of a trademark) was particularly notable
for its rhythm and consistency of screen geography.
Griffith's heavy workload gave him ample opportunity to experiment
with film grammar and rhetoric. In addition to exploring the potential of
flashbacks, "eyeline matches" and camera distances, his earliest
pictures also showed that individual shots were cinematic phrases that could be
edited together into meaningful sequences without a concrete dramatic logic to
link them. His depiction of parallel events and emotions in purely cinematic
terms prefigured later approaches to montage and subjective camera. And
each film brought a new sophistication. Griffith used domestic props to create
angles and shape and deepen the frame. He developed Porter's tilts, pans, and
"tracks" into decipherable forms of expression, even cross-cutting
between tracking shots. He used artificial lighting to suggest firelight
in and what came to be called "Rembrandt lighting" as a narrative and
characterization device. Graphic techniques, such as the dissolve, fade, iris
and mask, were designated narrative purposes, while split screens and soft focus
were sparingly used for additional impact. Griffith also transformed the
art of screen acting, right down to instituting rehearsals. Aware that the
camera could magnify even the slightest gesture or expression, he insisted on
restraint and all adherence to a range of movements and mannerisms which clearly
denoted certain emotions, personality traits and psychological states. He
invariably cast to suit particular physical types, and assembled a company that
comprised some of the leading names of the silent era.
It is often overlooked how versatile Griffith was in his
one-reel days. In addition to melodramas, thrillers and literary adaptations, he directed religious allegories, histories, morality tales, rural romances,
social commentaries, satires, and Westerns. The Girl and Her
Trust is an example of D. W. Griffith in his prime, working at the height of
his powers for the American Biograph Company in 1912. It features low
comedy, sweet romance, conventional villains ("Tramps!"), the
obligatory chase cut into parallel narrative actions, and a breezy, blushing
heroine. There is great cinematic sophistication here: extreme close-ups and
long shots, rapidly moving cameras, multiple story lines clearly cut together, a
variety of camera angles, expert mixing of moods and tones, and pleasing,
naturalistic acting.
Griffith's feature films betray all his strengths and
weaknesses as a director. Sets and costumes were painstakingly authentic,
narrative development taut, and the acting exceptional. The editing was
powerful. Yet in striving for scale and significance, Griffith discarded
experimentation and exposed his intellectual shallowness. His vision
overbalanced the rather contrived melodramas which he considered to be High Art.
Consequently, sentimentality, pretentiousness and political naïveté permeate
much of his later work, including his best-known films, The Birth of a Nation
and Intolerance.
All Griffith had learned during his apprenticeship went
into The Birth of a Nation, and cinematically, there is much to admire:
the reconstruction of period, the historical tableaux, the night photography,
the use of tint and the unparalleled power and control of the editing, which
linked 1544 separate shots into a cogent narrative. Overriding all, however, is
the film's racial bigotry, which did much to revive the moribund Ku Klux Klan
and caused a storm of protest. Still, The Birth of a Nation was a huge
commercial success, recouping its costs in just two months. Griffith invested
much of the profit into his wounded response to the adverse reaction, Intolerance.
Interweaving four narratives spanning 2500 years, Griffith
aimed to show how truth has always been threatened by hypocrisy and injustice,
but he was ultimately frustrated by thematic inconsistency and the idealism of
his solutions. There were many cinematic highlights:
the tracking shot of the vast Babylonian set, the battle scenes, the moments of
intimate detail amidst the broad sweep and the abstract, or expressive, montage
which unified the individual segments. But audiences were confused by the style
and alienated by the sermonizing and Griffith spent the rest of his career
paying for its failure. Suffocated by the studio system, his work became
increasingly conventional, old-fashioned, and increasingly prone to repetition
and sentimentality. Griffith's final film, The Struggle (1931), was a
failure which forced him to endure a seventeen-year exile from Hollywood,
snubbed by the medium he had done so much to fashion.
Video:
The earliest years of movie production provide two levels
of special satisfaction. The first is familiar, and obvious from the
works considered above: the styles and stories, the idioms and issues that
characterize the range of cinematic possibility as we perceive it today, were
nearly all present from the very beginning. To study cinema today is to
better understand where the medium has been. The
second level is less evident, though no less important. Early film is
of interest not only because it illuminates present practices, but also because
beyond considerable
historical interest, these filmmakers produced material that provides immense
pleasure on its own terms. These are old films, and they are influential films.
But beyond that, the bottom fine is that they are wonderful films, rewarding
close attention with great enjoyment.