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CHAPTER 11
FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: 1914-1919
During the years of the First World War there was not a great deal of development in film technology, but stylistic development continued rapidly in the United States of America. It is often said that the way the war cut
off the European film producers from many of their markets was responsible for the post-war dominance of the American film industry, but in fact the American industry was moving into a commanding position even before the
war started at the end of 1914. This can be seen from the figures for the numbers of films shown in Germany in 1912, and those put on sale in France from 1911 to 1914, as quoted in Georges Sadoul's Histoire Générale du Cinéma (Tome III, `Le Cinéma devient un Art', Premier Volume, p.10). In 1912 as many American films as
French films were shown in Germany, and in Berlin in particular far more, while in France the French industry's share of the home market fell steadily from 1911 to 1914, with the share taken by American films rising steadily
to take the leading position in 1914. Eye-witness accounts of the American takeover of the market in Paris can be read in Richard Abel'sFrench Cinema: The First Wave 1915-1929 (Princeton, 1984). Italian films held
third place in both the French and German markets throughout, followed by Danish films, and then the rest. The rapid expansion of the American industry pre-war must have been aided by the size of its home market, but
when one compares a sample of American and French films made in 1913, one can see that what the European cinema-goers were already voting for in the fairly free competition for their money was:- more shots per reel,
more shots in each scene, more close shots, and more naturalistic acting. In other words, a semblance of the more interesting parts of reality improved and accelerated by leaving out the dull bits, and serving the exciting bits
right up to the audience. The years 1914 to 1919 in the American cinema were concerned with the further development of these formal features, and also with the appearance of the newer features of `continuity cinema'.
The most obvious characteristic of the period, which was the establishment of films several reels long as the major part of production, had little influence on most aspects of the formal developments taking place, though it did contribute to the increasing profitability and expansion of the American film industry. The many new directors entering the profession, mostly drawn from the ranks of the actors, were important in establishing the new developments, since they were not hidebound by the earlier formal practices, and in fact the decade from 1914 onwards was the period when film directors had their greatest power in the American cinema. This is indicated by the slogan of the Triangle Distributing Corporation: 'The greatest pictures by the greatest moviemakers', and by the fact that many directors who had made a name for themselves were able to set up personal production companies towards the end of the war.
Film Stock
In 1916 the standard Eastman Kodak camera negative was improved to give what became known inside the company as Cine Negative Film Type E. A year later this was replaced by Type F, but this had no major visual
effect, for it had the same speed as the previous Kodak negatives, and like them had an orthochromatic emulsion. It seems likely that there was some improvement in its granularity and definition, however. Some years later this
standard Kodak movie negative came to be called Negative Film Par Speed (Type 1201). There were no other developments in this area during the years 1914-1919.
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Lighting Equipment
As is well-known, these years saw the introduction of spotlights for the lighting of studio interiors in America, but
the details of the process are not simple. The lighting units themselves were standard theatrical-type spotlights,
with the carbons producing the arc contained in an oblong box of black sheet steel, and the light from the source
being concentrated into a beam by a large glass lens several inches in diameter set in the front of the casing. By later standards they were rather inefficient, since only a small fraction of the light from the arc made its way
through the lens, and most was scattered around inside the walls of the housing. These spotlights could be focussed by moving the arc inside the housing with respect to the lens, and from 1915 they were used in a range
of sizes, from those drawing 60 amperes of electricity to those drawing 120 amperes. The principal American manufacturer of such lights for theatrical purposes was Kliegl Brothers, and they, and later others, supplied them
for film purposes as well.
Theatrical spotlights had been used as props within the scene in a number of films with a backstage story from at least as early as 1911 (A Stage Romance), but in these cases they were just standing round in the background unlit. The earliest possible instance of an arc spot effect being used as part of the lighting scheme is in At the Foot of the Stairs, where the principal scene is lit in low-key for suspense purposes. This Universal film was released in July 1914, well before Wyckoff and DeMille had done anything with arc spots. But it is very difficult to make out exactly which type of arc light is doing the lighting unless the instance is in a very low-key situation, so I may have missed something earlier amongst the films I have seen.
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The use of arc spotlights was very limited at first, and most American films continued to use no backlighting on interior scenes for the next few years. In this matter, as in others to do with film lighting, there was something of a split between films shot in the East Coast studios and those shot in California. In the years 1914-1916 films from the East, though more completely lit by artificial light than the Californian ones, stayed with either frontal light, or side, or three-quarters back light done with arc floodlights in the way that had begun to develop before 1914, while the films from the West Coast had more of a tendency to use full backlight on interiors. This backlighting of the actors was still sometimes done with sunlight in 1915, as in the illustration fromBetween Men, which was made in the Thomas Ince studios in that year. This kind of backlighting was done by constructing the set so that the sun was behind the actors, with its light diffused by the usual overhead cotton screens, rather than in front of the actors, as had previously been the case. The frontal light came from Cooper-Hewitts and arc floodlights as usual.
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On New York films at this date three-quarter backlight from arc floods on floor stands was sometimes used on close shots, and rather more often than in the previous period. Indeed by 1916 the usage was just starting to spread to some European films, as in some close shots in Signorina ciclone, as was the idea of using diffuse sunlight through the studio roof to give a weak backlight.
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By 1917 backlighting with an arc spotlight from overhead was appearing in more American features such as Forbidden Paths, and for the first time cameramen tried using two slightly separated arc spotlights from high behind so that they hit the side of the head from glancing angles on either side, producing a bright rim round the whole of the upper side of the figure. This began to appear in a limited number of close shots in some Famous Players-Lasky films in 1917, for example Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and A Mormon Maid, lit by Walter Stradling and Charles Rosher respectively, and it seems the idea spread slowly from there. Walter Stradling took it with him to the other Mary Pickford films he lit afterwards, such as Stella Maris (1918), and Rosher also began to use the idea consistently. By that year a single backlight was being used in some, but not all, interior scenes in other quality American features; e.g. A Modern Musketeer (Allan Dwan, 1918) and The Gun Woman (Frank Borzage, 1918). Walter Stradling had also begun to use arc spotlights for key and fill lighting on the front of figures as early as 1915, in Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo (1915), and frequently followed the practice thereafter. However, most cameramen continued to use floodlights for the key and fill in figure lighting, but there were exceptions in this, as can be seen in The Ghost of Rosie Taylor (1918), which is also lit using spots for much of the key and fill on the figures.
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In 1918 another major technological development in lighting equipment occurred with the introduction of a new type of arc spotlight, which was based on the military searchlight. This formed the spot beam with a large parabolic mirror a couple of feet in diameter, behind the arc, and it had no lens in front of the arc. This type of spotlight was much more efficient, and could throw a fairly broad beam over a large area from a distance, although this beam was less precisely controllable than that from the earlier type of spotlight. Over the next few years such reflector spotlights, referred to as `Sunlight arcs', came to be principally used for lighting large-scale night exteriors, but it would seem that in some of the daylight exterior scenes of Daddy Long-Legs (1919), the cameraman Charles Rosher used them for long-range fill light on the figures on daylight exteriors, rather than using the usual reflected sunlight. He also tried using the `Sunlight arc' as a floodlight on at least one interior scene in the film.
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Yet another important technical development in lighting during these years was the introduction of diffusing screens which were fixed in front of arc floodlights. These screens, which were made of ripple glass or spun glass sheets, were fixed to the front of the arc housing, completely enclosing the carbon arc inside it, rather than letting the arc shine unimpeded through the square opening as before. These diffusing screens completely changed the quality of the light coming from arc floodlights, making it more diffuse, so that it now cast softer -edged shadows instead of the hard-edged shadows that had been so characteristic of arc floodlighting. This was particularly significant in figure lighting, as the shadows cast by the protuberances of the human face upon itself were also softened, and if the key floodlight was fairly close to the actor's face, the result was an approach to the sort of `soft lighting' coming from a north-facing window that had long been considered attractive in portrait photography. (It must be made clear that this sort of softening of arc floodlights was only tending in the direction of modern `soft lighting', as the diffusing screen over the arc opening was only about 15 inches across, which is far smaller than true softlight sources.) The origin of this use of diffusion on arc floodlights, which came in fairly suddenly in the work of the better cameramen about 1916, is not clear. Fanchon the Cricket (1915) is the earliest film that I have noticed with the light from arc floodlights softened. Since arcs had been used for filming for over a decade in many studios, and since the use of diffused arc light in still photography goes back years before that to the beginning of the century, it is a little difficult to see its sudden appearance as late as 1917 as due to the influence of still photography, though that is not completely impossible. Another possibility is that it arose accidentally as a side effect of the attempt to cure the `Klieg eye' condition that began to afflict film actors a couple of years before, when the use of arc floodlights first started to become the main source of light on the East coast, rather than just a supplementary addition. `Klieg eyes' was an inflammation of the eyes resulting from their irritation by the fine dust in the studio atmosphere coming from the burnt carbons of the arcs, perhaps supplemented by the large amount of ultra-violet light given off by the arc flame. (Arc lights were generically referred to as Klieg lights at this time, after the Kliegl company, the principal American manufacturer of arc lights for theatrical use. In Germany arc floodlights were called `Jupiter lights' for similar reasons.) Certainly the cause and cure of `Klieg eyes' was a subject of considerable discussion in 1916-1917, and even if this was not the reason for putting glass diffusion screens on the front of arc lights, their enclosure in this way certainly stopped the arc dust getting out into the atmosphere, and also absorbed the ultra-violet radiation, as ordinary glass is opaque to it. On the other hand, the fact that some 1917-1918 films use arc floodlights both with and without diffusion in various scenes might suggest that the use of diffused arcs was a purely aesthetic decision, as a response to the dropping of the general frontal diffuse light which had previously concealed to some extent the harshness of the light from open arcs. This point can probably be decided by further research.
Although by this period most of the studios were using electricity from their own direct current (D.C.) generators to power their arc lighting, one can occasionally see one of the cheaper films that has scenes lit by alternating current (A.C.) arcs. The visible result is a periodic fluctuation of the light level several times a second due to the stroboscopic effect between the frequency of the A.C. fluctuations and that of the opening and closing of the camera shutter. This is quite a different matter from the occasional flicker of unsteady burning or near extinction to which arc lights have always been prone, as a result of irregularities in the automatic feeding mechanism advancing the carbons as they burn away in the arc. Although the carbon feed mechanisms were improved over the decades, all older cinemagoers will have sometimes experienced the dimming and extinction of an unattended arc-source film projector resulting from the same cause.
Mention of both shortcomings of arc light sources, the first eventually eliminated by the use of D.C., and the second still with us, can often be found in the reminiscences of people who were in films in that period, and both can be seen in its films, as retakes were not usual in the early silent period if an arc floodlight lighting a minor part of the background happened to go out in the middle of a take. This attitude began to change in the nineteen-twenties.
Throughout the years 1914-1919 the general large-area lighting of sets continued to be supplied by racks of Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapour tubes, and in some of the smaller companies by arrays of street- lighting type arcs hung overhead.
The General Development of Lighting Style
The first generalization to be made about the development of American film lighting during these years is a fairly
well-known one -- it speaks of a transition from films being lit with the help of the general diffuse light through the
glass studio roofs, to films being shot entirely under artificial light in blacked-out studios by 1919. Although the
latter situation is fairly true, as already indicated there were a number of films shot in East Coast studios even
before 1914 which had scenes lit entirely by artificial light, and this separation between the lighting practices on
the two sides of the United States persisted to some extent till around 1918. This is best made clear with some examples. To speak of Californian film-making first, the interiors of Birth of a Nation (1915) were lit entirely by
daylight controlled in one way or another, and a sketch of G.W. Bitzer's lighting procedures can be read in Karl Brown's Adventures with D.W. Griffith. There are one or two pieces of backlighting on interiors in this film
done by letting in a patch of direct sunlight through a gap in the overhead cotton screens, and the `spotlight' effect
on Lincoln's assassin was created with sunlight reflected from a mirror. An even better example of what could be done solely with controlled daylight is given by the lighting of Raoul Walsh's Regeneration (1915), for which
Georges Benoit created remarkably precisely controlled gradations and localizations of sunlight across some of the interior scenes. He also used sunlight for backlight in many of the interiors, with the key light coming from
reflectors put in front, in the same manner as was now standard for exterior scenes.
Even by 1915 the more common approach, both on the East Coast and on the West Coast, was to add some arc lighting to sharpen up the general diffuse lighting of the set; in the New York studios the diffuse light came mainly from Cooper-Hewitts, and in California from diffuse daylight. One of the most elegant demonstrations of this earlier (and about to be superseded) style is given by the lighting of David Harum (Allan Dwan, 1915). Although the photography of this film has been recently credited to Harold Rosson, it seems probable to me that he was only assistant cameraman on this film, as he was only twenty years old at the time, and his next claimed solo credit was four years later.
The less common, but more advanced, style to be observed in 1915, which consisted in lighting a fair number of scenes principally or entirely with arc lights, seems to have been confined to some of the New York and New Jersey studios. A good example of this is given by the remarkable short film His Phantom Sweetheart, which was made by Ralph Ince for Vitagraph. In this film the majority of the interior scenes are lit solely with arc floodlights; by necessity in the case of those shot inside a real theatre auditorium and its foyer. As can be seen from the illustrations, the theatre interior is lit with two groups of arcs, one on each side of the camera, and both coming in at roughly 45 degrees to the lens axis, on the pattern established at Vitagraph some years before. What is new in this film is the scale and complexity of the scenes. His Phantom Sweetheart also contains a climactic scene lit with genuinely low-key lighting done with arcs to contribute to a succession of moods -- sensuality, suspense, and terror. The rather similar, and much better-known example in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) is no more thoroughgoing and extended in its use of low-key arc lighting.
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By 1916 there were many films coming out of the East Coast studios that had most of their studio interior scenes lit solely with arc floodlights. One example is Silks and Satins (J. Searle Dawley), which had the lights disposed so as to give a stronger key light from one of the side-front directions, and weaker fill light from the other, and also sometimes three-quarter back lighting through a real or implied door or window opening in the set. (Due to the way that the light intensity from an arc floodlight falls off rapidly with distance, it was not possible to use one to do backlighting from directly behind and above in Long Shots. This was only possible with spotlights.) In Silks and Satins no diffusing screens were used on the lights to soften them. Relatively unsubtle arc floodlighting like this, or worse, can still be seen in some films made in 1918, particularly in California, e.g. A Modern Musketeer.
By 1917, as already remarked, the floodlights were being diffused a good deal of the time on some films, and one of the better examples of this was The On-The-Square Girl. (Although the cameraman and director of this film are named on the titles as Morris E. Hair and Frederick J. Ireland, Kevin Brownlow has suggested to me that these are pseudonyms for Arthur Miller and George Fitzmaurice. Given the high quality of the lighting and direction of this film, and that it comes from George Fitzmaurice's company Astra, and also that it was listed in a trade source at the time as a George Fitzmaurice production, this seems quite likely.) A fully accredited example of what the change to diffusion on arc lights looked like is given by Till I Come Back To You (Cecil B. DeMille, 1918), which was lit by Alvin Wyckoff and Charles Rosher. In this film there was still some contribution from the old-fashioned general overall light as well as the well-managed directional components from diffused arc lights on the closer shots.
Figure Lighting
From these years onwards it became the practice in America to treat the lighting of the closer shots of the actors
separately from the general lighting of the set as it was visible in Long Shot, and indeed to make changes in the positions of the lights when shooting the closer shots which were to be cut into the main scene. (Naturally there
has to be some sort of very rough correspondence between the look of the lighting in more distant and in closer shots, but nevertheless quite substantial changes are not noticed by the audience, now as well as then.) Although
the essentials had already been independently developed in a crude way, it was around 1917 that a few of the best cameramen such as Walter Stradling and Charles Rosher polished up what were to be the standard patterns
of figure lighting, presumably drawing on still photographic practice.
The most basic pattern of figure lighting is to have a key (or brightest) light directed at the figure from the front on one side of the lens axis, a weaker fill light from the other side of the lens axis, and a backlight shining forwards onto the back of the actor. What would be considered the ideal angles along which to direct these lights depended in the first place on the exact direction in which the actor was facing with respect to the camera, and in the second place on the shape of the actor's face. Besides the skill required in selecting the angles for the lights, there was also the matter of arranging the relative levels of brightness of the key and fill lights. It was here that there began to be a marked improvement over the practice of a few years before, for earlier it had been quite common to have the lights from either side of the camera of equal, or nearly equal, brightness. This produced two shadows from the nose, one falling on either side of the face.
Charles Rosher's progress in this respect can be illustrated by the difference between his work on The Sowers (1916) and The Secret Game (1917). In the former the lighting on the figure is rather flat, since the key and fill lights are of almost equal brightness, but in the latter the relative intensities and positions of the lights are very well judged. The key light was still being placed only slightly above actor eye-level in most films in 1917, but by 1919 some cameramen were beginning to place the key light rather higher when appropriate, as did George Barnes inDangerous Hours.
As already mentioned, a modification to the initial use of a single backlight now began to appear, with a few cameramen using two backlights, one directed from each side at the back of the figures. This can be seen intermittently in such films as Fighting Odds photographed by René Guissart in 1917, and Stella Maris and The Whispering Chorus, photographed in 1918 by Walter Stradling and Alvin Wyckoff respectively. This use of double backlights could be combined with either a single key light and no fill from the front to give an alternative form of three-point lighting to the basic form described above, or with both key and fill from the front to give four -point lighting, which was less common initially. Later the use of two backlights and a weaker light straight on from the front came to be the standard way of treating a `profile two-shot' (two actors facing each other), but this did not happen at first.
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It is at present impossible to tell who were the principal forces behind the developments I have outlined above, in part owing to the lack of cameraman credits before 1917, which was the year in which it became usual to name the cameraman on the better class of production. We also do not know what were the aesthetic assumptions behind the adoption of the standard techniques, though it might be possible to find out more about this with extensive research.
Interior Lighting in Europe
In 1914 the best European lighting of interiors was being done in a rather similar way to that in America, with
general diffuse lighting through the studio roof being sharpened up a little with arc floodlights in many scenes, but
also with the rare occasional scene done mostly with arc floodlights when a special lower key effect was wanted. Over the war years in Scandinavia there was a tendency, just as there was in America, to move towards heavier
use of arcs, but the Scandinavian studios were never blacked out permanently at this time, and even in the early
'twenties many scenes were still being lit in part with diffuse daylight, as can be seen in the films of Dreyer, Stiller, and Sjöström.
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The most accomplished Danish cameraman during this period was Johan Ankerstjerne, and his work on Benjamin Christensen's Haevnens Nat (1916) shows the way that a few European cameramen were also developing the kind of three-point lighting that has already been described in American films. But Ankerstjerne only did this on closer shots, where the light applied from the three-quarters back position could come from an arc floodlight. There was no introduction of backlighting from directly behind with spotlights in Europe, nor any use of spotlights at all for that matter, until well after the end of the war. Ankerstjerne also did some notable low-key work -- such things as a hand-held lamp casting looming shadows in a flight down subterranean passageways -- in Verdens Undergang (1915), which was yet another of the speculative and apocalyptic epics like Civilization which were produced during the early stages of World War I.Homunculus (1916), a German contribution to this genre, shows the retarded state of lighting in that country, in that its low-key effects were done solely by the control of daylight with blinds and the way the set was constructed, in the manner of the Danish films of some years before.
1918 the Germans had fallen badly behind in lighting, as is obvious even in a Lubitsch film such as Die Augen der Mumie Ma, in which the interiors were still done with general overhead diffuse light, with only a little sharpening here and there with arc floodlights. And even this was not well done. Things began to improve a little in 1919, particularly in the best productions of that year (Lubitsch again), but in most films the way light was applied to the figures was still rather crude by American standards.
The flowering of Swedish cinema during the war also involved some notable camerawork by Julius Jaenzon and others, and not surprisingly the styles used owed quite a lot to earlier Danish and French examples. The most common approach in Sweden to lighting the general shot of a scene was to bring the light in from one major direction, either from the side or from above at the front of the set. The source of side light was usually a large opening such as an actual (or implied) door or window letting in the diffuse daylight coming through the glass wall of the studio. The result was not an even flood of light over the whole extent of the set, but moderately localized light in one area tailing off into the further corners. Sometimes foreground features of the set or actors were left relatively dark. A good example of this is given by the lighting of Mauritz Stiller's Balletprimadonnan (1915). An alternative form of this localized lighting with natural light which was very popular with the cameramen at Svenska Biografteatern was to allow direct sunlight to fall frontally from high above onto a central area of the foreground of the set where most of the action took place, with more general diffuse lighting working its way into the farther parts of the set to light them more dimly. This second method of using mostly natural light gave somewhat the same effect of separation of lighter figures from darker background that had earlier been achieved by American cameramen using artificial light sources. When using both these methods of lighting the placement of the actors at the various stages of the evolution of the scene becomes quite important if their faces are to be clearly visible, and not heavily shadowed when they move into some parts of the set. It also precludes the use of a lot of cutting around to different angles within the scene. As the Swedish directors only used a limited amount of cutting within scenes at this point in history, they experienced no difficulties because of this. Nor did the major exponent of a somewhat similar approach in America.
Maurice Tourneur and Cinematography
There were some American film-makers who used lighting styles other than those already described, and the most important of these was Maurice Tourneur. His cameramen used the most precise and subtle form of lighting
from a single direction, and had probably evolved it from the rather more primitive French forms current before 1914. Although Tourneur used more cuts within a scene than the Swedish directors, he overcame the problems
in staging associated with the single direction lighting style by having a certain amount of localized fill light on the actors when they were in some positions, and also by unobtrusive relighting for the closer shots.
The most obvious visual feature of Tourneur's films, which was the creation of foreground silhouette effects, fitted in well with the handling of the main light source as described above, but this particular feature does not appear continuously in every scene in his films. On the contrary, during the years 1914 to 1916 many of the scenes in his films are lit in the more conventional manner usual at that time in American films. In fact, some of Tourneur's most striking images were obtained purely through the compositional arrangements in shots which were lit in a high key, i.e. with moderately even illumination over the whole frame.
Although hardly any of their films from this period have survived, it seems probable that the other emigré French directors at the Fort Lee studios -- Perret, Capellani, and Chautard -- worked in similar, though less exalted, versions of this `pictorialist' style. (The sense of the description `pictorialist' is that the compositional style is closely based on that used in the painting of past periods -- say the Salon painting of the end of the nineteenth century -- as opposed to the relatively nondescript compositions of the already existing film tradition, where the connection with fine art is at second or third hand.) The principal continuers of this tradition in America during the 'twenties were Rex Ingram and Josef von Sternberg, though in the case of the latter it evolved into a style with quite new qualities. Traces of the Tourneur influence can occasionally be seen elsewhere, for instance in von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, and also in the films of Clarence Brown, Tourneur's former assistant.
The Italian Picture
One aspect of the decline of the Italian cinema during the First World War was the pursuit of pictorialism, particularly in exterior scenes, regardless of its relevance to the narrative. In short, the story stopped while the
leading characters stood around in a beautiful landscape picture. This can be readily seen in the Eleanora Duse vehicle, Cenere (1916), but it touched even the best Italian films of the period, such as Assunta Spina (1915).
The Photography of Night Exterior Scenes
In 1914 exterior scenes purporting to be taking place at night were still exclusively shot under full daylight, and
the impression of night was conveyed by the standard blue tinting, usually with the help of a previous descriptive
title. But in 1915 the first night scenes actually shot at night with the help of artificial light appeared in a few American films. Notable early examples include a street scene in Cecil B. DeMille's Kindling which was lit by
Alvin Wyckoff solely with a few strategically placed arc floodlights, and a night battle scene done the same way in a short Thanhouser Company production, Their One Love. G.W. Bitzer's cruder solution to the same
problem in Birth of a Nation was to use pyrotechnic flares to light the scene of the farewell ball before the battle
. By 1916 the use of arc floodlights on moderate scale night exteriors was becoming more common in the better American films, and by 1918 even an ordinary Western such as Henry King's Six Feet Four has a large-scale
night street scene lit in this way. But very distant landscape scenes still had to be given normal daytime photography, and then integrated with closer shots which had been photographed `night for night' with artificial
light by applying the same overall blue tinting to the whole sequence. Some cameramen and directors show the first signs of trying to improve on this method however, and there are a few very rare cases where distant night
scenes have been photographed in the half-light of dusk (Female of the Species, 1916), or where the upper part of the scene has been darkened by putting a partial filter over it in front of the lens, as in Less Than the
Dust (1916). In such cases the cameramen avoided getting any appreciable amount of sky into the shot, but in general such an approach was neither possible nor striven for.
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In Europe the idea of lighting night exteriors with arc lights was also just beginning to appear, as in Bauer's Zhizn za zhizn (1916) and Sjöström's Berg-Ejvind och hans Hustru (1917). Elsewhere I have seen no sign of this technique before the 'twenties, but it must be emphasized that I am discussing location or `back-lot' exterior scenes, and not sets representing exteriors constructed inside a studio, such as those in Lubitsch's Die Puppe (1919), or the subsequent Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920).
Shadowplay and Other Lighting Effects
It was not until this period that the use of cast shadows for expressive purposes began its true development, though occurrences still remain fairly rare. Cecil B. DeMille began using the shadows of objects outside the
frame cast into the frame area as early as 1915. The well-known example here was the shadow of the prison bars falling on the husband in The Cheat, but the first instance of this in DeMille films was earlier in 1915 in The
Girl of the Golden West, where a rope casually dangling on the set casts the threatening shadow of a hangman's noose at an appropriate moment. Variants of the idea also occur in Maria Rosa, where the villain casts his
shadow on the wall before he enters the scene, and it had spread to other countries by 1916, e.g. Protazanov's Pikovaya Dama and Abel Gance's Barberousse, where the shadow of the clutching hand of a criminal slides
onto the white pillow of the sleeping heroine. After a scattering of other similar examples we find a natural part of the set creating the shadow of a cross on the heroine at a suitable moment in Until they Get Me, by which time
such devices were available to any really enterprising director. Looming shadows had begun to spread to other directors by 1917, e.g. The Whip by Maurice Tourneur, and Kidnapped. And DeMille's The Whispering
Chorus of 1918 uses looming shadows cast on the walls from lights placed low in a scene in which the hero begins to stray into wrong-doing. There was no apparent light source in this scene motivating these upcast
shadows as there had been in the earlier Italian examples of low placed lights that I have mentioned, and this is also the case in Sidney and Chester Franklin's Going Straight (1917), in which a low placed light shining up into
a face in Close Up was used in a nightmare sequence without any apparent or reasonable source, purely to convey a sinister atmosphere as the hero's fears and worries were played out.
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Cameras
It was during these years that the Bell & Howell camera, described in a previous chapter, began to displace the Pathé studio camera as the major tool for American cameramen. Another new camera, the Akeley, was first
produced in 1917, but since it was a few years before it had any significant use, I will defer a description of it till the next chapter.
Angle Shots
In this period shots taken from really high- or low-angles continued to be rare, and mostly they were used in a situation where they could be understood as representing the Point of View of one of the characters in the scene
in question. However, there are examples of extreme high-angle shots which are objective, and definitely not POV shots, in films from most countries, from America to Russia. When they do occur, the allowance is one per
film. Ignoring distant shots from the ground towards a first floor window, or something similar, real low-angle shots are even rarer. By far the most striking instance in this class is a low-angle Close Up in Abel Gance's Barberousse. This is of the titular protagonist, at the point where he declares that he is `the King of the Forest',
and this must be intended to be expressive.
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Camera Movements
During the years 1914-1919, just as in previous years, there was little change in the way the vast majority of shots were taken with fixed framing, particularly in interior scenes. Very rarely one finds panning shots being
used to follow actors across a set, as in some Reginald Barker films such as Typhoon (1914) and Between Men
(1915), but there was some increase in the use of framing movements -- i.e. small pans and tilts to keep the actors well-framed -- as some directors started to take even more of their shots closer to the actors. (When
shooting close in it is possible to avoid the use of framing movements if the movements of the actors are carefully
controlled, but if the cameraman had the ability to turn the panning or tilting crank while also cranking the film
drive, it was easier on the actors to let the camera conform to them.) Early examples of this slight trend towards the greater use of framing movements can be seen in David Harum (Allan Dwan, 1915) and The Right Girl
(Ralph Ince, 1915), but by 1919 it is much easier to find examples amongst the increasing numbers of films that were now being shot from closer to the actors; e.g. Jubilo (Clarence Badger, 1919). As before, exterior action
scenes were the likeliest place to find camera movements.
Tracking Shots
Parallel tracking shots, in which the camera moves at a fixed distance from actors moving on a parallel course, continued to occur on rare occasions such as car and train chases, but tracking towards and away from groups
of actors who were not moving a great deal (which I call `tracking on a quasi-static scene') had a world-wide vogue in the wake of the Italian film Cabiria (1914). Such tracking shots were referred to at the time as `Cabiria movements', for it seems that no-one had taken much notice of the earlier tracking shots on quasi-static
scenes in American and English films, except perhaps Giovanni Pastrone, the director of Cabiria. At the time
Pastrone stated that his intention was to create a `three-dimensional' effect in the photography to show off the vast solid sets of his film, and for this reason his tracking shots were made moving inwards on a diagonal to his
sets. These tracks are also of a fairly limited extent, slow, and do not end too close to the actors. In 1915 and 1916 every bright young director had to have one or two `Cabiria movements' in one of his films, but they used
them slightly differently to Pastrone.
To pick just a few examples of this fashion from well-known directors, I will mention David Harum (Allan Dwan, 1915), Ditya bolshogo goroda (Yevgeni Bauer, 1914), Evangelimandens Liv (Holger Madsen, 1915) , and The Vagabond (Chaplin, 1916), all of which move in much closer to the actors rather faster than the originals in Cabiria, and also have trajectories fairly straight in or out from the scene. And all of these tracking shots incorporate a certain amount of panning as well, which those in Cabiria did not. The example in The Vagabond is the most elegant application: a track out from a close shot of a painting reveals the people standing around looking at it. Everyone seems to have been satisfied with at most two tracking shots on quasi-static scenes in their films, with one well-known exception. This was The Second-in-Command (William J. Bowman, 1915), which though of no great interest otherwise, contains about two dozen tracking shots. These go closer in to the actors than those in any of the other films, even as close as a Big Close Up at one point, and one of them is of greater complexity than any in other films as well. The tracking shot in question follows a couple round a dance floor amongst other couples, panning the while to keep them in frame, and the general effect is exactly the same as it would be twenty years later in any tracking shot following a dancing couple. The Parson's Horse Race (Edison, 1915) has a track back from the final group of characters at the end of the film, and can be seen as a development of D.W. Griffith's idea for the conclusion of A Girl and Her Trust (1912).
By 1917 the tracking shot craze in America was declining as fast as it had arisen, and by 1918 and 1919 tracking shots on quasi-static scenes had again become rare, the only examples I have come across being in The Blue Bird (Tourneur, 1918), and Stella Maris (Marshall Neilan, 1918), though there probably some more amongst the large number of lost films. The example inStella Maris is a further development of a usage that was to become popular much, much later: as the hero and heroine embrace in the final shot of the film the camera pulls back from them, and there is a slow fade-out. There are also still a few examples in European films, such as Herr Arnes Pengar (Stiller, 1919), Jacques Landauze, and Malombra.
Camera Movement and Expression
Cases where a camera movement could reasonably be considered to produce meanings through its conjunction with the action in the filmed scene are hard to find in this period, apart from the marginal case in Stella Maris
mentioned above. The only other instance that springs to mind is in von Stroheim's Blind Husbands, in which
what was to be a characteristic effect in his films first occurs: a Point of View shot tilting up from the feet to the face of a potential prey as the villain sized her up.
Depth of Field and Other Photographic Variables Influencing the Film Image
Depth of field(often erroneously called depth of focus) is one of the central factors controlling the appearance
of the film image, and it is really necessary to get a clear understanding of the way it is related to other variable
factors if one is to appreciate the interconnections between the visual qualities of films and film technology. The four central quantities whose variations are strictly connected one with another are Depth of Field
, Lens Aperture, Focal Length of Lens, and Lens Focus.
Depth of field is the range of distance in front of the camera lens inside which objects produce sharp images of themselves as seen on the cinema screen when the film is finally projected. The boundaries of this range of
sharp focus are approximate, as objects just outside it appear only slightly unsharp, or may even perhaps appear in focus to the casual glance at the cinema screen. The range of sharp focus as it appears on the ground- glass
screen of any camera view-finding system is not necessarily the same as that on the cinema screen, though usually close to it.
Lens Aperture is the size of the variable opening in the diaphragm built into the middle of the lens. Its size is
measured in `f-numbers' or `stops', and these f-numbers are inversely related to the actual diameter of the lens
diaphragm opening. the basic series of f-numbers runs f1, f1.4, f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22, f32, f45, f64, though other numbers may appear on actual lenses. Each of these f-numbers is said to differ from the next by
`one stop', and each change of a stop proceeding from left to right along the series halves the amount of light
passing through the lens to the film, and conversely in the other direction the amount of light passing is double for
each change of a stop. The smallest aperture on a film camera lens is now usually f22 or f32, but in the early days it could be f45, and the largest or maximum aperture was usually between f2 or f4.5. Determining the
correct exposure means determining the amount of light that has fallen on the scene and is then reflected from it
into the lens, and then determining the lens aperture that will permit just the right proportion of this light to fall
onto the film to give the right amount of activation of the silver halides contained in it. It is colloquially said by
cameramen that when there is twice as much light on the scene, then the light has `increased by one stop', and
that a photographic film that needs only half as much light as another is `faster by one stop'. Likewise, a film that needs four times as much light as another is `two stops slower', and so on.
Focal Length of a Lens is the distance behind its `optical centre' of the plane in which an image of an infinitely
distant object is formed. The `angle of view' of a camera lens is inversely proportional to its focal length for the
same size of film frame, so short focal length lenses have a wide angle of view, and are colloquially referred to as wide-angle lenses, and long focal length lenses have a narrow angle of view. This brings me to the awkward
question of what constitutes a standard lens. the opinions of film cameramen on this point have changed during this century, and as already remarked, some cameramen before 1914 considered a 3 inch (75 mm.) lens to be
standard, though most considered a 2 inch (50 mm.) lens to be standard, which was exclusively the case in the 'twenties. Later on, there was some move towards considering even shorter focal lengths as standard, as I shall
detail later. There has been another approach to this problem through experimental investigation of which camera lens focal length gives audiences the best impression of correct perspective in projected images of real
scenes, and this work suggest that in this sense a standard lens has a focal length of around 35 mm. to 40 mm., with the uncertainty corresponding to a real experimental variation.
Lens Focus is of course the distance at which lens focus is set so that objects at that distance will produce the very sharpest images on the film and on the screen.
Now the value of any one of these four quantities is determined by the values of the other three, but it is usual to consider the effect of the depth of field of holding any two of the other three fixed, and varying the third. The results of this are nowadays set down in depth of field tables, but these were not used in the period we are considering, and cameramen relied on experience to determine what would be in focus or not. Given that the other two factors are kept constant, the depth of field increases with (1) reduction of lens aperture, (2) decrease of focal length of the lens, (3) increase in distance at which the lens focus is set (up to a certain distance called the hyperfocal distance).
As has already been indicated, the aperture cannot be freely chosen in any particular case, for it depends in its turn on the light level on the scene to be photographed, and also on the sensitivity to light (the `speed') of the particular type of film in the camera. And on this point there was no real choice till the end of the silent period.
Lens Apertures Used In 1914-1919
Towards 1919, for the first time since the use of diffused sunlight was established for the filming of studio interior
scenes, there began to be signs of a change in the lens aperture used, and hence in the depth of field. In a few films such as Stella Maris (1918) and Jubilo (1919), there is quite clearly a visible reduction in the depth of field
when the actors are in Medium Shot, when compared with the situation at that closeness previously. I estimate that in these cases, and one or two similar ones that I have seen, the depth of field corresponds to an aperture of
about f4 with a 50 mm. lens. Although these examples presaged the trend of the next few years, they were not typical in 1919, but restricted to the work of a limited number of leading film-makers. This phenomenon may
have had something to do with the move towards shooting in totally blacked-out studios which was taking place around this time, for although in general the background of diffused daylight that was lost in this move was
replaced with greater use of Cooper-Hewitts and diffused arcs, it seems likely that this replacement was not complete, and hence the overall light level dropped slightly. However the majority of the studios were probably
still working at an aperture of about f5.6 most of the time, just as before the war. Certainly the now minor and declining studios of Vitagraph and Edison were, according to an article in The Transactions of the Society of
Motion Picture Engineers (No.8, 1919). However this is a suitable point to warn against taking such reports of
particular cases as applying in general, for it is clear from the detailed description in this article of the kind of
lighting set-ups being used at Vitagraph and Edison in 1919 that the cameramen there had not advanced from the standard procedures of several years before. Whereas in the major studios there had been the considerable
changes in lighting style that I have described earlier. Similarly, a reminiscence by a cameraman that he once took an exterior shot at f45 around this time does not mean that this was standard practice. It wasn't.
Lenses
There was no change in the variety of camera lenses available during the years 1914-1919, but the first signs of
the use of long focal-length lenses appeared in entertainment films. There are isolated shots in a crowd scene in Civilization (1916) and the battle on the pyramid in The Woman God Forgot (1917) which are taken with
lenses of focal length in the region of 4 to 6 inches, both scenes clearly having been shot with multiple cameras. This kind of usage remained very rare for decades, even in similar mass-action scenes, as most film-makers
preferred either to arrange the scene so that they could get one of the cameras in closer with a standard lens, or alternatively to restage parts of the action for a separate shot.
Another harbinger was Hendrik Sartov's use of a long lens for shooting Close Ups in Broken Blossoms (1919), though when this practice became common in the next decade most cameramen were satisfied with something like a 4 inch focal length, rather than the 6 inches plus used by Sartov.
The Use of the Iris Mask
The use of the iris mask came to a peak during the years 1914-1919, both as a way of beginning and ending a scene, and also to create a static mask or circular vignette around some shots. Whether or not Griffith and Bitzer
originated irising and the use of the iris vignette, it seems highly probable that the well-deserved prestige of D.W. Griffith and the success of Birth of a Nation were responsible for the popularization of this device. By 1914
Griffith had settled on the standard procedure of beginning every shot with an iris-out (i.e. opening the iris diaphragm in front of the lens), and concluding it in the reverse way, though some of these irisings were removed
later in the editing process. Nevertheless, in Griffith's films a sufficiently large number of shots, even within scenes
and sequences, remain with the irising still present to create a very discontinuous impression. Very few film-makers in America went as far as Griffith in this direction, and those few who did soon abandoned the extreme
of the practice, but Griffith himself persisted with it into the 'twenties. This may be because Billy Bitzer kept using a Pathé camera, which did not have a fading shutter, throughout this period, whereas other cameramen were
switching to the Bell & Howell as soon as they could afford it.
The films made at the Ince studios contain relatively few iris-ins and -outs, and those few are confined to the beginning and end of sequences. At the Ince studios, as elsewhere, fades also continued to be used for the purpose of beginning and ending sequences, without any consistent relation to the temporal connection between the sequences they separated. By 1918 the use of the iris to begin and end sequences was starting to decrease in the United States, though in Europe it was just starting to become fashionable. At that date it is quite easy to find American films such as Stella Maris in which only fades are used.
A variant of the simple iris opening out from the centre of the frame appears at the beginning of 1915 The Girl of the Golden West and Birth of a Nation. In this procedure the opening and closing centre of the iris started from whichever point in the frame contained the subject of principal interest in the scene, and it had an effect somewhat analogous to a modern zoom shot. There are very few other examples until 1917, when the device became slightly fashionable. However, the effect was always used very sparingly, and in most films that have ordinary irising it does not even appear. To produce `directional' irising of this kind required a special sliding mount for the iris diaphragm that enabled it to be centred in front of the appropriate point in the frame.
Yet other variants of the simple iris appeared at this time, and in these the mask opening or closing in front of the lens had shapes other than circular. One of the more frequent of these shapes could be called the opening slit; a vertical central split appears in the totally black frame, and widens till the whole frame is clear, revealing the scene that is about to start (The Cossack Whip, 1916). Eventually the diagonally opening slit appeared as well. Another form was the single mask that pulled up from the bottom like a theatre curtain, or down from the top, or back from one side, and yet another was the diamond-shaped opening iris, as in Poor Little Peppina and Alsace (1916), rather than the usual circle. Again, all of these variant forms were very infrequently used, and when they did occur in American films it was usually in the introductory stages. Before leaving the subject of irising, I should also mention that by 1918 the edges of ordinary circular irises were becoming very fuzzy in American films, sometimes to the point where it is difficult to distinguish an iris-out from a fade. This is a reflection of the move that was beginning towards photography at larger apertures, and hence reduced depth of field, which put the iris mask in front of the lens further out of focus than it had been some years previously. The edge of the iris mask in European films stayed rather sharper and more distinct into the 'twenties, because the trend to filming at larger apertures had not yet developed there.
The Return of the Wipe
The true wipe -- i.e. a boundary line of some shape moving across the frame and erasing the image as it passes over it to leave a new image behind it -- which seems to have dropped out of use after being invented by Robert
Paul at the beginning of the century, now made its return around 1917. The Angel Factory (1917) includes several wipes as transitions to and from scenes representing a character's thoughts. These wipes have a curved
edge rather than the original straight edge of those used by Paul and Smith, and they proceed from side to side rather than up and down. A wipe of the same kind gets half-way across the screen to reveal a mental image
before stopping in Old Wives For New, and there is an instance similar to that in The Angel Factory inTwin Pawns (1919), so there were probably at least a few other films that used wipes at the time. There were also
various approximations to the wipe as a form of transition between sequences, as in The Ghost of Rosie Taylor (1918), where an iris-out is overlapped with an iris-in, and there were quite probably other examples of these
kinds of procedures in the vast numbers of films which are now lost, so the simultaneous iris-in and iris-out from opposite corners of the frame that is used a couple of times in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) is not as
unprecedented as has been suggested.
`Soft Focus' and Lens Diffusion
The earliest use of a form of `soft focus' of which I know occurs in His Phantom Sweetheart (1915), and in this
case it is done by putting the lens very slightly out of focus. That the effect is intentional is shown by the fact that
it occurs twice in successive shots; first as a mysteriously seductive woman is introduced in Medium Shot behind foreground actors who are sharply in focus while she is slightly out of focus, and then in a Medium Close Shot of
her alone which is again slightly out of focus. A more fully developed example of this technique occurs a few months later in Mary Pickford's Fanchon the Cricket, in which there is repeated series of Medium Close Shots
of Mary Pickford in an exterior scene with her face well out of focus, and with strong backlighting as well. The only other example of soft focus that I have come across from before 1918 is in Ablaze on the Rails, No.96 in
the `Hazards of Helen' series of films. This film, which was made in 1916, opens with a close shot of the actress playing the heroine of the film in a glamorous gown introducing herself in the working clothes of the films. The
central area of the frame covering her face is softened by some means, presumably the use of a special lens on the camera, and then this softening vanishes on a dissolve to the next shot, which has an identical set-up.
Although I know of no other examples of this technique from the next couple of years, this does not mean that they did not once exist, and indeed there has been a claim made for the use of `soft focus' in another film made in
1916, but which is now lost. What one does find in the next few years is the use of extremely out-of-focus circular vignette masks, which are so out of focus that the blurred edge of the mask extends its effect to the
centre of the frame, slightly reducing the definition of the image there. Then in 1918 there was a completely new development in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms. In this film all the Close Ups of Lillian Gish are heavily
diffused by the use of layers of fine black cotton mesh placed in front of the lens, and also by the intrinsically poor definition of the special long focal length lens used by Hendrik Sartov to photograph these shots. Heavy
lens diffusion was also used on all the other shots carrying forward the romantic and sentimental parts of the story, though whether these were done by Sartov or Bitzer is not known. Heavy lens diffusion was also used in a
similar way in France by Marcel L'Herbier in his film Rose-France. This could well have been a case of direct
influence, since that film was first shown at the very end of 1919. After that date lens diffusion occasionally appears in a more limited way in the works of the so-called `French avant-garde', but not elsewhere in Europe
for a few more years.
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Masking of Other Kinds
Masks of shapes other than circular also began to appear in American films during the years 1914-1918: first such simple shapes as the `cinemascope'-shaped narrow rectangle formed by a black band masking the top and
bottom of the frame in Intolerance, then moving on to more complicated shapes such as a mask with a cruciform cut-out in Stella Maris (1918). The Girl Without a Soul (Wm. Bertram, 1917) also has shaped
vignettes, while A Little Patriot (Pathé, 1917) has elaborately shaped vignettes used on a scene of a children's
mock battle, and also a white vignette to concentrate attention on a detail. In 1918 Maurice Elvey in Britain took up the idea, and, along with a number of other new tricks, introduced it into his Nelson; The Story of England's
Immortal Naval Hero. This has a couple of scenes framed in a heart-shaped mask, as does his subsequent The Rocks of Valpré (1919). The most elegant variants occur in some films Ernst Lubitsch made in 1919 and later.
In Die Austernprinzessin a triple layer of horizontal rectangles with rounded ends enclose sets of dancing feet at the frenzied peak of a foxtrot, and in Die Puppe a dozen gossiping mouths are each enclosed in individual small
circular vignettes arranged in a matrix. Unlike most of the vignettes used in American films, the vignettes used by
Lubitsch were `hard' or sharp-edged, as was necessary for clarity in his particular application. In France again, unusually shaped masks play a large part in Rose-France (1919), and later continue to appear in a small way in
subsequent films.
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For the sake of completeness I should also mention another celebrated use of hard masks in these years, and this was the characteristic arch-shaped mask used by Maurice Tourneur in his films to denote fantasy or hallucination . As far as I can remember he used it consistently for this purpose, and not merely for decoration. Certainly in Poor Little Rich Girl the arch-shaped mask is used solely on the shots of the heroine's hallucinations.
Anamorphosis
The use of anamorphic (distorted shape) images first appears in these years with Abel Gance's la Folie du Docteur Tube. In this film the effect of a drug administered to a group of people was suggested by shooting the
scenes reflected in a distorting mirror of the fair- ground type. Although this film still exists, it was not shown at the time of production, which Gance claims was 1915. It would be nice to have some independent confirmation
of this date. There may well have been other uses of anamorphosis during the war years, but in any case the next use I know of was in Till the Clouds Roll By (Victor Fleming, 1919). Here it was used to depict the nightmare
effects of indigestion in a comic manner. In fact, like so many film effects that distort the representation of reality, anamorphosis was first used exclusively in comic contexts.
Other Subjective Effects
In fact, it was during this period that camera effects intended to convey the subjective feelings of characters in the film really began to be established. These could now be done as Point of View shots, as in Sidney Drew's The
Story of the Glove (1915), where a wobbly hand-held shot of a door and its keyhole represents the POV of a drunken man. In Poor Little Rich Girl a rocking camera shot is intended to convey delirium, and by 1918 the
idea had got to Russia, in Baryshnya i khuligan, where the Hooligan's infatuation with the Lady is conveyed, in a less than ideal way, by his Point of View of her splitting into a multiple superimposed image.
`Poetic Cinema' and Symbolism
Symbolic effects taken over from conventional literary and artistic tradition continued to make some appearances in films during these years, and it is possible that there were yet more examples among the vast number of films from the war years that are now lost. In D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914), the title `The birth of the evil thought' precedes a series of three shots of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an insect, though at a later point in the film when he prepares to kill someone these shots are cut straight in without explanation. The inspiration for this may well have come from the widely distributed Italian film Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, which I mentioned in this connection in the previous chapter.
Possibly as a result of Griffith's influence, 1915 was a big year for `symbolism', allegories, and parables in the American cinema. Films following this route invariably included female figures in light, skimpy draperies, and indeed sometimes wearing nothing at all, doing `expressive' dances or striking plastic poses in sylvan settings. Titles include Lois Weber's Hypocrites, Vitagraph'sYouth, someone else 's Purity, and so on. All of it was thumpingly obvious, and usually done at considerable length, as in The Primrose Path, which starts with a large painting illustrating the concept, which dissolves into a replica of the same scene with actors posed, and then they come to life. This is amplified by closer detailed live action representations of stations on `The Primrose Path' before the film proper gets under way.
Giovanni Pastrone's Il fuoco (1916) represents an advance to some extent, in that the symbolic effects, though admittedly fairly obvious, were not explained as they occurred. Il fuoco was an entry in the already established `vampire' genre, of which the best-known example is Frank Powell's A Fool There Was (1915), but in fact these tales of a man enticed and destroyed by an evilly seductive woman had been developing in European cinema for years before that. The central figures of Il fuoco are introduced as `He - The Unknown Painter' and `She - The Famous Poetess', and the three stages of the affair are introduced by illustrated titles showing The Lightning Flash, The Flame, and The Ashes. Throughout the early stages of the film her dress and poses are arranged so as to suggest a bird of prey, and at a key moment a shot of one is cut in without explanation. An interesting German example from a few years later is Robert Reinert's Opium (1919), which has some notable innovations in the use of Insert shots to help convey the sensation of the drug reveries. These are travelling landscape shots taken from a boat going down a river, and they are intentionally shot out of focus, or underexposed, or cut into the film upside down. The last of these devices in particular seems to me very striking, and also quite successful in conveying a feeling of disorientation.
Symbolist art and literature from the turn of the century also had a more general effect on a small number of films made in Italy and Russia. The supine acceptance of death resulting from passion and forbidden longings was a major feature of this art, and states of delirium dwelt on at length were important as well. Although such features were mostly in what I would call the content of these films, there was an interaction of this content with their formal features, so I will mention some of them. The first Russian examples were all made by Yevgeni Bauer for Khanzhonkov during the First World War, and include Grezy, Schastye vechnoi nochi, and Posle smerti, all from 1915. These to some extent live up to the promise of the `decadent' aesthetic suggested by their titles; Daydreams, Happiness of Eternal Night, and After Death. Schastye vechnoi nochi includes a visually very striking vision of a medusa- like monster superimposed on a night-time snow scene, and Posle smerti has a somewhat subtler dream vision of a dead girl, picked out by extra arc lighting, walking through a wind-blown cornfield in the dusk. Later examples from the rival Ermoliev company such as Protazanov's Pikovaya dama and Satana likuyushchi lacked the true Symbolist feel. In Italy, another country somewhat isolated filmically by the war, the same kind of realization of the fin de siecle decadent symbolist aesthetic can be found, mostly in films associated with the diva phenomenon. I have already mentioned Il fuoco, but there were others afterwards developing the theme further, such as Malombra, and the most complete example, which also has decor to match, is Charles Kraus' Il gatto nero. This last is one of the few films of this kind to use atmospheric insert shots to heighten the mood. Films from other countries did not show this tendency to any significant extent, either because Symbolism had never had much of a grip on their major arts, or in the case of France and Germany, because newer artistic movements had made Symbolism thoroughly old-fashioned.
The first film explicitly intended by its maker to be a visual analogue of poetry, Marcel L'Herbier's Rose-France (1919), continues further along these same paths.
Art Direction and Design
The general style of design for film interiors remained a tidied-up naturalism, and it is during this period that it
became established that room sets in American films be built about 50% bigger than they would be in actuality.
The other generally notable characteristic of interior sets in American films is that the walls are always of a rather
dark tone. It is largely this convention, which lasted till the end of the nineteen-twenties, that gives the films of
these years their `old-fashioned' look. As is well-known, it was during the war years that greater attention came to be paid to art direction, and as well as care being given to visual co-ordination in films with contemporary
subjects, the first efforts at stylized design were made in a few films. Most of these have often been discussed and illustrated, but a brief survey should mention The Female of the Species (1916), in which the art director
Robert Brunton did not go much beyond what might have been the very latest ideas of refinement in actual interior decoration. Though the abstract designs round the intertitles in this film are a little more advanced. The
same concern for putting into a film the latest kind of `modern' elegance that a wealthy contemporary with the most advanced taste might hypothetically use in his home can be glimpsed in some of the sets in Benjamin
Christensen'sHaevnens Nat (1916) and Ernst Lubitsch's Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916).
In Fighting Odds (1918) Hugo Ballin went beyond this to a real degree of stylization; the furniture is sparse to a point well beyond the simplifications of the stylized naturalism in ordinary films, and such solid features of the decor as fireplaces are simplified to the barest possible geometrical shapes, and integrated into the walls by being covered with the same coating of uniform dark grey paint. This rather peculiar approach was not copied in other films of the period.
The films made in Russia during the war by Yevgeni Bauer are quite interesting from a design point of view, and some of them closely reproduce what was the most advanced work there in the interior design of real houses, mostly that being done by Fedor Shekhtel'. Most of this does not appear particularly forward-looking today, with one exception. In Yuri Nagorni (1916) the sets are done by Bauer himself in a slightly simplified, rectilinear way that resembles the mature style of Shekhtel', as in his Yaroslavl' Railway Station interior of 1902, and his 1903 project for the new Moscow Arts Theatre, and the furniture in Yuri Nagorni is clearly influenced by the work of Ivan Fomin from the same period. This is perhaps not so surprising, as advanced stylized set designs had appeared in the Russian theatre before the war, and Bauer had been a set designer in the theatre before he turned to film-making. Also, Ian Christie tells me that Bauer knew Shekhtel' quite well. It is also worth mentioning that some of the exterior scenes of Bauer's films have a definite flavour of the paintings of Konstantin Somov done in the early years of the century, with their peculiarly Russian blend of Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Impressionism.
The film Thais (1916) made by the Italian Futurist Bragaglia is usually mentioned as the first instance of the use of fully stylized decor, and this does seem to be correct, though it only applies to one set used in the last few scenes. The greater part of Thais seems to be a very conventional and inept entry in the `diva' genre that gripped the Italian cinema at the time - those films in which a female star anguished for love in the midst of rich and glamorous suitors and surroundings, struck Art Nouveau poses, and then died desperately. (It is just possible that Thais was intended as parody, but if that was the case it is still inept.) However, the decor of the final fatal room is highly stylized, with the walls covered with sets of alternating black and white rectangles and triangles nesting inside each other, but, contrary to some suggestions, the geometrical regularity of these designs sets them apart from true Expressionist art.
Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird and Prunella, both made in 1918, were rather more in the mainstream of cinema. In the first of these films some of the sets were partially done as simplified and stylized scenery painted on backdrops behind the action area. The style used for this was rather like some of the most advanced commercial art of the time, but certainly not in any of the manners used in the most advanced easel painting such as Cubism or Expressionism, or one of the abstract styles. Other parts of the design of The Blue Bird went straight back to nineteenth century Salon painting. In Prunella the stylization of houses, trees, etc. in the decor into simplified flat patterns was carried much further, with much more consistency. Prunella was also unusual in that these stylized sets were part of the framing action, which was set in a fantasy world, whereas the central section of the story was set in the real world, and had realistic sets, so reversing the usual large-scale construction of such films. Both films were designed by Ben Carré.
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Then in 1919 Ernst Lubitsch moved in the same direction with the decor of Die Puppe, though in this case the very definite `Toy Town' stylization of the sets was justified by the framing presentation of the narrative as representing the doings of dolls from a toy-box. Lubitsch's Die Austernprinzessin made earlier in 1919, and likewise designed by Ernst Stern, also used slightly stylized sets, but this did not go much further than the enlargement and geometricalization of the kind of decorative features to be found on the walls of real houses, etc.. Incidentally, all this happened before Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari was made at the very end of 1919. (Its premiere was on February 20, 1920.) The use of stylized decor in Die Puppe may well have suggested a similar approach in Caligari, though Ernst Stern's work had nothing to do with the characteristic forms of Expressionist painting. The choice of a truly Expressionist style for the design ofCaligari was presumably due to the impact of the stagings of Expressionist plays in the Berlin theatre that year. For instance, Toller's Die Wandlung, which was premiered on September 30, 1919 had decors by Robert Neppach in a genuine Expressionist style.
Glass Shots and Glass Matte Shots
Although the earliest examples date from the previous period, extensive use of glass shots did not occur till after
1914, in part because of the poor registration of cameras prior to the introduction of the Bell & Howell. Norman O. Dawn made the first glass shots in 1907 by painting additions to the scene being photographed -- which were
roofs for roofless buildings -- on a sheet of glass fixed several feet in front of the camera. The progress of the
painting had to be continually checked by examining the image focussed on the film to ensure that additions to the image exactly obscured the unwanted parts of the scene, and also exactly matched the other parts of the scene in
tone and shadow disposition. In this initial form of the technique the camera and glass had to be shielded from
direct sunlight by canvas to prevent reflections in the glass, and the painting had to be specially illuminated, either
by reflected sunlight or by artificial light. There were many obvious disadvantages to this process, not least the time required to make the painting, so in 1911 Dawn introduced a modified form of the process called the glass
matte shot.
In glass matte painting a sheet of glass is set up in front of the camera as before, but it is not specially shielded or lit. A matte or mask of opaque black paint is applied to the glass so as to obscure the unwanted areas of the scene in front, and this can be done rather quickly, checking the image on the film the while to see that just the unwanted parts of the scene are covered. Next the scene is filmed with the action taking place in the areas still visible through the parts of the glass which are not blacked out, and further lengths of test footage are exposed in the same way. Back at the studios one of the test sections, but not the main negative, is developed, and then threaded in the gate of a camera which is set up in front of an art board on an easel. Light is shone through the back of one frame of the test film to project an image of the test film onto the white art board. Then the artist is free to slowly build up painted additions to the scene, checking all the while for matching, and he finally blacks out the parts of the board where the filmed parts of the scene fall. The resulting painting is then filmed as a second exposure on the undeveloped negative after a series of test exposures and developments have been made using the other undeveloped test sections. In this way a correctly combined scene can be obtained on one negative after it has been developed.
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The successful application of this technique can be seen in Civilization (1917), and the result of trying to make matte combinations in a camera with poor registration can be seen in Birth of a Nation, in the `burning of Atlanta' scene.
Titling
During the war years the trend towards carrying most of the narrative through dialogue titles used in combination
with the action solidified into standard practice in the American cinema, though all films still continued to use a
small proportion of narrative titles. However, as with other aspects of film form, there were a few directors who clung to older practices to a greater or lesser extent, and here D.W. Griffith was one of the extreme cases. He
continued to use large numbers of narrative titles into the 'twenties when such a practice was quite obsolete. In Europe, as usual, these developments lagged some years behind American practice, with most directors using
few dialogue titles even in 1919.
It must not be understood from what I have just said that all the lines of dialogue which were visibly spoken by the actors came to be given in intertitles; what is at issue is the proportion of dialogue to narrative titles. All films continued to leave some visibly spoken lines of dialogue untitled, and as early as 1915 there were films such as David Harum and The Cheat which mainly used dialogue titles, but still left a large number of spoken lines untitled. In these films and many subsequent ones quite active co-operation from the audience was needed to deduce what might be being said. (I am not talking about lip-reading here, but about purely intellectual deduction , given what had happened in the film up to the point in question.) In The Cheat one of the many untitled lines quite clearly contained a proposition which would have been unacceptable to the various censorship boards of the time, though not because it was obscene in the strict sense. From this point onwards the pleasure of guessing what was being said came to be an occasional and intentional feature supplied to audiences by the brighter film -makers. One of the masters of this device was Ernst Lubitsch, though he did not use it in all of his silent films. His earliest really distinctive use of untitled dialogue occurs near the beginning of Carmen (1918).
Art Titles
Even in the early years the development of most formal and stylistic features of film was gradual, with one or two
isolated instances appearing first, and then over the next few years an increasing frequency of examples. But the
use of `art titles', which were title cards with illustrations on them, occurred rather suddenly, without preparation, in 1915. At least two Lasky films of that year, The Girl of the Golden West and Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo
have illustrated titles, as does Maurice Tourneur's Trilby. Then in 1916 quite a large number of American films use the device. Usually the art work, which sometimes covered the whole frame area with the text superimposed
, was an illustration of, or comment upon, the intertitle, but sometimes it was just a neutral decorative background or border. The style of the illustrations and decorations was almost always that used in middle-brow
book and magazine illustration of the period, but the abstract backgrounds to the titles in The Female of the Species (1916) were in the manner of the embryonic Art Deco style, which was the very latest thing at that date.
Art titles never caught on in Europe to any great extent.
A unique way to treat dialogue titles also turned up in this period, but it was not generally adopted for technical reasons. In Dolly's Scoop (J. De Grasse, 1916), the lines of dialogue at the climax of the film are superimposed directly over the image of the person speaking them, rather like the sub-titling used in modern films. However, in this case the lines of dialogue were superimposed across the top of the frame rather than the bottom. Obviously this would create problems with the production of foreign versions of a silent film, not to mention the extra difficulty of carrying out the superimposition in the camera at exactly the point at which the lines were spoken, so it is no surprise that there were no more examples of this technique.
A clever variation on the illustrated title idea which obviously had no future was the use of live action vignetted into decorative cut outs around the title in the title card in Twin Pawns (1919).
Acting
During the years 1914 to 1919 the range of acting styles used in American films narrowed, basically by the elimination of the last traces of the more exaggerated kind of miming. Acting towards the camera had been fairly
well eliminated in American dramatic films by 1914, but this was not altogether the case in European films, and it
is still easy to find examples of this in 1919. In the previous period Asta Nielsen had established the occasional look into the camera lens as an element of personal acting style, and in Russia the famous Mozukhin pushed this
further, with the aid of the more frequent close shots that were now appearing even in the films of that distant country. The other aspect of European film acting, which had already begun to appear years before this period,
was its slowness. There were theories about this sort of acting when it appeared on the stage, and these apparently were still in vogue in Russia where it had its most extreme manifestations in the films of Yevgeni Bauer
. It was just possible to do work in this style that still seems striking, as does Aleksandra Rebikova in Yuri Nagorni, but frequently it just seems like very protracted ham acting to the modern sensibility, as in the case of
Emma Bauer's acting in the same film.
The most naturalistic extreme of American acting after 1914 occurs in some of Maurice Tourneur's films -- some of the performances in A Girl's Folly come close to being not acting at all -- and it is difficult to think of anything going further in this direction until recent decades. By 1919 American acting style had developed to a point that left the acting in D.W. Griffith's films at the more emphatic end of the spectrum. What had earlier been outstanding invention of acting detail in the context of the general production of the time was now beginning to show its contrivance -- the hand of the puppet-master was becoming visible. In any extended piece of acting by the young actors in Birth of a Nation one can clearly see that they make the moves and expressions registering one thought or emotion, then there is a brief pause before they register the next thought and emotion, and so on. This is presumably the result of Griffith talking them through the scene, and although the general and detailed dramatic construction of his films was still sufficiently strong to over-ride this flaw, this was not to be the case in the next decade, when exaggeration in acting was a thing of the past. After 1919 dramatic acting became so standardized in American films that there are no more general trends to be discussed, though the fine detail and differences in individual performances can be profitably considered in other contexts.
The Rise of Continuity Cinema
The years 1914-1919 in America also saw the consolidation of the forms of what was to become the dominant mode of commercial cinema <196> that mode which I shall call for sharpness and brevity `continuity cinema'.
During this period there were other styles that were still important, and these can be considered to lie along a spectrum between the best examples of `continuity cinema' at one extreme, and at the other extreme the
`discontinuity cinema' of D.W. Griffith.
There are a number of factors involved in the strong and apparent visual discontinuities between successive shots in Griffith's films, and the use of cross-cutting between parallel actions is only the most obvious of these. Cuts within the duration of a scene are still relatively infrequent in his films, and when they do occur they are frequently from Long Shot or Medium Long Shot (which were the shots he most used) to a Big Close Up of an insert detail which only occupied a small part of the frame in the previous shot. This in itself introduces a fairly strong visual discontinuity across the cut, but as well as that, the cut-in shot might often have a circular vignette mask if it were a Close Up of a person, so reinforcing the effect. And sometimes the now-standard Griffith iris-out and iris-in might also be left on the inserted shot, even though it had action continuity with the shots on either side of it. As well as all this there was Griffith's habit of moving the action into another shot in an adjoining space, and then back again if it was at all possible, which produced a marked change in background which also made its small contribution to the discontinuity between shots. This discontinuity between shots in Griffith's films can be demonstrated in a particularly striking way by taking a reel from towards the end ofBirth of a Nation or Intolerance and showing it out of context alongside any other climactic reel from a film made by anybody else at that time or later.
Because of the custom of attributing all technical developments to D.W. Griffith, the first masters of continuity cinema are largely unsung, and sometimes even unknown, but it is possible to mention films that show particular continuity techniques making some of their early appearances. One of these techniques involves the exact way the movement of actors from a shot in one location to another in a neighbouring location is handled. At best this kind of transition had previously been dealt with by having the directions of travel of the actor in the two shots correspond on the screen, though there were still some directors in 1914 who could not manage that much. But in a film such as The Bank Burglar's Fate (Jack Adolfi, 1914), one can see shot transitions in which a cut is made from an actor just leaving the frame, to a shot of him well inside the frame in an adjoining location, which have the positions and directions so well chosen that to the casual eye his movement appears quite continuous, and the real space and time ellipsis between the shots is concealed. So thorough-going is the demonstration of barely noticeable shot transitions (in my terminology, `soft' cuts) in this film that I am tempted to take it as a consciously virtuoso performance by the director. Strangely, this film, so exceptionally advanced for 1914 in this respect, and also in other respects, entirely lacks dialogue titles, as the story is entirely supported by narrative titles. Anomalies between the sophistication of the handling of the different dimensions of the medium are not uncommon during this period; for instance crude acting sometimes occurs in films with good scene dissection, but this is the most singular example of this kind I have noted. Other good examples of this technique for eliminating several yards of waste space and a few seconds of waste time can be seen in Ralph Ince's films, particularly The Right Girl (1915), and by 1919 it was widely diffused in American films, but not in those made in Europe.
Exactly the same approach came to be applied to breaking interior scenes down into a number of shots -- a character could leave one shot and be picked up immediately several feet away on the other side of the room in the next shot, again with apparent continuity. This became important as more and more of the shots in a scene came to be taken from close in during the war years in America, but for the technique to work really well, it was necessary that there also be a substantial angle change between the two shots. This is because if both shots were taken directly from the front, the omission of several feet of the actor's path across the room would be more apparent from the obvious sudden background change. All this connects with the rise of the use of cutting to different angles within a scene during the years 1914-1919, and in particular to the development of reverse-angle cutting.
Reverse-Angle Cutting
It was only in 1915 that cutting to different angles within a scene became well-established as a technique for
dissecting a scene into shots. As already described, this approach had appeared a few times in earlier years, but in general cuts to or from a closer shot within a scene were still being made more or less down the lens axis as
established in the Long Shot of the scene in question. There were a few instances in which the disposition of objects within the filmed scene were such as to prevent the camera being moved absolutely straight forward to
take the closer shot, but the deviations were never so great as to have the camera shooting in the opposite direction. This applies to D.W. Griffith as well as nearly everyone else, but I must make one more exception to
this generalization, and this is in connection with scenes taking place in a theatre. In such cases cuts with a change
of direction of approximately 180 degrees between shots of the audience, and of the show they were looking at, were used even in Europe before 1914.
The leading figure in the full development of reverse-angle cutting was Ralph Ince, who has already been mentioned in this connection in the previous chapter. Films that he made at Vitagraph in 1915 such as The Right Girl and His Phantom Sweetheart show him putting the final polish on the technique of using a large number of reverse-angle cuts in interior, as well as exterior, scenes. Other directors were also just starting to take up this style in 1915, for instance Reginald Barker in Bad Buck of Santa Ynez, but none matched Ralph Ince's command. It must be emphasized again that this development has nothing to do with Thomas Ince, for the films he most closely supervised, such as Civilization (1916), lack the features I am discussing, and indeed it is quite possible that Thomas Ince was responsible for the other positively retarded features of Civilization. As for Griffith, in Birth of a Nation there are just eight cuts to reverse-angle shots in the scene in Ford's Theatre, while elsewhere throughout the two-and-a-half hour length of this film there are only four more true reverse-angle cuts. (I define a reverse-angle cut as one in which the camera direction is changed by more than 90 degrees, which corresponds closely to the way film-makers use the term.) None of these cuts occur at any of the major climaxes in Birth of a Nation where they would be most effective, such as the pursuit of Flora Cameron and her leap from the cliff, whereas there are more than a dozen such cuts within the ten minute length of Ralph Ince's His Phantom Sweetheart.
WARNING Since Birth of a Nation is such a frequently seen film I must point out that to the uninstructed glance there might appear to be more reverse-angles in it than I have stated, but careful consideration of the relative positions of the actors will show that in what might at first appear to be possible instances of reverse-angle cuts the camera is in fact shooting from almost exactly the same direction in the adjoining shots; i.e. from the `front'.
Nevertheless, the Griffith style of film-making was still followed in its full idiosyncrasy, with extensive use of side by side spaces and a definite `front' for the camera, in most slapstick comedy, and this was because of the success and influence of the Keystone company, which was already rigidly using this style before 1914. Directors of dramatic films such as James Kirkwood, Lloyd Ingraham, and W. Christy Cabanne, who had all previously worked for Griffith, also followed his style fairly closely, though by 1916 Ingraham could sometimes manage to use the occasional reverse-angle cut when the two shots concerned also formed a watcher-POV pair. In fact the Griffith style, with only a slight weakening of his relentless frontality of scene dissection, was the standard for films made by his Fine Arts section of the Triangle company, and was followed by all who worked there. D.W. Griffith's prestige ensured that many American film-makers elsewhere were very slow to adopt true reverse-angle cutting during this period, and on into the years after the First World War.
By 1916 there are a number of films in which there are around 15 true reverse-angle cuts per hundred shot transitions -- which I shall refer to as 15% reverse-angles -- and two such are The Deserter (Scott Sidney) and Going Straight. By the end of the war such films form an appreciable but minor part of production: e.g. The Gun Woman (F. Borzage, 1918) with 18% reverse-angles, and Jubilo (Clarence Badger, 1919) with 16%, and by that date most directors of quality films were making more use of reverse-angle cutting than D.W. Griffith did, though they tended to restrict the device to one or two major climaxes in their films. Anyone who did not move with this trend when it became dominant in the next decade was in danger of having their films look old-fashioned, and such was the fate of D.W. Griffith himself. Other qualities in a film could surmount this handicap, but not if it was combined with yet other retarded stylistic features, and old- fashioned subject matter as well. All this hardly concerned European cinema, where those few reverse-angle cuts used were mostly between a watcher and what he sees from his Point of View, both being filmed in a fairly distant shot. However, after the end of the war some of the brighter young directors such as Lubitsch started using a few reverse- angle cuts, mostly in association with Point of View cutting.
Cutting On Action
A major feature of `continuity cinema' was the establishment of cutting on action as a standard way of smoothing the transitions between cuts within a scene. This meant making the cut to or from a closer shot, not when the
actor concerned was more or less stationary, as had usually been the case, but when he was in the middle of a definite movement, and as well as that, making sure that the movement across the cut had reached exactly the
same point, to the very frame, in the shots on each side of the point where the cut was made. As in other aspects of the development of continuity cinema, a leading figure was Ralph Ince, and his 1915 films contain a number of
demonstrations, for the first time, of how to do this in a number of standard situations. His Phantom Sweetheart, The Right Girl, and The Juggernaut use perfect cuts on action in such places as the middle of the movement
of a person sitting down in a chair, or when they were making some other sort of broad body movement, and increasing numbers of other American film-makers took this up over the next few years.
Editing Equipment
Those film-makers concerned with the development of continuity cutting seem to have felt the need for some mechanical assistance with the editing task under these new stylistic conditions, for around 1916 the first editing
viewers appeared in the United States. Initially these machines were no more than a projector film-gate through which the film was pulled by the usual intermittently moving sprocket wheel, which was driven by the Maltese
Cross gear mechanism which was now becoming standard in projectors. The gear train was driven in its turn by a small crank-handle at the side of the device, and the frames passing through the aperture were viewed through
a magnifying lens supported a few inches in front of the film by a tube attached to the front of the gate. The whole
device was only several inches high and was mounted on a little stand which could be put on the top of an editing
bench. As the film was cranked through, it had to be fed into the bottom of the gate from a small roll held in the hand, and illumination of the frame of film in the gate was from behind in some sort of ad hoc manner. There
were no loops of film formed in the machine to smooth out the intermittent motion through the gate, so the editor had to keep unrolling the film from the feed roll so that there was no tension between it and the machine. This
was not too difficult to do for small rolls of film. No doubt this machine was only used to deal with the most tricky points of action-matching across a cut when the figures were small in the frame, since it is actually quite
possible to do good continuity cutting `in the hand' most of the time, with no aid other than a simple magnifying glass, as had been done before, and as still continued to be done.
The Use of the Insert Shot
As already described, the use of Insert Shots -- Close Ups of objects other than faces - was established very early, but apart from the special case of Inserts of a letter that was being read by one of the characters, they were infrequently used in American films of the previous period, and hardly at all in European films. It was also before 1914 that D.W. Griffith had begun to bend the use of the Insert towards truly dramatically expressive ends, but he had not done this often, and it is really only with his The Avenging Conscience of 1914 that a new phase in the use of the Insert Shot starts. As well as the symbolic inserts I have already mentioned, The Avenging Conscience also made extensive use of large numbers of Big Close Up shots of clutching hands and tapping feet as a means of emphasizing those parts of the body as indicators of psychological tension. Griffith never went so far in this direction again, but his use of the Insert made its real impression on other American film-makers during the years 1914-1919.
Cecil B. DeMille was a leading figure in the further development of the use of the Insert, and by 1918 he had reached the point of including about 9 Inserts in every 100 shots in The Whispering Chorus. He also pushed the insert into areas of visual sensuality inaccessible to D.W. Griffith, with such images as a Close Up of a silver-plated revolver nestling in a pile of silken ribbons in a drawer in Old Wives for New (1918).
The impact that the increased use of the Insert Shot had at the time is difficult to recapture now, for at that date there had never before been accurate images of relatively small objects presented with such definition and enlargement in any medium, be it painting, photography, or whatever. Things like pistols when shown in Big Close Up could be several times the size of a real pistol when held at arms length, and for instance in Her Code of Honour (John Stahl, 1918), the scratches on the metal and the movement of the internal parts as the trigger is squeezed can be quite clearly seen in an Insert Shot of an automatic. Since the evolution of the use of the Insert had been quite gradual in the United States, there was no comment upon it there, but in France a number of young aesthetes felt its full force in 1917, when the American films that had been withheld by the war during the previous three years were suddenly released to the public. Louis Delluc and others then explicitly formulated the idea of the Point of View shot and the Insert in their critical articles, and this had a significant influence on the development of the so-called `French avant-garde' of the early nineteen-twenties. (Detailed information on this subject can be found in French Film Theory and Criticism by Richard Abel (Princeton University Press, 1988 ). When Louis Delluc and others of like mind came to make films after the war, the fact that they had conceived of these sorts of shots as a separate idea tended to promote their use in a more isolated and discontinuous way than in their original source. Combining this with the influence of Griffith's cross-cutting in its most extreme form in Intolerance helped to promote a European avant-garde cinema of discontinuity which was some distance apart from the mainstream of continuity cinema that had already formed in the United States.
The Atmospheric Insert
Like many other devices that were more fully developed in Europe during the next decade, what could be called the `atmospheric Insert Shot' made its first appearance in American films during the years before 1919. This kind
of shot is one of a scene which neither contains any of the characters in the story, nor is a Point of View shot seen by one of them. It first appears to my knowledge in Maurice Tourneur's The Pride of the Clan (1917), in
which there is a series of shots of waves beating on a rocky shore which are shown when the locale of the story, which is about the harsh lives of fisher folk, is being introduced. Simpler and cruder examples from the same year
occurs in William S. Hart's The Narrow Trail, in which a single shot of the mouth of San Francisco Bay taken
against the light -- the Golden Gate -- is preceded by a narrative title explaining its symbolic function in the story.
This film also contains a shot of wild hills and valleys cut in as one character comments that the country far from
the city is so clean and pure. By 1918 we can find a shot of the sky being used to reflect the mood of one of the characters without specific explanation in The Gun Woman (Frank Borzage), but it must be emphasized that
these examples are very rare, and did not either then, or within the next several years, constitute regular practice in the American cinema. The Tourneur example just mentioned also could stand as part of the beginning of the
`montage sequence', which probably had its true origin in American films during this period. Another case that has crossed my attention is in The Woman in 47, which includes a chain of shots joined by fades discovering the
heroine in the middle of typical New York scenes, as she discovers the city for the first time. Maurice Elvey's Nelson - England's Immortal Naval Hero (1919) has a symbolic sequence dissolving from a picture of Kaiser
Wilhelm II to a peacock, to a battleship, which is probably more startling now than then, given our awareness of Eisenstein's subsequent films.
The atmospheric Insert began its notable career in European art cinema in Marcel L'Herbier's Rose-France. Here amongst the intentionally `poetic' uses of vignettes and filters and literary intertitles, a shot of the empty path once trod by the lovers is used to evoke the past.
The Flash-Back
The fashionable interest in the flash-back continued into this period, and it could now be entered with very little preparation, as in Between Men (Reginald Barker, 1915). In this film the hero reads a letter which refers to a
past incident in his life -- we see the letter in an Insert Shot -- then after a cut back to him sitting thinking, there is
a dissolve which goes straight into a representation of the past scenes referred to in the letter, without any explanatory titles occurring at any point. During these years the usual way of entering and leaving a flash-back
was through a dissolve, and this was in fact the principal use at this time for this device.
(The subsidiary use for a dissolve was to bridge a suspected mis-match in actor position on a transition from a Long Shot to a Close Up, and although the technique of American directors and actors was already sufficiently good to render this unnecessary most of the time, there are enough occurrences of this usage in 1915 and 1916 for it to be described as standard.)
On the other hand the dissolve was still not being used to denote a time-lapse, though there are one or two films in 1914 where it does happen to correspond to a time-lapse as well as to other things. In that year the enthusiasm for the new possibilities of the medium led to considerable complexity being crammed into one reel of film, as in The Family Record (Selig, 1914), in which an aged man and woman separated for most of their life have his flashback and then hers shown in succession within the framing story. In fact fully developed flashbacks occur in more Selig films during this period than in those from any other company contained in my sample. The Vitagraph company's The Man That Might Have Been (William Humphrey, 1914), is even more complex, with a series of reveries and flash-backs that contrast the protagonist's real passage through life with what might have been, if his son had not died. In this film dissolves are used both to enter and leave the flash-backs, and also the wish-dreams, and also for a time-lapse inside a reverie at one point. But fades are also used for these purposes in this and other films of the period, and flashback transitions are also done with irising in other films, and even straight cuts in Bauer's Grezy and Posle smerti, so that all that one can say on the basis of these examples is that the understanding of a particular transitional device depended totally on the context. To reinforce this point, I will mention what seems to have been a unique occurrence of a novel way of getting into a flashback during this period. In The On-The-Square Girl (F. J. Ireland, 1917), a flashback is shown as a succession of scenes inset into the centre of a letter which one of the characters is reading. Since this is a fairly standard sort of film, it would seem that this device was expected to be as understandable to an audience then, on its first occurrence, as it is now. This kind of lack of regularity in the significance of style features, which was to become even more marked with the emergence of the avant-garde in the 'twenties, is one of the main reasons for the failure of attempts to create a science of film considered as a language system. This is not to say that aspects of film cannot be studied by scientific methods, or that there are no regularities in the forms of films at all, but just that these regularities are insufficient, and also change too fast, to be considered as a language system.
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The fashion for flash-backs at the beginning of this period was such that one gets some instances where the use of flash-back construction was completely pointless, but on the other hand there are instances where an extensive series of flash-back scenes serves a contrasting function essential to the plot, as in Silks and Satins. During the war the use of flashbacks occurred in films from all the major European film-making countries as well, from Italy (Tigre reale) to Denmark (Evangeliemandens Liv) to Russia (Grezy and Posle smerti), where it arrived in 1915. As the years moved on a sudden decline in the use of long flash-back sequences set in around 1917, but on the other hand the use of a transition to and from a brief single shot memory scene remained quite common in American films. However, I have come across one more final example of complex flash-back construction in American films in the case of W.S. Van Dyke's The Lady of the Dugout (1918). This film has a story that happened long before narrated by one character in the framing scene, and initially accompanied by his narrating dialogue in intertitles, though after a while this stops, and the intertitles then convey the dialogue occurring within the flashback. Inside this main flashback there develops cross-cutting to another story, happening at the same time, and at first apparently unconnected with it, though the connection eventually appears . Next, inside this first flashback, the Lady of the title narrates another story, presented in flashback form, but with cut aways inside it back to events occurring in the time frame in which she is doing her narrating. Actually, all this is fairly easy to follow while watching the film, in part because what happens in all these strings of action is relatively simple.
Cross-Cutting Between Parallel Actions
After 1914 cross-cutting between parallel actions came to be used whenever appropriate in American films, though this was not the case in European films. It should be noted that a good deal of the American use of cross
-cutting was not the rapid alternation between parallel chains of action developed by D.W. Griffith, but a limited
number of alternations to make it possible to leave out uninteresting bits of action with no real plot function. In Europe, some of the most enterprising directors did use cross-cutting sometimes, but they never attained the
speed of many American examples, and their lack of ease with it is indicated by the fact that some of them felt it
necessary to make the initial transition to the first shot of the alternate strand of action with a fade, as in Benjamin Christensen's Haevnens Nat (1916) and the Cines company's Il sogno patriottico di Cinessino. And in 1918
the quite experienced Russian director Protazanov still found it necessary to cover important simultaneous action inside and outside Father Sergius' cell in the film of the same name by having the wall of the set split apart to
show these actions at the same time, rather than by cutting between them.
In the United States some directors became so enraptured with the idea of cross-cutting that they sometimes used it when it was not really necessary, and contributed nothing to the film; in other words, when nothing of any significance was shown happening in the alternate action, and no acceleration of the main action was accomplished either. One example of this is contained in the Selig company film, The Lost Messenger (1916). On the other hand, cross-cutting was used to get new effects of contrast, such as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B. DeMille's The Whispering Chorus, in which a supposedly dead husband is having a liaison with a Chinese prostitute in an opium den, while his unknowing wife is being remarried in church. Or the sequence in The Female of the Species (Raymond B. West, 1918), in which a man is crawling into a woman's sleeping-berth on a train while in the cross-cut scene another train is speeding towards them in the opposite direction on the same track. The crash comes as they embrace.
Of course all this was simple compared to The Master's Intolerance, in which four parallel stories are intercut throughout the whole length of the film, though in this case the stories are more similar than contrasting in their nature. The use of cross-cutting within these parallel stories as well as between them produced a complexity that was beyond the comprehension of the average audience of the time, and effectively though unintentionally turned Intolerance into the first avant-garde film masterpiece. (Only loosely speaking, since Intolerance was intended to be commercially successful, whereas real avant-garde films are not.) The influence of Intolerance produced a few other films that combined a number of similar stories having similar themes, such as Maurice Tourneur's Woman (1918), but the box-office failure of Intolerance ensured that these later films had simpler structures. The true line of descent from Intolerance curves away from the mainstream through Abel Gance's la Roue (1921), and some of Eisenstein's films, to the real avant-garde.
Scene Dissection
Another new fashion of 1915 was the practice of beginning scenes with a close shot of some detail in them, and only then tracking or cutting back to show the whole scene, rather than following the usual practice of starting
with a general shot, and only then cutting in closer. The first example I have come across is in the Thanhouser company's The Center of the Web, released at the very end of 1914, though this may not be where the idea
started. This film begins with an insert shot, and then the camera tracks back to reveal the whole scene. Other instances of this new idea can be seen in David Harum (Allan Dwan) and Elsa's Brother (Van Dyke Brooke),
released in 1915. A couple of years later, the Franklin brothers' Going Straight includes a scene which starts
with a series of Close Ups of actors interacting with each other, before where they are doing this is revealed. Although not common, once it had been established, this new variant in the way of dissecting scenes never
completely vanished after this initial burst of enthusiasm, but has been returned to from time to time ever since by imaginative directors.
The possibility of breaking a scene down into shots in markedly different ways that now existed in the American cinema was intimately connected with a number of developments, one of which has already been mentioned, namely the use of reverse-angle shots. Also involved was the general tendency to cut scenes up into more and more shots, and along with this the tendency to use a greater proportion of close shots. All these developments are obviously interconnected to some extent, but perhaps surprisingly they could also be relatively independent. And the films in which each of these different tendencies was most prominent may also be found a little surprising . For instance, by 1918 there were more shots per hour in a Kay-Bee Triangle film such as The Hired Man (Victor Schertzinger) than in Griffith's Broken Blossoms, while Jubilo (Clarence Badger, 1919) and Until They Get Me (Frank Borzage, 1917) are shot from much closer in throughout their length than contemporary films by the best-known names of the period. And Badger and Borzage used far more reverse-angle cuts than Cecil B. DeMille, while in his turn the latter used more Medium Long Shots than D.W. Griffith, who tended to avoid this range of camera closeness by 1918.
When I add that other films by other directors were now using various other combinations of these variables of film style, the response might well be to ask for a better, briefer, and clearer way of handling and describing all these matters than the imprecise words I have used up to this point. I shall now begin to provide this new approach in the following chapter.
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This is a typical chapter from the book, but with some of the illustrations left out. If you are interested in early cinema, the previous chapter (1907-1913) contains even
more important stuff that is not available elsewhere.
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